Jenna and I are back in Southend - for good. Where should I start? Actually, I'll save the details until we've got the legal stuff sorted. I'm told that the magistrates in Hammersmith and Fulham are fair and just, though, which can only go in our favour if certain people force us to take it to that stage. Yeah, I'll leave it there - for now; expect a foul-mouted MySpace-style rant once this is all over, though.

I suppose I have been very naive, especially given what I said in a post almost three months to the day ago. In London I saw opportunity, whereas in Southend I saw a pretty hopeless future. It wasn't really a romantic view of London, because I knew like any city it has its bad sides. I was just naive enough to think such problems were limited by geographical location, whilst actually it's entirely class-based. Any Guardian-sponsored predilection I had that we now live in a class-less society were soundly and swiftly shattered. Though as Jenna noted, I still think London would be a pretty cool place to live if you're rich. And therein is the catch.

I suppose it was naive of me to think that the cafe in Bayswater that was offering Jenna a wage of £1.87 was one dodgy arsehole, rather than a typical one. I now know when an employer asks you to state on your application how much you expect to be paid, what's going on is a reverse auction, and the lowest bidder will get the job. The concept of a minimum wage is meaningless in London. The minimum wage is as low as the most desperate person is willing to work for. And I can tell you a migrant worker is far more desperate than someone like me, who won't work (for someone else) for less than £5.35 an hour.

In London I saw opportunity because I thought there would be thousands of jobs, which have alluded me in Southend. What I didn't see, and here the naivety comes back into play, is that there are a hundred people chasing every single one. You need only go on to Reed.com and check out London job vacancies, because Reed tell you how many people have applied for each one. In Essex you rarely get more than ten for each, and usually the same ten, I'd wager. After Reed receive one hundred applications for a position, they don't tell you the exact number anymore, they just put ">100" next to the vacancy. And that's how most of them are in London. It's as good as a lottery.

I lost track of the number of jobs I applied for, the number of CVs I posted off. I didn't hear back from a single one. Not one. I applied for a whole range of things, from office work, to shop work, and even handing out leaflets. I joined several agencies, and the only time I ever heard from the sole one that got back to me after joining was to suggest I do voluntary work to help improve my CV. And of course, they have a point. My CV is pretty bad. I only have 10 GCSEs, 4 A-Levels and a Honours degree. They're as meaningless as the minimum wage, though, unfortunately.

I was also rather naive regarding the nature of multi-culturalism. I'd always assumed that because my first friend in playschool was an Indian boy, and because I've mixed with people from a wide range of colours and creeds, even some first-generation immigrants, that I was living in a multi-cultural society. Except I wasn't; not really. They didn't come from a different culture. They were all Westerners. They all spoke fluent English. They all had Western values and wore Western dress. They were just a different colour, or went to a different type of church at the weekend. Southend is something like 96% white, but it's 100% Western, and this latter point is the crucial one.

In contrast, in Shepherd's Bush, where we were living, the breakdown is more complicated. Whites are in an ethnic minority (I'd say about 40% of everyone is white), but are still the ethnic majority (i.e. there are more white people than there are any other specific racial group). However, the cultural thing smudges across the racial boundary, of course, because there were amongst that number Western black people, for example, yet white people who were very much still living in Iran as much as they could get away with whilst not actually residing in the Middle East.

We'd been living in Shepherd's Bush a few days before I first tried to use the bus into central London, that being half the price of the Tube. These days they expect you to buy a ticket before you board, or use an Oyster card. I knew neither of these things, having just arrived, so asked the driver for a ticket. You can still do this, but as he didn't speak any English, he was unable to explain to me that you should buy tickets before boarding, and he didn't know what the English word "return" meant, so I had to buy a single and then get another on the way back. As punishment (I presume) for holding up his bus, he gave me change from £2 all in pennies. I sat down feeling very much how I expect immigrants feel when they don't understand how things work in this country, and they don't speak the language to be able to communicate with those that can explain it.

Except I'm not an immigrant in this country. I was born here. And I do speak the language, and rather well, too. I got an Oyster card after that. Because then you don't have to talk to anyone, you just touch your card on the panel as you get on. The driver is just the part of the vehicle that opens the doors and puts his foot on the accelerator. Can you see something good coming of this?

Jenna and I had numerous exasperating encounters of this kind, and it really wears you down, because in the end you feel like you're turning into a racist. It gets demoralising when you choose a queue in the supermarket based on the colour of the cashier's skin because some past experience kicks in insidiously and subconsciously at that point, because chances are the black girl speaks as good English as we do, and the white guy is actually Polish and doesn't know his "please" from his "thank you".

A guy living in the same house as us that we got quite friendly with summed it up pretty well. London isn't a melting pool, it's a cesspit. He quickly defended himself from charges of racism, but that was hardly necessary, given that he's married to a mixed race Argentinian. It's not about race, after all, it's about culture, and she is a Westerner too. It's not even about cultural superiority, the idea that Western culture is supposedly superior to others; it's about the separation that the divide creates, and how IT JUST DOESN'T WORK.

It was a few days ago, when Jenna and I were reflecting on how much we hated London after being out of the place for a few days, that she said London hadn't started turning us into racists, because that involves a racial distinction. Living in London just makes you hate everyone, from the bus driver who can't speak English, to the obese white guy who takes up one and a half seats on the Tube, and even the girl on Oxford Street who stops suddenly and acts violated when you can't help but walk into the back of her.

I had a dream a few nights ago of a nuclear explosion going off in London. It wasn't really a nightmare, apart from the fact that Jenna and I were in the city at the time. We ended up near Regent's Park, searching abandoned houses for food but finding a convent instead.

My subscription for the jeyers.co.uk domain runs out in three or four months and I'm not yet sure whether I'm going to renew it. This year in particular all the most interesting stuff has happened when I'm too busy doing it to actually post about it.

Sunday 22nd October 2006, 8.15pm

Well, I've closed down my Amazon sales and updated my ten year old diaries for the past three months, because tomorrow I'm moving to our new place in Shepherd's Bush. It's on the second floor of a converted house just around the corner from the BBC Television Centre, which is certainly a lot more interesting thing to say than just around the corner from Tesco (which is also the case). Unfortunately it doesn't have a phone line connected at the moment, so I will be sans Internet for a while.

Jenna's internship at Bloomsbury starts next Monday, but she's also been looking for part-time work for extra cash. We were both surprised when she managed to get a job as a waitress in a cafe in Queensway on the spot. I suppose she should have taken it as a sign the place was no good when they didn't even ask to see her visa. She went back for a training session that evening and met the other staff, some of which didn't speak a word of English. Others explained that shifts are eight hours long, and for that she would get the princely wage of £15. No, not £15 an hour. £15 for eight hours. To save you getting out your calculator, that works out at £1.88 an hour. And to save you checking the DTI's website, the minimum wage has just risen to £5.35 an hour.

Needless to say she hasn't gone back. I keep trying to convince her to report the place to the DTI, if only to keep my blood pressure down, because whilst it's been easy for her to find something else, my blood still ferments at the thought of these people getting away with that. I suppose it's naive of me to imagine they're the only place ignoring the minimum wage by giving cash under the table, no questions asked, hiring illegal immigrants and basically exploiting them too.

My moral streak is far more black and white and afflicted by tunnel vision, so whilst I can only see justice in that place being shut down, and the owners being deported back to their own country, she can see that if people are willing to work for such derisory amounts, they must be pretty desperate. And she has a point. Next-to-nothing is better than nothing-at-all.

It reminds me of the bit in "The Grapes of Wrath" where the landowners need a hundred workers, so they print a thousand handbills and offer 20c an hour because they know that if only one hundred people turn up, they'll have to pay them that amount, but if ten times as many turn up, they can auction off the work to the lowest bidder. After the first hundred have got jobs, if the other nine hundred are truly desperate, they'll say "No, don't pay him 20c, I'll do the job for 19c" to which someone else says "And I'll do the job for 18c an hour, so give it to me", and then they end up paying 5c an hour to the most desperate, all the while making hundreds of pounds profit off the back of the exploited. The book's almost seventy years old. Things haven't changed much.

"The Thieves of Pudding Lane" has fallen at the final hurdle. I've rewritten the penultimate chapter three times now, fitting in writing sessions as and when I can. It just isn't working. The final chapter is in fine form, a fitting conclusion and a rousing finale, but the one that comes before it is basically just a blip in comparison. Ideally I would just be able to cut it out, but it needs to happen so that the final chapter can happen. I'm not going to be taking my laptop up to London this week, so I'm going to be taking an enforced break anyway, but I've been stuck in a rut on this one for almost a month now.

Tuesday 26th September 2006, 8.49pm

Just a quick post for a quick link to this game that I found on Mike Stone's LiveJournal. It's actually a piece of marketing for a new type of M&M, but it's such a good (i.e. bad) piece of marketing that you're more than likely to forget what it's advertising even before you stop looking at it (a bit like those car adverts that use good songs, and you only ever remember the song). Anyway, it's like that dingbats-style picture in which you had to guess the bands from the clues (so the metallic airship was Led Zeppelin, etc), except even more interactive. You have to guess fifty horror movies from the clues in the painting, zooming in and clicking over the image and typing them in to see if you're right. Some of them are very clever (such as the men with the letter O on their tops), though some of them were just a case of "say what you see" and it turning out to be a horror movie I'd never heard of. It allows you to save your game in progress and I had 32/50 movies when I gave up just now. Though be warned, the repetitive music will incite computer-rage.

Thursday 21st September 2006, 6.03pm

This week's been quite a nightmare. I haven't written anything since before the weekend, so there's now no chance of "The Thieves of Pudding Lane" being finished before Jenna arrives. On Monday I went to look at the studio flat in Harringay I described in the last post. It was indeed very us, very archaic and anti-Ikea, and I would have taken it there and then, had the agency's terms and conditions not been way beyond any possibility of us affording it.

It's not like the rent was extortionate. It was only £170 a week, including bills, but not council tax. And there was going to be two of us. This wasn't good enough for the agency, however, who insisted that each tenant to have been earning the equivalent of double the minimum wage for a continuous period of at least six months prior to signing the lease. And whilst I have said the studio flat was very us, Jenna and I, that didn't stop it from being a grungy bohemian dive in a less than desirable part of town. In a nutshell, if you're earning £10 an hour or more, and there's two of you doing so, so effectively a combined income of £20 an hour... well, this isn't a place you would want to live when you could afford better. It will be interesting to see how quickly it goes, but it wouldn't surprise me if the next tenant would be, like the present one, a single person to whom £10 an hour is about right.

I could go into a rant here about the government, the government in waiting, and the government with no chance, and their now seemingly consensual policy that the free education they all got should no longer be provided to us lot, on the basis that the average graduate starts at a £18,000 salary and will end up earning a lot more than everyone else, so should damn well cough up or fuck off. And it got me thinking, this letting agency in London's demands, about how I don't know anyone, any graduates, who are earning anything like double-figure hourly salaries. £18,000 works out at about £9 an hour, but you start paying back student debts when you reach £15,000 if I recall correctly. So, long before you reach that exalted double minimum wage salary you're already shelling out debt repayments. I knew there was an issue with graduates unable to get on the property ladder, but I thought that only applied to people trying to buy, not rent.

