i'm all alone, all alone am i. weeee!

my boss has gone on holiday for two weeks leaving me in charge. in charge i tell thee.
yup.
i have one major task while he's away and thank god it's not one littered with peril and galactic responsibility.
heck.
it is isn't it?

this is where i work. i know, "isn't it grand," "isn't it beautiful," "isn't it big," and other gasps of amazement similar (but opposite) to the sorts of things i hear in the bedroom.

my task in the next couple of weeks is to get a company in to rip up all that nice antique wood, fill it with cables, drill a few holes here and there, sink some speakers into some big holes and then put it all back together again. without leaving so much as a pile of sawdust.

oh fuck.

this ain't scrapheap challenge any more. this could go very wrong. wish me luck.
if it does go tits-up, read up on my blog while you can... i don't think i'll be able to add to it much with broken fingers and my teeth punched through my arsehole.

i'm powerless to resist the gypsy punks

.. and from the cold, still night i eased back the canvas and pushed my way into the tent. muted blues and blacks parted like the red sea and fell away to colour; such explosions and waves of colour. like a fire had been lit and the people within were aflame. gut red, ivory white, earth brown. the stench of sweet sweat circled and pushed me further into the throng. i disappeared for a moment, swept up in the writhing mass of bodies. the mighty noise lifted me upward where i could gasp for air. sound and colour and light and dizziness combined into one viceral punch and pounded my body side to side. then my focus left. and the band roared.

then in an instant, for a moment, silence. a battle raged in the stillness, sirens in the distance. until...

slicing through the thick air like wire through flesh came the violin. one shrill note pierced the masses. it lasted for days. a moment. an age. the throng; caught for a second, paused, petrified, like stone. eyes closed.

then, then the demons came


thump thump thump thump. they burst through the canvas ceiling leaving portals to the sky in their wake. and the violin joined by accordian and drums and cymbal. guitar shouted. bass pounded. dogs were barking, monkeys were clapping, and gypsies sang of illumination, they sang of strength. they told me of the time of ancients, the time where there was only dance and song. where all men laughed and all women writhed with pleasure. and the audience jumped and fisted the moonlight canopy.

and men laughed.

and women writhed with pleasure.

and in the middle, the girl with the blood red dress swayed with shut eyes. her marble-black hair fallen about her shoulders and clung to the moisture dripping down her spine. arched back. muscles swam 'neath olive-brown skin as she rolled her head from one side to other. buttocks slid beneath silk. thighs parted and closed and hands carved senseless shapes in the air.

and the band played on. gold-chained gypsy women screamed. the mustachioed chieftan commanded the warriors below. men chanted. a spell drowned the crowd. panic followed by praise followed by ecstacy followed by nostalgia followed by catharsis. then another song. and another. and while we danced time fell away, taking with it the existence of all the world outside of the tent. the hours fell like jigsaw pieces 'til there was only us and the band and me and the girl in the blood dress dancing in the distance.

intoxicated by my own flowing blood i forgot the rest of the world.
until silence finally brought sobriety.


your new favourite band

i'm not proud

you could say it was a very small thing. very small indeed. maybe i was just being very very picky and i should have ignored it. maybe it doesn't even matter.

she was a beautiful dame. eyes you could part with a breast-stroke, hands you could swallow and lips you could lay your head on. we met in the lingerie section, it was prearranged. i went early to check out the crotchless rack, she waited outside 'til closing time. we recognised eachother instantly; i looked just like my photo, rectangular and two-dimensional, she wore the bear costume as requested.

we walked into the night, but before we got there we stopped for wine and song. we frowned and asked the bartender to quieten down so we could watch the jugglers. but the jugglers sang and disturbed our drinks order. nonetheless we enjoyed our bread sauce and garden-twine cocktail and talked 'til the darkness wrapped us in their charm.

"i believe in a thing called love," she told me. i couldn't hear her over the impending guitar solo. "quarter past ten," i replied. she kissed me. i kissed back, but missed and hit her lips. her tongue slid over mine. it tasted of emeralds. mine slid under hers. it tasted of tongue. it was beautiful, like two little red whales mating in a foamy sea.

i surfaced for air blowing saliva in her face. she smiled as she playfully knocked two teeth out with her paw. it was a moment i wanted to make last forever, while she took a piss i pulled the battery out of my watch and dropped it on the floor beside her. she looked up and gazed at me, a tingle clearly visible in her lady area. 'it's only a chemical reaction to the battery,' i thought.

