23rd April 2005. St George's Date update: Falling And Laughing with a past-the-date loaf for an impromptu duck feed in St James Park with typeface ('Please don't call them fonts') fan Ms Maudlin. 27 pence can stretch, to heaven sometimes. Working class, diamond bright and self-confessed 'hard work', I felt immediately at ease, which is worth gold. 'Kooky' can polarize, you want to hug 'em or hang 'em. Default to the former because kooky and bitchy rarely infect the same host, and there's usually a good heart beneath the rambling at tangents. Deserves a better hand than she's being dealt (creative, less for career than the midnight flight from the high rise). Fibbed about her age, the scamp. A young 'un. Terrorized a sedated ICA with daft theatrics, throwing each other a platform to take their performance further, danced around on the Mall. Maybe this is why youth is prized. Nothing to do with fat ankles, they're actually a laugh. 'Dark Star' (when space seemed to be a metaphor for California rather than Japan) and Doug Trumbull, 'Beat Girl' and the British New Wave, I could brick you up behind a wall of bored tears about liking this woman. Maybe I just dreamt her, conjured à la 'Weird Science', in a haze.

20th March 2005. Six dawns for the hell of it. Slow starter, for a tale about speed. I've never touched the stuff, although an ex did a tonne with the Jesus And Mary Chain circa their 'Sound Of Speed' chronicles. A gentleman might feel a need to turn a blind ear to tales of keen debauch, else it cast a colourlessness on his type-you-settle-down-with, safe-pair-of-mittens self, but no need with Ms Cream. Tea, éclairs and the modern anti-semetism (flirt, then 'don't be daft') in politics/ advertising, she doesn't drink or use profanity, and wears modest, crocheted cardigans. My only Jewish connection is on the Heron side, when a cousin vanished to the Israeli kibbutzim. Republican estates went through a phase of sporting Palestinian flags, Loyalists retorted with Stars Of David, to the delight of her son, who assumed they'd gone to all that trouble for him. 'I'm too.. frumpy,' pre-surgery support counsellor Ms Cream protested, self-depreciatingly. Despite the safe hands, I did feel like a sleazebag quaffing, effing alleycat. We enjoyed 'Sideways' ('The Woodsman' is hardly fitting and has Bacon in it, anyway). Like daily life, dating could become an exercise in Difference vs Repetition - in noticing only angles, the exceptional, and ignoring the heart. A woman with an exceptional heart, nevertheless.

13th February 2005. First... We Let You Go. Dates with Alice, surname unknown. Art, then the King's Road (crayfish and Tabasco pizza, three bottles of Pinot Grigio which vanished quickly). An academic and more into the gallery scene than I ever was (when asked how I approached dealers I assumed she meant drug dealers, and had to admit that I probably knew more of the latter than the former). The chat was cultured, I was rusty. She talked surrealism in architecture, William Morris, OuLiPo, Birkbeck headbend incl. postcolonial theory, Marxist bathroom taps and Eric Satie's 'Vexations'. I burbled about Valérie Valère and the importance of hallways in Anna Karenina. Felt like a broadsword Celt wookie to her diminuative and well-oiled C3PO but she was charming and direct. ('What are you like in bed?' she asked, with the tone of someone suggesting we split a tossed salad). Date 2 (Beuys vitrines, 'La Cave' under Southwark Cathedral) was drier. Subtitles searching for the boundaries in any longer term exchange, mutual dislike for self-charmed, me-centric City life and being on-the-make through a lack of any alternative, all with an dawning suspicion that our boldest demands and expectations are an armour against the unexpected, and describe our worries and brittleness more than any sassy urbane strength. Interesting woman.