Meanwhile there's tens of billions available for the war in Iraq, billions more available for the war in Afghanistan, billions available for the new Trident nuclear missile system, billions available for European Union subscriptions, and countless other white elephants that really don't make any sense to me but clearly are far more important than giving someone a free education. Whenever I think about the whole argument about giving people a decent start in life, I always remember that Oxfam advert: give a man a fish and he'll feed himself for a day, but give him the means to catch his own fish and he'll feed himself for a lifetime. Now we've got the political parties in a concensus and they would probably even charge you for the fish, let alone teaching you the art and science of fishing. I guess I did go into that rant after all.

Anyway, we had to pass on the studio flat in the former Victorian hotel, but we found another just round the corner, which I visited yesterday. On the plus side, it was nearer the tube station, and it was about three times as large, with four seperate rooms rather than one room with a washing machine and an oven in a cupboard and a shower tucked round the back. Also on the plus side was the fact it was cheaper (just, £165 a week), and the letting agency said there would be no problem with our financial situation, providing we had a guarantor. The only down side I could see to the place was that between the tube station and the quiet street the house was on was a council estate. I'm an unabashed snob about these things. I find it offputting seeing kids in hoodies sitting on top of a roof drinking alcopops when they should be at school. But I was able to overlook that, and we were going to take it. Unfortunately, as Jenna found today, it was snapped up by the people waiting to look at it right after me. I don't blame them.

I've given up looking for work in Southend. I've tried private employment agencies, the typically abysmal local JobCentrePlus (plus is the opposite of what I would suffix it with), and even walked the streets like some sort of desperate hobo looking for posters in shop windows. I should have taken it as a sign last year when I applied for a job in one of the main bookshops in town (a job that with my six years of experience working in one I was more than qualified for) that when I took my application in, the girl with the gormless, heavily-pierced face and an 'assistant manager' badge pinned to her Holland-style chest, would still have been in Key Stage 3 when I sold my first book.

This town is at the rectal end of not just one but two different railway lines. Maybe that explains why the people here are, I find, so disagreeable and easily loathable. It's a dead-end town full of people who either can't or don't want to get out of it. I start thinking in Hugo Weaving's voice about how I feel infected by it just being here. So I've already started applying for jobs in London, whether Jenna and I actually ever get somewhere to live there or not. I can't say I'd be a happy commuter, but I can't see an alternative. Staying here isn't one.

Saturday 16th September 2006, 7.53pm

Perhaps you should realise it's time to find something better to do when you are idling on the Internet and end up on MySpace.com trying to remember your password. I only set up an account in the first place because some of the GG people have them and you need to be a member to look at other people's photo sections. That was before America, and when I finally managed to log in I found some months-old pending friend requests (including one from someone I didn't know that was quite obviously a frontispiece for links to a pornsite - she had several thousand friends, funnily enough). Poking around randomly I also discovered two of my Norwich housemates, and my old high school, though I only recognised a couple of people on it (such as Simon). Anyway, I updated my profile a bit. You can look at it here: I Pray For Nuclear War (not really). And add me, if you really want.

I'm into the final few chapters with "The Thieves of Pudding Lane" now. There's two big chapters left and a sort of epilogue set several days later after the fire's out. Jenna's biggest criticism about the last chapter is that it ended at the worst possible moment and she needed to know what happened next. That's exactly what you always want to hear. One's nearest and dearest are usually the worst critics, as anyone who's ever watched one of Simon Cowell's TV shows purely for sadistic pleasure can tell you. They tell you you're wonderful and that you can do anything and anyone who says any different is wrong. Jenna, on the other hand, is more like a piranha in a paddling pool. She's never once reined in the constructive criticism, and on many occasions her advice has amounted to "Cut the crap, Eyers". She was telling me when I was onto dud ideas months before I eventually gave up on them. So I've come to trust her judgement. Now, if only she'd let me return the favour. She's the one that's made thousands of dollars out of her writing, after all...

Time is running out to find somewhere to stay in London, but we think we've found a place that is very us in Harringay, or Haringey, or however they're spelling it this week. It's a studio flat on the second storey of a converted Victorian hotel, a listed building, which still has the original fireplaces. It's certainly got character, but I've e-mailed and phoned the agency to no response these last couple of days. Native Londoner Luke has been giving us some advice, because he would obviously know better than we outsiders what the different areas of the city are like. According to Wikipedia, ninety (90!) percent of the heroin that got into the UK was controlled by Harringay's resident Kurdish gangsters until recently. It doesn't exactly sell the area to me, but the thing is, like, this is London, innit? Scratch the surface and there's going to be something wrong with most residential areas. Those studio apartments in Kensington and Chelsea are very nice, but quite a long distance from our upper price range, alas.

Sunday 10th September 2006, 7.36pm

So, a quarter century. Ouch. I received some nice presents, including a great deal of the Steinbeck back catalogue. One of the books (one of his diaries) isn't even in print anymore. I got the new Muse album, and the rather Prince-like vocals in the first single have grown on me since I last heard it. I also got the "Genesis of the Daleks" DVD set, which has been my favourite "Doctor Who" story since the BBC repeated it in 1992 or 1993, but on watching it this afternoon I noticed just how little the Daleks are actually in it.

My birthday morning was ruined by a woman who kept phoning the house and leaving abusive messages on the answering machine. At one point she was calling back as soon as she had hung up. She never said who she was, or even who she wanted, but she called back yesterday (at 8.15am, screaming that she had been calling for three hours, so a liar as well as a nutter) and we worked out how and why she had got ahold of our number.

My mother used to work in mental health, y'see. I remember coming home from school one day and playing a message on the machine and it was somebody threatening to kill themselves over the phone. Her GP had given her our number thinking it was a helpline, and apparently they're still doing so, because this woman was another one of those. I haven't answered the phone since then, and wouldn't do so again unless my mother gets the number changed. In the end we turned the answering machine off and turned the ringer down to an inaudible level.

In the afternoon I went out to the park to read in the sun. I used to be able to do this in our back garden. I read in the paper in the other day about the guy who was driven crazy by his neighbours' dogs barking, so shot both neighbours, then fled into a field and shot himself. He has my sympathies. There are five dogs within a twenty foot radius of our house. As soon as one starts barking, the other four start, and they don't stop until the others stop, and none of them stop until they are taken inside, and they're not taken inside because they're barking, and our lovely neighbours would rather sit behind their double glazing and let the rest of us put up with it. As soon as you step out of our back door the smell of dog shit is so strong you would think you'd stepped in something. Seriously, if someone, anyone puts ASBOs for pets on their manifesto, they will get my vote immediately (BNP exempt).

I am currently reading the latest Adrian Mole book by Sue Townsend, though it's a couple of years old now. I was wary about bothering with it at all. The last one was a serious disappointment. It just wasn't funny. The first sixth of the book took place entirely on election day in May 1997. I couldn't work out whether it was Sue Townsend who thought this was the dawn of a new golden age, or whether she was being satirical because the hapless loser Adrian Mole thought it was the dawn of a new golden age. I think it leaned toward the former, so it just didn't work.

I remember laughing out loud at a bit at the end of the first book where Argentina invades the Falklands and Adrian wakes up his dad to tell him, and his dad leaps out of bed in a panic because he thinks the Falklands are off the coast of Scotland. The funniest thing in the last book was the bit where Adrian finds a first edition of "Nineteen Eightyfour" and tosses it out because someone called Eric Blair has scrawled their name on the inside cover. Though that's hardly a laugh out loud moment. Indeed, it's more of a knowing smirk moment, and requires prior knowledge that Eric Blair was George Orwell's real name.

By the end of the book, where Adrian inherits a house and it then gets burnt down by a mad woman, it had become a story of pure victimisation. Yes, you're meant to laugh at Adrian being such a failure at everything, but Townsend just seemed to be indulging in a little too much of that schadenfreude (great word) guff. The whole idea of Adrian Mole seemed to be exhausted.

So it was with much relief when I opened the first page of "Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Distraction" and the first entry was Adrian's personal letter to Tony Blair reporting his travel agency for refusing to refund a deposit on a holiday to Cyprus. It's set just after Blair announced Saddam Hussein had WMDs capable of being launched in 45 minutes, with a range able to reach... Cyprus. The travel agency demands proof of said WMDs, and say an address by Blair on TV claiming they exist does not constitute proof. If Sue Townsend did indeed think the May 1997 election was the dawn of a new golden age at the time of writing the last book, it's brutally clear how she feels about it now.

So there's a vein of vicious political satire running through this book, as you'd expect from one with a title like that, but it's not a one-tract thing. Townsend develops another angle in that Adrian's newly come of age son Glenn is in army training (at Deepcut Barracks, no less) and passes out (is that the term?) just in time to go over to Iraq.

Meanwhile Adrian has other preoccupations, like his parents deciding to become property developers (developing former pigfarms into luxury apartments), like his struggle against a local swam called Gielgud, and like getting accidentally engaged to a mad woman called Marigold Flowers who makes a dolls house of his apartment as a Christmas present. He's still writing, though he has now ditched fiction in favour of a non-fiction book called "Celebrity and Madness", the research for which consists of writing to celebrities, explaining how celebrity has made them into freaks, and then asking them for an interview. And of course, he's still madly in love with Pandora Braithwaite.

I'm enjoying this book very much, and it's been some good light relief after the misery of "The Grapes of Wrath" (fabulously excellent though it was). The best Adrian Mole books will of course remain the original teenage diaries, but of the adult diaries this one is the best.

Remaining on the topic of books, a link I saw on AOL's entry page annoyed me the other day, though it's really quite a trivial little thing. It was about what books are the must-have (no, not must-read) books, the ones to be seen with, because, as they claimed, "what books you choose says a lot about you". This kind of fashionabilism (yeah, I made up a word, I have an English degree, we're qualified to) really faffs me off. It's like all those people who wear AC/DC t-shirts because it's an inexplicable fashion, not because they like the band. What it means is now you can't wear an AC/DC t-shirt in case people think you're one of those people who doesn't like the band, rather than the other way round. And now the fashionistas are trying to hijack books in the same way, which means you can't read the books on the list unless people think you're only reading the books on the list because they're on the list.

Most of the books on the list were crap anyway, but that's beside the point.

Tuesday 5th September 2006, 6.45pm

There's been some major late-in-the-day changes with "The Thieves of Pudding Lane". Today I excised two chapters from the original line-up. Fortunately, both of these chapters were yet to be written, rather than ones I've already toiled over and decided to bin. What happened is that whilst I junked the original plan, especially the beginning, I left the ending pretty much intact, as it has been for several drafts, mainly because I never got close enough to give it much thought. Parts of both chapters have been merged into other chapters on either side, but they no longer weigh down (or slow down) the conclusion.

It means I am down to a planned twelve chapters, and I am currently on chapter nine. This bodes well for finishing it by the time Jenna arrives, given that it takes about five days to write a fully polished chapter. However, it does mean it's going to come in at the lower end of the 40,000-50,000 word estimate.

