The Intoxication of the Working Weak

Again I found myself tipping into a slightly destructive pattern. Thankfully all it was this time was a relatively short passage of working too much, which I self medicated with regular doses of Stevie Wonder (at one stage the only non-work mental stimulation I could manage was "Don't You Worry Bout a Thing")

Through this period it became apparent to me how working like this on a more regular basis can have such a magnetic and destructive pull, like the swoon you feel when a tube train thunders into the platform.

There is a brilliant passage in The Unbearable Lightness of Being where Kundera describes one character feeling "vertigo... A heady, insuperable longing to fall" as she tries finally to turn her back on a painful relationship. He goes on to comment,

"We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down."

Obviously things weren't that bad, but I love how he expresses that tipping point of self destruction, the seduction of the self into believing how a conviction, a determination and commitment, can be mistaken as strength in itself.

The character Kundera is referring to also has a total lack of support from anyone else around her, and so I am glad to report I had great support from colleagues and my partner checking on me and pulling me back. I even managed to squeeze in an official engagement, my left hand now a little weightier than at the start of last week.

Thinking of colleagues, possibly the biggest lesson for me was the potential for a weird co-dependency that I saw some glints of as we ping ponged between euphoria and despair during our long working hours.

It's easy to subconsciously drive each other on even if you know what you're doing is kind of ridiculous and it feels like each of you are personally deciding to behave like this.

Weirdly the simile that came to mind was like bulimic sorority girls. As a manager, awful to think I may have been lead "Heather". Apologies to those who haven't seen the film - but I think you'd at least understand we all want to be Winona Ryder really (minus the painkillers and shoplifting).

Introducing Louby van Hoogstraten

It wasn't my idea to be a landlady. It was a sensible financial investment thing that my partner, a sensible financial type person, had advised we do. Despite my initial discomfort, however, I'd started to feel comfortable, proud even, of our blossoming property empire.

Day two of our lives with tenants and now it feels like having needy dependents with none of the potential moral superiority. I realise the upside is supposedly financial, but three trips to Ikea in and our profit margin forecasts are already looking gloomy.

I refused to buy them a microwave today and felt terrible. On reflection I find it strange that they even asked but then I suppose, why not? It hammers home what a sap I've been through my whole life with landlords having over the years put up for extended periods with dodgy electrics, no hot water, no heating in a bathroom, and on moving into one place, a flat filled with old furniture (including at least 10 wardrobes, 6 beds) for about a week.

Although the chap didn't get on my best side by describing the sofa fabric we had chosen as "minging" the couple seem perfectly pleasant and I'm certainly not expecting them to be saps. I'm just worried that my microwave refusal is the start of a mean streak endemic to all landlords. I've not had any great role models, see.

Pull me up on it, won't you? Before I end up on this site.

Big Decisions about the Big Day

For those of you who don't know, the wedding of the year has been booked. On June (the) 30th I will be betrothed to my long-term love, Robert, witnessed by a selection of friends and family.

I've been thinking about what music to have on the big day. It's a small venue so we'll probably only be able to have a pianist and singer. We might be able to squeeze in a tambourine, but that'll be it.

That said, the favourite joke in the wee hours as Robert drops me off to the station and Auntie La-La plays us her latest top tunes is always "first dance?" Since "our songs" have included a rave version of the theme tune to Black Beauty (just imagine it at 160 BPM - "du-dur-durrr ... du-du-du-du-du-du-du-dur-durrr") and "Animal Nitrate" by Suede, the thought of it being "Calm Down Dearest" by Jamie T isn't all that peculiar despite the fact it might be quite tricky for our singer and accompanist to replicate the slurred delivery and driving bass line.

And all this stuff about it being your day is nonsense. If "Smack my bitch up" really was what we wanted, I just can't see Rob's dad gently taking my mum by the hand and leading her on to the dancefloor after an appropriate time. They would stand open mouthed and appalled.

I do realise this is the least of my worries. I have food to arrange, a dress to buy, and travel arrangements to talk about with people from far and wide. We've got the ceremony and vows to agree on, for goodness' sake.

Incidentally, my other displacement obsession is with the wedding invites over which I have already had some heated debates with my intended. After a relationship that's spanned more than fourteeen years, I think invites with a picture of Trevor McDonald on the front and the immortal line "And finally" inside would be perfect. I'd agree to obey if we could have them.

The Agreeability of Pseudonymity

Ever since someone who went by the name of "my black ass" (complete with associated animated gif) pointed out that my alias on Last.fm "loubrown" wasn't too inventive, I've been wondering about the relative strengths of having an online pseudonym and the relative weakness of having my identity so clearly strewn across the internet superhighways.

I "came out" in terms of my online persona in response to a lot of soul searching about the fact I worked for a new media department and so might have vested interests or biased opinions that I should be open about.

It wasn't like I was planning some Belle de Jour type revelations (those were the days my friend) or a grand whistle blowing (over a year in, and no evidence of a need for it), but I didn't fancy sneaking around wondering if people knew who I was or could work it out. OK, so I also realised I was less likely to write anything too offensive or incriminating (small lapse in judgment notwithstanding).

However, I now find myself actually embarassed by how much I'm shouting my real name from the virtual rooftops especially as numerous colleagues are now coming out as bloggers and social networkers under various guises. It's a bit like my user names are ALL CAPS and spoken v-e-r-y d-e-l-i-b-e-r-a-t-e-l-y. Loubrown, louby, louisebrown... Yes that's me! Yoo-hoo! Here I am!

