But Who Is Currently Playing Roxie In Chicago?!

I have recently had to change my transport strategy. This was due to rather cannily moving to within two miles of my miserable workplace as opposed to a hundred light years away in London terms, although strangely, my commute takes exactly the same amount of time. I can only assume I have happened upon a space-time wormhole in the middle of West London fuelled by the constant smug afterglow of a yummy-mummy pilates class, and I'm sure Stephen Hawking will be along to prod my face shortly, just as soon as he can disentangle himself from the sweet embrace of his...post-graduate mathematics students. Oh please, we are long past stripper jokes in this here parish!

Anyway, as a delicious consequence of this, I now only uses buses to aid my weary trudge to hell and back every day, and have left behind the brutal reality of the tube network. But but but! This seismic change has unforeseen drawbacks. Here I was, naively thinking that my life would improve tenfold after escaping from the gripping claustrophobia and constant underlying threat of TERROR on the Piccadilly Line. What I didn't realise is that leaving the tube behind means I have absolutely no idea what is happening in London. I had a heavenly visitation from some out-of-town pals recently, and as I was desperately casting about myself for things with which to entertain them, I realised that without the daily presence of tube ads telling me what films were out, what exhibitions were on or what gripping thrillers had been published by authors with impossibly glamorous names, I was at a complete loss as to what the young urban lovelies of this city actually did with themselves of an evening. I couldn't even tell them what was new in the exciting, fast-paced world of multivitamins. In the end, I had to get completely drunk and make a pissing fool of myself to keep them occupied, which I think worked out for everyone involved.

But quite apart from making me a cultural numbskull, the good ole' London bus has thrown up a whole new set of juicy irritants for me to gnaw on. Youths, for example, are far more pronounced on buses that they ever were on tubes. They take up 14 seats each, bark at each other in quasi-gangster accents about how many times they kicked that bloke in the head last night, they use words I don't understand which I can only surmise is specifically to make me feel like the oldest of old hags, and worst of all, the bastards get on free. Damn them all the way to Hades.

Bus drivers tend to be a very special brand of psycho too. I quickly learned that sitting at the front of the bus on the top deck is not, as I had previously thought, a way to cheaply simulate the giddy thrill of a rollercoaster, albeit a nasty themed rollercoaster based on a grotesque urban dystopia. Oh no. It is in fact a surefire way to induce bum-squeezing panic attacks at the sight of trees. Trees are all very nice and benign when you amble underneath them as God intended, but when you have had 2,000 branches whacked right in your face at 40mph, each one threatening to smash the bus window into a million eyeball-piercing fragments, at the whim of a crazed bus driver trying to make it back to the depot before his meth hit wears off, the mere sight of a majestic oak can send you quivering into the arms of strangers. True.

Ah well. No alternative for me, I guess. I could walk to work, but bugger that to Brighton and back. As my good friends the Patricks would say, Gary. See? Don't know what that means, do you, youth? Ha! I have my own words too! Tiny victory for me!

Thank You For Your Patience, Kind Reader (Singular)

And we're back. A small hiatus there, but I do have valid reasons - firstly, I went to New York, cos I'm just that kind of person, and as some kind of karmic retribution for actually going and having a pleasant time somewhere, I return home to find my computer has committed suicide, in that the power supply blew up and took the motherboard with it, which is apparently a rare thing to happen. Fortunately for me, my computer was not thinking clearly in its depressive last hours, and although it managed to rip out its own still-beating motherboard heart, it left its hard drive brain intact, so I've been able to give it a heart transplant which has left it quieter, faster and more powerful, much like the Bionic Man of old. But lo, my poor shiny new computer is still tormented with the rancid contents of My Documents and my favourites list and is now on permanent suicide watch, and I think I've stretched that metaphor quite long far now, thank you.

Yes, and New York was quite fabulous and snowy to boot, thank you, although all through my trip I was plagued with unoriginality. Let me explain. Oh, go on. You see, everywhere I went, and everything I looked at, I felt verily weighed down by the comments of every other person who had ever been there. I would look at the Empire State Building, at Times Square, at Ground Zero, and I would think, "There is absolutely nothing I can think or say about this sight that has not already been thought or said." That bothered me lot, I must say - mostly because I had to take my mind off the fact that it was minus 400 celsius and I was wearing everything I had packed for a four day trip all at the same time and I could still feel ice crystals forming in my bile duct, but still. It bothered me.

And now, confound it all, I can't think of anything original to say on the subject of unoriginality. I blame it on BBC Four, who have quite ruined my evening by showing a repeat of Life On Mars and thus are making me wait a further seven days to hear Philip Glenister say "Will you shut up, this is making me rather horny!" Which, if I'm not mistaken, is the funniest thing ever to be committed to the TV equivalent of celluloid, which may of course be celluloid. You'll have to excuse me. I had a dream last night that I should give up smoking, and I did for exactly 11 hours and 14 minutes, which was three fags ago, so I'm a little ashamed and on a total nicotine high.