Saturday 2nd September 2006, 10.52pm

It was at 4pm this afternoon, on the cusp of completing chapter eight, that it occurred to me that it is exactly 340 years to the day since my story was meant to have taken place. The Great Fire broke out in the early hours of Sunday 2nd September 1666, and most of my story takes place the following night, that is tonight, three and a half centuries ago.

In an idle moment I brought up the Microsoft calculator and worked out that I am just over 3/5ths of the way through the story now. Yes, quite anal, but not quite as anal as completing each writing session by bringing up the calculator and dividing my remaining word target by the number of days I have left to see how much I need to write every day to finish it before Jenna gets here (she leaves the US a month today, and gets here a month tomorrow). Thanks to a couple of above-target days this week, my daily word target is down to 511.

Still, that only works on the provision this story only goes as far as I've aimed it, and means if it ends up several thousand words longer, I'm going to fall short of time.

Sunday 27th August 2006, 8.34pm

This weekend I received my story "The Bottle-collectors" back from the North American Review in pristine condition. I can't even tell whether it's been read but it's probably safe to assume it has, though the return slip they put in the envelope wasn't very revealing; it took two reads to make sure it was indeed a rejection.

The last time I submitted a story anywhere (to science fiction magazine Interzone, in early 2001; this story's not on the site) I got a nice handwritten note that was at once both encouraging and helpfully critical. "Competently written" it said, but then something about being too straightforward or basic or basically unoriginal. All of which was true.

This pre-printed little note from the North American Review doesn't really give any indication of how much they loathed it, or whether it was rejected simply for not fitting in with everything else in the journal. Which really isn't very helpful at all. I've been tinkering with the story since I sent it out and even changed the first sentence a bit, so I'll look for somewhere else to send it, and send them the new improved version instead.

Thursday 24th August 2006, 7.14pm

It's now exactly forty days until Jenna emigrates (well, six months almost counts) to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and becomes an honourary royal subject, so I thought it about time I updated the counter. Forty is also a good round number, and better, at least, than the -6 months since I left for the US as it was until just now. I was going to try and find a picture for the counter, but I kept putting it off, and I thought if I waited any longer it was hardly going to be worth the effort anyway.

I crossed the 20,000 words point with "The Thieves of Pudding Lane" today, and as I'm planning to finish it before she gets here, I have to write 500-600 words a day to do it. I usually write 800-1000, but there have been awkward days recently when I have barely written a paragraph or two, so if I keep aiming for my usual amount, even if I slip again there should be enough time. It'll probably end up longer than anticipated anyway. I think what I've written so far still needs some more work, so I'm going to finish this draft, then let a few people read it critically, forget about it whilst they do, and then return to revise it before sending it out prospectively.

Monday 21st August 2006, 7.07pm

It was a good job I decided to wait until today before making my mind up about that Amazon zShops thing. Today the postage rates went up. I couldn't believe it when a Royal Mail spokeswoman on the BBC lunchtime news said the new postage rates were not about making a bigger profit, but were redressing the balance, and then she held up a copy of the latest Harry Potter book in hardback and said it was actually cheaper to send this book today than it was on Friday.

I don't see how she worked that one out, but then, of course, she didn't work it out, she's just saying what she's been told to say. I had four books that I sold on Amazon to send today. One was thin enough to be classed as a large letter, so went for 65p, the same as it would have been last week. I then had two average sized novels, and they cost me £1.70 each to send. Last week they would have cost me about £1.20-£1.30 each to send. The biggest and heaviest book, about the size of the Harry Potter book the woman on the news used as her example, cost me £2.20. The last time I paid so much to send a book it was a massive reference tome, not some average sized book.

Fortunately the sting was taken out of the tail of that particular sale by the fact that I sold it for £7.60 whilst I bought it originally for 50p, but still, Amazon don't give me £2.20 to send books, and they're not putting up their postage rates. It means whilst their prices remain fixed, and the cost of the books I buy to sell remain fixed, the changes in the postage rates only really effect me, and how much I make.

I've got a lot of second hand paperbacks in good condition on sale for about 60p-70p. When it only cost 80p-90p to send them, but Amazon was giving me £1.50 postage after taking their commission, there was a reasonable profit to be made at the end of the day because they only cost me between 20p-50p in the first place. To put Royal Mail's unabashed profiteering in the name of fairness in context, to make the same amount off the same books this week, I will now have to up the prices for those paperbacks to a pound or more.

Which is why I'm going to pass on the zShops thing. It might have made good sense to have had it these last few months where I've been selling several books a day and making at least double the subscription fee after costs. But if I now have to sell books at £1 that others are selling for 1p, I can only expect sales to drop off. I'm not going to take any listings down, because I've sold books before where I've listed them at 73p and there have been plenty of identical copies for sale at 1p, but I suspect the trend will continue to be against that. I'll have to see.

Wednesday 16th August 2006, 11.50pm

I was standing at a pedestrian crossing today when a man on a bicycle asked me if I was black. I didn't know what to say. I could quite ably hide in a snowstorm. He was entirely serious and he looked pissed off so I didn't even give him a condescending look either. He then asked me what I was doing in this country and promptly told me to go back to my own. After that I didn't wait for the little green man. Proof positive drugs should stay illegal.

I am for all intents and purposes halfway through "The Thieves of Pudding Lane". Though it's my final stab at the story, I'm going to rewrite the last two chapters, having not found the focus until I got to the end. Together they comprise a contained episode in which our two heroes Samuel and Mary (a stand-in name, after I had to use the original, Hannah, for a real historical person I didn't originally intend writing into the tale) let curiosity get the better of them, and get their noses burnt (literally) trying to help the adults fighting the fires raging along Pudding Lane, Fish Street Hill and Thames Street. I always knew these would be demanding to write, because it's essential to establish how calamitous this fire was, but I think I went a little overboard. I have crowds of people fleeing in every direction, abandoning their homes as the fire spreads like a tidal surge. That all happened, of course, but it was a bit later in the day, and a bit later in this story too.

That said I took a day off from all that today to clear my head. It does start to own you after a while. You know you need a break when you're shouting at the cat because you can't think of yet another synonym for "burn" and a sentence just won't do until it's perfect and purple (whilst it's generally the case that if you mean to say "burn" then you should just say "burn"). You need a break to remind yourself that spending an hour on one paragraph is a waste of time when a reader will only spend a few seconds reading it. Reading helps, but reading is generally the first thing to slip when you get writing. I've been reading John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" for a month now.

So anyway, today I went for a long walk. It somehow feels less of a waste of a day if you're going somewhere, or if not going somewhere, then just going. Last week I took a therapeutic day off and walked along the seafront, not heading anywhere in particular, and not ending up anywhere in particular either. I kept going until I couldn't see the beach anymore and it wasn't until I was on the way back again that I really got an inkling of how far it had been. By the time I reached Southend high street again I was exhausted, to the point where it doesn't feel like your blood's pumping oxygen round your body anymore, so I did what I never do anymore, and caught the bus back. When I checked the little red map book I found I'd walked across three pages and onto a fourth, about eight and a half miles even after the bus trip was deducted. Crazy, but the next day the words slipped out like diarrhoea.

Today I didn't walk quite as far, though I think I've got a blister on my foot now. I walked to Old Leigh, Southend's unapologetic answer to Cannery Row. Though unlike Cannery Row, the cockle, whelk, mussel, eel and shrimp business is still thriving here. But similarly unlike Cannery Row, nobody's ever going to write an affectionate novel about Old Leigh. It was the first time I'd been there in well over a decade, but it was odd how I remembered things I'd forgotten all that time. Old Leigh is like an anachronistic island, cut off from the rest of the town by the c2c railway line. The only way to get there is over the bridge. For the most part it's been preserved. The houses are still weatherboarded, the streets are still cobbled. Anyway, I took a handful of photos, which you can look at here.

Wednesday 2nd August 2006, 8.02pm

It's been a couple of weeks since I last posted because I no longer seem to have an hour in the late afternoon to ponder over an entry, either because by that time I am already pooped, exhausted of words for the day, or because I am still writing.

I am now working on the third (well, second and a half) and final draft of "The Thieves of Pudding Lane". None of the previous attempts were a complete draft, rather a series of restarts, and always right from the beginning. I first had the idea for this story exactly two years ago. The title came to me straight away, as I was watching an epic Channel 4 documentary about the Great Fire of London. I mulled over the story for a year, in which it was going to be about Plague orphans stealing for a Fagin-like priest. Then last winter I sat down and ploughed through the two major historical works on the Fire (one superb, one worthless but for the better map of the city), distilling their contents into twelve pages of notes.

The plot I settled on when I wrote the first chapter I posted here months ago is still for the most part intact, though like a zealous mohel I have hacked at the beginning, so that the story now starts several days later. I realised the main problem was that, having planned the story in detail, the first chapter consisted of what needed to happen, rather than what should. In the end it just became easier to lop off the beginning and start the story in the thick of it. And contrary to my fears that it would rob the story of its meat, its given it a focus, a more streamlined plot.

As this is a children's story, I am aiming for between 40,000 and 50,000 words, and am bang on target at the moment. I am a few hundred words shy of the end of the third chapter, which will bring my word count to 9,000 words. And then in a little over 2,000 words I get to set fire to the entire city of London. Who wouldn't want to be a writer?

Yesterday I saw the new "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie, which was slightly disappointing. The best thing I can say about it is that it was two and a half hours long but felt like under two hours. And that's mainly because it was overstuffed. Maybe I was having an Essex Boy moment, but half the time I had little clue what was going on, and the rest of the time I was wondering why they had included it anyway. Like there's a scene where the characters get imprisoned in a cage hanging over a ravine. There's no good reason as to why they're hanging over a ravine, but of course, this is just set-up for a set-piece in which they have to roll down a hill in the cage.

It kinda destroys the reality of the story's universe when things betray logic simply to set-up the next scene. Though the cage bit was rather funny. As was any bit with Johnny Depp in (especially his first appearance), but perhaps that was the biggest problem with the movie: Johnny Depp wasn't in it enough. With the three main characters getting split up and going in separate directions with separate (and conflicting) goals, there's a period when Depp's missing from this movie for nigh on half an hour. And Orlando Bloom just can't carry it in his stead. The ending was a completely unsatisfying "To be continued..." that didn't tie up a single plot thread, and attempted to conceal it behind a completely inexplicable cameo. I still want to see the third part, but I won't be after either of them on DVD.

Monday 17th July 2006, 5.57pm

Those who have known me long enough might remember a time before I developed my great love for the "Alien" saga, though we're now talking almost twelve years to the day since I first saw Ridley Scott's original.

It was at the end of my first year at high school, a year in which if I was a fanboy of anything, it would have been "Doctor Who". That was the year when we played (it would be wrong to say devised, as it just kind of evolved) our "Doctor Who" themed version of It. It was rather liberal of us, when you think about it, casting the tagged person as a Dalek and giving them a glove to throw by way of exterminating them, the equivalent of making someone else It; it levelled the playing field, giving our 'slower' friends a better chance. Now, if only they could throw any better than they could run...

