Label gun to the head.

Label gun to the head.

I've tried to develop a rule. A rule about getting angry with people. One that sounds nifty and sensible, but which I find falls over immediately when it comes face to face with a particular group of people. Or my actual moral capacity.

Bankers.

Now, before embarking on my rank banking rant, the real detail of interest here is that, whatever I may think, I evidently feel the need to deploy the phrase 'group of people'.

Ah, nothing feels better when you're on your inexplicably high (and presumably wobbly) horse than to herd a group of people together and jab a finger at them repeatedly.

"THERE! THERE they are. THEY. THEM. OVER THERE. LOOK, LOOK AT THEM, all there with their, their... bloody whassnames and their, their... ruddy THINGS. JEER. JEER AT THEM."

>CONTENTED SIGH<

It's just so much simpler.

---

Somewhere in the honest light of this, my clever and upright-sounding rule about losing one's rag with someone clears its throat and meekly says this: that I should, in the heat of disagreement, take care not to label the disagree-ee with my accusations and colourful judgements.

Whuh?

I mean, to me there's a difference between shouting at someone that they have been acting like something unmentionable, and shouting at someone that they are something unmentionable. Despite the fact that you've clearly mentioned it very loudly.

Really?

If you've gotten to the stage where you really are actually shouting at someone, then you've probably already entered the taped-off room labeled Academic Arguments, when it comes to exactly how you're framing the tense of your abuse as you pick up the chair.

But it's a detail of internal perspective that seems important, because it may govern how you or I see and therefore treat those around us.

..And then. JUST when you think you have those around you treated jolly well – with a friendly hello in the baker's (if you're in the mood), or an occasional Big Issue purchase (if you haven't already crossed the street because you didn't want to break a tenner), or an effusive thankyou to a friend who's just cooked you a free slap-up meal (after moaning before arriving about having to turn out that night) – along come some bloody, ruddy, depraved, soulless, evil, murdering bankers.

Arrived with the sole purpose of upsetting your nice moral equilibrium. The bastards.

---

Why I'm so hot under the collar about the banking system I have no idea. I can barely work Sage or send the occasional invoice. It's not like I understand a thing the markets are going on about. And our household and business has fared okay over the last year. I have not a thing to actually complain about.

But really. With so many millions of people across the world in debt up to their receding hairlines because we've all been encouraged to keep spending like the dialysis machine will implode if we don't, the corporate banking sector seems willfully disconnected from the rest of humanity.

Ah. And there. How stealthy is the private human urge to segregate – to create Them and Us. We can so nearly blame The Bankers for segregating themselves. Can't we? Can't we?

In a year of calamitous financial cock-ups that bared to all the wildly childish level of responsibility that the current, laxly-regulated global banking culture seems to stimulate, the Clever Chaps At The Top Who We Desperately Need To Retain With Reasonable Incentives – and who incidentally CAUSED the apparent near-collapse of all we pinned our fiscal hopes to – decide to keep paying themselves EXTRA payments on top of their bulging salaries. In the full glare of the media. Of us little people judging them. Jabbing our bony, underfed fingers at them.

They don't appear to care. Or they really don't see. Which are sort of the same thing.

Or, I suspect more realistically, none of the people closely involved in this whole tedious drama quite has the courage to challenge things so fundamentally. I'd be nervous. And selfishly so.

I mean, here's the point: Mercs are like, really comfortable in the back. And nicely soundproofed. You can really feel lulled to slumber in there. I'm not sure I'd want to be woken up. Would you?

---

I found myself ranting on Twitter this morning in the sort of annoying way that ruins your followers' feeds with endless repetitions of your tedious icon. For the record, here are those tweets:

I'm not in Davos, just to be clear. Much as the banking heads of Earth implored me to come and tell them again how angry they make us all.
Eloquent as my Davos speech would have been, peppered with colourful oaths and gathering purpleness of face, I fear pearls to swine.
If a group of vulgarly well-paid adults with saturated access to 24hour news media can't sense the need for SOME symbolic gestures...
ONE year. Just ONE year without bonuses. Everyone in banking - one year. The one where people are losing jobs and businesses are folding.
Is it so hard – to give up one year of EXTRA money? Is solidarity or just seemliness incomprehensible to senior banking culture? Apparently.
Use one year's bonuses across the banking sector to wipe the debts of others. Go on. Try to get your heads around that. Just ONE year.
"We must retain the brightest talent with disproportionately, offensively large additional payments." Really? Go on, really?
Banks want to attract and retain soullessness, do they? What else would a clear dependency on bonus cash at any cost do to people?
Sack the top tier of bankers. If they can't function for a humble year – a year now gone already - without bonus, lose them. Why not?

Well, yes – why not? Have a spring clean. Promote from within. Warn the new guys not to break the banking system this time, but let them have a go. A healthy step up for these chaps could still cost way less than the bloated funds pouring through the coffers of some top individuals at the moment, and they might have a few new ideas. Make the generation above sweat a little. That's capitalism, baby.

I'm an idiot. Which means I not only do not understand these things, I am also far too comfortable with failure. So, y'know – do not take my advice about anything.

But a wise-sounding wit I used to work with once said something to the effect of this: When a task you're hopeless at gets taken from you, it's just a relief, isn't it?

Ah, how I sit in the studio and soberly ponder this every day.

Anyway.

Don't strike the Banking Bastards from society. Don't write them off as humans. Invite them back into the group. Coax them back from There to Here. Relabel their foreheads from Them to Us. Then lower the label gun.

Just, for the love of all that's sensible, make some of them stop banking.

The Trojan white elephant in the room.

The Trojan white elephant in the room.

It's getting rapidly to the point where I can't turn back. There will be no hiding. It will be out there. It will be exposed.

Now, they say that when something giantically obvious but awkward exists between people, their mutual or group instinct to not mention it to eachother is like having an elephant in the room. But I doubt this. I think it's probably a poor analogy.

I think that even if you and your fellow awkwardees did instinctively swear an unspoken pact to not mention the inexplicable presence of a three-and-a-half metre tall, eight-ton African land mammal in your kitchen diner, as it casually overturned your pine dresser with an inadvertent tusk swing, the direction of your conversation would eventually slide.

I think that your noble English understatement would be somewhat undermined by the fact that your floor's integrity suddenly would be.

And anyway, I think that the elephant would be too smart to play along. I think it would politely but firmly clear its throat. And prod a trunk at the pile of letters from the WWF asking you how you intend to look after it.

---

It makes me wonder though. If the ancient Trojans had adopted this marvelously oblique and English attitude, would Troy have turned out differently – "What big horse?". Or is this attitude exactly how Troy was allowed to be finished and put on theatrical release in the first place?

I mean, surely only an unnaturally developed ability to ignore the bleedin' obvious could have gotten some of the film crew through some days of that film production, screened again lastnight on Channel 5.

You can hear the execs talking about the idea in pre-production meets and all slavering in agreement: "a huge cast of absurdly pretty, famous people, supported by a secondary cast of respected elder voice-over actors, all dressed to the nines in ancient world finery, with a bunch of epic battles and a couple of shots of Brad Pitt's butt – what's not perfect? What?"

Yeah. Right. Nothing. Except for the small detail that the whole thing's a stinking embarrassment of an idea.

Really, it's a howler. Watch it again sometime. You won't make it as far as the ruddy horse. We didn't. It's clearly a very slow horse.

