Hypocrisy is a wonderful thing, and thanks to the medium of social networking, it is a much easier thing to achieve. Every time Facebook chisels away at the privacy settings of the least private private network in the world, or Google adds another prohibitively anti privacy line to its terms and conditions, I do the little shudder that will be familiar to most users of the internet, then I open my Gmail anyway and post a YouTube clip to Facebook. I might also grumpily link to an article on some well meaning blog bemoaning the gradual slide into the dystopian future we are all party to, or grumble on Twitter a bit. Maybe sign a petition. Down with this sort of thing.

But, having bemoaned my personal information going to places not of my choosing I them completely undercut my own indignation by taking all of my information and spitting it at the internet like an excitable toddler might a particularly tasty pudding. Not only do I have not one but two blogs dedicated to churning my every waking thought into something vaguely readable, and I’ve spent the last three years on Twitter, where I have posted a quite alarming 12,000 tweets, most of which were probably revealing of myself either in their tedium or otherwise. I joined Last.fm, which takes note of every single song I listen to and turns them into spiffy charts, which it then spews out onto Twitter, as though anyone has the remotest interest in what the three bands I most listened to were over a seven day period. () I’m not alone in doing this, and I actually love to look at other people’s charts and compare their ‘musical compatibility’ with my own, even though it often leaves me feeling oddly voyeuristic even though they too have blurted their own taste out to the world, just like me.

It doesn’t stop their either. About six months back I joined a service called Miso, which you can use to log every single thing you watch and leave a little comment. It also then asks you if you would like to post it just to your friends on Miso, or your Twitter feed, or Facebook, or all three. It then gives you points based on who you tell. I gave up using it for a while based on the fact that I found it a step too far, but then I decided it would be a good idea at the beginning of the year to see just how many films I watch in a year. Because, well, why not. It’s the sort of thing someone as geekily anal retentive as myself might want to know at the end of the year. ‘Oh look Ethel this year I have watched 174 films, wasting an average of 350 hours of my life, roughly meaning I could have spend an entire fortnight doing something more productive. Isn’t that interesting? Ethel?’

But then I instantly fell back into the trap of broadcasting my every episode of Sherlock, or Desperate Housewives, or Coppers, blurting to the world like some kind of broken foghorn, spluttering meaningless titles at the void and hoping people will look at my viewing habits and somehow decide that I am so utterly and comprehensively amazing that they should give me a research grant. Or a medal of some kind. Quite disappointingly, it turns out that in the whole of January so far, I’ve only watched 6 films as well. Gutted.

Then, yesterday, this happened:

I need more! More ways to rivet you all with my every move. Well actually, I thought it would also be interesting to see how many books I actually manage to read in a year, but nonetheless, this needs to stop! Well actually, more than one person pointed me in the direction of GoodReads.com, and having signed up and listed my first books of the year maybe I won’t stop, thank you very much. And I love my last.fm, it listens to me far more than most human beings do and has a lovely recommendations page that isn’t a ‘You like metal?’ Have you heard of Metallica?’ exercise in obviousness. Every month I take heed of its recommendations and find at least two or three new bands that turn out to be pretty good. Also, my charts are too in depth, too complex, too massive to abandon now.

So if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook and find my constant need to transmit objectionable then I apologise. But not all that much. Your choice. I’m not going to change. Next month I’ll probably find something that broadcasts my every idle thought and I’ll sign up for that too, and link it to my Facebook feed and my Tumblr, just for kicks. But the next time you see me crying over privacy settings on the internet, please do give me a virtual punch on the ear, and tell me to stop being an idiot. I’ve lost all right to do that.

Oh, and if you are a fellow obsessive, you can find me on Twitter, Last.fm, Miso, Goodreads and Tumblr.

Song 28, Colour Haze – Tempel.