Ironically that was the year "Doctor Who" was as dead as could be. After four years without a new series, the BBC made a special episode for Children In Need and it represented everything that was wrong about the show when it was cancelled. It was a joke, and not even a particularly entertaining one anymore. Meanwhile the series continued in a licensed novel series, except those novels had strayed a long way from the core concept; there were books where the Doctor took drugs, and others in which the Doctor didn't appear at all. The very idea of "Doctor Who" was utterly exhausted.

When I saw the advert for ITV's 'Leading Ladies' (sponsored by Lil-lets, though I had no idea what they were at the time) film season on consecutive Saturdays over the summer, and that the first two films showing would be "Alien" and "Aliens", I thought I'd check them out. Even though the first film was older than I was, and the second almost a decade old itself, I'd found something new, and different, and much more my cup of tea.

So it's ironic how things have pretty much come full circle. "Doctor Who" is now the best show on TV, and reading about the newly greenlit latest addition to the "Alien" canon fills me with not the slightest bit of interest at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.

"Alien vs Predator 2" starts off where the first film left off, on the Predator spacecraft as it leaves Earth's orbit, and an alien/Predator hybrid bursts through the chest of a Predator that was impregnated in the previous film. Thirty seconds into the film, not even off the first page of script, and this story self-immolates: the alien/Predator hybrid grows from a chestburster into a full grown monster in an instant. A split second. The beastie goes on a rampage around the Predator spacecraft, causing it to crash back on Earth.

And that's when the film takes a turn for the godawful. Does the spacecraft crash in a futuristic New York City, or Los Angeles, or Tokyo? No. It crashes outside a small town in the American Midwest. Which is where I've just come back from. And it's the last place I'd set this movie, but then, that brings up the issue that I wouldn't set this movie on Earth, nor would I set it in the modern day, so obviously I'm biased against this plot twist.

From offensive, to godawful, you might be surprised to hear the script actually gets worse from then on in. The alien/Predator hybrid conveniently survives the crash and escapes into suburbia, where it starts running amok. Only one Predator also survives, and he proceeds to hunt the hybrid through the town. Numerous humans are caught in the middle, and I expect they'll all be so well drawn they'll almost be four-dimensional, let alone three.

And then, in case your expectations have not been sated (surely not!) already, take hold of your cinema seat armrests and brace yourself for the all-action spectacular climax: a showdown between the Predator and the hybrid in a K-Mart!

This is the franchise that gave us alien creatures that exist solely to rape, the visceral body-horror of a man dying in childbirth, monsters that are based entirely on some nutty Swiss's sexualised paintings. This is the franchise that gave us Sigourney Weaver and Ripley, the mechanically enhanced bitch fight over Ripley's nuclear family at the end of "Aliens", and Ripley's selfless suicide to save the universe from the alien menace in "Alien 3".

The best they can come up with now is a punch-up in the cat food aisle of Asda. I wouldn't even watch this shit if it was on TV.

Those who frequent notoriously unreliable Internet movie websites may well suspect this is just another one of those rumours that come from nowhere and don't amount to anything. The problem being, when Aint It Cool News ran a script review for "Alien vs Predator 2", Fox sat on it, threatened them with legal action, so they removed the review. And that only ever means one thing.

In the past, on one Internet fansite or another, I have railed against those unwilling to give a new movie a chance, but now, finally, I see where they're coming from. I feel like someone watching a nature documentary who hopes the deformed bunny born without any eyes or legs dies quickly. Not out of maliciousness, but simply because maybe it would be better if they just let this one go, slip away quietly without any more fuss. Euthanise it before the bad memories overwrite the good.

Friday 14th July 2006, 10.54pm

I enjoyed the second season of "Doctor Who" more than the last, quite probably because it didn't take nine or ten episodes for me to take a shine to the lead, and quite possibly because the writing has moved up a notch or two this year.

It started off rather uninspiringly with episodes that were pretty much more of the same we saw last year; entertaining, but never really pushing the boat out. "New Earth" echoed the first episode last year, forty minutes of set-up and then a simple, unsatisfying deus ex machina solution that wrapped everything up with a nice bow. However, in its final moments, it hinted at where Russell T Davies was going to take the show this year, upping the human drama, with the villainous Cassandra becoming more of a tragic anti-heroine.

The second episode, "Tooth and Claw", reminded me a lot of how the show was during the era of producer John Nathan Turner (the one who squeezed Tom Baker out of the role, lost Peter Davison, sacked Colin Baker and then drove the show to extinction), with its emphasis on visceral shocks every couple of scenes rather than coherent storyline, padded out with plenty of running around being chased by a monster. Its setting of a Victorian house and having monsters that are really humans was straight out of half Sylvester McCoy's stories. I see it's become something of a fan favourite already, but I don't see why. It was the only episode this season I can say I actually lost interest in what was going on halfway through.

Fortunately, things really hit their stride with a straight run of half a dozen excellent episodes straight after, starting with "School Reunion". This episode sounded terribly contrived, just an excuse to get in an old-school cameo. However, it was the complete opposite. It was the classic set-up of an everyday location infiltrated by aliens, and the Doctor turning up for no reason other than to stick his nose in. It made perfect sense that former companion Sarah Jane Smith would also show up, given that she was a journalist, and it was her poking around that got her involved with the third Doctor in the first place.

Here's where RTD and his writing team upped the emotional ante; rather than just exploit the Sarah Jane character as a cameo, they milked the idea for its full potential, not only having Sarah Jane bounce off Rose (and draw comparisons between them) but also have her slightly angry at the Doctor for just abandoning her six regenerations previously. It felt like a continuation of an old story you didn't need to know the start of, and worked because it mirrored Rose's character arc as well. Great stuff.

The emotional ante was upped even further with "The Girl in the Fireplace", which at first glance didn't interest me in the slightest. Clockwork robots in pre-Revolutionary France? Bah. But this was by the far the cleverest episode of the series's regeneration so far, and the most science fiction in terms of plot, what with far future spacecraft repaired with human organs and time travel portals. But at the end of the day, it was a simple love story between the Doctor and Madam de Pompadour that not even Mickey's presence could ruin. It was also a well-conceived mystery, fitting the forty-five minute format perfectly, and the final shot, the killer twist, was one of those moments I wish I'd have thought up.

The "Rise of the Cybermen" two-parter set in a parallel universe put the emphasis back onto high adventure and action, but kept the human drama paramount. Rose finding a universe where her father is not only alive but actually made something of himself could have been an interesting story in itself, just pushed the threshold a little further by throwing Cybermen into the mix without having to worry about exposition or series mythos. But it was Mickey's story really, and he actually grew on me over the course of the two episodes. I loathed the character from the start, and then when I began to like him being around, he goes and leaves, though it was a fitting end to the character. Or so I thought.

Following that was "The Idiot's Lantern", written by Mark Gatiss, and like his effort last season, very much in the vein of old-school "Doctor Who" horror stories. It benefitted from having a guest star (in Maureen Lipman) who wasn't hamming it up and nudging and winking at the audience like that awful recurring Slitheen woman last year. Plus a bit of 1950s nostalgia is never a bad thing. So above average, but it suffered in its placing by being sandwiched between the two crowning pinnacles of this season.

"The Satan Pit" two-parter was another high-point, mainly because it went back to the horror roots of the old series, but with all the aplomb and scope and scale of the new series. Distant planets, inexplicable spacial anomalies, visions of Hell, small dwindling crew, no wet humour - this was always going to be up my street. It came across a bit like a TV-friendly version of "Event Horizon", except where you actually get to see Old Nick, rather than merely ditching all plot threads at the last minute in favour of a nice big explosion like Paul WS Anderson did.

It also probably helped that this story represented the first major detour from Earth in the new series (and thus far the last, alas). Yes, there was a token visit to another planet in the first episode, but even that was New Earth, so hardly counts. Not since Jon Pertwee's third Doctor has the Doctor been so confined to Earth, regardless of the time period. I mean, he has a vessel that can travel anywhere in the universe at any point in history, and nine episodes out of ten he's on a modern day council estate in south London. Why? Most people wouldn't even notice if Brixton was taken over by aliens, the rest wouldn't care, and some of us would actually be hopeful they might improve the place.

After that excellent two-parter, things took a bit of a tumble, and it was clear they were doing stuff on the cheap to save the pennies for the finale. I don't know why they don't just make less episodes instead (probably because then they'd get less budget, so would still have to scrimp). "Love and Monsters" has been widely maligned for being too farcical, and for not having enough of the Doctor in, and for just desecrating the memories of fanboys nationwide who remembered when "Doctor Who" used to be about things like the Doctor deciding if he was going to kill the inventor of the Daleks before he had unleashed them upon the universe, rather than chasing after ill-advised cameos from over-rated comedians in fat suits.

All valid criticisms, but I don't think it was as bad as all that. It was like the "Humbug" episode in the second season of "The X-Files" where Mulder and Scully investigate a murder amongst a freakshow, which was pretty much played for laughs, poking fun at the show's own absurdity, without ever breaking the fourth wall. It was when those kinds of episodes became the best that "The X-Files" should have been put down rather than renewed for another two or three years, and hopefully that won't be the case here. My main criticism of it is not what was there, but what wasn't: it was the story of a group of people who have all had prior contact with the Doctor, so like the very first episode "Rose", it was a missed opportunity to explore the fact that there have been ten of them so far, even if the people obsessed with this mysterious Doctor don't realise they're all the same person. Indeed, if they fear the one Doctor, much more could be made of there being an entire group of these people all going under the same name.

"Fear Her" wasn't as bad, though it was pretty standard and uninspired, kind of like the Doctor and Rose walking into an episode of "The Twilight Zone". Though it reminded me more of that episode of "Eerie Indiana" where the girl possesses the power to bring her drawings to life, and vice versa.

I would give the two-part "Doomsday" finale 5/5 were it not for Catherine Tate's sudden appearance at the end. "Daleks? Cybermen? Am I bovvered? Seriously, though. Look at my face. Face! Bovvered!" Ugh. That aside, this was much better than last year's finale, in which the Dalek invasion of Earth consisted of a CGI shot of flying Daleks sweeping down into Earth's atmosphere... and then cut to three Daleks versus four humans hiding behind a barricade. We got some proper Daleks vs Cybermen battle scenes here, but with a proper story going on (albeit sometimes as background window dressing). I'm glad the Daleks rejected the Cybermen's offer of an alliance; it was bordering on fanboy wish material by that point already.

I was actually happy when Mickey put in a surprise appearance in the first episode, the character had grown on me that much. When I saw the parallel universe version of Rose's father in the teaser for episode two, I thought with his wife dead in that universe, but a widow in this, what a more fitting ending to Rose's story arc it would be if she could get them together and then leave rather than die, as claimed. So I was glad when that is indeed what happened. Killing her off, even if she had done it heroically to save the world/the Doctor/the south London council estates, would have seemed a bit cheap. The true nature of the Genesis Ark was also a great twist, and the black Dalek's last minute teleportation out of danger somewhat portentous. Or maybe Russell T Davies was just covering his back for next year's finale.

