The festering season

A bright red blanket on the mud and incident tape when we walked past Barnes Bridge on Sunday, one-under at Stratford today, the couple next door have been having a barney all sodding week now with added flung furniture, it's that time of year right enough.

What is point, tell me, what is point?

Four compelling examples which suggest that while the public may at first get what it wants, it is no less happy later to want what it gets:

- Tom and Jerry after Fred Quimby
- Star Trek after Shatner
- Doctor Who after Tom Baker
- Scooby Doo with Scrappy Doo

And yet I have encountered more than one man old enough to see his hairline go into full retreat who believes otherwise.

Serve chilled at °5C with a large creamy head

You know those hangovers which are so sophisticated that they get their own second wind not long after you've risen? Well, my new Waitrose is so close that I'd got there, bought eggs, bacon and Bombay Sapphire and was home again before I started spewing. That's convenience.

Just read 'unwary maiden' as 'unwieldy maiden'. Not as good as mishearing 'cumbersome' in place of 'buxom' the other day. Also, Charlotte Green, does she gargle with dairy products (o.n.o.) before hitting the studio or what?

Can I have another drink yet? Have I been awake long enough?

These Are A Few Of My Favourite Things

When considering the correct approach to reading a newspaper I omitted to mention the tide tables. Consultation of these is important for those whose city is complemented by an estuarine body of water. Few things are more cheering than the sight of the river at the height of its froth looking fit to swamp the Embankment and fill the cellars of Southwark with its ebullient swell.

Fewer still more depressing than at its lowest ebb when it appears that every water molecule with a valid passport has emigrated to a villa in Bulgaria.

Banks of mud and broken masonry are exposed, strewn all across with:
used firearms and shanking tools,
red Royal Mail rubber bands,
Nutrament tins,
Railtrack luggage trolleys,
traffic bollards,
plastic bags from Gregg's,
skateboard halves and bicycle segments,
used GHB bottles,
Make Poverty History bracelets,
crack pipes and clay pipes,
the plastic surrounds SIM cards are snapped out of,
discarded Filipina domestics,
Oyster card wallets,
exhausted fire extinguishers,
Waitrose charity tokens,
luminous visibility tabards,
Next and Top Shop clothing hangers,
latex gloves,
Fitness First backpacks,
IV drip stands,
fag stubbers sponsored by Addison Lee,
USB memory sticks,
acrylic nails,
conference pass lanyards,
Metropolitan Police incident boards,
complimentary Evening Standard umbrellas,
seat cushions detached and defenestrated from First Capital Connect carriages,
pages from Georges Perec novels,
cassette tapes of Clement Freud 'Just A Minute' filibusters,
and the occasional torso of a ritually murdered child.

£=€=£=€ ha-ha-ha!

Avoid newspapers displaying an indecent haste in getting to the facts. Short punchy sentences, swiftly conveying information, suggest that the reader is in a hurry, has something better to do. Places to go, people to see, wanting to know the state of the world in ten minutes, reeking of business. This style of journalism is clearly aimed at persons who wear wristwatches - and consult them.

Ideally there should be many more words to get through than strictly necessary and the path to knowledge must take a circuitous route. The press should insinuate the news rather than report it.

No lady or gentleman would rush her or his morning paper (least of all by reading it in the morning). The mature reader will take a more sedate approach. The mature reader will begin with the obituaries.

Followed by the court circulars, then possibly the day's race cards. Then the theatre reviews.

Financial pages go straight to line the rabbit hutch or to light the fire in the study. On no account should they be read, other than in a period of onsetting recession, in which case they may be declaimed aloud to gatherings of family and friends for mutual delight and hilarity.

Then to the comment pages and editorial, to put one in a properly prejudicial frame of mind before moving to 'the front of the book'. International news first - start with the Tropics, other developed nations' remote holdings, one's own remnant empire and former colonies, then the neighbours. Finally domestic news, beginning with the parliamentary sketch: never quite as satirical and scurrilous as Hansard, but it will do

7 pence an hour

They didn't really riot of course, that's just typical Evening Standard bollocks. But I'm told things got pretty foul.

This evening, the sort of noise that in the print media would be described as 'a sickening thud' and the bus driver dropping anchors and swearing loud and panicky. 'Ah f ck we jus run summon over y'know.' the girl behind me remarks.

The mildly uncomfortable feeling of being on a bus that is on someone. Though arguably more agreeable than being the someone under the bus, I'll grant you.

Due to the height involved only the gathering crowd, briefly distracted from London Lite, Blackberries and Foot Locker, gives a clue as to what is happening directly beneath the windows. Hands over mouths in a dismay sort of way, but not actual wincing. Then a sort of quasi-religious reaction, gaping and widened eyes and actual smiles. She is risen.

Seems she'd fallen into the kerb by the vehicle, and was tucked into the gap between bus and pavement. Brief glimpse of her standing unaided looking down herself in wonder, all still there.

And off we go again, I'll be off in ten minutes, the driver's got no break until Golders Green. Had it been me I'd have turned out the passengers and parked up on Portman Square for an hour to cry or punch the seat cushions or just hit the pub. I don't know how they do it. Not just the near misses and actual hits - Oxford Street full stop. The collision took place at low speed, between lights, short of precognition what can you do?

You don't get a much bigger frontal profile on a moving object. 14 feet high, 8 wide, bright red. It doesn't exactly test the peripheral vision. But just try the view from the front up top, Centrepoint to the Arch. It's a series of masterclasses in making attempted suicide look like an accident.

Shoppers, they're not all there. Drunks have better coordination and spatial awareness. Free-range psychotics display more concern for their own personal safety. Like toddlers transfixed by the brightly coloured objects they blunder across the spaces between shops without regard for what they may meet on the way. Could be a river running between the pavements, boiling with snapping crocodiles. Or a chasm without floor until the flaming pits of Hades. They'd still step off the kerb without for one moment taking their eyes off the opposite window display.

In the suburbs the shops open at eleven on Sunday mornings. In Oxford Street they don't switch the tills on before noon. The creatures from Burb World forget this. By 11:15 the pavements are crawling with whimpering staggering zombies, pawing and beating at the closed doors, scratching at the windows with their credit cards. At the request of the London Ambulance Service many shops relent at half-past, giving the junkies thirty minutes of product fondling before they can finally start Chipping and Pinning.

A fine bloody recession this is turning out to be.