I’ve been putting this one off for a while now, because quite frankly I don’t know if any music makes me feel particularly guilty. I suppose the intention in this task is to see if there’s any music that causes a memory recall for something bad you did. But I’m struggling to think of one. I suppose there’s the old chestnuts of songs that ‘belonged’ to a particular relationship or another, one where you perhaps acted badly, and have some remorse about. But as I believe every single one of the ladies who have crossed my path over the course of my life will testify, I am fundamentally the greatest living human being, and have nothing in my past love lives to feel guilty about. *ahem*

I’m kind of counting on none of them reading that last part, obviously. But still, the point holds, there’s no particular piece of music that can suddenly produce a wave of guilt over my past behaviour. I have a certain moments of remorse, or regret, but none of them have a soundtrack that I can particularly pinpoint. So I’m back to scratching my head. I was watching the X Factor (yes, yes, I know, bad me) over the weekend and they were doing songs that were ‘guilty’ choices, but this just seemed to mean 80’s pop music. I don’t really like 80’s pop music either, so no ground there. And besides, we’ve already had a ‘guilty pleasure’ song.

This is all rather exhausting. I’m sitting here trying to go through every single this I have guilt about in my life and seeing if it has a song attached to it, and none of them do. But then I’ve thought about them and felt a bit guilty in that way that raking over past regrets will make you feel. To top it all off I have work that I should be doing, coursework for my uni course, and a novel to write. So now I feel guilty about not doing any of that.

Hang on a second.

Writing this blog post is making me feel guilty, and I’m listening to music right now, so…yeah, ok, it’s a cop out. Not so much a song that makes me feel guilty as a ‘song I’m listening to right now while feeling guilty.’ That’ll do. You all understand that this is the ultimate cop out and just a way of putting up a cool video I found on YouTube and you’re not going to judge me, right? Excellent. Well in that case please be upstanding for the wonderful Colour Haze. This is a video I found of the band playing at what has to be the ultimate stoner rock venue, and makes me damn jealous for not being there.

Two to go.

I spend most of my day with one headphone in my ear, which is obviously preferable to spending the day with no headphones in my ear. Sometimes I go hog wild and put two in. Throughout the day I am free to listen to music whilst I do all the work type things that I do. Being a bit of a bore (as I am) this has meant that I plan my listening habits for the week in advance, and fall into little habits. For a while I would load up a load of stuff I wanted to listen to and then listen to the whole lot in song alphabetical order. My phone holds about 7gb of music, so this lasted quite a while, but this became slightly jarring after a while, no good for maintaining a consistent mood, and certainly no good when a lot of the music you listen to is from albums designed to be listened to as just that. Oh I’m sorry, have you lapsed into a coma there? I do apologise.

My next habit was to choose a load of albums I wanted to listen to and then make my way through them alphabetically, deleting each album once it had been listened to. This works a lot better, and when you are empty you go and fill it up again, which is all well and good until you realise you’ve gone to work with only two albums left on your phone. Nightmare. Sorry, do you need to sit down? Is the excitement of all this getting too much? Now though, I have a new fun way to get through the day, and thought you’d like to know. Well, actually, I just didn’t want to do a 30 day song challenge pst and I’m not quite ready for another thrilling instalment of Gym Films just yet.

Back when I was first getting into music, the band that really did it for me were Queen, although since I was getting into them at the tail end of their career (I believe it was around the time of The Miracle, trust me to jump on board at the exact same time as their absolute creative nadir) I quickly realised that I had a hell of a lot of back catalogue to get through. For the next four years or so nearly every trip to Our Price or other music outlet would see me heading straight to Q in the Rock/Pop section and rummaging through the cassette tapes for those elusive albums that had so far escaped my attention. Eventually I made it, I think, but during that period I imagine I ended up forking out a small fortune, and had probably missed out on a hell of a lot of other albums I could have bought. Mind you, they probably would have only been A-ha albums so perhaps I was better off.

These days however, get interested in a band or an artist and you can find their entire musical output available within maybe five minutes of looking, and I’m not just talking about putting a band name and ‘discography’ into a torrent search engine. Spotify, Last.fm, iTunes, it’s no effort at all to say, ‘hey, REM have split up, makes me nostalgic, so let’s download absolutely everything the band have ever recorded.’