Rumours that next year will feature the reappearance of the Ice Warriors don't exactly fill me with excitement. That's kind of scraping the barrel for big baddies now the Cybermen have been used up and the rights to the Daleks will cost the BBC too much to renew. I can't see why they can't create a new recurring evil enemy, rather than a bunch of them that get defeated in time for the end credits. Some proper fascist alien bastards, who don't go around farting, or have cute faces, and aren't called the Slitheen.

Friday 7th July 2006, 5.29pm

This week I have been reading "The Third Brother" by Nick McDonell and "Sweet Thursday" by John Steinbeck.

I read McDonell's first novel, "Twelve", because it was published when he was just seventeen, and there's always something that's appealed about reading the work of authors younger than me; perhaps it's a bit of jealousy, or a hope that you can catch them out. "Twelve" turned out to be a good read, though the similarities with Bret Easton Ellis don't stop with the age at which they got published. "Twelve" was basically a far more polished, perhaps even over-edited version of Easton Ellis's "Less Than Zero".

"The Third Brother" starts off a bit like Alex Garland's "The Beach", which is about Western teenagers with too much money descending on Thailand to get away from their parents and get high. "The Third Brother" is about Mike, a student intern with a travel magazine being sent to assist on a feature about precisely those Western teenagers, and about how the Thai authorities try to balance the tourist trade with the drugs industry that is intertwined with it.

However, as well as that professional assignment, his editor (an old college friend of his father's) also tells Mike to track down a man living in Bangkok. He doesn't tell him why, beyond the fact that the man is another old college friend of Mike's father, and indeed, we never actually learn the true reason. "Heart of Darkness" is another clear influence here as Mike gets to see the darker side of this tourist resort as he ingratiates himself with the locals and tries to understand why everybody hates the guy he's been told to track down.

I have my suspicions where the novel was going, what it was getting at, and what the ramifications would be, but this is a novel of two halves, and just when all the questions are about to be answered, it suddenly shifts gear. A family tragedy forces Mike to cut his trip short and fly home to New York City. The second half of the novel takes place entirely on September 11th 2001, juxtaposing personal tragedy with the terrorist attacks.

And to be honest, this is where the novel loses the plot, literally. When I read the blurb about the book and saw the author of "Twelve" was tackling the theme of being a kid in New York on 9/11, I was interested. But by the time he gets to that half of the book, it's not the novel he's been writing for the last 30,000 words, and I wanted him to get back to that one. That's not to say the second half isn't as well written; I might go so far as saying it's better written, adopting a predictably surreal approach to apocalyptic events. However, it's the second half to another book, and I still want to read the second half to the first book. I don't know, maybe I've just completely missed the point he was trying to make.

"Sweet Thursday", meanwhile, is Steinbeck's sequel to "Cannery Row", set several years later, after World War Two, when the Monterey Bay canneries have all gone out of business, and for all the national pride during the war, the people who live on Cannery Row are just as poor and stuck there as they were in the Depression-set first book. Less episodic than the first one, which could have been broken up into independent short stories, the general plot of this one is that wideboys Mack, Hazel and Whitey are determined to make the Doc happy again by finding him a woman, though just as in most of Steinbeck's books, the best laid plans of mice and men always go a little caca.

Thursday 6th July 2006, 5.50pm

I have finally finished uploading all the photos (and writing all the notes for them) that I took in America this year. I've divided them up into sections according to the states where they were taken, which are in chronological order of my visiting them, though of course photos in the Michigan section span a timeframe from my second day there to my penultimate. I've also sub-divided them into categories for ease of digestion, particularly the Michigan and Utah series, which are the largest, comprising more than half the 205 photos between them. If you want glorious landscapes and sunny vistas just skip straight to the Utah section. It's the best one.

I've submitted "The Bottle-collectors" to the North American Review. On the one hand, it was probably a waste of time, the North American Review being one of the most established literary journals in the US (I get the impression it's like the American answer to Granta). On the other hand, this is the first story I've sent anywhere (excepting portfolios for courses) in almost six years. I lack a thick skin when it comes to rejection, and the philosophy behind this submission is that it's better to get the ball rolling with a rejection from the top, and then work your way down, than to get a rejection outright from the scrappy little webzine that you don't really want to appear in anyway that's at the bottom of your list.

The net result may be the same, either way, but at least by then the emotional connection I still have with my baby, having only finished cosmetic tweaking yesterday, will have diminished to a state where the rejection won't feel like a testicle theft. And of course, part of me has to hope that when they say in the submission guidelines that they want stories about issues of class (amongst other things, but this theme is appropriate to my story) in America that start swiftly and have strong narrative arcs, then that's what they mean.

It's been a hard one to place. It's a story very much about America in theme as well as setting, and that's going to count against it in this country. There's also a far larger grass-roots literary movement in the US; I got this impression whilst I was there. UEA's quarterly literary journal rarely ever features anything by actual students at the university; CMU's equivalent is run by students, as well as being written by them. Of course, there is a market for short fiction in the UK, though it's largely a genre market. Indeed, as I was searching through the websites for just one place where my story might fit, I've already located three places where a Gothic horror story I am currently toying with would fit right in.

Friday 30th June 2006, 7.01pm

I wish Menzies Campbell would just go. I thought before he was elected that he'd turn out to be the Liberal Democrats' Michael Howard, the victor of a bloody coup that the party faithful rally around but who doesn't have what it takes to reach much further beyond. But it's actually worse than that. In the latest poll in the Telegraph only 6% of those polled wanted him as the next prime minister. Seeing as the LibDems scored something like 22-3% of the vote in the general election (though that has now slumped back to 18% in Ming's capable hands), that means three quarters of LibDem voters don't even want him!

He's a lame duck, and an embarrassment. Who else would call coming second (in Bromley) a "stupendous" result? That's pure defeatism. How can the electorate consider a third party becoming the first party if the leader himself is perfectly happy with second prize? And whilst it does sound like quite the achievement, slashing a 12,000 Tory majority, when you look at the actual figures, there's more than a little bit of creative analysis going on here. The LibDem candidate only actually gained 1000 votes, and from the look of them, all from Labour. It's just a case of Tory voters taking their safe seat for granted, as usually happens in by-elections in safe seats. This will undoubtedly have been a short sharp shock and they'll all be out in force again come 2009.

Hearing that this week Campbell is enlisting the help of somebody to 'rebrand' him just smacks of somebody who has completely run out of ideas, if he even had any to begin with. Wearing a baseball cap, doing judo with Seb Coe and boasting about drinking eighteen pints in one session did nothing to help William Hague's standing. It's clear whose voters Campbell is after by portraying himself as a genial slipper-wearing gent who likes late afternoon daytime television - the people who are so old and set in their ways they think David Cameron's too young and hip.

Not that there's many candidates suited to replace Campbell. Simon Hughes would probably be the one with the highest profile. Chris Huhne would be better off in the David Davis camp of the Conservative Party. Meanwhile, the more interesting candidates don't even merit 'rising star' status. You have Norman Lamb, who scraped a narrow win in the previous Tory stronghold of north Norfolk in 2001, was widely predicted to lose it back again in 2005, but in fact turned his lead into a five-figure majority. He must have done something right.

Then there's Evan Harris in one of the Oxford seats. He's often getting quoted in the papers, but you never hear anything about him, whereas I remember reading an opinion box-out he wrote in the Independent early last year in which he just struck me as someone with a vision. Can't even remember what topic he was writing on, just that he struck a nerve. The problem is, of course, that if the Tories really are going to win 38-40% of the vote at the next election, it's going to be at the cost of marginal seats like Oxford. And if the LibDems are beaten back into only having MPs in Scotland, you can safely write them off for the next few elections as well. It doesn't have to be that way, but they need a better, more dynamic, more original leader than this to stop it.

Thursday 29th June 2006, 4.43pm

Of course, I'm not just selling books; I've also been reading quite a bit as well. I've recently completed both "Pet Sematary" by Stephen King and "Every Man For Himself" by Beryl Bainbridge.

Anyone checking out which books I'm selling will notice I've got most of Stephen King's books up there, mainly because they're 1400 pages long, and I've seen the mini-series of most of them now (including the absolutely dire "Desperation" starring Ron Perlman, which was on ABC whilst I was in America), and I don't see myself ever getting round to reading them.

I picked out "Pet Sematary" because I haven't seen the movie, and what's more, I didn't have much of a clue what it's about. Plus it's not 1400 pages. It's not really about a pet cemetery; it's about what's beyond it, in the ancient Indian territory, where things that get buried there by mistake make a habit of not staying buried for long. It was actually quite good, despite Stephen King's reliance on portentousness, warning the reader what's going to happen fifty pages from now, to keep the interest going over entire chapters where nothing of note happens. It gave the impression of being a novella stretched to novel length.

Beryl Bainbridge's "Every Man For Himself" was at the other end of the literary spectrum, a nominee or winner of numerous notable awards. The shift over took a bit getting used to; no doubt if Stephen King had taken on the story of the Titanic, it would have been as long as "The Stand", rather than this slim, concise, fast-moving tale. At first I didn't quite think Bainbridge had got a grip on being a male first person narrator, though perhaps this is due to me not realising until halfway through the (long) first chapter. See, this is lit'rature; they don't tell you these things outright.

The story follows the bastard child nephew of one of the White Star Line's owners as he travels to New York with a stolen painting of his mother, and all the rich bitches and poor little waifs from steerage he falls for along the way. I suppose the Titanic setting is incidental now that I consider it. It's not really about the Titanic, not so much as it is about a type of ordered society that by popular concensus we like to believe sank with the ship. Whereas Bainbridge knows it's still flourishing today.

Indeed, she first came to my attention years and years ago when I read an article about how she was asked to nominate a book-of-the-year at some high falutin' literary festival, and she was applauded with sage nodding, and people came up to her to support her nomination. And then at the end of the festival she revealed she'd made it up, that the book didn't exist. Can't beat a literary author who reveals the Emperor's New Clothes for what they really are.

This week I also finished I story I started back in April, whilst I was in America. It's set in Michigan, and in winter (there was still patches of snow left on the ground when I started it, after all), and I'm very pleased with the result. I put this version online yesterday, but I couldn't resist some cosmetic tinkering today. I wanted to write something like John Steinbeck's stories from "Cannery Row", but the thing with trying to write like someone else is you always just end up writing like yourself anyway. Still, the result was interesting, and unique amongst my oeuvre because of it.

See that? I just used a French word in a sentence without intending to.

Friday 23rd June 2006, 11.50pm

This week has been a bumper week for me and my new best friends at Amazon. I've now got about three hundred items for sale via Amazon Marketplace and they have been selling at a steady daily rate. Tuesday was a particularly good day, on which I made £30 from books. One of them I sold for £9.66 (after Amazon took their cut), which I bought at the Mencap bookshop where I used to volunteer, for only 50p. I've been into the shop three times this week and left with a bag of books each time, but never spending more than £3. Wednesday was another good day. I found Eric Hobsbawm's "Age of Extremes" in the shop for 50p, put it on Amazon for £4.70 and it sold within a couple of hours.