There is something so much cooler about having a pseudonym. It's like being the Scarlet Pimpernel or Superman; only a select few know the real you, and everyone else is dying to find out.

My time-suckingly dreadful forays into Second Life as "Thora Turk" (you are forced to choose a first and last name for your character) gave me a flavour of what it might be like to have a pseudonym and associated virtual image. Unfortunately my poor Second Life programming skills meant that rather than the Lara Croft-like Amazon astride the virtual world of my fantasies, Thora/I ended up as a plumpish Japanese schoolgirl with quite big boobs and a ragged, slightly gothic wardrobe and a tendency to accidentally end up sitting on top of road signs.

I blame age. I come from the days of the Internet when to get your real name in hotmail was to have kudos. I leapt at the chance to get a (on my terms) cool gmail address but soon found out the downside having since been saddled with a stream of incorrectly addressed email meant for my numerous dopplegangers (one of them having issues with insurance, another a big skiing fan). If you've sent anything dreadfully personal to me that I haven't responded to, watch out, you might end up in The Metro if the email was incorrectly addressed.

I now have the additional worry that I'll end up giving away enough information here to steal my identity without having to rifle through my bin or glue together my shredded bank statements. There are photos, reading materials, bound to be a biography up there somewhere. People should realise that the idea of your porn name (Name of first pet + Mother's maiden name) was probably cooked up by a really smart identity thief ("How on earth can I get people to reveal the answers to their security questions?).

In fact, my only comfort is that, rather like the owner of a rashly requested tattoo, the likes of "my black ass" will wake up one of these days to find himself saddled with a once-cool but now plain embarassing pseudonym that it's just too hard to change. In the meantime, I'll just have to relax back into my relative lack of obscurity.

Enough Geekery, Back to the Literary

Bukowski's The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills was resurrected from my storage boxes a month or so ago.

When I first pulled it out I marvelled at how the publishers had aged the cover as if it had been left to mellow amongst the emptied bottles of wine and discarded betting slips on the floor of "a 6 dollar a week/room/in Chinatown".

On second inspection I noted the wine stains and candle wax were mine from when I was living not that far from London's Chinatown and my books (and I) lived in piles on my living room floor (mind you, rent was a bit higher). Let's just say I was no Emily Dickinson.

Same as a lot of others, mostly male, I am attracted to tales of his experiences and such a life lived. The poems smack of "loving, fucking, eating, shitting" with additional high- and low-lights provided by drinking and gambling.

Some poems burst with bravado, like when "My Boy Bobby" came in and then a "beautiful whore" showed him "all the tricks of wonderland" whilst they listened to Carmen, although he confesses "days and nights like that just don't happen too often". Most others paint a bleaker picture, shot through with wild energy and cadaverous lethargy.

I recommend reading a whole volume like this. Taken as a whole, you embrace the world of extremes, drunken memories recounted as if covered by a film of dirt suddenly pierced by bright, sinuous flashes of nature. I loved the energy of the verse and palpable longing of "18 cars full of men thinking of what could have been":

"I saw a woman in green
all rump and breast and dizziness running across the street.
she was as sexy as a green and drunken antelope..."

There is nastiness and violence to be stomached here, same as in the house of any hardcore drunk. He prowls and pads catlike through his poems and life, lolling with one evil eye open and watchful, then exploding into vicious hissing action. Although I confess I laughed out loud at the scenario he describes in "what seems to be the trouble, gentlemen?" when the police break into a hotel room where:

"I had the sofa in front of the door
and the chain on,
the 2nd movement of Brahms' First Symphony
and my hand halfway up the ass of a broad old enough to be my
grandmother"

Saving the best 'til last, the absolute highlight are those mourning for his dead lover Jane. I was moved to tears by "With All the Love I Had, Which Was Not Enough" which I would encourage you to read (hence link), the last image of the forlorn, child-like lover gently sobbing "but/they will not/give her back to me" killed me.

Yeah, so I love it - some of you will, some of you won't. Oh, and I also saw Factotum recently which is another film based on one of Bukowski's works (first film like this was Barfly) and it was pretty good. So also a DVD recommendation for those of you who can't be bothered to read the book. And for the rest of you, I'll leave you with some online footage (it's a documentary cut into parts) that I just spent way too long watching.


Note on formatting: I now find that line spacing weirdness after block quotes is a bug. If you've got this far, you can forgive me, I'm sure.

Tagging, Labelling, Categorization

One of my criticisms of Gmail in my last post was the labelling system which is basically a version of tagging common to a lot of new web sites and services.

For those of you uninitiated and who can’t be bothered to read Wikipedia, it’s a sort of indexing by readers/users/viewers of content whereby articles, pictures, videos, even people can be associated with any word or phrase that an individual user chooses to – for either their personal use (e.g. an email in gmail) and/or the use of other people on the site (e.g. public photos on flickr). This allows for faster, more flexible ways of finding content giving dimensions of relevancy that a search engine can't compete with e.g. until last week, Leo Sayer would not have been tagged “big brother” but would be now and could have been the second he moved into the Big Brother house.

For an insight into my own crazed mind, I thought I'd review the tags I've created:

• I tag on del.icio.us mainly about work - it's a bit messy and inconsistent, but I like the fact I might help someone else find an interesting or useful article that I’ve stumbled upon and one of these days I will get around to tidying up the tags. I use other people's tags a lot here, so there's a lot of give and take going on.
  