Some would say that this takes something away, that music should be something that you have to work for, and they have a point. I certainly miss the effort and love that used to go into making myself little mixtapes (that’s right, I had no friends to make them for.) But at the same time, I think of all the wonderful music that my kids will experience that I had to wait until my late twenties or early thirties to even be exposed to. Gone are the days of cassette mixes, but here are the days where a musical education can be one band leading to a thousand others through links and recommendations.

The problem with getting access to all these vast back catalogues is actually getting around to listening to them. Invariably I’ll stare at the folder full of albums I don’t know and end up stumping for the one I know I like. After a few times of doing this I seem to convert that into thinking that I don’t actually like those other albums, when actually I’ve never heard them.

So, new game. For the next few weeks I’ll be taking the complete works (albums and proper ep’s only, I’m not doing any live albums or best of’s) of selected bands and I’ll be listening to them in chronological order, start to finish. The idea being that I’ll get to find out if these albums I neglect are actually any good, hopefully discover some little gems along the way. It’ll also be a good chance to chart the progress (or decline) of an artist as they go along. I have actually already started, having completed two discography’s last week:

Ryan Adams: It was this that started me off, when I realised I only really listen to three of his albums, even though I absolutely adore the three I do listen to. Verdict: By and large I think the albums I listen to are probably the best, although I’d never given Gold much of a chance and probably should have done, and I realised that Love Is Hell is staggeringly good. I prefer the stuff where he’s being all maudlin and melancholy rather than when he’s being all upbeat and straight country, but on every album there are at least a couple of outright stunning songs. Best album: Heartbreaker, which was my favourite before and after.

Bright Eyes: Having enjoyed doing the Ryan Adams discography, which at the very least made for an interesting day, the Bright Eyes one made sense for the same reason, loads of albums I just hadn’t gotten round to listening to. The biggest shock here was the first album Letting Off The Happiness, which is unfeasibly good, a howl of rage and unabashed emotion that I’d never even listened to before. In the main I realised there’s no such thing as a bad Bright Eyes album, and that listening to eight of them in a row is like taking a warm bath in lovely words. Quite how anyone can keep producing lyrics of that beauty and honesty over such a prolonged period is beyond me. Perhaps the last few albums are a little lacking in the rawness but still, pretty astounding. Verdict: I like Bright Eyes a lot more. Best Album: I’m Awake, It’s Morning.

And that was going to be that. But then I watched a Pink Floyd documentary on Friday night and realised I only really know about half of their albums, if that, and so they went on the phone. As it stands I’m seven albums in and I feel a bit like I’ve had a bath in Valium. Then Led Zeppelin and Pearl Jam followed. I actually know every Pearl Jam album off by heart but I thought since I am doing this thing, I might as well listen to my favourite band. So that should be this week sorted. But if I’m going to do this, perhaps I should open up the floor to other suggestions. What do you, dear reader, suggest I should be listening to? What classic band are ripe for this kind of treatment? I’m thinking REM might be a good idea, although I don’t know if that much Stipe would lead to some kind of shutdown of my internal organs. I had a notion of doing the Beatles albums as well, and I’ve never given the Stones a proper good go. But there are obviously thousands of great acts I have never gotten around to, so have at it, let me know your suggestions.

Last night I braved a downpour so severe I could barely make out my own headlights on the road ahead to make my way towards a modern building in an esteemed seat of learning, and found myself sitting in a classroom for the first time in over a decade. I was surprised to see that even in such surroundings as the starkly modern physics building of the University of York that they still resort to chalkboards. It was oddly comforting to be in such an austere high ceilinged room, reminiscent of all those lecture halls I failed to attend when I was at university proper.

I was back in the academic world for the first class of my creative writing evening class, which I’ve been meaning to do for ages but which only got decided on a whim a week ago. I’ve mentioned before that the more seriously I take my writing the more I realise how lacking I am in certain areas. Due to an idiotic decision to take English Literature at A level rather than English Language (actually I should have done both and dropped stupid Media Studies) I really have very little technical understanding of the fundamentals of writing, beyond that which I have picked up through trial and error or osmosis over the years. So here I am, back to school, trying to be better.