This is the first week where I've sold more books that I've bought second-hand in the first place than I have sold ones that I bought new at list price. The difference being that you can't hope to sell a book via Marketplace at list price, but if you've only paid 50p for it, and it's in good nick, you can sell it for a reasonable amount (such as half list price) and make perhaps 400% profit, even after shipping, if you're lucky.

I've actually been pretty dense about this. I've been selling stuff over Amazon for nearly two years now, but didn't really get how people could sell stuff for 1p and not be making a loss. They're not making a loss because Amazon add on £2.3something postage to every book order, which means if you're selling a book for 1p, you actually get something like £1.3something (after Amazon take their obligatory commission). The average sized novel costs between 64p and 84p to send, so even if that book cost you 50p, if you're selling it at 1p, you still make a small profit.

The vast majority of people selling books at 1p are also members of the zShops scheme, which I have been evaluating this week. Being part of the scheme means Amazon waive their commission, so using that 1p book as an example again, with £2.3something postage added on, you're actually getting the full £2.3something rather than the £1.3something after they take their cut. For this you pay a monthly flatrate subscription of £28. So far this week alone, Amazon have taken £28.29 from my sales as their commission.

I'm going to give it another month and see if I can keep this up, and then perhaps invest in a zShops membership. In the meantime, if there's anything you fancy, you can check out my 'stock' here.

Monday 19th June 2006, 10.32pm

This weekend I met up with old housemates Luke and Nick for what certainly felt like a mini-festival by the end of a long day in the sun in Hyde Park. The Foo Fighters were headlining, on the Feeder-tying fourth occasion I've seen them live, supported by Motorhead, the creatively washed-up shadow of what was once Queens of the Stone Age, Blink 182's increasingly aged-looking frontman Tom DeLonge's new band Angels & Airwaves, and Juliette Lewis and her band, the Licks.

The Foo Fighters also happen to be the last band I saw live, back before Christmas, and I'm yet to write a proper review of that in the dedicated section. In fact, I'm yet to write a proper review of a certain Australian pop pixie at Earl's Court, and that was over a year ago now.

In the event that I don't get round to writing a proper review: greatest hits plus some off new album but not all singles bit short can't put finger on many exceptions except "Hey Johnny Park" (forgivable, played last time) and "Tired Of You" rest played pretty fast except to-be-expected Foo Fighters muckaround in middle of "Stacked Actors" to extent forget song by the time they get back to it Lemmy from Motorhead back on-stage for a Probot song encore drummer Taylor Hawkins singing Queen song guest appearance by Brian May (and Roger Taylor) wasted opportunity but not unwelcome good to see them and then fine version of "Everlong" to finish. Got that?

For some reason the photos I took this year didn't turn out half as well as the ones I took at the Red Hot Chili Peppers and REM in previous years. Only five of them were really good enough to upload, and you can find them here.

On a related note, the 205 photos I have decided to upload from my trip to America are already online, it's just the whole business of creating thumbnails, a gallery and annotating each one that's going to take me a while longer.

I was planning to update the site a lot more whilst I was in the US, but in the end I had better things to do, as you'd expect. To tell the truth, I have better things to do in the UK as well, and this site has become something of a distraction that I faff around with and convince myself it's better than doing nothing when really I have things to do and I'm just avoiding doing them. So I'm going to streamline the site. It's heading upwards of a thousand files and when this new American gallery is finished will probably be nearer two thousand.

I'm going to be keeping the photo galleries (and indeed, adding more photographs) and the writings section. This blog-type page will remain the frontispiece, as it were, and I'll also keep maintaining the ten-year-old diary section as well, because I know how amusing that is to some people, even ones who didn't know me back then. The links seriously need updating (hello, two-year-old dead links). As for anything else, it might stay, it might go.

I never got around to sorting out that Quotes section, and it's been a couple of years since I last worked on it, so that's as good as gone already. I'll probably work the Multimedia section (and the 'guided tour') into the photo section instead. Not sure what to do with the gig review section yet, nor with the Origami section.

The CD and DVD sections are definitely for the chop. I haven't updated those in a long while, not since I started selling more of both than I was buying. On a related note, it's too much hassle to keep updating the 'for sale' section, especially when you've got two hundred items on Amazon as I have now, and particularly when it'd just be far easier to provide a link to the list of all my items for sale at Amazon itself. (Oh, and if you do click it, before you ask, no, not all the items I'm selling are mine).

If my trip to America taught me anything about myself it's just how little I need most of the material things I have here. Though I think I already knew that anyway really, and it just took three months away to prove how I could go without them. Apart from the guitar, some CDs I didn't take, and some DVDs I quite fancied watching, there's not really much in my room that I missed, and indeed, some things I quite ably forgot I had. So two hundred items are on Amazon already, with almost as many to follow, and next stop is eBay.

I'm also going to write a new About section. It seems a bit old to be complaining about high school still and I think I've finally got over that now anyway.

Thursday 15th June 2006, 9.39pm

Well, according to the counter it's been a hundred days since I left for the United States, and I've actually been back nearly a fortnight now, so probably best to get round to updating this. A month ago I was tramping around the deserts of Utah in up to 109F heat, following trails into the mountains, delighting in the prevalence of wild lizards as common as starlings, and cooling off with a dip in clear, blue mountain freshwater. Already it seems like much longer than a month, and indeed, like it might not even have happened at all.

This is compounded by getting back here and finding nothing much has changed in my absence, nothing much at all, if I was only really away for a long weekend rather than three months. I knew I was back in England proper when I got off the plane at Heathrow and there was a queue three quarters of a mile long for non-British citizens to go through passport control. And I'm not kidding; the queue was so long it trailed out of the passport control area and halfway along the corridor to the gate where we got off the plane. Compare this to Detroit, where I joined the non-American citizen line at passport control and there were only two people ahead of me at the time.

Ah, now there's a story, of my welcome to America, though it wasn't unexpected, and indeed, I was prepared for it. I had advance warning how pernicious the Border Control people are in America, but if there's one thing that'd disincline me ever to return it's not the loony Christians, the gun nuts or the anti-abortion protestors I saw (all three of them, and all old, and all men), it's the Department of Homeland Security agents vetting everyone who enters the country.

I had high hopes, given that the two people I mentioned that were directly ahead of me in the line for passport control passed through in a matter of seconds, that I would be as lucky. I maintained those hopes as I submitted to the obligatory finger-printing and photographing, and the guy behind the desk was perfectly pleasant and... and then it was a case of "Follow me, please." At which point he got out from behind the desk and took me, yes, into the Back Room!

Before anyone thinks this is about to get titillating, I unfortunately most disappoint, for there was no slapping on of the latex or "Bend over the table, please." I was, however, interrogated by no less than three agents who all asked the same questions, and asked them several times. What was my purpose in the country? Who was I staying with? How did I know them? Why am I staying so long? How can I afford to? Out of interest, the rest of the people in the Back Room were all women wearing head-to-toe veils with slits for their eyes, and they were still all there when I was finally allowed to go.

Though that wasn't before they searched all my belongings and read every piece of written stuff I had on me. I was glad I hadn't worn my Green Day t-shirt, though it perhaps didn't help that I had "American Idiot" in my CD case, which also got searched. I'd taken several books onto the plane to read, and my Carol Vorderman "Big Book of Sudoku" got flicked through in case I'd hidden any illegal work papers or terrorist plans in there. Same for the Tony Benn diary I was reading. Fortunately they didn't take the time to read any of the entries that I'd turned the corner over of; he's never exactly been a great fan of America (even if he married an American). Still, could've been worse, but luckily I don't own any Michael Moore books.

What I think eventually clinched my release was my diary entry. Oh yes, they read that too. I'd anticipated this, so as I sat on the plane, I wrote a deliberate entry, in which I neurotically prattle on about flying, and confess I'm glad I won't have to do it for another eleven weeks. I thought this would come across as convincing to any Border Control officer scrutinising my belongings for evidence of intention to stay; after all, a diary's meant to be private and personal, it's not somewhere you go to lie. And it worked. Just over an hour after I'd got off the plane, I was finally given a stamp in my passport, and wished a happy trip.

It's not that the Border Control officers were particularly hostile. Indeed, the one given the task of searching my belongings was actually quite friendly - though whether he really was, or whether I was just being obsequiously polite and co-operative to the brink of developing Stockholm Syndrome, I haven't given it much thought. I think my naivety came across loud and clear when I tried to explain to the guy how to open the combination lock on my case; he was already halfway there at that point, having guessed I'd left it on the default.

Anyway, that's pretty much the only horror story I have to report of the entire three months. The rest of the trip was a dream. I could sit here until noon tomorrow writing out everything that happened, and even then I'd probably forget a lot of it. So instead I'm just going to upload the several hundred photos I took on my trip and annotate those accordingly with what happened, maybe even what I wrote in my diary at the time.

You know they sell shotguns in the supermarkets over there?

Friday 3rd March 2006, 12.48pm

The site was down for a few days whilst Andrew (who very generously hosts the eight or nine hundred files that make up my website for no charge at all) switched to a new server. It won't make much difference at my end of things, but he assures me it's better, and that I could now host videos. Which I had been doing already, but now the opportunity has arisen to launch that pay-per-view porn empire, I suppose.

This will be one of my last updates before I leave for America, though I intend to install the FTP software on Jenna's machine and post plenty of dry, cynical observations about the New World. It just might take a while to get round to it. I have uploaded the next three months of my 1996 diary to save lugging the old book halfway across the globe. To clear out my digital camera's memory card I also finally got around to uploading thirty-odd photos from London Zoo.

I found this little book t'other day, and I just had to take a photo. There's no Photoshop jiggery pokery here, as I do not have Photoshop. On the one hand, it's a cute little novelty. On the other hand, someone at the European Commission has no sense of irony making it that small.

For the most part, it's a generally sound document. I expect they spent millions drawing it up, but I could have copied out the American Constitution for them in under an hour on minimum wage if that's what they wanted. To its credit, they ditched the bit about guns and substituted in a bit banning capital punishment. However, at the same time, it also bans stem cell research and in my interpretation provides scope for someone to try and push through an EU-wide ban on both abortion and euthanasia (but only because of its generality and vagueness).

Though on the basis of recent direct violations of the charter, I doubt there's much danger of that happening. That woman who was arrested for reading out the names of soldiers killed in Iraq at the Cenotaph is protected by the charter, which protects the right to assemble and the right to protest. The government requiring permission (i.e. that which can be refused) to protest within a mile of parliament would seem to contravene articles 11 and 12.

Likewise, but more contentiously, the recent imprisonment of David Irving in Austria is in direct violation of articles 10 and 11, which protect freedom of thought (and conscience), and freedom of expression respectively. His life, career, reputation and finances were ruined by his denial of the Holocaust, which is far truer justice than locking someone up for barmy opinions. If you allow someone like him a platform, you're in a position to defeat them with the intellectual argument. Lock them up, and you just make it look like you don't have the superior argument after all, or don't trust people to make up their own minds. David Irving is the last person you want to become a martyr for freedom of speech.