And what we've learned is that the easiest elephants in the room to ignore are clearly the white ones.

----

Now. You may be wondering why I'm pondering the subject of epic ineptitude.

Well. Glad you ask. And you're there ahead of me, obviously. Because it won't be long before I'm quietly rolling out the red carpet to the premier of an epic production of my own.

Inviting the stars along. Gurning smugly at the paps outside. Winking at the reviewers. Straightening the sleek bow tie. Making the lovely first lady of Momo slip on some preposterously expensive evening wear. As if that's different to usual.

Because I have begun the final, unnerving, dispiriting process of doing the final mixes for The Golden Age of Exploration.

And I'm wondering if it's possible to hide behind the massive bulk of a white elephant when the rotten cabbages start raining onto the stage.

---

Now, now. I'm not being disingenuous. As I step back in the studio and try to take one more honest look at the canvas, like most artists, I vacillate between thinking I'm looking at a masterpiece and wondering if I'm actually staring blankly at Aphrodite at the waterhole, by that famous Parisian sculptor, Tony Hancock.

It's neither, of course. I'm exaggerating for comic effect. Really – I do that from time to time. True story. It's a collection of tunes that are, I suspect, cheekily likable.

But, as someone of a more effortlessly hip demographic might put it with withering efficiency, likeable ≠ credible.

The last time I rolled out the red carpet for a production of mine was August 2001. Just a couple of weeks before 9/11, I happily invited all and sundry down to Cranleigh's church hall for the launch event of a little 'space opera' all about an unexpected terrorist attack on an Earth of the future. Whole thing starts with a massive explosion sound. Friends came. A handful stayed and listened to the whole darned two-and-a-half hours of electronica and drama – a kind of loving cross between Jeff Wayne's musical version of The War of the Worlds and Blake's 7. Which, be honest, you secretly think sounds brilliant. And if I'm secretly honest back, I think was kind of groovy. It was also, after four toiling years of my life, essentially a very long bedroom demo, featuring many of my mates in lead roles, and a lot of very inadequate recording techniques, plus a number of shaky moments in the script.

I had a blast, of course. And was crushed because Chaser was basically pointless, of course.

Well, I wasn't really. But imagine the pressure now, after seven years of prep. Especially given the fact that I'm claiming The Golden Age of Exploration as more than just a worthy creative demo this time, but in fact A Musical Product That Will Actually Be Released For Purchase. All be it via iTunes to a fan base that doesn't exist beyond the Thinking Juice studio and a single inexplicable but friendly chap in the Czech Republic.

I've mixed three tracks so far. Spent most of Friday working on one enormous song near the start of the album that I'm trying to convince myself is not a wildly ill-advised bit of pop melodrama.

Dear me, three tracks in and I'm wondering if I'm wasting my time. Or whether I'll do what I always do and press on, finish it, invite people and pray they don't mention the giant white elephant in the room.

Thankfully, most of my close friends are English. Doubt they'll have the heart to say anything.

Thaw and theodicy.

Thaw and theodicy.

Fifteen days in, as the snows at last begin to subside across the treacherous, inconvenient winter wonderland of the UK, it's still hard to accept the fact that Christmas really is over and it's now 2010. After all the digging out and mucking in and helping hands and freezing feet, it's the future. We're here, living in it. Officially.

This week, however, the people most on our minds must surely be those in the Caribbean who have been blasted back to the middle ages. Of all the places to suffer a natural catastrophe of such magnitude, Haiti was perhaps the least prepared in the western hemisphere to cope with Tuesday's earthquake.

With at least 50,000 people dead as a result of that 30-second 7.0 magnitude shock, horribly close to the centre and surface of Port Au Prince, further millions have been practically displaced around the dense capital.

Think about those figures. That's like half the people of Bournemouth gone – just gone. And at least three or four times as many people who live in the entire Christchurch, Bournemouth and Poole area made homeless. Imagine every street around you shaken apart like that.

Well, you can't. Probably. Either because you don't live in Bournemouth or because you do and all you can think about at the prospect of a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hitting the town is that at last the bloody Imax might fall down. Or possibly the BIC, if you're still holding that grudge.

And I'm certain that you're unlikely to be reading this from a city with most of its inhabitants living in shanty shacks trembling their way up the surrounding hillsides in the hope that one day millions of jobs will magically appear for everyone who moved there from the deforested, flooded, wrecked economies of the countryside.

So we can't realistically imagine what's going on over there, despite all the footage. Bodies piling in the street do not look the same on the telly as they do at the junction of Arnewood and Paisley Roads.

---

It's been a country of poverty and revolution, of sorts, for centuries.

The island now divided into western Haiti and eastern Dominican Republic was 'found' by heroic imperial land-nicker himself Chris Columbus in 1492 – a year in which he seemed to pack an inordinate amount in, given the woeful lack of international travel and broadband speeds at the time – and became a Spanish settlement. Everyone in Haiti today speaks French you'll notice observantly, however, because the Spanish sort of gave away the mountainous end of the island to the French near the end of the 17th century. Probably lost it in a card game or somesuch over coffee.

Interestingly, it was the first place on Earth, it seems, to have been overthrown by black slaves and to have subsequently abolished slavery. Napoleon's own brother-in-law couldn't retake the country and it became fully independent in 1804. Though why being Napoleon's brother-in-law should be any gauge of military competence is anyone's guess; Lord knows what some blokes have to do to keep their wives happy. Especially potty, pint-sized despots – they're bound to attract some high maintenance skirt.

The sad truth is that Haiti seems to have been defined by dictatorship, coups and political instability ever since. And that ALWAYS leads to financial stability and a healthy middle class, right? Especially when there's American money sewn up in the interests of the country somewhere too.

After some twenty years of military take-overs vying with fledgling democracy on and off, Haiti was famously hit by a particularly severe hurricane season for the island in 2008. Floods killed hundreds. Mudslides from the bare hills and mountains stripped of their meager wood value just slooped into the roads and towns, wrecking infrastructure. The DEC and other overseas aid agency alliances together raised some $1billion-worth of support at the time.

And today they're launching another appeal. Because today, Haiti is on its knees.

---

Interesting turn of phrase that.

It's not long before you hear the G-word somewhere in the face of such rampant, apparently very precisely unfair suffering. God. And two and a half centuries ago was no different, with one particular debate about divine purpose and suffering flaring into comedy. With absolutely no reference to Dante.

Rapier French wit, Voltaire – so cuttingly funny the French kicked him out and sent him to live in the more satirically-minded London – lampooned and lambasted Enlightenment-tinged theology of the day in his bawdy tale of Candide, published first in 1759. The absurd Dr Pangloss in this rip-roaring cross between Tom Jones and Private Eye was famously a caricature of Gottfried Leibniz – a right brain-box, polymath and contemporary rival of Newton, who also rather smugly invented the word 'theodicy'.

Nice, isn't it? Theodicy.

I imagined it was spelt theodyssey and pictured a glittering, disco gospel supergroup. Google thought I was looking for information on Homer.

Most appropriately of all, perhaps, it doesn't half sound like theo-idiocy and it's not to be confused with theodolite which was then an emerging tool of engineering, of sorts. Which is interesting because theodicy concerns itself with divine engineering, of sorts.

Put overly simply, it's the idea that God – if he is, after all, God – must know what he's doing and that therefore: "if you think THIS world's shite, you should see the ones he discarded, mate. Sheesh."