The class itself was great fun, and got me really quite excited. The module is very much introductory, but I’ll be learning about poetry, scriptwriting and prose, and getting a better grasp of the fundamentals. The group seemed a good mix, from a clearly very talented 18 year old with a keen eye for poetry, a shy girl with a lovely turn of phrase, a novice starting out on his journey, a few people who seem to be regulars of the creative writing courses and the old lady whose polite manner hides a burning political anger. The first session saw us introduced to ‘Fast Writing’ where we’re given a riff (think of a place and imagine yourself there) and then given five minutes to write as much as you can. For some reason my mind went straight to sweeping up the bar of Certificate 18 after the drunk metalheads had vacated and when we all read them out my piece seemed well received, which was nice. There was some lively debate on the nature of creativity and overall I left with a tangible sense of excitement about the whole thing.

As well as taking the step back into education, last week saw the first Demon Pigeon staff meeting in nearly a year, sparked by the impending renewal of the domain name. Seems we’re all really keen to pick it up again, who knows how long it will last but I did my first proper review in ages this week (which you can read here) and have a rather silly but good idea for an article next week so it seems it’s all systems go on that front as well. I’m making a real effort to find a few nights a week to sit down at the laptop rather than the telly, and the writing seems to be flowing really well. Tonight it is back to the novel, and I think I’m going to try and get some work done on sorting the plot.

On an unrelated matter, the picture you see at the top of this post is a rather lovely word cloud of all the ‘tags’ (ie genres) that I have listened to over the past few years over on my last.fm profile. For those of you who don’t know, last.fm is essentially a service which logs all the music you listen to and then makes recommendations based on your tastes, with the added bonus that stupidly geeky people such as myself can pore over the logs and lists and get lost in the detail. But I thought this was a really nice visual, and is a nice accurate description of my tastes. The more bands I listen to in a particular genre the larger it is, and it’s no real surprise to see the domination certain genres have achieved, even if it does rather put pay to the idea that I have a varied and eclectic music taste. Oh well, I can live with that. If you’re on last.fm why not add me as your friend!

Well now that I’m back I should probably try and get this ridiculous challenge over and done with, or at least moan about it a bit more. At this point it is only sheer stubbornness that is driving me forward. I can’ imagine that if I let it wither and die unfinished that there would be a huge clamour to find out how it all ends. But honestly, I really wish I hadn’t started it now, but the idea of getting this far and then no further fills me with the sort of dread I normally only get when Downton Abbey returns.

What do you mean that’s back as well…? Oh for fuck’s…. Anyway.

So, a song that I wish I could play. Well, given that I have the musical proficiency of a smashed lamp filled with bees and broken soldering irons, how about, well, any of them. Or all of them. Yes, I think I’d like to be able to play all the songs. Even the bad ones.

I’d like to be able to play all the instruments on all the songs, in the same way that I’d like to be able to write as well as all my favourite authors, or act like all the best actors. I think if I was going to learn to play an instrument (and I have tried, or at least bought an instrument, which is the same thing right?) then I wouldn’t just settle for learning one song.

But that’s not the point, I know, I’m supposed to think of just one song that I’d like to be able to play. So I suppose I’ll try and think of one that is ridiculously technical, because if I can play that then it probably means that I can play all the songs that are less technical, or at least have the capacity to do so. Of course this is nonsense as well, because being able to play drums like the guy from Origin doesn’t mean you’d have the means to play trumpet like Miles Davis, does it? Unless the drummer from Origin can play the trumpet like Miles. Because let’s face it, Drummers are odd, and most of the ones I’ve met in my life are obsessed with Jazz. And I bet Miles Davis couldn’t have played any of the drums on ‘Expulsion of Fury.’

Sigh.