Similarly Ken Livingstone, though his suspension was swiftly lifted. Section four of the charter protects your right to employment, but acquiesces to national laws, which is basically a fudge, but as having a contentious opinion and expressing it is not justified cause for suspension or dismissal in the UK, it was only right he return to work. Personally I can't stand the man, but you can't have an elected politician being removed from office by an unelected body. If he has brought his office into disrepute, then Londoners won't vote him in for another term, but I have a suspicion they will, if he stands. Again, you can't legislate against the whims of public opinion just in case it doesn't go your way.

Where the charter seems to have a page missing (or in the case of this little book, three or four pages) is on the right to privacy. The right's not listed. The nearest to it is article 7, which says you have the right to "respect" for your personal life, and article 8, which says you have the right that personal data about you is handled "responsibly". But that's not the same thing as a right to privacy. And, I suspect, that's largely because ID cards will contravene that right. I read last week that ID cards will be capable of transmitting data by short wave radio, nominally so that you only need to carry it in the vicinity of a receiver rather than having to swipe it. I'm not sure how having all this personal information floating around us like an aura is meant to make us safer and protect our identities. I'm reminded of that bit in "Minority Report" where Tom Cruise only has to walk into a shopping centre, a computer scans his retina, identifies him, then starts running a personalised commercial addressing him by name.

Of course, we'd all be safer if the police put CCTV cameras in our homes, too. What with the new universal DNA database, burglary would just become too difficult to pull off without being identified and ultimately caught. On top of that you could catch all the men beating their wives, and parents smoking around their kids, and people reading "Mein Kampf". We'd all be safer. You could bring on a new era of decent society, where all you have to do is trust those behind it to act properly with their new unlimited powers of observation, and the only price you have to pay for it is someone being able to watch you get undressed, take a bath, urinate, defecate, masturbate, fornicate, etc. But if you're not doing anything legally wrong, you've got nothing to worry about. Right?

I was disappointed Menzies Campbell won, but predictably so.

Saturday 18th February 2006, 4.37pm

Though it's probably several decades since he was famous enough for the news to have made it into the headlines, this week saw the death of Peter Benchley, who wrote the novel "Jaws". More than anybody else, including innumerable far superior writers, this author was responsible for the initial spark that set me along the course that I am still following, seventeen or eighteen or more years later. Steven Spielberg should also get an honourable mention, because it was after seeing the movie adaptation of "Jaws" for the first time (or rather, the sixth or seventh or tenth time that I watched it in a row) that I sat down, made myself a little book, drew a shark's fine sticking out of the water on the front cover, and then wrote my first story. I still have the book somewhere. There's not much to it. If I found it, it would probably only be as long as this paragraph. People go swimming, they get eaten by a shark. The end.

I remember asking my dad how to write John Williams's famous "Jaws" theme into the story, then sang it to him: duhhhduh duhhhduh duhduh duhduh, etc. He suggested writing "DD-DD-DD", which I did. You see, I wasn't thinking like a writer then, I was thinking as a six year old trying to capture on the page what was happening in his head. It was a movie that inspired me to do it, but I had no conception of how making movies worked in the days when nobody had camcorders (or at least nobody working class in the middle of a recession), so instead I turned to the written word, the blank page, and my limited vocabulary to get my ideas down on paper. And I haven't really stopped since.

Incidentally, a few years later, the novel by Peter Benchley that spawned the Spielberg film was the first adult novel that I ever read. My mum saw it in a charity shop one day for 50p and I started reading it at the bus stop before we got home. As anyone who has read the novel will know, it's about twice as long as the film, and pretty much all that Spielberg cut out of it was endless steamy sex. I was eight or nine, and remember getting to the line (which I recall verbatim all these years later): "There hadn't been much sex in the Brody household lately." I looked up, looked around, made sure nobody was looking, then got my nose back in that book. I knew of the word at that age, and of the connotations, even if I didn't really understand. I did by the end of the novel. Quite eye-opening it was. And to think the Daily Mail is concerned that kids of the age I was then are going to be taught the proper term isn't boobies.

So anyway, who's to know, if it hadn't been Peter Benchley's story, it might have been someone else's, or maybe if I had never seen "Jaws", I might have been ensnared by another passion and things would be very different right now. I might even have a career, let alone a job. I lean towards thinking that probably would have been the case. So to the dear departed spirit of Peter Benchley, my everlasting gratitude. I don't regret this path.

Keeping with that theme, though I've been trying to kick another cold this week, I have been working in a piecemeal fashion on a new story called "The Cradle Will Rock", which I completed this afternoon. You can read it here. It's a comic coming of age tale about one of my favourite pet topics: nuclear war (in a roundabout fashion). It's also the first short story I've written (i.e. finished) in over a year, and it hasn't really re-energised any latent interest in the form. In fact, I wanted to write something longer, but the idea only stretched to a few thousand words.

Tuesday 14th February 2006, 12.06pm

I've uploaded this script I've been working on these past few weeks. It was originally intended to be something to work at idly, semi-seriously, when I needed a break from "The Thieves Of Pudding Lane". Of course, such intentions are stamped beneath the jackboot of the obsessive side of my personality, so it became more a case of "Thieves" was something I worked on when I needed a break from this side-project. I'm off to America in three weeks now, and there's not really time to get into the thick of it with "Thieves". I had a long break during the writing of that "Doctor Who" fan fiction I wrote last summer, and it was hard to get back into the swing of things. Where I am with "Thieves" is now a good place to stop and let it ferment for a while, unlike where I stopped with the Cybermen story, which I basically left hanging in mid-sentence.

Anyway, this screenplay is based on a dream I had in November or December 2004, and which I brought up briefly on this page in that e-mail to Gary Lankford (he's the one that lives outside a place called Utopia, Texas) I posted a little over a year ago. Basically, the dream was about an old acquaintance of mine (who peculiarly enough e-mailed me out of the blue a few weeks after I had the dream, three or four years after we last spoke) coming up to me with this Stephen King-esque horror tome and pointing out certain uncanny similarities between savage killings in the novel and real events that are transpiring. In the dream we predicted who was going to be the next victim to see if it really was a copycat crime, and found it was a lot more sinister than that. I've cut back the more excessive, random elements of that dream. In fact, compared to the original dream, the screenplay is downright prosaic.

I'm currently reading "Deception Point" by Dan Brown, because after countless false starts reading books that were complete turn-offs, I wanted something I knew I'd like, at least on some basic level. And it's got really short chapters, which always helps. "Deception Point" is unlike "The Da Vinci Code" and "Angels And Demons" in that it doesn't have the historical or religious element, instead swapping them for politics and technology. The plot revolves around NASA discovering a meteorite in the Arctic wastes that contains fossilised insects, supposedly proof of extraterrestrial life. Except when a Washington intelligence analyst goes up north to corroborate, she discovers something decidedly fishy is going on. Not least of all when special ops soldiers try to assassinate her.

One of the interesting angles Brown takes in this one is the argument over NASA. I'm only halfway in as yet, but one of the obvious (perhaps too obvious) baddies so far is a Republican senator and presidential candidate that argues NASA is a monopoly, using taxpayers' billions to take photos of space clouds. Of course, the alternative is a bunch of private aerospace companies rushing to stake claims to interstellar real estate, selling advertising space on the sides of space shuttles and quite probably starting a new cold war with space-based armaments like SDI. Brown doesn't hide his position on this one, and it's easy to share his perhaps romantic ideal that NASA should be about exploration, furthering human knowledge of the universe and its origins; something you can't put a price on. Actually, reading this, it's also pretty hard to understand why George Bush et al haven't mothballed NASA on the same grounds as the dastardly senator in this book. He could pay for a lot more wars at NASA's expense, rather than the health cuts he made last week.

Wednesday 8th February 2006, 10.15pm

Events in the world this past week have reminded me how lucky I am to live in the West. It's often easy to be blase and take things for granted, and get worked up about what seem like big issues here simply because, overall, we have it pretty good. I am of course talking about the brouhaha over the Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed, which seems to have turned into a clash of ideals.

It was probably wise of the British press not to reprint the cartoons, and thus retain the moral high ground. It has allowed them to criticise the fundamentalists without deliberately antagonising them. As it is, more people around the world have probably looked at these cartoons now because of this furore than ever would have seen it in Denmark. I looked at them online and most of them seemed solely intent on baiting Muslims. A couple of them, however, did have a pertinent satirical message to make, such as the one where God tells suicide bombers to stop because Heaven is running out of virgins.

On the other hand, I don't necessarily think it was the wrong decision for newspapers in France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and Hungary to reprint the cartoons out of solidarity for press freedoms. But I do think it was wrong that the French editor was subsequently sacked, and that the Danish newspaper subsequently apologised. In doing so, what they have done is tantamount to apologising for Western liberties, and all it took was a few protests and death threats. The press have a greater responsibility to upholding freedom of expression than they do to cossetting extremists.

A representative of the self-appointed and unelected Muslim Council of Britain said in response that freedom of speech should end when people start getting offended. On the contrary, that is precisely the point where freedom of speech begins. Freedom of speech is not about concensus. By definition, it is your right to say the things that I do not want to hear. You can't legislate against being offended. You have no human right to be protected by the state from hearing things that might counter your personal perspective of the world.

Of course, it was little ripe for some of the same people complaining about freedom of speech being used to offend them to then march outside the Danish embassy in London waving placards that say "Butcher those who mock Islam", "Europe - remember 9/11", "Britain will pay - 7/7 is on the way", "I [heart] Al-Qaida" and the usual variations on "Death to the West". Because those things offend me, and I suspect quite a lot of people. If I marched outside the Syrian embassy today waving similar messages threatening slaughter against Muslims, I would be arrested. "Democracy is hypocrisy" is another sign I saw being waved on the news footage. What's hypocritical is living in a democracy and using your democratic rights to rail against it.

That's not to say, of course, that these fundamentalist types should be banned from expressing how they feel. Freedom of speech has to extend to them too, however repellent their message is. You don't get rid of unsound opinion by driving it underground. Banning certain things from being said doesn't mean people will suddenly stop having those opinions. Better we know who thinks what than only find out how they feel about us when they blow up a train full of people. It's the same principle that landed the BNP in court last week. Because they are free to express themselves, we know who they are, where they go, and who they associate with. They don't exist off the radar, where they can't be monitored. Abu Hamza was trapped the same way.

I'm not naive enough to believe the next train bomber necessarily shouts from the rooftops his feelings about the West, but none of the terrorist attacks committed in Europe, America and Indonesia in the last few years were committed by one person working alone. They were the combined efforts of a large network of people, and if we can find one link in the chain before it happens, then maybe we can stop it before it does.

On another note, firebombing embassies, attacking random people of Danish nationality in the Middle East and sending death threats to newspaper editors are hardly convincing ways of arguing that depicting Mohammed with a bomb slanderously paints Islam as a violent religion. I wonder what they're most bothered about: the connection with violence, or the actual depiction of the prophet.