In other words, as Dr Pangloss keeps saying throughout Voltaire's biting little book, we are, dear fellows, living in the "best of all possible worlds."

..It's an argument from a very different age to ours philosophically, of course. It has, I suspect, rather lost its debatory heat for the average Celebrity Big Brother watcher.

But it still resonates a theme that is, I think, eternal – ie: "God, WTF?!"

---

As I've sat and watched the inconsolably hard images from Port Au Prince this week, lost for words, a detached, academic little part of my head has imagined countless people of faith this week trying hard once again to, as Voltaire often put it, 'let God off the hook' on this one.

The 9.0-factor Lisbon earthquake and subsequent tsunami of 1755 was the disaster that resonated for him; how could God allow such carnage? And how could posh blokes in Europe straighten their wigs calmly and try to explain away the theological injustice of it?

Interesting then, that so many of the top UK aid agencies, represented by the DEC, are faith-based, like Christian Aid, Cafod or Tearfund.

I don't know about you, but I wonder whether a little bit of anger about such horror is sort of the point. I wonder if the person who wants to shout at the sky and to prove their concern gets on a plane and goes to pull people out of the rubble and clear away the countless dead and feed the countless hungry and try to find out what human cock-ups made the situation far worse, is actually articulating God.

As perverse as it sounds, while we're sincerely tackling the intellectual pain of being alive in radio studios and online forums, God may well be out there with his sleeves rolled up, tending to the survivors.

It is perverse. In my head. But something about that idea warms the freezing cold idea of suffering in my heart. ..Which still misses the point if it doesn't warm all the way to my hands and feet; they are, I suspect God might say, the best tools to articulate love with.

And how many people need that of us today, whatever we believe.

Fin. And Vin.

Fin. And Vin.

No, now I've been thinking about this and I don't believe it. I'm going to put my foot down this time. This time it's pushing it. Someone has to take a stand.

I flatly don't believe it's 12 MONTHS since I pressed Play on the Paradiso new year's epic iTunes playlist. It… can't be.
 
>SIGH<
 
>PAUSE<

>SIGHHHHHHHH<

Rubbish too, because I kind of feel I want to really, y'know, own the idea of tomorrow being a new year. A new start. A Day One. ..A Tomorrow I'm Going To Be Dead Good sort of day.

Oh don't snort. You're not helping.
>BORED FIDGET<

Ah, well. I currently have FIP on, playing some random Cuban-sounding thing by a bloke apparently called Oran Oran. Just so you know. I'm tempted to put on my last-minute-possible-favourite tune of 2009 on to make it seem more like a party – Lindstrøm's Baby Can't Stop. It's disco heaven. Very groovy. Will really get the party going. Yeah.
>EMPTY MOMENT'S GAZE<

..You, ah... you doing anything tonight?
>SUDDEN FLOUNCE TO FEET<

Oh that's it. I'm going to go and find the Adam Ant costume I was wearing this time ten years ago.
>THOUGHTFUL FREEZE<

Ten... years.

It's really ten years since the millennium started?
>SLIGHT SHOULDER SLUMP<

Well, I can hardly complain. The last ten years have been ten of the most formative and vital of my life. A fair bit of cool stuff has quietly happened in that time. Momo, for one. So perhaps the ol' Adam Ant outfit will work its charm again tonight. Even if I'm sitting on the sofa with a mug of bleedin' cocoa while wearing it, things will still seem more rock and roll as we start the new decade.

And so here's to it. Here's to turning the last ten years of learning stuff and mucking about into ten years of finally becoming a properly useful member of society.

(I said don't snort.)

Happy New Year, with important capitals, to you and the whole bally family. See you in 2010, inshallah.

Break out the cheese and wine, I feel a middle aged new year coming on. And someone PLEASE turn up that there ruddy disco...
xxx

Cold.

Cold.

Of course, one of the best things about Christmas is the appearance of unexpected gifts.

In that respect, tussling with the small army of nephews and nieces that one always does at this Yule-ish time of year should have rendered the element of surprise moot in the case of this particular gift – but I was none-the-less wrong-footed by the joyous outbreak of colds chez Paradiso, just a day or so after returning from the bosom of the rellies.

I am now a bit fed up with sitting about on the sofa, ashamed as I am to say such a reckless thing.

But a raspy-arse throat and sniveling, sniffing, dripping, pounding head do rather combine to lay out a chap uncomfortably. And even a chap has his things to do. Like shopping for shoes; I had not the fortification for this important task in the front-line affrontery of sales crowds yesterday. Too much. I feared the need for smelling salts as I giddied through the throngs of John Lewis.

And this nasty nasal adversary even floored the lovely first lady of Momo too – which is unfortunate, since our remarkably compatible constitutions helpfully tend to pick up different sicknesses, on the perhaps unfortunately-rare occasions we have legitimate medical excuses to bunk off a decent day's work.

Last time we were sick together was food poisoning – I remember one of us lying on the floor of the lounge and one of us on the sofa, but I can't remember which was which as we limply held pale hands and periodically made little sorrowful noises to eachother. I do remember thinking that that would be the last time I had fish pasta at Casablanca airport.

---

But today, manfully, I'm back at work. And womanfully, the lovely first lady of Momo is actually back at work, while I do this.

Can it really be a year since the spectacular Paradiso new year party, which rocked the neighbourhood with my 12-hour iTunes playlist and to which about five people came, including my mum? Can't believe it.

And what kind of year has happened in between?

Well, I'm not about to try to review it in any detail. I'd say that I'm left with a bizarrely positive feeling in the ol' gut regions about it, and about the impending new year, even though much of 2009 on paper was not an easy one.

Simply surviving the recession for another 12 months makes one feel profoundly thankful – we both kept earning this year, while others have lost work or been unable to find it in the first place. But it should be said that Momo:typo did see more than its fair share of inefficient or awkward jobs and working just as hard as normal seemed to yield less impressive full-time scores on the books. And all that went hand in hand with a surreal year for us personally.

Still, it feels as if a new road lies ahead of us beyond Thursday night, wherever we can find to spend it. And that's at least partly a simple relief. And beyond that, I can't help but feel a growing nodule of something that feels remarkably like excitement about what Momo:tempo might get up to in 2010. I should be working on skits for Sophie in the Orient instead of doing this, for example. And the preview edition covers to The Golden Age of Exploration are waiting for me at the printers.

It will be a year of change, 2010. For us. I expect to be saying goodbye to the blessed Momo Arnewood studio and trying to find another one, for one thing. And that could be the experience that breaks the Momo stiff upper lip, I imagine.

I hope, as much as anything, that it's not a year where friends drift apart. Rather, I hope we as a family will find new ways to grow together – I certainly know how much we going to need them, if not the other way around. Celebrating birthdays with conspicuously round numbers is on the cards again in the coming weeks and I know how easily life can take us away from eachother. Though I'm very aware this Christmas of how often it also gives us reasons to really need eachother.

So I'm thinking warm thoughts, not chilly, about the next 12 months. Even if I don't know quite what to do first. Apart from wipe my chuffing nose again.

Wish the kids had given me a bumper box of tissues for Christmas. That might have been a useful gift.

Idea.

Idea.

Very nice little print campaign here.

In the car back from the MIN awards the other week, I asked quiet advertising legend, Steve J – whose first ever advert was signed off by Charles Saachi in 1975 or something – what was the one thing his years of advertising experience had taught him.

He paused thoughtfully for a heartbeat and then smirked.