Ok, if we’re going to talk technicality, but also versatility, then there really is only one possible winner. Well, that’s not true, there’s loads of potential winners. But for the sake of argument I’m saying there’s only one. The Dillinger Escape Plan may have recently been toppled from the top of my last.fm charts, but when it comes to marrying dizzying technical ability with the old fashioned craft of songwriting there really is nobody out there to touch them. Or there probably is, but if I could play any of their songs on any instrument (or sing with anything near as much talent as vocalist Greg Puciato for that matter) then I would be a very very happy man. I’d probably also be in a really good band. Or really good at Guitar Hero, or possibly be able to play it without going into an apoplectic rage. On top of this, they remain the best live band I’ve ever seen, which is quite impressive for a band of such musical complexity. I doubt you’d see any of the so-called guitar legends like Vai being able to play their solos while hanging upside down from the rafters of a sweaty venue in York. And not just because Vai is unlikely to play York.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this. Let’s just roll VT. Here you go, I want to be able to play this song. On any instrument, I’m not fussy.

So, three more to go….

Song 26, Soundgarden – The Day I Tried To Live

Once upon a time in a galaxy far far away (Sunderland, to be precise) I used to own a bass guitar. Don’t laugh. It was large and unwieldy, and for the first year I spent at University, I attempted to learn how to play it. I pretty much spectacularly failed to do so, what with never really doing much more than picking it up, strumming it randomly, trying to work out really simple basslines, then giving up to go and do something more productive, like cry about the girls who wouldn’t talk to me, write terrible poetry, or drink vodka to the extent where it has taken me nearly a decade to be able to stomach the taste of it again. You know, student stuff.

I don’t really know why I chose the bass guitar. It’s not a very cool instrument, truth be told, it is heavy, and I’d not yet started listening to bands whose bassists had it so low slung that it actually looked good. Not only that, but as someone who had pretentions of song writing genius, it is absolutely useless for writing songs. You are there to compliment the sound of others, and while there is nothing wrong with that I think the thing that drove me to pick up the bass was that it looked easier than the guitar and cheaper than the drums.

The best bassists are truly amazing. Imagine Kyuss without Nick Oliveri or Scott Reeder. Or Tool without Justin Chancellor. Primus without Les Claypool. I was never likely to be on that list. I never even learnt to play any Rage Against The Machine bass lines, which is what you will generally see bass players playing within five minutes of buying their first instrument. Me, I learnt the bass lines to precisely five songs before my bass guitar was stolen at the end of my first year, never to be replaced. Blind by Korn. Break Stuff by Limp Bizkit, the Beautiful People by Marilyn Manson, a Nirvana song although I can’t remember which one now and this, The Day I Tried To Live, by Soundgarden.

I have chosen the latter for this little exercise for two reasons. Firstly, it is the only one of those songs that doesn’t make the 32 year old version of myself cringe with embarrassment a little when I think how much I used to like it, and because the others are essentially the same two notes, played with different tempo and order. I can at least be a little bit more pleased with the Soundgarden one, which I remember being the product of a lazy afternoon trying to work it out.

One night, heroin addled burglars broke into our halls of residence and stole all my stuff, which I had conveniently packed together for them since I was moving house the next day. My bass guitar was part of the loss, but given that I also lost my entire cd collection as well, failed to make a huge emotional impact. I sold the unstolen bass amp to fund buying back a few cds and never picked up another instrument again. Two years later I got my wish of joining a band, but in the much cooler position of singer. But every now and again I hear this song and it reminds me of the brief time when I was going to be a bassist.

Song 26. The Frogs – Meet the Frogs.

In a week when world stock market prices are tumbling, and the never ending cycle of apocalyptic news headlines continues to beat everyone into a listless depression, it seems prudent to try and lighten the mood a little. Laughter being, you know, good stuff.

So, funny songs. Well the problem is that there are lots of songs that are quite funny, but they tend to get played to death, and repetition isn’t necessarily a friend to comedy. Ok, try telling that to Stewart Lee, but that’s different. What I’m talking about is what I like to call Tribute-itis. Do you even remember a time when Tribute by Tenacious D was funny. I know it seems like a dim and distant time but it was true, nonetheless. A simple but funny tale, set to a pretty good song to boot. The first time I heard it I thought it was hilarious. The video was really funny too. The first few times.

