Redline wrote:Rusty gave me this shirt. He is the dude of all time.

Awesome. I want one.

i've just been out drinking with friends in town and whilst idly skimming through a style/hipster magazine that was left on the bar, i discover a two page article about a girl i used to date when i was 18 and how she is now a successful artist.

the coincidence of me randomly finding this left me utterly perplexed for the rest of the evening...

I am walking on a bridge over the Seine to have dinner. The sun is setting.

I stop and watch it. I grew up with incredible desert sunsets, but this one maybe tops anything I have ever seen. Its the City Of Light, for fucks sake. I am transfixed for many minutes.

The sun is in its final throes. I happen to glance to my left, and I see this ultra suave French couple in the midst of the most passionate public makeout session I have ever seen. The woman is literally swooning. She lies down on the bridge wall, shuddering with pleasure.

A feeling comes over me that is very much like getting hit in the chest with an object that is somehow both blunt and sharp.

Angus Jung wrote:I am walking on a bridge over the Seine to have dinner. The sun is setting.

I stop and watch it. I grew up with incredible desert sunsets, but this one maybe tops anything I have ever seen. Its the City Of Light, for fucks sake. I am transfixed for many minutes.

The sun is in its final throes. I happen to glance to my left, and I see this ultra suave French couple in the midst of the most passionate public makeout session I have ever seen. The woman is literally swooning. She lies down on the bridge wall, shuddering with pleasure.

A feeling comes over me that is very much like getting hit in the chest with an object that is somehow both blunt and sharp.

How long will you be in France?

There is a piece of public art on Middlesbrough's high street, Linthorpe Road. It has been there perhaps ten years. It is a sculpture of a woman, sat/kneeling down with her arms wrapped around herself. Quite a generic and inoffensive piece of the type you might find in any town centre in England.

Sometime in the last year, some inspired and talented artist has ingeniously altered it to make it a woman in a straight-jacket with a muzzle.





Thus making it a much more profound piece of public art, not least because the alteration has been done very well, has had some thought behind it and has been done without any permission from the relevant authorities.

Yesterday morning (Sunday), on my way to the bus station to go and meet up with my friend Gill in Durham, who was up from London for the weekend, I passed the straight-jacketed woman. She was in two pieces, split cleanly across the waist. Her upper body was on the floor, about five feet from the rest of her. Sometime on Saturday night, someone has deliberately gone out with a sledgehammer and smashed the sculpture in half. It isn't something you could do randomly whilst drunkenly passing the sculpture. It would take deliberate premeditated action to perform this task.

There are some fucked up people in this town.

We moved offices over the weekend and I am now facing the Strand near Aldwych with sunshine and pretty masonry facing me, rather than the slightly dark tinted windows of the Goldman Sachs building.

Yesterday was a write-off due to unpacking, causing me to work late and get up early this morning. I like getting up early on the rare occasions I do - I feel more alert and peaceful. Getting off the bus on Waterloo Bridge, looking east looked pretty, so I took a little picture:



Bless our purple polluted skies.

On Sunday morning 2am, having just got my son back to sleep after a nightmare, I was lying in bed trying to go back to sleep myself when I heard shouting in the street. Initially worried it might be a fight, it rapidly became clear that it was some braying rugby-club shitwit on his mobile phone, bellowing into like it was two-bean-cans-and-a-piece-of-string, in like-Dom-Joly-but-more-so style.

I heard the following (excuse the caps, but it really was that loud)

"YEAH, KARAOKE... YEAH, WE HAD LIKE A PRIVATE ROOM... YEAH, I DID BILLY IDOL ""WHITE WEDDING" AND THEN FRANK SINATRA "THAT'S LIFE", AND WHEN I FINISHED, EVERYONE THERE GATHERED ROUND ME, SAYING "YOU MUST BE A PROFESSIONAL, YOU MUST BE A PROFESSIONAL!"

Yeah, right, Mr Bellowing Phone Man, professional karaoke singer, that is a career.

I'd like to pretend that as I lay there, listening to him bellow his way down the street, I simply felt relieved not to be him.

But in reality, I was pettily hoping he'd (for some obscure reason) bellow his address, so I could go round and curl one off on his doorstep or something.

Last night I was shopping at the Pick and Save, and a Mother/Daughter witch/goth team were arguing in front of the huge soda display.

Daughter (with black star tatoo on chest and John Bonham bass drum-like symbol tattooed on her neck)- "Let's just buy this!" , points to a Sprite fridge friendly 12 pack.

Mom (with black fingernails, tatoos and red streaks in hair)- "How much is that?"

Daughter- "It's $3.55!"

Mom - "It's a waste of money! Just buy this!" Mom hoists up generic lemon lime soda for less $, tosses it in the cart.

Minutes later, they come up behind me in line, and the mother says to the daughter, she says "You buy the groceries, I'm doing the Christmas presents this year!"

I breezed in and out of the New York Department of Motor Vehicles office this morning in less than 90 minutes. Rather than making me happy, it's created a sense of great apprehension that I've pulled one over on the capricious gods of bureacracy, and the next time I attempt to parallel park at a meter, I will in fact explode.

The kitchen in my new place was flooded today because of the dickhead builders in the flat above.

I hate moving. Hate hate hate it.