"You've always got to have an idea" he said.

http://www.ibelieveinadv.com/2009/12/sooruz-merry-christmas/
Sage advice; nail the idea, and the ad will ride itself.

Moral drilling.

Moral drilling.

If ethics or politics tutors wanted to make up a conundrum for their students, one to really bend their beans around like a kind of Kobayashi Maru No Win scenario, they'd be hard pushed to make up anything as effective as one particular one-word agenda item looming over the Copenhagen climate talks like a giant bovine methane cloud.

Brazil.

I mean, this one's like some sort of twisted boardgame for Geo-suffix nerds.

If you are one – sitting there, getting off on your global issues and your impossible political predicaments and your sickening, cynical desire to make an actual difference to this world we share with tomorrow's children and all the little woodland creatures – then you'll really be rubbing your thighs at Brazil's current teaser. You probably already know about it. You're probably writing a bloody 'blog' about it right now. You lefty, conshy pervo.

Now, I won't pretend that my own knowledge of Brazil extends much beyond the two most pertinent facts of the place – namely, that the country's cultural GDP ballooned in the late fifties with the invention of lift music, and that the female population's freakish levels of natural beauty are apparently genetically inverse to the male's – but I do know that they really have it in for Wales.

As every schoolboy knows, Brazil has been destroying areas of its rainforest that are specifically the same size as Wales since, ooh, the late seventies.

Why, is anybody's guess. People have been asking for it to be verified in double-decker buses, elephants and football pitches for a long time, but nada.

I digress.

The moral condundrum in question is this:

Brazil, right? Largest country in South America, fifth largest in the world and fifth most populous to boot – some M192 people spread unevenly over more than three million square miles of diverse geography, from Atlantic coastlines to mountain peaks, by way of lots of scrubland, low plains and altitudinous highlands. Though not the sort with tartan kilts and swearing.

Oh, and the single largest tropical forest in the world of course.

Now, if you're as ignorant as I am, you might be forgiven for thinking that a Latin American country will have its work cut out to keep its head above the Third World waterline – what with all those cocaine-filled, twin-engined planes crashed in jungle trees, and militias in the hills and what not. Right?

But Brazil is something like the tenth largest economy in the world. And, lest we forget again, it's the country that invented culturally sublime things like Bosa Nova, chic-sharp space-age architecture, football as a creative genre of ballet and all manner of spectacular ways to keep girls from Ipanema and everywhere else just about in their famous carnival outfits. It's a country of a very great deal of groovyness and even, reportedly, happiness. And it's in the middle of spending a fortune in improving its infrastructure.

The thing is, of those almost two hundred million groovy citizens of said Federative Republic, more than fifteen per-cent still live below the poverty line.

As with many countries juxtaposing fast-growing post-modern parts of themselves with almost pre-industrial parts, Brazil as a whole is made up of all kinds of parts that don't all fit together comfortably. The cities grew so fast in the late 20th century, that people flocked to them from the countryside – and found themselves living on the urban periphery in favelas. Today in Rio, for example, it's thought that one in five of the city's residents now lives in of of its six hundred police-no-go slums. Favelas represent the fastest growing populations in Brazil still.

Meanwhile, people in many of the inland areas are facing poverty that so many others left behind when they headed for the cities. And climate change predictions threaten to make some of these dry parts of Brazil uninhabitable by the end of the century.

And then there's the key factor with Brazil as far as the geography schoolboy is concerned – the rainforest. If the Amazon is the lungs of the world, how can the country find a financial way to stop the loggers, ranchers and miners tearing it apart? How do you fund such a fundamental shift in cultural finances locally – and how the hell do you police an area so utterly vast?

It's going to take more money than the middle classes in Rio or Brasilia have got, right?

Now, let's add two facts that turn this interesting but largely academic study into a right bloody moral conundrum.

Firstly, and randomly, I think, Brazil currently has a world-leading status as a green energy provider. Almost all its cars currently run on bio-fuel. A country struggling to catch up with the 'developed' world is actually leading it in eco-economic vision. A recognised pioneer in its field, renewable energy is becoming a key part in Brazil's future.

Secondly, it's just struck oil in the Campos Basin. A staggering shite-load of it.

---

So now what?

What the arsing hell do you do, when you have a green agenda pressing down on you from the rest of the world that will only dramatically hasten the swelling economic pressure from within, just as you feel your country might stand a chance of taking a more important place at the global table – when someone pipes up: "Ah, you'll never guess. Funny thing, but we've discovered enough black gold to pump a world record-breaking 100,000 barrels of crude a day into our economy. Eh? Cuh."?

Chew on THAT Copenhagen hopefuls.

---

It doesn't get us anywhere, sitting in our lounges across the UK, but watching Channel Four News' week of special reports from the balmy waterfront at Rio last week was inspiring. I have no idea what else to do now, but I can only hope – as I did with such teeth-gritted conviction about Spitting Image, 20 years ago – that some politicians were watching and feeling challenged.

If there are still journos with enough vision to turn their caravan 180° from where everyone else's lenses are currently focussed and get to the heart of an issue's impact, then maybe these people can also give the politically powerful, the scientifically informed and the financially invested a right bloody drilling about what should be done next by all of us.

Seasonal cheers.

Seasonal cheers.

This may sound daft, but we have our tree up.

Well, you know – most years, we get most of the way through December before decorating. This year, we figured we'd go for a cheering American-style month-long holiday season. Had my first mince pie; had my first listen of Christmas Crooners this morning.

But kicking off the festive sing-song is a piece of work that Tempo has spent half the summer playing with – for tonight, the ad is premiering.

At 8.50pm, The Euronics will perform their brand new electrical soul classic, This Christmas you could save – right in the middle of The X Factor on ITV1.

Do please watch and cheer on little Mr Plug and his band.

And I wish I could be a fly on the wall of my long-suffering downstairs neighbours when they hear that bleedin' tune come at them out of the telly instead of the ceiling.

Just a MIN.

Just a MIN.

So, there are jobs. Then there are pitches. Then there are award ceremonies.

And then there are the things you're trying to keep half a brain on in your real life.

As November spools past, I seem to have survived them all, even if nearly all of them have felt rather like some sort of pointless penance – like a time-wasting detention to just get through, so you can go home. Not to actually get anything for at the end. Just out.

Given the efforts involved in executing most of them, and the level of skill I and my team members all seem to have invested in them, it's interesting that the one to feel like the most fruitful was the one where all I did was fall into someone's car for five hours and get carried to a free dinner.

People always focus on the lunch. Turns out they should turn their blagging efforts to somewhere past tea time.

---

The MIN awards in Manchester this week came for me on the back of a long old week in the early-morning/late-night saddle. I was knackered, as Gel, Deb and Steve from Thinking Juice whisked me off to the North for a be-bibbed-and-tuckered freebee. And I knew that they were each just as knackered. So who, I wondered sleepily in the back seat, who exactly would be in any fit state to drive HOME again the next morning?

That I was able to swan around in a tux with them and be there when they came within a gnat's hat of winning Agency Of The Year – before being allowed to take home the South West Agency Of The Year piece of trinketry – was an honour, I should say. Those guys can hold their heads up with anyone in a room full of UK agency creatives. In truth, I think they could honestly hold them a lot higher.

If any of us could hold up our heads at all by the next morning.

It felt like one of the more rewarding moments of the last few months, not because the award was for anything I had done, but simply because being with those you care about at little key moments are, I've long believed, the real gems to be grabbed on your life journey.

