Yelp.

Yelp.
Here’s the truth: I don’t get us. Us lot – humans.

I mean, I do – I can yelp at the moon with the craziest of them. But we are mad bastards.

I mean, how is it that we can meet each other in the street on most days and more or less come off as grounded, sensible neighbours who can be trusted to help each other out in an emergency – and yet manage to produce armies of flesh-eating zombies as soon as someone rings the Oh Shit bell?

I mean, really – where do all the monsters come from? Where are we hiding them?

Something I’m largely ignorant of is the conflict in Sri Lanka. What sparked the Tamil Tigers’ two decades or however long of dissent and fighting against the government, I don’t know. I’ve not been to the country. I hear it’s beautiful.

But lastnight, I heard just a clip of an interview with a woman who’d escaped from the final throes of the war in the north of the island, earlier this year. She described scenes of carnage beyond counting.

She said that in one place she found herself, ‘everywhere was bodies’. Everywhere she looked she saw corpses. Not just fallen or left, but piled.

She ran to the local hospital. They had no more room for bodies of people – there too, they were piling them in corridors and side rooms.

Where did all these dead people come from? And, more to the point, where did their killers come from?

This morning, an account by a woman who walked for miles to escape the fighting in the Somalian capital Mogadishu, left me wondering the same thing. She said she was so repeatedly robbed as a refugee, and so subsequently malnourished, her dreadful appearance must have been the only thing that saved her from being raped. She said that most other women with her had been, by the time they reached the coast.

It resonates with stories from the genocide in Rwanda more than a decade ago. And perhaps, in a sense, with others from the war in the former Yugoslavia – neighbours and ordinary locals appearing to develop an overnight thirst for eachother’s blood and suffering.

In the case of Sri Lanka, it was government forces apparently dishing out the death. In Rwanda and in Yugoslavia, in the broadest terms, tribal friction had embedded itself in identity like a sleeper cell, so they say.

But whatever uniform you’re wearing, or given at birth, you are still you when you make your choices. Even when you’re part of a system trained to execute orders.

You’re still you. Aren’t you?
And in Somalia? Well, it’s just about every conceivable element of conflict all thrown in together, isn’t it? Identity, politics, poverty, money, geography – it sounds like every slavering, blood-shot, howling vision of hell ever hallucinated. It sounds like Dante’s fucking Inferno. And yet, the woman this morning could still remember ‘how beautiful Mogadishu was before the fighting’.

Can anyone imagine the Dish as beautiful? From the ignorant snippets of it we digest quickly from the news, it has become another Beirut or a Belfast – a place synonymous with destruction.


It seems incomprehensible. I don’t understand where the sheer numbers of rapists and murderers appear from, when the trumpet of chaos bleats. And the level of depravity and cruelty lept to so quickly in war zones. I can’t picture that happening in Bournemouth.

I feel sure that young men and women serving with British forces in Afghanistan at the moment might be able to look me thoughtfully in the eye as I say this.

So interesting, as an aside, that two of the most level-headed, likeable and positive people to have perhaps ever appeared on Channel 4’s post-supper comfort Location location location were lastnight’s couple, Chris and Nikki – a major in the Paras and a flight lieutenant in the RAF, respectively. If you were looking for it, at least in the edit, there was a self-effacing note of dignity brought to the usually agonising proceedings of middle class people enjoying their freedom by whining about only having a £500,000 budget to buy a home.

I shamelessly love Phil and Kirsty. And I whine about property often. But its interesting to observe people who are trained in the art of self control – trained specifically so they can be fit to defend our right to make TV about banal comforts.

As the debate around healthcare in the US begins to pull in ever more inflammatory language, and a barking, screaming, hair-pulling, goggle-eyed, yelping madness seems to be supplanting the country’s pragmatic conversation about how best to sustain its society, I wonder how close to childish lunacy even the most idyllic models for living really are.

Is there a better dream than America? And are more petulant, ignorant voices to be heard hollering so loudly anywhere else on Earth?

But whether Bournemouth, Beirut or Belfast; Berlin, Boston or Baltimore – we humans are the only common factor in these different scenes. And, if you think about where people in these different cities find themselves in 2009, our ability to rebuild, to transform, to totally re-invent our vision of these places, and of eachother, seems as remarkable perhaps as our lurking and utterly universal weakness for fear.

So Tong, then.

So Tong, then.

In a typical Friday style, I’ve been in the studio for a while. So long, in fact, that I have removed the empty cafetiere and mug from the little table in the window and replaced them with a full bottle of Burgundy Pinot Noir and a glass.

So it’s a year since we were braving mudslides at Robin Hill country park, over on the island for Bestival. It’s begun again over there now and they’re forecasting great weather. And Kraftwerk. And stupid sci-fi costumes.