With every repetition beyond, say, the fifth time, comedy songs start to lose their ability to make you laugh, because humour often lies in the unexpected. There’s only so many times you can have that visceral reaction, and eventually, you’ve reached that point when there is no more laughter to be found. After hearing Tribute for possibly the hundredth time, I no longer find the funny. It’s a bit like Michael Cera. His shtick was funny in Arrested Development, and then in Juno, but by failing to vary it he is now utterly unable to make me laugh. A comedy band can mix things up over time, but an individual song is stuck there, only as funny as it is ever going to be, and after that first hit it will only go in one direction.

So, where does that leave us? Well, all the songs I have thought of as funny are no longer funny, for this very reason. It has nothing to do with the song, the song has done nothing wrong. It is my fault for listening to them to the point where they’re not funny anymore. I watch all the Bill Bailey DVDs too much. Ditto with Tim Minchin. Very funny, but then you knew that. So what can I post that is funny, as in still makes me giggle? Well there is one thing. It isn’t so much one song though, but it is music, and some 15 plus years after I first saw it, it still makes me laugh.

I used to be obsessed with the Smashing Pumpkins, back when Billy Corgan still had both his hair and his sanity. Siamese Dreams had just become my absolute favourite album on the planet, and I got pretty much anything I could, including the Viewphoria VHS that came out about a year later. This was a collection of TV appearances, live performances, acoustic things and the standard sort of gubbins you’d get from bands on these releases. But what made this video different was the little interludes between songs.

For a band as famously po-faced as the Pumpkins were, these little interludes was hilarious, mostly for how funny they weren’t. Most of them were just bizarre. There were segments on James Iha’s dog, band therapy sessions in which Billy Corgan talked to toy representations of his band mates, and other videos which showed the band to be just a bit daft. But nestled amongst them was this gem, a very short film about the band’s support act, the Frogs.

I have never managed to find much more about this band. In the pre-internet age, it was highly unlikely that I ever would, but this video really made me want to find out more. I know they were a favourite of both Pearl Jam and Soundgarden at the time, but to my fifteen year old self this video appearance was as close as I ever got to them, Even now there’s only a handful of YouTube clips, and I guess they are probably not as funny as I thought they were, but there you have it. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you The Frogs.

Song 24: Clutch – (Eulogy for a) Ghost.

Wahay, and we’re back! I figured it is about time to finish this rather idiotic challenge off, seeing as I’ve only got seven more to do and they happen to be the ones I’m more interested in. So, funeral music. Well, this is actually something I’ve given an awful lot of thought to over the years. As someone who takes immense joy in inflicting my rather terrible music tastes on others (why I became a music blogger, after all) the funeral presents one last, glorious opportunity to make people listen to something. After all, it isn’t as though anyone is going to stand up and ask for it to be turned down, or changed. So, a truly captive audience.

The mischievous bastard in me sees this as quite the opportunity to inflict something really unlistenable and heavy onto my friends and family. Chances are my friends would even get a kick out of it. As a committed atheist I only really want to end up in a church if I get to defile it a little bit, so something utterly inappropriate would be fun. Maybe Raining Blood by Slayer. But then I’d rather not end up in a church.

As much as I like the idea of getting a bit teary at a funeral, about it being an emotional payoff to the grieving process, I also like the idea of making people laugh, because I like to make people laugh and if I can do that at my own funeral then maybe I’m not that bad after all, and people will remember me as a happy fella. As much as I don’t want the whole church thing, I think I would rather be buried, firstly because I don’t like the idea of cremation, and second of all because a coffin means some people have to carry it in, and therein lies my best chance to make the assembled people laugh. The Imperial March from Star Wars perhaps, or maybe the Benny Hill theme, that should do it.

Then we move into the ‘hymn’ territory, and for this I’ve always quite fancied ‘I’ve Seen My Fate’ by Will Haven, because it is one of my favourite songs, is inappropriately heavy and shouty, and because, well, I have seen my fate. It’s the very funeral I’m writing about here, the only fate any of us can be really sure of.