25th January 2005. Doing Dates. 'I'm not the kind who hops from one relationship to the next.' We all say it but New Yorkers wait four days, Parisians four weeks, Londoners four months and I wait four years, usually. Determined to be straightforward. 'Must be adventurous in bed' read one lesbian's wish list. 'I can't put that.' I mused, as if getting-it-right doesn't involve leaving your shore, building love on trust and trust on confirmation, and as if bed isn't a source of confirmative hydropower, or sailing under the jungles doesn't sound fun. Why play it safe, man? A modest, self-fulfilling burden fluttered up from the trees and past my mind's eye - territory - Oedipal rigging - good girls don't - urban island minds where you have to be careful - sex and love as essentially either/or - till a choice is between a 'nice' neutered bore or a stark mentalist up for giving every vegetable in your kitchen several. Ghostly canoes navigated tributaries of the New Suave, towards the Zambezi, struggling with silent, sexual self-question locked, tight as eyelids, into 19th century trunks. Half curious to roll them, once in a lifetime, like a barrel of scaredy-cats, over the plumes of Sheer Perv.

29th December 2004. Chav Crass. Just home from the Hicks supporting Youth Of Britain: a post-boy band, post-rap, chav Crass. Odd event by any standards. An ex was there. Some, including myself, stay friends with their exes (if we were good friends, why lose that?), some don't (too awkward). I want to but it's too soon.

18th December 2004. ..three hour sex ordeal in Stockwell.. It's not a weblog until there's been a hangover confession ..pinned down and raped by other soldiers.. Five late ones in a row, Resonance FM pans to and fro and no, ..assaulted with a bayonet in the Tower of London, it's not the worst of de Sade, it's just the news today, oh boy. What's happening? Where oh where the backlit chimney pots of Poppins? I shall take my promenade on Holloway, with comfits, lozenges, pastilles, sherbets and subtleties for the urchins. 'Young fellow.' One was helping a couple with their shopping, through the window of their Ford Focus. 'Sweet benevolence, and sorely rare. A dragée.' I reached a butterscotch into his palm and ruffled his crop. 'Sorry miss!' A dim court, where the scantest wastrel, huffing a can bong like a Limehouse Chinaman, grunted through fug for my business. 'A Pontefract pipe!' I smiled. Spinning about, some Lower Highgate Basin ruffs were turning a compadre upside down for his Filet O'Fish. 'Be off!' I raised some candy canes but cast them instead as offerings. Shocked by their own poverty of spirit, each repented, chuckled, chomped and sang. And sang.

14th November 2004. Night flight: they're re-adhering Band Aid right this second, not far from here, for Sudan. The first one happened at a time when British pop romped more globally, yet the latest has the top spot sown, they say. Follow a swallow's line past the inmates at HMP Holloway (what a library of lives) to London Zoo, where a lion prepares for slumber. Migrate further afield and the Red Crescent poise until the smoke clears, to be allowed Fallujah (what an unholy, blown-open anthology that'll be: black and white, red all over). We tend to think in decades or less, fundamentalists live in centuries. Maybe, if we airdrop Busted in tonight, the disenfranchised won't feel it's a month of Bloody Sundays. Maybe.

14th October 2004. Asexuality is in the news, with a growing number of people admitting they just can't be fucked. Most of the asexuals I heard interviewed last night associated sex with 'other base behaviour' (louts, aggression, social groups they feel easily taken over and emasculated by) in such clipped and minor tones I suspected interaction in general as an issue. Squeamishness was mentioned. More than straight/gay, active/passive, perhaps the essential sexual definition is between romanticists ('why is porn so.. gynaecological?') and those with relish for God-given bodies. If the true asexual fetish is for mystery, there's no mystery to the competing needs under their duvet. Perhaps it's just too crowded under there.

28th September 2004. Less a missile, more a brief handshake, for it is dark. Mission Statement: blank. Verse: blank. (Head: blank. If truth be told.) Round-the-back handshakes not a new thing (blast each other off the topograph, but one mustn't be rude) but it's disconcerting while we're liberating the oppressable. Bob Mugabe and his level less interesting to me than their screwy martial sidewinders, in Zimbabwe's case Col. Perence Shiri (aka Black Jesus), invited for a brush up at the Royal College of Defense after smoking twenty thousand of the Mbele faith. Touch dusky when they did the invites. It was fairly dark as people were being thrown en masse into mine shafts, having had the brass cheek to vote funny and run from burning huts. 'No talking at the back. What's this? "Please excuse Black Jesus from Fusillade today, but he really loves Quasar at the Trocadero."' Students.