As a Kuwaiti on Gamegossip informs me, it's not actually part of Islamic law that bans the depiction of God (though as I understand it, Mohammed wasn't God, even if he has been elevated to a Christ-like status), just tradition. It's not in the Koran that nobody should depict God; that is something that has been introduced by the clerics over the centuries in the hadith. If I was a Muslim I would also consider it slightly patronising to suggest that if I ever saw a picture of God I might start worshipping it instead of the real thing. I don't know who is more stupid: the clerics who believe people might actually do that, or the people who believe the clerics rather than know their own minds. There's something insidious about the whole idea. That these cartoons were printed six months ago but hysteria has only broken out in the past week suggests there are far too many people of blind faith that are easily wound up at the dubious discretion of preachers.

I'm glad the government failed to get their religious hatred bill through the Commons last week, despite Labour MPs being told they had to vote for it. It seemed to be trying to muddy the area between race and religion, to the point where criticising someone's religion could be legally construed as racism. Just as not all Jews are semitic, Islam is not a race. It is in fact the most ethnically diverse religion on the planet. Like all religions, Islam is just an opinion. It doesn't matter how forthrightly you believe an opinion, that doesn't make it superior to any other opinion.

I'm not normally this partisan about it, because I think there's something decidedly dodgy and suspect about any form of social order that puts a myth at the top and then allocates authority to those that believe it the most, but it's not Sikhs rioting against freedom of speech being used against their opinions this week, and I can't remember the last time Buddhists flew aeroplanes into skyscrapers or Hindus blew up a train.

So, this has been a pretty politically incorrect post, but further to what I said in my "Munich" review, I suspect deep down most would probably agree with the gist of it, however conciliatory they are, and however begrudgingly they would admit it. I'm pretty unapologetic in my belief that, however decadent Western society is, despite its many faults and foibles, I'd much rather live here than a country that does this, and this, and this for any reason, least of all in the name of holy righteousness.

Friday 3rd February 2006, 9.14pm

This week Luke and I went to see Steven Spielberg's new film "Munich". For a long while the film was simply listed as "Untitled Munich Project" on IMDB, whilst working titles bandied around included "Black September", after the terrorist group that kidnapped and killed a dozen Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. Going in, that to me seemed like a much more appropriate title, given that it's more about the hunting of the Black September members who organised the Munich debacle rather than debacle itself. "Munich" seemed like the title they used because they couldn't think of anything else. Coming out, however, I reckon "Munich" was probably the most appropriate title to use after all.

"Munich" is the story of Avner (played by Eric Bana), a Mossad agent who, considering himself a true Israeli patriot, readily accepts the mission to assassinate the leading members of Black September. He is joined by a gung-ho marksman played by Daniel Craig, who wants to go in all guns blazing and who talks repeatedly of caring only for Jewish blood. They have three other companions, one of whom is a mechanical toy-maker, and puts his engineering knowhow to work building them bombs. Though theirs is a secret mission, they quickly switch from shooting their targets to blowing them up, to ensure Black September, if nobody else, will realise these weren't accidental deaths or random attacks.

I don't know how much of this is true. I suspect it's heavily fictionalised in places, but I don't think this distracts from the message. As the mission continues, things start to get more complicated. They almost kill one target's little girl, and are inadvertantly forced into several close encounters with other intended targets, and see their human sides. Things are complicated further still when it turns out their French source of information about the location of the Black September members may or may not be selling details about them to Black September as well. Then he gives them details of people who had a hand in organising Munich that weren't on their original list of targets to begin with. From determined men on a mission they start to implode in a spiral of self-doubt and paranoia, much of it not misplaced, and some of it reserved for the people who sent them on this mission in the first place and called them heroes for agreeing to do it.

Though Avner and his men find themselves killing the replacements of men they have already killed, and watch as Palestinian groups launch attacks against Israelis in response to the Black September assassinations, the message of this film isn't a pat, simplistic or self-satisfied 'An eye for an eye will leave us all blind' or 'By doing unto your enemies what they would do to you, you become as bad as them'. It doesn't even really ask the question of when seeking justice turns into seeking vengeance. Avner and his team are conflicted on all these questions themselves, and the film works best when you in the audience feel the same way. It'd be easy to watch the film passively and outright condemn the retributive killings from a cosy cinema seat with popcorn in one hand and Western morality in the other, but go with the film for a moment and it might set you wondering whether really, honestly, were you to come face to face with your own personal Osama bin Laden, whether you'd just let him go.

Steven Spielberg taps into that righteous anger vein, that part which exists in all of us, even those who may go out and protest against the Iraq war for example, but who at the end of the day would much rather live under George Bush et al than Saddam Hussein et al, even if they would only begrudgingly admit it in public. If there's a worming doubt in your mind that maybe just perhaps the Middle East will be better off without the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein, and the Iranian theocracy (the way things are headed), this film will find it and challenge it. It may well leave the feeling intact, but it will leave it looking a doubtful possibility, implausible, impractical, downright unlikely.

As the film reaches its climax, as Avner and his men target the final name on the list, yet Black September is stronger than ever, the idea that this was a pointless mission begins to creep in, that responding in kind has only led to ever increasingly violent levels of escalation, counter-attacks, counter-counter-attacks, that using a gun and a bomb to try and bring about peace, justice, democracy and reason is ultimately futile.

It's telling that both Israeli and Palestinian groups have said the film is biased against them, whereas it doesn't actually have much nice to say about either side. I would consider myself pro-Israel, but just like criticising the Bush government doesn't make you anti-American, criticising Israeli actions (then and now) doesn't make you anti-Israel, let alone an anti-Semite. The film doesn't justify terrorism by humanising the targets. It'd be easier for the characters and the audience to accept the Black September members being blown away if they were just anonymous one-dimensional baddies from a Schwarzenegger movie. Less so when they come across simply as similarly passionate and similarly angry individuals on the other side of the coin to Avner and his team. Spielberg doesn't seem to be saying Israel shouldn't have done this for the sake of Palestinians, he seems to be saying Israel shouldn't have done this for the sake of Israel itself.

For a film called "Munich", this doesn't really have anything to do with Munich. It's not really about the botched kidnap attempt, nor the botched rescue attempt. The athletes and their kidnappers are already dead by the time Eric Bana makes his first appearance several minutes into the film. The reason I think "Munich" remains the most appropriate title is because the film is about the idea of Munich, of what it represents, and how it has been used, and misused. Every time Avner has to kill someone, Spielberg intercuts with his speculative recreation of what really happened in the Olympic village. Munich is the reason and the justification, and the cause, the start. Except, as Avner begins to realise, it probably wasn't the start, it was just another level of escalation.

I expect it's probably a fictional twist, that Avner ends the film with his wife and baby daughter living in Brooklyn. It seems a little convenient, but at the same time, Spielberg's final point is clear. Strolling along the banks of the Hudson River with a Mossad operative who has tracked him to New York, Avner is doubtful that the death of the final Black September member on his list means it's all over. Behind them, shrouded in a fog over Manhattan, are a pair of newly completed skyscrapers, which three decades later became for us what Munich was for Avner.

Tuesday 24th January 2006, 10.51pm

We're almost in February but this is only my second post this year. I don't know. I keep thinking "Ooh, I'll post about that", but when I get round to it, I think "What's the point?" so don't bother. The truth is I don't have much to write about, hence why in my first post in a fortnight, I'm starting off writing about not having anything to write about.

I'm going to revamp the site soon, just because I'm bored of it again. I don't know whether it'll be a complete offline overhaul that I'll upload en masse one day, or a more piecemeal affair, changing bits here and there as it occurs to me. Probably a bit of both. There are several dead links in my Links section now, and I've got several more I want to add. Some sections of this site (the CDs and DVDs) I've just altogether stopped updating, ever since I started selling more than I was buying. Without the comments I was going to write about all of them, which I can't be bothered to do now, they're rather pointless sections. The 'for sale' section needs updating. I'm being quite ruthless with what I'm putting on Amazon now.

That said, I have made some small updates to the site recently. I've uploaded a small gallery of photos that I took in my last week in Norwich last summer, several of them on the day before I left. I've brought my ten year old diary up to date. I'll soon be on to the diary I kept in a huge hardback book, which I won't be taking to America with me, so before I leave I'll be uploading March through June in one go. I've also uploaded a new sound sample (turn your speakers up), part of a more developed Multimedia section, for which I'm working on a new mini movie too.

I'm still working on "The Thieves Of Pudding Lane", which after a false start is now going well. The first chapter I originally uploaded is no longer part of the story after I cut the entire opening sequence. It was going to detail the trial for murder of Jack Tanner. I had problems with it from the start, mainly because the average trial in the mid-seventeenth century lasted only eight minutes, there were seven judges, no lawyers, and the accused was rarely given any details about the prosecution before the trial began because it was thought best their initial reactions to the charges and evidence were witnessed by the jury. Though ultimately I decided to cut the entire sequence because the acquittal depended upon the testimony of an Anglican priest, and it was stretching plausibility for a righteous man to help a man he suspects of murder get off scot free. That the story's not only still working but working better without it shows how unnecessary it always was anyway.

Last year was a good year for books, but so far this year I haven't read a single page that made me want to miss something good on TV to read instead. I started reading "Music Upstairs" by Shena MacKay, which I should've read for a class at UEA. It's about a girl living in a house converted into individual flats in London in the 1960s and having an affair with both members of a couple living in another of the flats. The quotes on the back claim it's "scruffy, sweaty, shapeless, inchoate poetry" and that MacKay is a "rococo writer" with "marvellous unblinking clarity". That should have been warning enough. Random things happen, people do things without reason, there's no plot, etc. I used to really like these kinds of realistic slice of life things, but now I find them tiresome. A good book has to offer something I can't just see for myself by opening the front door.

Tuesday 10th January 2006, 12.55am

I watched the "Celebrity Big Brother" launch show just to see who they got, with no real intention to keep on watching it, and after they reached the tenth C-list celebrity who I had kind of heard of but not for a while, I expected I could capably miss this one, but not actually miss anything. But then they bunged George Galloway in there, and I haven't missed an episode since. Tonight's episode saw him berate Jodie Marsh for being a slapper, and using class as an insult against her. What a socialist. I bet he's never felt so illiberal.

Talking of which, the Liberal Democrats seem to have imploded this past week. I actually thought it was pretty courageous of Charles Kennedy to admit to being an alcoholic, even if it was simply damage limitation to soften the inevitable, his being replaced. Alcoholic or not, he was still the least worst candidate standing next to Blair and Howard at the last election. Which is why it's a pity the LibDems slaughtered him like the Tories slaughtered Iain Duncan Smith, and like the Tories, are seeking to replace him with the party-popular candidate.

I've curled a lip at Menzies Campbell several times on my website and stand by what I said each time. His most famous speech remains his assertion, on the day Saddam Hussein was captured by the US military, that the Iraqi dictator should just be set free in the interests of being humanitarian. The problem being that, unlike the Tories, the LibDems won't ditch the guy after the next election, because they won't be expecting to win anyway. So if they make him leader now, it's for the long term. I'd rather have Blair/Brown/Cameron.