A noble and dedicated philosophy that has seen me passably rich in such things and otherwise working out of my bedroom at nearly 40.

---
After today, for various reasons, I essentially just want to go to bed. Having made it this far now seems like payment enough. It may sound defeatist – but firstly, I'm a lover not a fighter, remember, and secondly, if you're not a believer in plateaus you haven't climbed high enough yet.

Not a single one of the many investments Momo's creatively made this year may bear fruit. Working your ass off isn't enough to fight the force of some narrative directions. But that's fine. There are following chapters.

Remember, Harry Potter and The Order Of The Phoenix seemed an interminable drag to read the first time. But it was essential to the rip-roaring plot denouement of the series.

Right now, I'm grateful for being given any chance to fall flat on my back for a moment.

High Noakes.

High Noakes.

I stumbled across something quietly wonderful this afternoon.

Chewing over a new Monster Master Über To Do list after a hefty-ish week of mopping up various ends of jobs to go to print, I was scrolling around for some pleasant background entertainment when I found a little delight. Which induced a most unexpected little reverie.

In the smokey, dyed-diesel-plume wake of the news that the last British bastion of daring-do, splay-bursting, delta-nining chapdom has admitted a filly into its ranks, the BBC had placed some intriguing links on its homepage.

One was an interview with Flight Lieutenant Kirsty Moore, the first female pilot to join the Red Arrows Ruddy Marvelous Aerobatic Display Team – a typically British forces kind of thoroughly nice lass who seemed at a loss to explain why none of the splendid female piloting talent of the RAF has donned the Reds' flight suit and caught the keys to one of their little Hawks before.

The other was... a complete episode of Go with Noakes from 1976. The one where he flew with the Arrows for himself.

---

Clicking the Play icon, I didn't quite know what to expect, after 35 years. But as the ledge John himself strolled into shot with trusty hairy TV partner Shep, in glorious 70s Filmgrainovision – doing that double act they always did of one of them spouting even, Yorkshire train-of-thought rambling while the other looked disinterested – I felt a lump rise in my throat.

---

That was my childhood. My safe, hopeful, much-loved childhood. And how I got away with enjoying it as such for the whole time, I've never worked out.

But John Noakes' safe, clear tones – friendly but tinged with just enough adult authority, mixed perfectly with the constant possibility of a dry, silly quip – were a huge comfort to a generation of us exploring the world around us from the safety of gently irradiating new colour televisions.

I learnt more about the Red Arrows from this gloriously be-side-burned, be-sensible-haircutted 30 minutes than I remember from any other time. Why, I didn't realise it was so easy. They're making it up on a stick and a wink way more than you'd think up there. John even did it. Which means I now really want to do it.

"Here" said his pilot, "take the stick. Forget the rudders, they're just there to rest your feet on. Now, put it hard over... Whoop! Heh-heh. There. You just did a roll. Easy eh?"

Hell, yeah. Letme-letme!

As he then watched the jolly fine chaps open their season with a display over Whitby bay, I thought of all those childhood memories of standing on similar cliffs at Bournemouth, waiting for the nine red darts flash overhead from behind us in a suddent screech at precisely On Time O'clock.

And as I saw a little 70s chap sitting in his Dad's arm, in little shorts and a little home-knitted jumper, I couldn't help picturing a very similar little chap of a very similar age, in a very similar little outfit sitting expectantly in the crook of his own daddy's arm, some 300 miles south, that same afternoon probably. And I felt an echo of the same comforting thrill of formative times.

It was wonderful.
This was the same daddy, incidentally, who would, upon hearing the Black Dyke Mills Band strike up with the gloriously whimsical theme tune, always say: "Ah there are the Black Mills Dyke Band again." Every time.

Then I remembered when Go with Noakes secretly filmed at my school, just a year or two later. And I kind of wished the BBC would post up that episode, to see if I recognised any of the big-haired, be-flared youngsters from the year above me at St Katherine's CE Primary, who got to go do the adventure exercise circuit up on Hengistbury Head with television's nicest, pre-Ant & Dec double act.

I may e-mail them and ask for the whole bally series to go up.

Mean time, check this out for yourself. It'll get you high on the funny reality of your childhood. Because it wasn't just a pre-digital age daydream. You were there.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/aerialjourneys/5328.shtml?all=2&id=5328

I remember 1989.

I remember 1989.

Twenty years. I guess it seems that long.

So much has happened since the Berlin wall fell in a colourful spill of people, but it's also kind of gone fast. In fact, I wonder whether the intimation in Jon Snow's tone tonight was that it's hard to imagine a world with the cold war now – a fact perhaps astonishing after so little historic time. Whatever, Channel Four News gave tonight's celebrations in the German capital a slightly misty-eyed lead story status. And rightly so.

It's poetic to suppose that of all European nations emerging from the 20th century, Germany should be the one to give the world one of the most potent symbols of reconciliation – that footage of teenagers dancing on the Brandenburg gate in November 1989.

Or was it Wind of change by The Scorpions?

Anyway – no, east and west are not fluidly one country yet. Not in the fullest sense. And I'm not sure if they can be – no slashed wound heals without a scar where the tissue knitted back together. But the practical cost, as in South Africa, is still worth paying. Surely. Living apart is ultimately more unsustainable than working together. It just is. Your identity has to be strong enough to cope with the change.

And I'm pretty sure most Germans think the same in the end. They're very sensible people. They made Wind of change the 10th best selling record in Germany of all time.

---

I remember reading something in a text book while still at school, some while more than twenty years ago. I remember that reading it at that time seemed a little shocking. Just bold. Ballsy of the writer, I thought.

Because he said something almost blithely about how history warned us that the Berlin Wall could not possibly stay standing for long. That one day it would surely fall.

Now, if you weren't around then, this statement will probably seem self evident. To be filed under 'Duh!' – along with other statements, like: 'Cod sci-fi TV soap Defying Gravity walks a fine line between likeably daft and annoyingly stupid' or: 'Gordon Brown's government is already putting things in boxes'. It's just obvious.

But, really. Back then the wall seemed immovable. Utterly. A symbol of a status quo beyond any challenge. This writer's worldly wisdom seemed simply audacious to my 15-year-old self; back then, the only way to combat the Berlin Wall from Bournemouth was to buy a nuclear bunker for the garden. I remember seeing them for sale at the Hurn air show, next to the only just retired Vulcan bomber.

And yet, just a month after my 19th birthday, down it came. Surprising everyone – not least of which the important handful of soon-to-be-former soviet state heads, which duly rolled in the coming two years.

---

Annoyingly, I almost got to go to Berlin that summer. Some church thing. I could have seen the wall in all its terrifying actuality for myself to marvel my kids about years later, if I'd been put on the right list. Or if I'd had kids.

I ended up in Düsseldorf. Singing hymns in the town square or similar. And, weirdly, Caroline happened to be passing through the city with her family at exactly the same time; I remember calling her from a phone box and almost being able to meet up. But not.

Not a great 'I remember 1989' story, I know.

Still, to celebrate, 20 years on, I'm going to Düsseldorf without her again next week. Re-live the important personal moments. ..Of how we weren't in the right place at the right time on at least a couple of counts.

While I'm there, hunting for that phone box, I may also see if I can squeeze in some site visiting with Jules for our client's show.

Either way, I know one thing. I still want to wave a flag when I see that footage. Or when I hear the 10th best selling German record of all time.