But then I would like a song that makes people stop sniggering and think about me and how awesome I was at stuff like being a friend and a dad and a partner and all that, so for one last song I would choose today’s song choice. The reason for choosing this song is fairly self explanatory, it’s a eulogy, albeit a slightly dark and mysterious one shrouded in mythological and biblical imagery, but I adore this song, and whenever I hear it I think it sounds like the perfect choice for such an occasion.

‘Now who will toast our noble host that has this morning given up the ghost?’

NB: if I have indeed shuffled off this mortal coil and I haven’t left any other instructions, you can consider yourself instructed.

There is too much news these days, the relentless pace seeming to forever juggernaut along, new stories piling up on top of each other at such an alarming rate as to end up leaving you feeling battered. In the last few weeks we’ve seen all of the above vying for coverage alongside the Phone Hacking scandal, a Chinese rail disaster, the Eurozone crisis, and the lunatic right in America threatening to kickstart a new world recession just to try and win an election. And that’s before you remember that the Japanese nuclear disaster was only a few months ago. Death, celebrity, money, politics, power. It is too much. I can’t keep up any more.

What makes it worse is that there is so much news that we are left obsessing over what should get the coverage. First people were complaining that phone hacking was getting more coverage than the Eurozone crisis. The next minute both are forgotten, replaced by an argument as to which deaths should be covered, a much loved pop star or those dozens of innocents in Norway. I can understand the argument, this was a woman who had every opportunity for help in the world, but it isn’t that black and white, is it? Addiction is surely still worthy of pity, and the family and fans of Amy Winehouse have legitimate cause for grief and sorrow. It doesn’t detract from what happened in Norway, surely?

And anyway, surely if we’re talking a numbers game shouldn’t Africa be leading the news every night? And why isn’t it? Is it because famine is old news, those poor malnutritioned faces staring into the camera no longer enough to force a visceral reaction from the viewership? Not like the victims of a massacre. Africa is the one place where increased coverage would be a good thing. Increased coverage means increased donations, increased political pressure. Covering the familial grief of Amy Winehouse helps nobody, save for the circulation of the newspapers who hounded her so throughout her life. Coverage of events in Norway is important, but leads to a real risk of amplifying the message of this right wing idiot, and in any case, has been riddled with inaccuracy. All the while the world keeps turning, but it seems too heavily weighed down by events. Things are moving too fast.

Stop the news, I want to get off.

But anyway, it probably doesn’t matter to you that I’ve been absent, but away I have been nonetheless, so it seems prudent that I fill you all in on the goings on in my fantastically exciting and interesting life. I finally finished my redraft of the first three chapters of Blood On The Motorway last week, and since then I have been suffering a little bit of writing fatigue, as well as doing actual life stuff like joining a gym and trying to sell all of my worldly possessions in order to buy a shiny new laptop. Surprisingly enough my first gym session didn’t end up with me sobbing with anguish as I devolved into a puddle onto the floor of the chain outlet mega gym, and the attempt to hawk all my stupidly obscure cds went quite well.

Car boot sales are, it turns out, quite good fun, so long as you remember to take your sun cream with you as you prepare to stand facing a blaring hot ball of fire for five straight hours. Unfortunately I forgot to do that, and I’m now coloured a malevolent and unsightly tinge of lobster. Still funds were raised, and after one more car boot and I may even be able to purchase a shiny new way of retreating from the real world by the end of the next week.

As for the writing, the redraft went quite well I think, I’ve had a bit of feedback from the lovely Ms Park, and tomorrow I aim to take it to writing group to see what they make of it. I am currently a little fatigued by the whole thing, and once I have these three chapters polished I may give it another week before I start to polish the next three, but slowly I feel like I am getting there. I’m starting to see why people say writing a novel is hard. Writing a novel is actually quite easy. Writing something that you can be proud of showing to other people is bloody difficult, quite tiring, and more than a little frustrating. Who knew?

Anyway I will try not to leave it so long next time, not least because I don’t have far to go on the aforementioned 30 day song challenge, and the next choice is a song to play at my funeral, which is, let’s face it, my kind of area