• I tag on last.fm quite selfishly, as by tagging music here I can create virtual radio stations by tag for each of my moods - I very rarely use others' tags, occasionally music genres. On reviewing these, I'm not entirely happy that I can't edit them, as you can all find out that I find "An Old Whore's Diet" a "sexy" song.
  
• I’ve even had tag anxiety, worrying that my recent additions to Flickr may have been tagged with an incorrectly identified bridge. You can see here that I love looking at Rome as much as I do Robert.

So why, you’re dying to know, haven’t I started to tag my emails? Actually, to contradict my cynicism yesterday, I think it comes down to Gmail's great, prominent and trustworthy search. Rather like when you leave a coat on indoors before you go back into the cold, I've never felt the benefit. What each of the above tagging systems do is improve or enable existing or new services which is why I've persisted in using them.

The reason I've been thinking about this stuff is because we're currently working on a new site, and I've been considering potential features and thinking about how users would actually benefit from each of them. Would I, for example, want to tag myself, and if so - how? "Essex", "Anxious", "Ego", "Laugh", "Big" is about as good as I've come up with for now without getting into an all-too-revealing self analysis. I suppose the location and mental state might be handy for some, but possibly in order to avoid me rather than make a connection.

In fact, the other place where I find it a bit unrewarding to tag is actually the categories that I can assign to each blog post here. Tagging something “Saddam Hussein” or “Google” seems to rather overblow the importance of this blog. But I've started to do it, I have used it on occasion to find a past post, it's just a little depressing when the real thrust of each post could be much more neatly tagged as “me” “myself” and “I”.

On the Rebound: The Truth about Me and Google

Google’s emergence in search neatly coincided with when I first got a job at Microsoft as the business manager of the newly launched MSN Search UK. When I left Microsoft five years later, I went through a manic phase from which I’m only just emerging.

It was somewhat akin to throwing oneself into a passionate love affair with someone I’d flirted with through a doomed, dull marriage. Shamelessly, I switched to gmail, telling everyone at Microsoft when I left that was how they would contact me rather than good old hotmail despite it matching the kind of disk space that anyone would want.

Then the amount I googled everyone, everything and anything bordered on the obscene (even I had succumbed to internal best practice which was at least to try MSN Search first).

Finally I reignited my blogger flame, which has brought us together here today.

One of the last hang ups I carried with me was my use of Start, one of the only products – apart from MSN Messenger – that I really believed in, and was at the very least developed genuinely apace with small start ups in a nascent 2.0 world.

It’s a dead simple start page with inbuilt RSS reader that became my default as soon as I found about it and the agile development team behind it. It very quickly even got Scoble’s seal of approval, so it had to be cool, right?

I was probably the last person using it. I started to get embarrassed when people noticed me using Start and hated explaining it, thinking that people might think of me as being deliberately obtuse (“I am Queen Geek, hear me roar!”) or a bit dumb (“You can take the girl out of Microsoft…”).

It felt quite cleansing to finally move to Google reader last week, like I’d thrown away the final photos of me and an old partner – you know, the ones you really want to throw away last – the ones where you both look really nice and quite sexy.

After I’d imported my OPML file I have to tell you, I felt pretty smug about how close Google and I had now become.

Sadly, it took a matter of days for me to realise that me and Google wasn't the answer I'd been looking for. It’s not that easy to organise your feeds, and it can be quite slow both to render and navigate about. It’s good, don’t get me wrong. But so is … Word. And Excel. They are you know, they’re quite good.

Then everything came crashing round my ears. Gmail is a bit annoying, it’s not as pretty as Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail and the much vaunted labelling system is the only tagging system of a web product that I don’t actually use. And I’ve been left with way too many emails in my inbox. I don’t need to delete any emails because of the stonking storage system but - whisper -I actually would quite like to get rid of some crap.

But I couldn’t see it. I’d just moved from one overly controlling, co-dependent relationship to another. Looking back, since university all I’d done was move from Marxist to Microserf to Google-dependent. It’s never a good feeling when you realise you’re in a rebound relationship, and especially not one it’s really hard to leave.

So yeah it was a rebound, ok? I can’t help it if I’m attracted to big strong multinationals who promise the answer to everything with their tidy packages. I just have to come to terms with the fact it’s all a fairy tale that was never going to work.

Or I could just buy a Mac…

The Outsider: Saddam Hussein

An existentialist classic I sadly didn't read when studying existentialism, Camus' The Outsider grips you like a cold hand on your heart - your own hand, finally feeling the blood pumping and oozing through and around the organ, the crude nature of that symbol of your loves and passions palpable in its offal nature.

I finally read it for the first time last week when, at the same time, I kept feeling a similar pall of reality observing the brief scenes and frozen shots of Saddam Hussein (about to be) executed that declared all media outlets open for business in 2007.

When I'd seen him in court during the trial, he was visibly shaken, confused and angry, pathetically attempting to disrupt proceedings with his shouts and slogans. The thought kept coming back to me that this was a man who was finally being confronted with the fact that he was just a man, having did what he did because he did and it was wrong; all reasonings, justfications and grand plans whether ideological, spiritual or material, were a nonsense.

Read the book. Watch the footage if you must. Both have enforced some of my increasingly entrenched views. I do not believe in the death penalty. I do not believe in the right of one person to take another's life. I do not believe in the death penalty as a/n effective punishment.