..What am I doing here, again?

Pouring a glass and saying cheers, actually. Turns out it’s Pete Tong’s last ‘welcome to the weekend’ tonight.

Yep, it’s come around already. And it turns out too that the Essential Selection is as old as our marriage. Eighteen years.

I feel a genuine sadness. This news just makes me feel that little bit more sad than I did already.

How many Fridays felt that bit better because of this show? I don’t want to overstate it – wait ‘ill I’ve polished off the glass – but whether we were cooking damn fine chile or driving somewhere to meet chums, watching the sun go down in the Arnewood kitchen window or watching the countryside slip past the windscreen on some evening A-road somewhere, this was how we knew it was the weekend.

When I think back to these years and this little joyful detail of our average week, I shall probably think of listening to a live version of World Hold On from one of Pete’s Ibiza shows one summer, while we were stuck in a stationary traffic jam in North London one sunny summer evening. What a strangely nice memory.

Still, sentimentality never built the future, eh.

Think I might keep this cork on my desk, though.

One more tune, mate – it’s three minutes to the end of the show.

..Finally it’s happened to me? From 1991? The year it started; the year we were married.

Good choice.

Somehow, we shall keep dancing.

Cheers.

09.09.09 09:09

09.09.09 09:09
(Bugger.)
09.09.09 21:09

Yes, alright. I missed the proper one this morning.

But here we are in the next best thing. I was working through the proper one and here I still am – for the record, doing another part of this giant pitch for a particular international client.

Coo-er. Sounds glam.

It’s not. I do this in my bedroom, remember.

Anyway. A neuf.

(And for the record, ignore the demented clock on the post bar below – I hit Post at EXACTLY nine minutes past… oh even I’m not listening any more.)

Rain and rowlocks.

Rain and rowlocks.

At last.

At long, chuffing last.

Miserable weather.

>CRACKS OUT LACED FINGERS AND PULLS IN CHAIR<

I can finally get some decent work done.

Of course, it’s not helpful to a normal household rhythm, but gloomy teatimes can be a great time for the brain to find creative traction. The more the rain slips down the window, the better it seems; the fuller the gutter, the firmer the grip.

Now that I have low lights on and ridiculous jazz courtesy of FIP, I can feel productivity seeping through my veins again, bringing Momo’s mojo to life.

I’ve found some gorgeous afternoons draining productivity this summer. The ability to make decisions sometimes, worryingly, just departs and I’ve spent hours scratching at the layout pad and the screen and the kettle, muttering motivational mantras to no decisional avail. I loath it. I’ve left school. I hate the suspicion that I need a scary maths teacher to help me get through a piece of work.

Momo does, of course, operate like a business even with me at the helm. Writers may get to lie in until noon and then gaze forlornly at daytime telly until cake time, but my little studio always has something sensible in actual production, with things like deadlines and phone calls and emails and budgets and strategies and clever-dick ideas to administer.

Beats me how I let this happen.

But, even so, when you are the business and the Brilliant Brain fairy leaves your shoulder, it doesn’t feel encouraging.

So a bit of cosy rain tonight feels like a refreshing shower to the outlook.

It’s something to do with my ever-deepening love affair with Autumn, of course – the season of fresh starts. I’ve been actively waiting for it this year, despite loving impromptu sunshine and family and lazy riverbanks and discovering the lunacy that is the invention of rowing, on days like Monday’s bank holiday.

All very good and much appreciated – but that’s the point, after all. Summer should really be the time to let go of the reins a little; create the rhythm of a restart at the back-to-school time of year.

I think, though, this year’s been a bit of an exaggeration for me on that score because of Momo’s preponderance of cranium-aching projects over the balmy months. If everything on your creative schedule at any one time is strategic stuff – fathoming marketing campaigns, or website structures – you’re in danger of running out of buffer space in the brain, let me say.

I rather prefer having some of the projects on the schedule near their end and needing some pretty artwork finishing or fancy words filling in.

Still, if I can keep with it enough – and if this rotten and therefore inspirational weather digs in properly – the cranium aching of this summer may well lead to a very interesting final quarter of 2009 for Momo. Both Tempo and Typo.

I should feel encouraged, I guess. Most of the time I keep Momo on a steady course down stream nicely. Al hamdu li lah. But as I approach the beginning of this funny business’ eighth year – eighth, for Pete’s sake – I am certainly ready to see a new season unfold around me.

If this rain keeps up, of course, it may really float Momo’s little rowboat.

But, as I have now learned with blistered palms thanks to the hire place on the river at Wareham, pulling for all you’re worth just to go backwards seems like an awful lot of rowlocks.