Well in the past few days I’ve been going through the five large blue crates that contains my CD collection and I’ve managed to sort out an entire crate’s worth of music that can go. The first lot of these items have been loaded onto eBay for sale. The weird thing is that I don’t feel any upset with this anymore. Before I would have felt a little miserable, but this feels quite liberating actually and I am considering shifting the rest of it too. I feel so disconnected with my music collection that I might as well profit out of it while I can. But I realise that it is nice to have a purge and that you can’t live in a sub-branch of HMV. The only downside to all of this is that it could take me a couple of months to actually shift all of this stuff.
Celebrity Big Brother is turning into car-crash TV and real guilty pleasure…no, actually pleasure isn’t the word because I am finding some of it genuinely unsettling. It’s obvious that some of the freaks in there need psychiatric attention and shouldn’t even be on the programme. Meanwhile, the sight of Pete Burn’s skinny white ass in tights is almost as unpleasant as his fucked up face. In Victorian times, the upper classes used to roam the asylums for their fun…now we have it pumped live and direct into our homes.
While CBB is a toilet, it’s good to see the BBC investing in original drama and so I did enjoy Life on Mars a couple of nights back. It uses a central conceit often used in novels (Irvine Welsh’s Carabou Stork Nightmares, Alex Garland’s The Coma) or TV (Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective) where the central character is trapped in a coma nightmare and his surroundings are just a construct of his symptoms. While the writing is a little wobbly and some of the authenticism just a little too brown for my liking, you have to watch this with your tongue in your cheek and the voices of The Sweeney’s Regan and Carter ringing in your ears. Of course, it’s going to end with John Simm discovering one of the major baddies is himself and he’ll wake up from the coma. (Or he might not, if the Beeb wants a second series). But I just keep marking the days off the calendar for the return of Dr Who.
If you have been coming here via Google about the Highbury House/Paragon crash, then I would like to take this opportunity to provide an update for that. My contact at Paragon informed me that although he doesn’t know what the future holds, the company does intend to pay its freelancers. The downside to this is that because magazines have been closed and he has had to absorb extra staff from those magazines, there’s going to be little or no freelance work for us loyal writers. So it looks as if another door closes…ho hum…
Anyone going to volunteer to give me that kick in the ass?
Meanwhile, someone yesterday told me I was in The Guardian. There I was thinking that they were maybe talking me up about my writing or my music and it seems that they had quoted my Golden Wonder lament. Oh well…in a weird way, I feel honoured.

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