Yes, I remember it well.




Well, no. Of course I have no idea where I was on the actual night. I mean it was ages ago...

Global outlook.

Global outlook.

So I'm sitting in a hotel in Kuwait City.

I don't know how I found myself apparently pretending to be an international, ex-pat-type business person – I'm just a simple-minded creative. I like titting about with words and tunes, and sitting about with chums and coffees. I can hardly suddenly successfully convince everyone I've actually been some big shot serious person underneath it all, all along. Can I. Really.

So what am I doing in a hotel in Kuwait City?

Well, I can't be sure, but it rather looks like what I've been doing is planning how to muck about with creative stuff for some undeniably nice people I've spent the last couple of days sitting around tables of food and coffee with, while trying not to come off as someone pretending to be some big shot serious person. That and making a lot of jokes, obviously.

And it also looks like I've found myself in the middle of a significant chunk of work out here in the desert. Between all the wonky English jokes, Julian and I have put together a very serious proposition for our emerging friends out here. It'll stretch us – it'll stretch me. But I went out on my own to enlarge my outlook – and I'm looking forward to us helping each other do just that.

---

The thing about the real global outlook – the one getting on with itself, far outside the tiny ring-fenced reality of the Nick Griffins of this world – is that it doesn't in fact look like the sleekly soulless Business section of your stock photography website. You knew it wouldn't – nothing human could possibly exist there. There in that God-awful eternity of hand shakes and thumbs up and hour glasses running out and people in suits punching the air. But I'll bet even you didn't realise the new global economy would turn out to be quite so... tacky.

The new world order would appear to be a steakhouse restaurant chain in the lobby of a business hotel chain, themed in a plastic version of the Wild West, administered by Koreans in chaps and stetsons, frequented by Arabs in kafirs and Nikes, and cleaned by the people of the Indus. Observed by middle-aged English businessmen who've married Thai women and retired to Dubai. Soon to be invested in by Russian gangsters. And speaking Mandarin.

Is this more or less frightening than 1984? Is it more or less stupid sounding now than the idea of Communist conformity or Nazi purity?

The outlook for the global economy is as multi-coloured as a tasteless fast food logo.

But it's free.

And it makes us open our eyes to eachother.

Because the reality, when you sit down in the plastic Wild West and engage it in conversation, is human shaped.

The differences between people can be perspective changing – especially if you don't want to get arrested. But I'm coming home at the end of the week reminded that the reason a simple-minded creative like me can float his little business boat on this bewildering, complex sea of change is because of the similarities underneath the stetson brim. Or the kafir folds.

A person you like is a person you like, wherever you find them. And I like this.

Even if piped karaoke covers of pop favourites forces my fingers into my ears while I'm sitting there, I shall continue to keep my eyes open.

X.

X.

I haven't seen a single second of it.

Not a clip. Not a pic. Not a quote.

This year's X Factor is a complete mystery to me. Who are these 'twins' people speak of with such derision? And how can I generate a Facebook campaign with even half as many signatures on it as their I bet I can find a million people who hate the twins group? Some of us can only dream of such exposure.

It's not that I took some high-minded decision not to partake in the shiny ITV1 shenanigans. I think watercooler telly is not only the most transatlantic of phrases I could have made up there, it's one of the saving graces of modern life. Something we can share with strangers.

It's just that, well... when am I ever going to be in the mood to watch a programme that is as much about toe-curling car-crash talentlessness as it is about soulless slickibility. (Yeah, chew on that, automatic spellchecker.) I mean, I have enough of all this at home.

---

One of the key daft things about working at Momo is the split personality it requires. Yes, it keeps me entertained, swapping hats as I do, but it begs the question: When am I going to knuckle down with something and start to get properly any chuffing good at it?

I've spent today generating big sheets of layout paper with numbers scribbled all over them. Next week, Julian and I are in the Middle East, trying to convince a significant client that we do in fact know our seating facilities from our articulation in the arm – and for this we obviously need to demonstrate fairly clearly that we know what we're talking about.

Now, you might say that given my preponderance of coping with too much to do by winging things shamelessly, this is an uncomfortable state of affairs for my company's creative director to find himself in.

But, while I'm putting together a strategy and a budget for something that will take a year for us to deliver to a growing international business, I'm also trying to release a record.

If nothing else, this presents a significant challenge to choice of haircut.

I mean, two more different markets I could not be trying to serve. And there is only so far the idea of 'idiosyncratic' will get you before you luck out, suddenly very obviously dressed for the wrong context.

---

Thing is, big break for Momo:typo as this gig would be, I do feel happy that we can help the client. We've done some great work for them before and we've got some great people involved, ready to jump all over it. I'm mainly just, kind of, excited. Sure – I'll need to wear a tie when operating this side of the business. This side of the business is often talking in board rooms and sensible grown up places.

But, y'know, I rarely wear a tie to these places. I prefer to be conspicuously human in formal environments – so long as I look like I know what I'm doing there in the first place. The human bit is, in fact, the whole point of my work. And these days, I'm more likely to put on a tie to go talk to some musos – a nice, trendy slim one. I think I did, in fact, recently.

It was a meeting about our little bit of conspicuously shiny ITV-type work, going out in time for Christmas.

Olu and Lou are seasoned musos, each having been signed to majors at some point in their careers and each knowing a thing or two about being very cool very naturally. I'm not sure whether they noticed and appreciated my nice trendy thin tie or not, when we met the first time to discuss Thinking Juice's little advert for the telly. I'm sure they did.

As amusing as the paying demands of advertising are, it's still hard not to feel something uncomfortably approaching serious pride in some bits of work you get to contribute to in this business. Silly does not always equal ridiculous. At least, not when you receive the cheque.

Squeezing into their roof-top studio with three brass players, or hearing the session cut of the strings part in the mix for the first time, I feel as comfortable with the work we're turning out here as I do anything grown-up enough to dress open-necked in the boardroom.

It's all a bit of a weird cross-over, I'll grant you. But I'm oddly comfortable with Momo's split personalty as I prepare for the Autumn shift.

Don't ask me what it is, but something tells me it's too soon to cut my hair.

Therapy.

Therapy.

I have no particular need of therapy at the moment. Other than as I always do, for the backdrop, bedrock barking. Things are okay, I should say – but busy.

People like busy people. It sounds credible. It's a good problem. But you can be busy being an arse, remember. And I should know.

No, I'm thinking of a type of therapy that's so universal, so multi-practical, so everyday-useful I mention it now as a helpful daily tip, should you find yourself 'busy'.

Need a pep?

Pertness pooped?

Feeling less than frisky?

Really f***ing depressed?

I defy you to find me a human condition that is not downright righted by taking the following simple steps:

1: Locate a music playing device. A proper one, not a phone. One you can annoy the neighbours with (which if you do, you can instantly return to point one to feel better again, remember).

2: Locate a playable copy of Earth Wind & FIre's tunes In the stone and Star.

3: Turn up volume a tad beyond Loud Enough.

4: Press Play.

Really. I frankly DARE you to try to prove me wrong. I would prescribe this on the NHS for people with the most fearsome personal obstacles to overcome. Only I might prescribe the whole damned Greatest Hits for hardcore cases.

Trust me. I'm not mad.

Despite being off to the physical therapy of a circuits class.

Old blogger.

Old blogger.