A friend bought me The Outsider a relatively short while ago. I would recommend it to anyone who feels the disquiet of the current cultural atmosphere (whatever is post- post-modern vs. fundamentalism) and especially anyone affected by the brutal execution of this misguided world leader.

Coming soon: how I learnt to forget about world worries and love Google's RSS reader.

Cold Turkey at Christmas

This Christmas I have been cruelly yet consensually denied three of my favourite things: my mum, cigarettes, and sharing a double bed with my partner. Nothing sinister at work, I just spent my second Christmas ever at my boyfriend’s parents’ place.

Thankfully, his parents are pretty much my fantasy mum and dad. His mum insists on no television - just parlour games and conversation - and makes the gravy from the giblets. His dad gently teases everyone including his wife who he still loves dearly after nearly fifty years of marriage. Bliss.

I even went to a carol service and if anyone does then surely God knows I love belting out a few songs about mangers and virgins' wombs. It also provided the absolute highlight of my Christmas when a riot nearly broke out over an indestructible piñata presented by an earnest Sunday School teacher to the family service.

After informing us of the story of the piñata's origins (something to do with Marco Polo and the devil - Christmas relevance lost on all of us) she asked the children thronged on the front pews salivating for more chocolate and Skittles, "Can you see what it is?" and they, having built the thing apparently with Araldite and gaffer tape, wetly chanted "a star" only to have the vicar (who had fallen off his chair barely ten minutes previous to this), retort "It's a chicken!", to which it did bear a closer resemblance, to be fair.

Unfortunately, this was not a chicken ready to become an ex-chicken. Even after about twenty children had, in turn, had a go at bashing the hell out of the thing with what looked like Captain Caveman's club, it was still gleefully bouncing around the sixteenth century wood-carved chapel. It got a bit frightening when eventually some of the older kids started really going at it whilst the other ones shouted "Get it! Kill the Chicken!" A perhaps not-so-rare Lord of the Flies moment in a Devonian village.

Local Jennifer Saunders was in the congregation, can't help but wonder if it might turn up in Jam and Jerusalem (Rob's mum, a member of the local WI on which it is no doubt based, underwhelmed by it so far, I think it's pretty good in places).

And we were housed in the bungalow of a fellow kind lady of the village (not sure if she's another WI-er) who was whooping it up in a Saga hotel in Winchester over the festive period and had kindly offered two single rooms for us. Again, I could complain but it was preferable to the living room floor alternative which would have no doubt involved Rob’s dad tiptoeing over me to refill his mum's sherry glass in time for the Queen’s speech (that country air really knocks me out).

As for the fags, well it’s a dull but ongoing fight against these oppressors, my lungs the Middle East of my now-aging battleground of a body. I think the UN are probably about as effective as the grubby (nicotine) patch now affixed to my soft underbelly, but it keeps my baser instincts at bay.

Thankfully whilst denied my maternal fix for the most part, I did manage to see Mother Brown on Boxing Day evening for an enormous squeeze and lots of kisses on kitchen-ruddy cheeks. Truth be told, I do actually like cold turkey - alongside an enormous pile of my mum's bubble and squeak, stained with pickled walnut juice, of course.

Back to work tomorrow. Ah well.

Let's Have Some New Cliches

I was going to title this post "All I Want for Christmas" then realised it would be the same title of a million other entries simultaneously saved to blogger which may have caused the Internet to explode.

Anyway, what I wanted was the Internet back. And I just got it. Gawd bless BT. I also want one of those USB LP converter thingies for anyone who's interested. I realise I will, however, be getting a couple of varieties of unction, a stinky candle and possibly a not-quite-right book, same as I've bought for everyone else.

Have a smashing winterval.

x

P.S. Is Internet still upper case or am I showing my age?

One Cold Pontiff and Three Warm Old Ladies

As well as working on and at the fringes of various exciting projects, interspersed with whines about my lack of time (Balls It's F*cking Friday, I say) and my lack of broadband at home (dull poor customer experience post may be with you soon), I have managed to squeeze in a long weekend in Rome since I last wrote.

Without the time and materials, I have failed to get some nice pics onto Flickr, or my video of the inside of the Pantheon onto Youtube as planned, but here are some highlights to be getting on with:

1. The emotional intensity of seeing St Peters and the Pope
   We saw Benedict XVI speaking to the crowd on Sunday, and whilst a lapsed Catholic it did seem pretty astounding (and to be fair, my travelling companion Tracy is Jewish and she was pretty impressed too).
   
   I was also moved wondering whether religious members of my family had ever been to Rome or seen a Pope speak, and was pleased/relieved to find out from Mother Brown that my nan had actually been to Rome although the pope she saw was nicer, the current one "not being what I call a warm pope" on Mother's popeometer. (Incidentally, have only just realised where the word pontificate comes from.)
   
   St Peters as a whole is awe-inspiring due to the beauty of its sculpture, art and architecture, humbling for the piety of some of the characters in the building past and present, but ultimately for me a little nauseating for the amount of decoration, ostentation and glamour.
   
   
2. Food
   Includes: spaghetti cacio e pepe (goats cheese and black pepper); fig and walnut ice cream; deep-fried artichokes Roman-Jewish style; squid in a spicy tomato sauce; fritto misto (Italian tempura); coffee; sesame and honey ice cream; some sort of delicious tuna thing; linguine with lemon and sea bass.
   
