freedom costs money

Today a spider scared the living daylights out of me from beyond whatever the arachnid equivalent of the grave is. It must have thought "jings, a'm feeling a wee bit oan the peeky side, a'm goan find masael a wee hidin' place fr'm which ma wee emaciated corpse can scare the shit out of some poor bugger", and it went on to select for that hiding place my gigantic teacup, which was at the back of the cupboard awaiting the winter.

Not all television is bad: The Royle Family last night was marvellous. Made me cry. Really.

I've been listening to The Burkiss Way on BBC7 recently and it's ripping. The advert for the rebranded French Revolution is the funniest thing I've ever heard.

Apparently it'll not be available on CD unless there's a sufficient demand for it, so, everyone, write hundreds of letters demanding it to this address:

I had always found the Beatles' When I'm Sixty-Four a perfectly innocent song, quite nice to listen to whilst doing something not too mentally demanding, like solving the Ripper murders or coming up with a cure for that irritating cancer difficulty. But ever since Cherie Bliar massacred it in Japan (admittedly some time ago now) whenever I hear it I see her horrorstruck I-can't-believe-I'm-doing-this gob and hear her abominable staccato wail instead of the soft dulcets of that Liverpudlian chap, whichever one of them it was (they're surely interchangably annoying or dead these days, bar Ringo, who did Thomas the Tank Engine and so absolved himself of being irritating or dying, although somebody might've told Death about that). She's done for it what Niel Kinnock did for D-Ream, or whatever it was they were called. Can't be D-Ream, can it - that'd surely be the fourth bundle of five-hundred, wouldn't it? Anyway, what was I saying? It was going to be something about Pavlov's dogs and a cruel joke about the Prime Minister's wife. Tony Christie? On the subject of Tony Christie, I should like to say that I think it's pretty amazing that he's been so thoroughly rehabilitated already: acid-bath murderer to man-we-love-to-hate crooner in less than a century. Impressive, if nothing else. But the point! I had a point! Honest.

I had a most unsettling experience last night: I dreamt I was walking through a town that was more or less entirely derelict. The streets were empty and the buildings were either completely ruined or boarded-up.

As we all know, seagulls love nothing more than a bit of an aerial heist involving some unsuspecting tourist's fish & chips or candy-floss. Successful seagulls therefore invariably end up on the portly side, which can affect their ability to do their day-jobs. Steve Seagull is not such a creature. Judging by Belly of the Beast, which was on (unsurprisingly) Channel 5 the other night, Steve Seagull has had a summer where his cup hath runneth over as far as fish & chips and candy-floss is concerned, and yet still he acts just as ever he has. There he was doing his usual thing (this time the McGuffin was Seagull's daughter, who had been kidnapped by some absolute bounders with guns), but looking alarmingly like a sort of cross between Gordon Brown and Dale Winton: it was great.

Yesterday afternoon I seemed to stray into a landscape tailored to the needs of witches: It was a tangle of branches, glittering bogs and silver cobwebs, full of mushrooms and toadstools of vivid colour and inventive shape; in it I came across lizards, frogs, toads, spiders, insects of all sorts, lots of little tiny fish and the biggest owl I've ever seen. It was all, all of it together, rather surreal. The owl in particular appeared to have been waiting for me, and once it had observed me and noted that yes, indeed, I had made it safely through the wood, it revolved its head in that way owls do, flopped lazily off its branch and soared away between the trees. Formerly this was a wood I'd always found faintly sinister, but yesterday it felt uncommonly friendly. It was all very lovely.

Looking for that elusive Hungarian cover of Galveston?

You'll be needing The Igors, I think.

Raise the antenna...

I shan't be writing about what I've done and where I've been in Europe. Two reasons: First, such articles always, no matter how whimsical, no matter how much of a disaster the trip, always but always read as rather arrogantly boastful; Second, I have hated writing What I've Done On My Holidays pieces ever since Mr Tennyson, an otherwise excellent teacher with wild white hair, an out of control tie and a cane which he used for pointing out the words to the hymns, forced me against my will to write just such a piece about a catastrophic holiday in Wales (mumps, rain, woodlice). The experiences of one's formative years are not easily overridden.

Steve Irwin, the chap with the irrational lack of fear, has finally come a fatal cropper in an encounter with a stingray, which he had probably only just described with wide-eyed incredulity as "grumpy". I can't help but feel a pang of regret that he's gone; normally I'm scornful of anyone in nature programming that falls short of the Attenborough (D) standard, but Steve Irwin's insane enthusiasm and total lack of caution were fairly endearing. And amusing - who can't be amused by the spectacle of an Australian being chased up a tree by a crocodile?