could this be it? so soon after the last girl?

we met again, two weeks later. no amount of planning and pleading could shorten the time. she had hardly changed. she had swapped to a black scrunchie but still had that oyster shell between her teeth. we went to dinner again, choosing a restaurant at random. this time we received the wine we asked for. luckily i had thought to ordering it previously on-line and having it delivered to the restaurant door on our entry. we conversed, we made small talk, we chatted, we discussed, we mentioned. it was easy as swimming on tequila.



but then she dropped a bombshell. apparently she had found it en route. it fell from her mouth and rolled across my linguine. "hey!" i whispered inaudibly, "that ruined my meal."

it wasn't a big bombshell. indeed some would argue on later dates that it wasn't even a bombshell at all, but more of a.. 'hobby.' but still it rolled around my head and twisted my thoughts back and forth like a psychadelic roller-coaster.

so, although she was beautiful and funny; i haven't called her since our last date. now, even if i thought i could ignore the little round tasteless bomb, it's too late. i feel like a generic. i feel a little sorry. i feel a tiny bit sad. but it wasn't perfect and i like things the way they are at the moment.

i have joined blogspot. it is better than myspace.

myspace is a shite. as soon as it starts working again i'll transfer all of my blogs so far onto this far more advanced and reliable server.

i'm popping out

out of the neon sun ~ chapter one

yikes oh crikey!
i'm only bloomin' going to china. CHINA!?
here's why: my pal matthew is a bit of a traveler. no, not the type that parks their house in a cinema car park so they can thieve pick 'n mix to live on, but the type that gets a craving every now and again to throw some stuff in a bag and see where his wind takes him. off he goes into the sunset to seek out the hidden parts of the world that most people have never even heard of. it's been pretty safe and risk free so far. most of the world is. all you need is an england football shirt and a credit card and most of the world is your clam.
not all of it though. for a while he's wanted to do the trans-siberian railway. the trans-siberian railway is exactly what it says on the steel-wheeled tin. and more. it's the world's longest railway line. it literally stretches half way around the world. literally. if you travel the entire length you'll go from moscow, through the entire breadth of russia and siberia, to vladivostok on the coast of the japanese sea. its a long way. and you'll see some of the most desolate, untouched and beautiful parts of this planet we live on. the trip of a lifetime many people have said, but not in that overused "i larged it in i-beef-ah" way. trundling throught the dust. edging slowly forward into ground level infinity. the abyss, unterraformed. abandoning the modern world except for the ancient green locomotive steaming you ever away from the crutches of day-to-day life. powerless in a desert more untouched than mars. "he would tell me of the great train that ran across half the world.. he held me enthralled then, and today, a life-time later, the spell still holds. he told me the train's history, it's beginnings.. how a tzar had said 'let the railway be built!' and it was.. for me, nothing was ever the same again.. i became possessed by love of a horizon and a train which would take me there.." * to the world at its most basic form. the bleached-bone beauty of the earth's crust. raw. majestic. bigger than anything you have seen. prehistoric ground-zero. world's end and world's beginning. humanity existing and co-existing leaving not so much as a scar on fellow inhabitants or a crease on mother earth.
... so i thought i'd go too. y'know, i might as well.
at the moment we plan to fly to moscow, have a look around, then hop on a train to irkutsk in siberia where we'll take the trans-mongolian branch down to the mongol capital; ulan bator, timing it so we see the colours and energy of the naadam festival, then on to beijing. if you travel constantly it takes a week to cover that distance. we're gonna stretch it out to a month.
and so begins the planning of a lifetime. i think it'll take a great deal of thought to get from one side of the world to another without leaving the ground or using expedia.
it will give food for my blog for the next few months. i will call my journey "out of the neon sun - the losing of the urban cowboy"
read it here.
* lesley blanch journey ino the mind's eye

i'm worried about you

today i had a bottle of drink. it had a lid with one of those popping things that pop when you open it the first time.
it said "reject if depressed"
poor thing.