   My favourite of all was a dense almondy cake rich with dry fruit and fresh from an oven from an unmarked bakery we'd been tipped off about by the Time Out guide. We nearly gave up on the place until I spotted two old dears feverishly scratching at the paper bag containing whatever they'd just bought - which I found out was this heavenly stuff. Now known by me as "old lady crack", if anyone can hazard a guess at what it's actually called, I'd love to find out. It tasted Christmassy and had lots of whole almonds in it as well.
   
   
3. The Pride of Romans in their City
   We paused for a few moments in a (by Roman standards) non-descript piazza to admire the intense blue sky against the amber rooftops, and a little old lady walking across the square strode past us beaming and waving her hands in our direction, saying something along the lines of "Bella! It is beautiful, Rome, yes?" I'm not convinced it would happen in another city.

Wish me luck getting Tiscali to get our broadband up and running, I need my virtual life back.

Too Damn B. & L.

I've moved house and work is nuts. This has left me with a racing mind, mentally spinning Welsh dressers full of plates and unfortunately dropping a few - of which my regularish updates here have been one.

I am now in Starbucks (no broadband at our new house yet), wondering why their wireless internet access isn't free, and hoping I don't have another accident on my laptop with my grande skinny latte.

I refuse to sound like one of these chaps, I've just been too damn busy and lively for my own - or this blog's - good. But instead of running away from the guilt that I feel about my lack of updates I've decided to share my confession of a selection of other things I'm feeling a whole lot guiltier about:

Not Having Flossed Regularly
This week saw the first in a series of industrial dental cleaning appointments due to years of having a literally dirty mouth. After a slightly traumatic appointment, I shopped in Hampstead (see below) talking like John Merrick as I drooled blood down my chin, one side of my mouth still frozen from the local anaesthetic. I managed to cheer myself up with the realisation that the shopping assistants of Whistles, Karen Millen and Nicole Fahri no doubt assumed I had had a bad botox job rather than the more plebeian truth.

Rash Purchases
When I find myself in times of trouble, large, stiff paper bags with soft rope handles call to me. In the past week I have bought trainers, a dress, a jumper, a shirt, a pair of shoes, two different kinds of over-priced moisturiser and a t-shirt. I realise I am lucky to have this disposable income but even I admit it felt like a bit of a problem when I described the collection of bags in the hall as "Presents!" and was then congratulated by my partner for my organisational skills. One pair of velvet gloves does not a Christmas make (the rest were for me, from me as a sign of my appreciation - of me).

Smoking (again)
The other night I found myself looking straight at the woman in Oddbins and as she handed over 20 Marlboro lights and a lighter saying to her "I am such a loser". I am also tending to smoke Marlboro Menthols in the desperate hope that my breath won't smell as bad even tho I think they gave me a nose bleed the other day as I was combining them in a lethal menthol cocktail with Airwaves gum (don't try this at home).

Reading Crap
This has included Heat, the National Enquirer (Go Britney!) and even resorting to reading free newspapers on the tube (the London Paper is my preferred option, it doesn't have offensive spelling as does "London Lite" and has at least two gay columnists - yes, I am that easily pleased). I also bought Private Eye the other day and only read the cartoons and letters.

Enough already. My latte has grown cold, I'm sure there are some pictures and captions in the Saturday Guardian I could manage (maybe just the wallchart), and the chemist in Golders Green has a good selection of makeup and perfumes I could be perusing. And I'm gasping for a cool menthol draw...

Can anyone absolve me?

Martin Amis - House of Meetings

I imagine being commissioned to write a review of a Martin Amis novel is as daunting as painting a portrait of the Queen. So for this post, consider me at best an amateur Rolf Harris.

My love of such masculine writers as Amis borders on pathological. It’s no doubt an extension of my child-of-divorce habit of picking up father figures as friends and confidantes (you don’t have to be older than me, incidentally, if any of you have just counted yourself out).

I’m pretty sure Amis mentioned the impact of his parents’ divorce being somewhat responsible for his own collection of fathers in Experience – the likes of Saul Bellow, Nabokov and another of my favourites, Philip Roth. His later books, including this latest - House of Meetings - feel a little like homage to this collection of fathers with their tales of Russia, immigrants, America, Jews. Ageing plays a stronger role here than in past books, too.

Still the biggest theme of House of Meetings and all other Amis novels – maleness – is the anchor. And as it’s addressed to a daughter, Venus, I found one of my literary fantasy fathers was finally talking me just as I’d always wanted.

The book explores the two sides of man (and Martin), the aggressive, single (one-track) -minded beast and the gentle, at times feeble, reasoning, kind intellectual. Each side is represented by one of two brothers consigned to over a decade of life in a Soviet gulag and their reactions both inside and later in life to the horrors and pleasures they witnessed and participated in (much more of the former than the latter).

Amis works hard to further expose the Stalinist regime (after Koba the Dread), and the horrendous conditions endured by the enslaved brothers are hard reading at times, at others barely comprehensible. It is akin to tales of the Holocaust, and I confess there were times when I really wanted to see a picture and look and look and look to ensure I had fully understood exactly what went on.

More than a tale of deprivation and violence, however, the depth of the book comes from it being a kind of fucked-up love story of power imbalance between all the major characters; Stalin and Russia, Russia and its Jews, Russia and Russians, man and woman, brother and brother, encapsulated by the main thread of the relationship – or lack thereof – between narrator and Zoya, the sensual “Jewess” he is obsessed with before and after camp, who he finds to his disgust has married his younger, feebler brother.