It's not exactly been a jolly bloggy kind of few weeks, it has to be said. The pithy mirth and incisive observation you've come to rely on, oh utterly imaginary reader, have not been bubbling in the gullet ready to spill out of the creative windpipe into an entertainingly explosive coughing fit all over the Mac monitor quite as normal. I have had indigestion. Or whatever the upright version of constipation would be, suffered metaphorically. Off-colour in some way, anyway.

Which you undoubtedly are now after that little picture.

My point is that the only news I've had and the only interesting happenings I've witnessed in that time would have been so tedious to report, I'd have had no trouble conjuring a pretty accurate atmosphere of slow death. And, like every Hollywood take on the second world war ever released, the point of all this is hardly historical realism, is it.

You come here for succinct entertainment and pseudo-clever enlightenment mixed with just a self-affacing twist of zeitgeistian insight, masquerading only flimsily as proper personal journal. There's no way I'd expect you to read what I'm REALLY doing every day, any more than you'd expect me to give you what you really want – detailed but readable proof that my life is actually fairly devoid of any truly decent stories, star-struck chance happenings, big creative achievements or half way sodding decent pay packets.

---

So yes, I've not been in the mood to rock the blog. Not had time either, really.

Not the way I wanted to start my 40th year.

For I have. Today. Today marks the completion of my 39th year on Earth and the inexorable skid through my fortieth into my actual fortieth birthday, one little year from now. I have, as my sister put it, just one year left of legitimate kidulthood.

I don't know what's more tragic – that my generation's main claim to fame is that it invented this shameful reflection on our inability to grasp responsibility, or that I would describe any occurrence of it, at any age whatsoever, as legitimate.

Age itself hasn't usually been an issue for me, I have to say. The numbers are pretty meaningless. If only they'd take the hint and consistently feel so.

The numbers are, in fact, more than meaningless – they start to sound just ridiculous. I mean, who the hell would let an arse like me near the age of 40? I'm the same time-wasting bastard I was two decades ago. What am I going to do with an adult age like 40? Really? Find a point to all this arsing about all of a sudden?

I think we all tend to be judged on track records. And there's plenty of track behind me now, apparently. And not many records.

Apart from this heavily edited and incidental blog, anyway.

I suspect I know exactly what I'll do with an adult age like 40.

Put it off for a year.

Yelp.

Yelp.
Here's the truth: I don't get us. Us lot – humans.

I mean, I do – I can yelp at the moon with the craziest of them. But we are mad bastards.

I mean, how is it that we can meet each other in the street on most days and more or less come off as grounded, sensible neighbours who can be trusted to help each other out in an emergency – and yet manage to produce armies of flesh-eating zombies as soon as someone rings the Oh Shit bell?

I mean, really – where do all the monsters come from? Where are we hiding them?

---

Something I'm largely ignorant of is the conflict in Sri Lanka. What sparked the Tamil Tigers' two decades or however long of dissent and fighting against the government, I don't know. I've not been to the country. I hear it's beautiful.

But lastnight, I heard just a clip of an interview with a woman who'd escaped from the final throes of the war in the north of the island, earlier this year. She described scenes of carnage beyond counting.

She said that in one place she found herself, 'everywhere was bodies'. Everywhere she looked she saw corpses. Not just fallen or left, but piled.

She ran to the local hospital. They had no more room for bodies of people – there too, they were piling them in corridors and side rooms.

Where did all these dead people come from? And, more to the point, where did their killers come from?

---

This morning, an account by a woman who walked for miles to escape the fighting in the Somalian capital Mogadishu, left me wondering the same thing. She said she was so repeatedly robbed as a refugee, and so subsequently malnourished, her dreadful appearance must have been the only thing that saved her from being raped. She said that most other women with her had been, by the time they reached the coast.

It resonates with stories from the genocide in Rwanda more than a decade ago. And perhaps, in a sense, with others from the war in the former Yugoslavia – neighbours and ordinary locals appearing to develop an overnight thirst for eachother's blood and suffering.

In the case of Sri Lanka, it was government forces apparently dishing out the death. In Rwanda and in Yugoslavia, in the broadest terms, tribal friction had embedded itself in identity like a sleeper cell, so they say.

But whatever uniform you're wearing, or given at birth, you are still you when you make your choices. Even when you're part of a system trained to execute orders.

You're still you. Aren't you?
And in Somalia? Well, it's just about every conceivable element of conflict all thrown in together, isn't it? Identity, politics, poverty, money, geography – it sounds like every slavering, blood-shot, howling vision of hell ever hallucinated. It sounds like Dante's fucking Inferno. And yet, the woman this morning could still remember 'how beautiful Mogadishu was before the fighting'.

Can anyone imagine the Dish as beautiful? From the ignorant snippets of it we digest quickly from the news, it has become another Beirut or a Belfast – a place synonymous with destruction.

---
It seems incomprehensible. I don't understand where the sheer numbers of rapists and murderers appear from, when the trumpet of chaos bleats. And the level of depravity and cruelty lept to so quickly in war zones. I can't picture that happening in Bournemouth.

I feel sure that young men and women serving with British forces in Afghanistan at the moment might be able to look me thoughtfully in the eye as I say this.

So interesting, as an aside, that two of the most level-headed, likeable and positive people to have perhaps ever appeared on Channel 4's post-supper comfort Location location location were lastnight's couple, Chris and Nikki – a major in the Paras and a flight lieutenant in the RAF, respectively. If you were looking for it, at least in the edit, there was a self-effacing note of dignity brought to the usually agonising proceedings of middle class people enjoying their freedom by whining about only having a £500,000 budget to buy a home.

I shamelessly love Phil and Kirsty. And I whine about property often. But its interesting to observe people who are trained in the art of self control – trained specifically so they can be fit to defend our right to make TV about banal comforts.

---

As the debate around healthcare in the US begins to pull in ever more inflammatory language, and a barking, screaming, hair-pulling, goggle-eyed, yelping madness seems to be supplanting the country's pragmatic conversation about how best to sustain its society, I wonder how close to childish lunacy even the most idyllic models for living really are.

Is there a better dream than America? And are more petulant, ignorant voices to be heard hollering so loudly anywhere else on Earth?

But whether Bournemouth, Beirut or Belfast; Berlin, Boston or Baltimore – we humans are the only common factor in these different scenes. And, if you think about where people in these different cities find themselves in 2009, our ability to rebuild, to transform, to totally re-invent our vision of these places, and of eachother, seems as remarkable perhaps as our lurking and utterly universal weakness for fear.

So Tong, then.

So Tong, then.

In a typical Friday style, I've been in the studio for a while. So long, in fact, that I have removed the empty cafetiere and mug from the little table in the window and replaced them with a full bottle of Burgundy Pinot Noir and a glass.

So it's a year since we were braving mudslides at Robin Hill country park, over on the island for Bestival. It's begun again over there now and they're forecasting great weather. And Kraftwerk. And stupid sci-fi costumes.

..What am I doing here, again?

Pouring a glass and saying cheers, actually. Turns out it's Pete Tong's last 'welcome to the weekend' tonight.

Yep, it's come around already. And it turns out too that the Essential Selection is as old as our marriage. Eighteen years.

I feel a genuine sadness. This news just makes me feel that little bit more sad than I did already.

---

How many Fridays felt that bit better because of this show? I don't want to overstate it – wait 'ill I've polished off the glass – but whether we were cooking damn fine chile or driving somewhere to meet chums, watching the sun go down in the Arnewood kitchen window or watching the countryside slip past the windscreen on some evening A-road somewhere, this was how we knew it was the weekend.