i'm happy with my purchases

what an superb weekend: good friends, glorious weather, excellant gadgets, free tickets, beautiful surroundings, lovely people, fast bike, nice chocolate.
here is my weekend in a nutshell/list/rating format:
film = imax, superman, good company, funny jokes, alright film ***
journey = to birmingham, 11.30pm - 1.30am, speedy, chilly ***
satnav = 1st real use, perfect, straight to the door *****
chris's flat = very nice indeed, spacious, homely, gadgetty, xbox 360 ****
chris = not many people who can stay up til 4am playing computer games, it's good to be back, we're the man *****
birmingham - surprisingly superb city ****
BBQ = cheese baps for the burgers, genius ****
man for all seasons, a play = very good, beautiful setting, free ticket, nice people ***
journey back = incredible weather, hot, quite sweaty in leathers, 100mph ***
mid-journey rest stop = cadbury's dairy milk bar with creme egg filling ****

i'm coming up, so you better get this party started

it's very convenient isn't it? whenever you witness a story you always manage to follow the main character. you start watching a film, reading a book, hearing a tale and somehow, quickly, your focus is on the main character or characters. there's two things i always always think when this happens. firstly i think

who is this person? why did fate pick them to experience the following events?

why is it that particular people are chosen? the chances of this level of life changing events happening to a particular person are miniscule; but in a movie or a book someone might have one after another after another. think of wendy.. in the space of a few weeks or so, a flying boy came into her bedroom, she discovered fairies existed, she learned to fly, she travelled to a distant land with her brothers, she experienced pirates first-hand, was kidnapped, rescued and i would probably guess, lost her virginity to a 50 year old teenager dressed as robin hood.
what did she do to deserve these experiences? what led her to that point? we don't know much about the years before peter turned up, but i can't imagine she did anything that extraordinary.

the second thing i think is

how very convenient.

what a stroke of luck it is that whenever you watch a movie you bump into the main character. you always happen to come across the main event and are able to foIlow the most interesting part of the world for that period. how different the story might've been if we had momentarily found wendy's next door neighbour jeanette more interesting in the minutes before the flying boy turned up with his pet fairy. might we have ended up following an attractive young woman struggling through puberty and parental-divorce before becoming the first successful female wallpaper importer? by that time we might have forgotten that childhood dream where the next door neighbour's kids soared off into the moonlight.

i call it the Jimmy Olsen Effect. for those of you who don't know, jimmy olsen is an employee at the daily planet where superman works. he leads a pretty eventful life, he's quite successful as a professional photographer and occasionally has his work printed on the front page of a widely-read newspaper. he's had first hand contact with a demi-god and been inches from death on a number of occasions. all this before he reached 25. he'd probably make a good main character for a story except that usually at the end of a day he goes home and watches TV instead of donning a red and blue lycra suit and popping up into orbit for a good listen..
it's all very well following the exploits of Wendy, Clarke, Buffy, Ann Darrow, Bugsy Malone, Neo, Jane Eyre.. it's just.. sometimes i'd like to hear the story of the forgotten people.
-that biplane pilot who was thrown out of the air by a 200 foot gorilla; did he parachute out and survive?
-how did that 22 year old straight-A student get to the point where he was an unnamed vampire goon?
-how did the other boys at the orphanage feel when oliver, the kid with the irritating singing voice, got scooped up by a rich family and they didn't?
-that ugly henchman of Dr. No, shot without a second thought by secret agent Bond.... he had a family; now what the fuck are they gonna do? i doubt villainous henchmen get much life insurance.

spare a thought for the forgotten many. donate to their cause if you will. just £2 per week can feed a computer-generated crowd at a gladiatorial arena for infinite time. send a cheque or postal order to me and i'll sort it out for you.

tee hee, fools. (did i dictate that out loud?)

i'm stumped

here's an experiment. i have nothing to write about today, but haven't posted anything in a couple of days so am going to try and put together a half-interesting blog.
i could tell you about a couple of things of recent times. firstly, i had a lovely date on saturday with a very attractive young lady who made me laugh. i can't remember many details of the evening as i drank wine. (i'm not a big drinker generally). not a level of drunk that meant i fell over a lot, but enough to make much of the evening quite fuzzy. some things i remember: we talked for the entire evening without any awkward pauses / we ate in a restaurant that i probably wouldn't choose as a 1st date type place, i couldn't find the more expensive, classier, romanticer place i was hoping to take her to / she is a superb kisser, really very good / the evening went far too quickly / the ice-cream cafe near leicester square doesn't stay open late enough / it's kind of difficult to learn much about someone in the space of one short evening / i'd like to meet her again... we shall see.
the second thing is that on sunday i had a lovely lovely evening with my friends Jonny, Louise and Ruth. we played pictionary and got dominoes to deliver pizza to us in the park, then realised we were all freezing our various types of genetalia off and went back to listen to Louise's songs. Louise is brilliant and you should go here to prove it: http://www.myspace.com/louisegolbey
turdly, my housemate matt came back from berlin. He has been out there for 6 weeks covering the world cup with a well known broadcasting company. Its good to have him back though a little strange. hes been away for six whole weeks. thats a long time. he has had a bizarre few weeks by all accounts. for example, on sunday night he partied with Gary Linekar, Alan Hanson, Noel Gallagher, Clive Owen and (fuck off, no really) Spike Lee! (he took photos)
oh, the circles i inhabit! (by proxy)
okay. bedtime.

i'm super, thanks for asking

The first thing I ever stole was a cat. I learnt soon after that it was better to take things that a) you really want b) do not decompose.