There is so much going on past and present throughout the novel, that it can be an exhausting read at times – although it picks up to a gallop by the end. But it’s how Amis writes, as ever, that still makes me sigh; I was so delighted with the following illustration of a handshake I looked up from the page, looked back down and pointed at it:

"White and humid, the flesh seemed about to give, to deliquesce. It was like holding a greased rubber glove half full of tepid water."

I noted tons more examples of wonderful writing that I would love to pore over as poetry, from descriptions of Arctic summers as anxious-to-impress late-running housewives, to scenes of extreme violence compared to the explosive snap within a reptile house.

Occasionally I find myself angry when he uses phrases that I feel like he’s been waiting to slot in somewhere – he describes American teens wearing “the shat-myself look they all favoured, with the loose jeans sagging off the rump” and despite its simple brilliance and accuracy my gut reaction was a strong desire to slap his smug face.

It was at times like these I wondered whether I heard too much of Martin Amis in the narrator to the detriment of the fictional character. I also thought there was something missing from the depiction of Russians and Russia somehow – in my experience of Russian ex-pats, there is always a bit more noise, absurdity and colour than you ever expect - although that could have been deliberately drained away given the extraordinary life experiences this story depicted.

But overall, whilst not the greatest of his books, House of Meetings is extremely good, and lots of the comments, themes, ideas and language will stay with me, some to positively haunt me (unlike, for example, Yellow Dog, which I enjoyed but haven’t really retained). Engendering sympathy for a rapist, for example, is no mean feat.

You can rarely knock the ambition of Amis’s novels nor his tactics. In House of Meetings, the enormity of subject matter coupled with some delicate portraits of brutalised individuals, makes for a rich – if, at times, depressing - feast.

It's On.

We're moving on Saturday. I am surrounded by boxes. As detailed previously, we are moving to Hampstead Garden Suburb, and I've uploaded my first Youtube video to show you what the downstairs looks like when it's empty. Excuse very shaky camera work (this was done with my phone) but please enjoy the only slightly entertaining moment when Dolly Daydream here tries to turn the light on in the bathroom forgetting that no lights are fitted. (Chinese Backstreet Boys mime artist I am not.)



We are both petrified that we will ruin its perfect little loveliness by shipping all our crap in. But had a breakthrough moment when the carpet went in upstairs earlier this week i.e. this is actually our home and we will live there. So we're both a bit scared but mostly excited.

To The Loud, Offensive Boy on the Victoria Line at 7pm

At around seven o'clock this evening, two red-faced boys with puppyish hair fell through the tube door just as we pulled out of Victoria station headed for Walthamstow on the Victoria Line. They plonked themselves diagonally from me, the first loud and brave and slurping at a beer, his shifty sidekick stared at his knees, cupping his can. They sat like they'd arrived in a bar - loads of energy and self consciousness.

The loud one started to swear loudly about the attractiveness of another passenger, and once her beau was established, they both began to bark at each other about what the lucky fella would be doing to her later, their faces grimacing towards the squirming couple, eyes and voices askance. Their palpable angry nerves suggested they had never done what they were loudly detailing.

The couple got off at the next stop, the guy grinning whilst he apologised to his gorgeous girl. The boys repeated what they had been saying for a few minutes after their departure, like a dying echo, until the shifty boy doled out another can from a blue plastic bag to his superior and the slurping recommenced. Two teenage girls opposite me tittered.

The loud boy's eyes darted around the carriage looking for his next victim, our next entertainment. He motioned between two men in front of them, then mumbled something punctuated by the words "Muslim" and "killed" spoken in a slightly shriller tone.

I looked to see the person they were referring to. An Asian man in his late twenties/early thirties sat reading a London Lite. He looked like he could be a sweet person, possibly a bit boring.

Then the loud boy said something truly horrible, really loudly, fired at the sweet-but-boring looking passenger. The shifty boy flinched at his partner's words, the passenger didn't - I hoped he didn't notice but doubt that was the case.

The loud boy drew breath and looked around the carriage. I stared at him, wanting to know what to say to make him stop. I shot a glance back at my fellow passenger to let him know that other people on the carriage did not agree with the boys; he didn't look up from his paper.

In the end, I ended up locking eyes with the loud boy, and tried to look as angry as I could to stare him down. He looked at me, cheeks burning with beer, and he stayed silent. Whilst I'd love to think differently, I don't think there was any causality between my glare and his silence. In summary: I did nothing.

I reflected on their words, thinking I almost wished that he had started on me, so then I would have been really justified to say something, and maybe then could speak on behalf of other people on the carriage too nervous of repercussions or maybe just too tired of similar incidents to speak up for themselves or defend others.

Then I started worrying that maybe other people did agree with them, which was why they had been bold enough to speak up. I'm pretty sure some other men on the carriage would have had the same lewd thoughts about the gorgeous girl, for example, and even her boyfriend had just shrugged his shoulders.

It reminded me of when, as a young teenage girl again on the tube, I found myself grinning and fluttering my eyelashes at three men sat opposite me who were winking at me and discussing how pretty I was. Then they turned on the Asian girl who was sitting next to me and started saying how much nicer I was than her because ... you can fill in the rest. I didn't say anything to the men that time either, I just stopped smiling and blushed for a different reason. But at least I got off at the next stop with the girl and apologised to her in person for not saying anything and, I suppose, their behaviour.

It's hard to hold onto the thought that both times I was really justified to say something because I was offended, and I don't like people feeling scared who sit with me on the tube. Did I really need to be scared of two slightly drunk teenagers? They were the ones who ran off at the next stop this time.