When I think back to these years and this little joyful detail of our average week, I shall probably think of listening to a live version of World Hold On from one of Pete's Ibiza shows one summer, while we were stuck in a stationary traffic jam in North London one sunny summer evening. What a strangely nice memory.

Still, sentimentality never built the future, eh.

Think I might keep this cork on my desk, though.

One more tune, mate – it's three minutes to the end of the show.

..Finally it's happened to me? From 1991? The year it started; the year we were married.

Good choice.

Somehow, we shall keep dancing.

Cheers.

09.09.09 09:09

09.09.09 09:09
(Bugger.)
09.09.09 21:09

Yes, alright. I missed the proper one this morning.

But here we are in the next best thing. I was working through the proper one and here I still am – for the record, doing another part of this giant pitch for a particular international client.

Coo-er. Sounds glam.

It's not. I do this in my bedroom, remember.

Anyway. A neuf.

---


(And for the record, ignore the demented clock on the post bar below – I hit Post at EXACTLY nine minutes past... oh even I'm not listening any more.)

Rain and rowlocks.

Rain and rowlocks.

At last.

At long, chuffing last.

Miserable weather.

>CRACKS OUT LACED FINGERS AND PULLS IN CHAIR<

I can finally get some decent work done.

---

Of course, it's not helpful to a normal household rhythm, but gloomy teatimes can be a great time for the brain to find creative traction. The more the rain slips down the window, the better it seems; the fuller the gutter, the firmer the grip.

Now that I have low lights on and ridiculous jazz courtesy of FIP, I can feel productivity seeping through my veins again, bringing Momo's mojo to life.

I've found some gorgeous afternoons draining productivity this summer. The ability to make decisions sometimes, worryingly, just departs and I've spent hours scratching at the layout pad and the screen and the kettle, muttering motivational mantras to no decisional avail. I loath it. I've left school. I hate the suspicion that I need a scary maths teacher to help me get through a piece of work.

Momo does, of course, operate like a business even with me at the helm. Writers may get to lie in until noon and then gaze forlornly at daytime telly until cake time, but my little studio always has something sensible in actual production, with things like deadlines and phone calls and emails and budgets and strategies and clever-dick ideas to administer.

Beats me how I let this happen.

But, even so, when you are the business and the Brilliant Brain fairy leaves your shoulder, it doesn't feel encouraging.

So a bit of cosy rain tonight feels like a refreshing shower to the outlook.

---

It's something to do with my ever-deepening love affair with Autumn, of course – the season of fresh starts. I've been actively waiting for it this year, despite loving impromptu sunshine and family and lazy riverbanks and discovering the lunacy that is the invention of rowing, on days like Monday's bank holiday.

All very good and much appreciated – but that's the point, after all. Summer should really be the time to let go of the reins a little; create the rhythm of a restart at the back-to-school time of year.

I think, though, this year's been a bit of an exaggeration for me on that score because of Momo's preponderance of cranium-aching projects over the balmy months. If everything on your creative schedule at any one time is strategic stuff – fathoming marketing campaigns, or website structures – you're in danger of running out of buffer space in the brain, let me say.

I rather prefer having some of the projects on the schedule near their end and needing some pretty artwork finishing or fancy words filling in.

Still, if I can keep with it enough – and if this rotten and therefore inspirational weather digs in properly – the cranium aching of this summer may well lead to a very interesting final quarter of 2009 for Momo. Both Tempo and Typo.

---

I should feel encouraged, I guess. Most of the time I keep Momo on a steady course down stream nicely. Al hamdu li lah. But as I approach the beginning of this funny business' eighth year – eighth, for Pete's sake – I am certainly ready to see a new season unfold around me.

If this rain keeps up, of course, it may really float Momo's little rowboat.

But, as I have now learned with blistered palms thanks to the hire place on the river at Wareham, pulling for all you're worth just to go backwards seems like an awful lot of rowlocks.

Sheesh.

Sheesh.

I learned something depressing today.

>DEEP BREATH<

Turns out my occasional recreational toke on a shisha pipe is going to kill me after all. And as punishment for my smugness about its 'practical harmlessness', rather faster than a cigarette, apparently.

Great. Spent my life walking the remarkably high-minded line between having never smoked and being socially unphased by the idea of people smoking, and then it turns out my multi-cultural affectations are going to punch me in the lungs for being a pretentious arse. Fair enough I suppose.

A study by the Department of Health and the Tobacco Control Collaborating Centre – you know them, right? – has revealed some allegedly shocking levels of Carbon Monoxide.

>SIGH-COUGH!<

Turns out half an hour on a hookah is, at its measurably very best, significantly worse for you than a fag. In fact, in many instances apparently, an average shish sesh outstrips a ciggy by factors in the hundreds for CO levels.

And to add cultural insult to circulatory injury, a London shisha bar owner mentioned that he doesn't ever inhale when he's using one. Like you're not supposed to.

So I should stop filling my lungs with this stuff, then? You tell me this now?

But it's so sociable. I really enjoy breaking out the pipe occasionally. Never put anything more relaxing in it than humble oriental apple resin, you understand, but it's a nice thing to hand round the table after you've mopped up the last of your baba ganoush and your lamb tabouli, don't you think? Right?

Oh fine. Right. So don't break out the hubbly bubbly.

---

I can hardly have any complaints otherwise today, though.

I've spent half of it sifting through the schedule to construct various strata of To Do lists from the chaotic debris of a busy couple of weeks. And I've been doing so after a weekend that was a much looked-forward-to long one that's subsequently etched its blatant idleness all over my face. Really. I have stupid ski-jock panda eyes from staring at the skies in sunnies.

After a few days of shamelessly lounging around the vast front lawn of Laura and Chris's place on the Westcliff, sipping champers and nibbling strawberries, while tracing the lazy arcs of various acrobatic aero displays over Bournemouth's fairly amphitheatrical bay, I feel nicely head-cleared again. Gorgeous weather for four days, basically, while a selection aviation engines purred and roared their poetry over the seaside atmosphere. Lovely. These are the days, and all that.

The ones that will help you say: "meh – fair enough" when it all goes belly up.

The secret to switching off in such a Carefree Git-like manner though, is tying up loose ends before you clear off. Wiping the ol' slate. Putting out the mental moggy and leaving a note for the mental milkman. Clunking the door closed on a clean house as you leave with a full case.

I managed to push the wraparounds up the nose and fold the hands behind the remarkably successfully disengaged bean as I did for three whole, luxuriant days purely thanks to the number of serendipitously positive notes on which last week was mercifully ended – the most significant and serenading of which being the pertinent one. The one you need to take note of. The album.

The album.

Yes. Really.

If I could relax on the lawn at all for a couple of precious days, it was partly because I could bask a little in the mental warmth of having posted a complete pre-mastered version of The Golden Age to Jamie on Saturday morning. Yes, again, really.

No, really.

Ish. The 'ish' being that it's not completely right, of course. So just hold your horses.

It's not a version I'll be putting in anyone else's hands until I've heard his immediate verdict and given him my lengthy Well Obviously It Won't Be Like That list. Various levels are off and numerous details are not quite right and a session is missing... but, ah, it is in shape. It does exist. ..I can now hear it from start to finish.

There is now no smoke to hide behind.

>DEEP BREATH<

So now, back to work, I have to start resolving what the hell to do with it.

Sheesh.