It happened when I was fourteen. I remember it because we had recently come back from a family holiday on a farm in France. While I was out playing on the farm I had seen the local dog chase down and kill a rabbit, ripping it apart in front of me and then chewing on the greasy entrails. I guess it had something to do with my decision to take the cat, but even in hindsight I couldnt tell you the reasoning.

On the way home from school one afternoon soon after I saw a cat get hit by a car. It was on the path in front of me so I barked like a dog at it. It looked at me quizzically as if to say: What do you mean, bark? Youre clearly not a dog. A spark of a moment later it darted out onto the street like a tortoiseshell rocket. It went between the wheels of one car with the skill of a ninja, into the oncoming lane where the bumper of a Mazda popped its head. The body cart-wheeled for second landing belly up where another Mazdas tyre did a full length, neck to tail. My fourteen year old eyes widened and glazed over immediately. My stomach turned over and leapt with joy. My sphincter released a burst of gas.

i'm going to birmingham tomorrow to see troubadour's house. before that i'm off to waterloo iMax to see the third installment of the superman trilogy. yes third. geeks know what i mean.

i'm updating you

so a while ago (june 24th) i told you about saying yes. i thought i'd let you know how its going:
awesome.
its changed slightly, its not quite as simple as saying 'yes' to everything. its made my whole attitude to stuff better. i've taken risks that i would never have taken, i've spent time with people i might not have done, i've done some other stuff which has been really rather super, there is something that involves a beautiful young lady...
things are shiny.
something for you to remember: you can't always change the stuff you have to do, but you can always change your attitude to it.
ooh, and i found my mutha-funking keys.

i'm not american, so i don't care

happy 4th of july everybody.
i had a jolly nice evening last night with my two best buddies. Jonny and Chris. by the banks of the river thames way out west in richmond; we talked into the night, drank sugary drinks and commented frequently on the beauty of the sunset. (well actually Jonny commented frequently on the sunset cos he's a big old homo like that.)
its good to be back. long live the Three Kings!
Righteous Velocity, Minim and The Funk back in the lycra, kicking some serious mediocre arse.
get in.
AND it only took me 35 minutes to ride home from richmond to wood green. weeeeeee!!!!!

i'm home

M,
awesome
x

i'm on a big old downer

i did a musical.
it was the last night, last.. er.. night, so now i've got a head full of anti-climax. anti-climax-head is poo. to all those By Jeeves lot out there, cheers for an excellant few months. especially nice to meet: Peter, Gus, Richard, Richard & Jamie. i hope you guys enjoyed being part of our happy little group, we certainly enjoyed having you round to play.
Andrew, you were designed by god for that part. Andy, you on stage is one of my favourite things in the world. Jonny, i love your tummy, but you're a thief, give me back my card! Gus, you are my hero and my mambo. Peter, there are things i don't need to hear, but thankyou for telling me anyway. Jamie, we never had a conversation, but you seem super! Tall Richard, you taught me that no matter how tough you can build something, it can always be broken; a valuable life-lesson. Short Richard, we miss you, hope paid work is also fun. Rachel, ah, delectable Rachel. mmm. Sarah, you nearly made me shit myself laughing. Helen, next time we meet, i'll try not to injur you. its only because i'm shy & i get destructive. Louise, lets totally release an album. we could call it "The Snax of Golb & Funk."
Ruth, -e-baby, you worked wonders with a distinctly average script. Mark, thankyou for writing those nice things, one day i'll get to read them myself - Jonny take heed - i also love working with you. Gemma, you're wonderful, you know. Miriam, good luck in Brum, don't disappear forever. The Band, kicks ass.
it was all good. except of course; the list of Courtyard health hazards. jesus,... that place?!?!

i'm up far too early

night buses suck.
i waitied for an hour and ten minutes for the N41 this morning trying to get home after a night out. when i got home, it was daytime. rubbish.
otherwise a lovely night, thank you to everyone involved.