I'm still none the wiser as to how to handle such a situation in future, but a trend possibly reported from Japan a while back came to mind, when women take pictures with their mobile phones of men who have touched them up on the train and publish them to a website to denounce them and warn others.

Maybe we could start a movement here - take a photo of someone who is being racist, homophobic, sexist or just generally obnoxious on the train and publish it - hey, send it to your local paper. I would actually love a column like that, an alternative lonely hearts "To the loud, offensive boy on the Victoria Line on Tuesday night at 7pm: you are a horrible person who deserves a big smack in the mouth and to learn that no one wants to hear your idiotic views on sex you've never had and politics you don't understand."

Schoolboy Terrors

Yesterday, without having seen The Sun's headline or this excellent post about it (link courtesy of Tom Coates), I started to write a post about how strange it was that Kim Jong-il has been consigned, not only by the South Park fellas, but also the mainstream British media, to a comedic figure teetering around North Korea in platform shoes, high on brandy and Elnett.

Admittedly, there is something odd about the Korean leader from the reported stories - and the quote on the BBC article above, "I know I'm an object of criticism in the world, but if I am being talked about, I must be doing the right things." seems wildly Wildean given recent actions.

Evidence above would suggest it's clearly not just a British trait to use playground tactics in political commentary, but my next example of how ridiculous British politics actually is was when listening to yesterday's exchange between Cameron and Blair in the Commons.

Cameron totally out-Blaired Blair in terms of wit and polish but at the end of the day it was like listening to kids from rival schools trying to outdo each other. It ended up not seeming to have all that much to do with politics, which, to be fair, Blair tried to spit out. But then it became mostly about this strange teenage obstinacy of Blair not wanting to be open about wanting the leadership contest to be a bit more open.

But worse was to come today. I challenge ANYONE to sit through Sion Simon's spoof Cameron Youtube video - it is truly hideous, a total misfire that makes me feel comparative affection for Cameron's calculated but earnest efforts.

I realise that some of the language in the Youtube comments is hideously offensive, some of which I'm about to quote, but totally in keeping with this schoolboy toss e.g. "you spasticated gaylord" seems a fair criticism. The Tory anger is clearly misplaced, if I were a member of the Labour party I'd be demanding Simon's head on a stick.

Later Note 16:30, 13th October: Simon Video removed.

Back in the Saddle Again

In the past month access to computers and connection to the Internet have been intermittent, and latent anxiety levels have crept up. Now Toshiba has handled the tea incident for me and I've returned home after dog sitting in an internet-free Essex house, I feel a lot more relaxed.

Here are some of the things that I have written about mentally in the past month and may expand on at a later date:

• The RSC's latest production of The Tempest - I've never seen the play before and was really moved. The set is incredible and the portrayal of Ariel as a tragic Nosferatu character inspired. It's coming to London next year.
• Banana Yoshimito's Hardboiled Hard Luck - clean writing portraying complex emotions. My second Japanese author after Murakami and one I will read again.
• Understanding philosophy via In Extremis - a poignant and thrilling love story with more enduring lessons than the handful of lectures I sat through at university
• Is email the new fax? Interested to read this story about how the preference for instant messaging and social networks may sound the death knoll for a technology that my age group and older thought revolutionary
• Whether or not to start driving - after discussion with a fellow non-driver, I am considering a one-week residential crash course to get me started.

More in the coming week. I'm drooling over the new Martin Amis book on the shelves and will be purchasing this week, so they'll be a no-doubt adoring review coming soon.

Good for me

When I explained to someone that I had spent my two weeks off pottering around our flat, and staying for a few days each in the Cotswolds and Devon, their response was the limp "Good for you". Faint and damning maybe but also correct - it was good for me.

During the first couple of days, still buzzing with surges of stress-related adrenalin, I ended up transferring all work energy and anxiety into bizarre creative personal projects including the pointless ambition of the development of a new literary form - the cross-genre review mashup.

This was inspired by a conversation I had with some colleagues where, possibly through the medium of wine, we seamlessly moved between chatting about the amazing online game/experience/community/world Second Life and a book I'd started to read, Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island. Before I embarked on my ambitious plan, which I may attempt at a later date if the idea isn't manic nonsense, real life got a hold of me and my virtual creativity occupied less and less of my headspace.

I confess, even when real life did kick in, my boyfriend and I still couldn't shake work ways. On Day 3, we sat gazing at the view from Parliament Hill, the remains of a picnic in front of us, then proceeded to fill out coloured pieces of paper with "what we want to achieve during the rest of the holiday" - one idea per piece of paper, all ideas are valid - and then prioritised our list by scoring for urgency, impact and ease on a criteria grid. And before anyone anonymously comments "you are sad" - yes I know, that's the point of confessing this.

So what did we achieve? In descending order: 6 nights away from home in a good hotel and with family; 5 ok books read (between us); 4 mostly terrible films watched; 3 great walks (5 miles +); 2 good plays seen; and 1 great meal out.

We might not have purchased a sofa, gone to the chiropodist or plastered the ceiling in the spare room, but I think we prioritised ruthlessly and effectively.

More Worry, Less Posts

Ah, the irony of the emphatic end to my last post "Worry less, post more". Within 24 hours how I had learnt to rue those words.

It started with a colleague telling me how a random person had told him they'd enjoyed my blog. I was ecstatic to learn that someone who wasn't a relative, friend, or colleague past or present, was enjoying anything I'd written. All this talk of only posting for friends and colleagues went out the window: I had a fan!

When I found out the next day that this person had enjoyed my Channel 4 insider's insight so much he had included a link in a newsletter, I became hysterical, worried that I might have broken a cardinal rule of employment in an attempt to make my mates laugh.

The thing I'd missed in my last post on the relevance of daft blogs was that the most interesting and relevant thing about my daft blog for a certain group of people - and that might keep them reading - is the fact that I work for Channel 4.

I told my boss about it straight away, and he was supportive and relaxed as were the few colleagues with whom I confided my concerns. But as I suspected there were some things I should have been more careful and thoughtful about mentioning it seemed right to review past posts.

This led to a night of the long knives for Busy and Lively, with the culling of one post and some judicious editing of others. The only irritation for me being that taking out some of the detail made it well, a bit less funny (if a bit more accurate).

Reflecting on my extreme reaction, with a boss relaxed and colleagues supportive, why was I so worried? Let me give you the back story: just under a year ago, I left the company that brought you the monkey dance and went to the company that brings you Dispatches (I might watch Big Brother more, but that's not the point).

(Ok, I admit it, when I watch that video of Ballmer - I was there at the conference when it was filmed - I actually get happy shivers, it was like being at a rave but with fewer whistles and more pocket protectors. The only problem was, when Ballmer boomed at the end "I - LOVE - THIS - COMPANY", that's when I shrugged my shoulders, looked at the floor and thought "meh".)

It's hard to explain how much happier I am since changing jobs without sounding weird, but, rest assured, work feels like something very different now and not something I want to put at risk for a mention in (the) Metro.

Most usefully, this mini saga meant I was spurred on to be more proactive about working to set up a corporate blogging policy in order to avoid future panics for me and others by laying down some ground rules - like reinforcing little principles like accuracy and respect that are remarkably easy to stretch for the sake of a gag.

Once that's sorted, all I need then is to persuade Andy Duncan to come on stage at our big internal meetings to Eye of the Tiger or similar and life would be perfect. If I do manage to keep hold of my job and am called upon, I've already got my entrance music sorted (not sure about the outfit, mind).

The Relevance of Daft Blogs

I learnt recently about a technique of online community management called "speed bumping" whereby users are prevented from posting comments more than once every few minutes. The result is that whilst reducing the sheer number of posts, it also encourages more intelligent, thought-through contributions, and less entries that consist solely of either TLAs (three-letter acronyms) or bizarre combinations of punctuation marks ;-) (LOL).

I've been hoping that this might be the effect on my blog due to the indefinite inaccessibility to a laptop in the wee small hours (incidentally, Blogger doesn't work with my Nokia N70 despite my previous positive posts). Theory was less quantity, more quality. In actual fact, I can't help but feel that it's had more of a negative effect - I'm finding this first post in over a week much tougher to compose.

Perhaps it's because quality of blogging has been on my mind since Rachel Cooke's article in The Observer last Sunday "Who's to judge? Better an eminent critic than a daft blogger" about bloggers being oh-so-wrong about Snakes on a Plane and other shit films that daft bloggers have made a fuss about.

Personally I'm a bit tired of the argument about whether journalists and critics are better writers and judges that bloggers - of course they are. Most journalists who earn any kind of living have to fight through an enormous amount of competition, may have a training/education in their chosen sphere, are likely to have amazing amounts of experience and unquestionably better prose styles than your average blogger. On top of this, the professional hack has a commissioning editor to confirm what they're writing about is worthwhile, subbing teams to pick up their split infinitives and editors and designers to aid presentation and layout.

But this article and some mainstream press miss the point about why it's ok for people to get excited about crap films like [m*therf*ckin'] Snakes on a [m*therf*ckin'] Plane.

In a media landscape where there is an embarassment of content riches to be had, what you need is relevance - not just relevance to the task in hand (where Google cleaned up) or to your particular industry (digg, Media Guardian) but also relevance to your life and tastes. It's why I know that a bunch of you are still reading my views on blogging (you're the work people) and why hopefully the rest of you are still reading (you're the people that like me - oh yes, you do, don't even try to deny it). Most bloggers only ever write for a bunch of friends and/or close colleagues as I do (great US report from a few months back on this here).

A lot of the content "long tail" is shit, if your definition of "shit" is never forming part of any canon or even appealing to the majority. But then, is there nothing that you love in your life that does not stand up to critical scrutiny?

I, for example, will always treasure the memory of Rupert Everett's performance of his first (and only?) single "Generation of Loneliness" on the Wogan chat show. (Had I just managed to find it on Youtube I may have ripped my top off in the office.) Others, possibly including Rupert himself, may cringe at the thought of it. But he was my ultimate pin-up during my teenage years and anything that he was involved with I consumed with a ridiculous amount of subjectivity (although seriously, he was robbed of a career as an international pop sensation).

Similarly I will endure sentences with the poorest construction in the world ever and even; the misuse of punctuation in some blog entries! As have you. Because the writers themselves are interesting and relevant to my work, my life or my beliefs. Bloggers may appear to be a barmy army, but mostly they're just people keen to share their particular interests and passions - Samuel L Jackson starring in ludicrous movies being one of them that quite a few shared.

Writers should stop worrying about lunatic bloggers taking over the media asylum, and think of them as more akin to influential pressure groups - sometimes crazy, sometimes a little over-excited about the power they may or may not wield, but always relevant and valid to a certain group of people and on the whole an excellent conduit for ideas and opinions to surface.

Note to self: worry less, post more.