Neighbourhood Watch

The people who live in the parallel flat in the house across the road from me are wonderfully vibrant people. I sometimes look out of my window to see them dancing around their sitting room, often with a large number of chums. They have energetic Wii sessions and like a bit of a drink. They're like Jamie Oliver's pretend advert friends, with added bonhomie.

The only problem is that whenever I'm watching them cavort about I tend to be sad. Sad because it's 3am on a Tuesday and I've been lying awake listening to them shrieking at each other, even though there's two sets of windows and and AN ENTIRE FUCKING STREET between us. As I start another doleful midnight surveillance I'm always amazed that there isn't a trickle of blood seeping out of each of their trendy earholes - it must be like the inside of a 747 engine in there.

I slept through it last night, although my girlfriend didn't. Apparently I woke up sufficiently to mutter "bastards".

It's fun terrorism. It's a huge game of uptight chicken - who on the street will crack first and blu-tac a passive-aggressive note to their intercom? Or even march up to the door in their dressing gown and hem hem a "Do you know what time it is"? Not me - I'm a cowardly mouse of a man. If I complain they might go insane on recreational drugs, drag me into their flat and slaughter me on the Twister mat. Or wait until I've gone to work and butter the steps to my front door.

So I'll bide my time. They have to move out sooner or later.

Cruelty to grandmothers

It has taken ten years of dedicated Observer reading for me to notice how many of the very best things in it are written by one person - Lynn Barber. She may look like a snooty dowager from a weak 70s sitcom but from her interviews with a vast range of subjects she seems to be unshockable and completely fearless.

She breaks all the rules of a good interview by inserting herself and her own opinions into them to a pathological degree, but this results in a level of open disgust with some of her subjects that is all too rare in these access-driven times. Having spent a happy couple of hours wading through her archive at the weekend, it's almost hard to pick favourite moments. Perhaps making professional do-gooder Vanessa Redgrave cry by telling her she doesn't give a monkeys about people in Kosovo? Or getting Lembit Opik to describe an evening with his Cheeky Girl sex doll "discussing the concept of whether a perfect circle can exist in reality or whether it's only a conceptual construction"?

Both candidates, but it's hard to better these two:

1) Harriet Harman - from 1998 but pure savage gold. "If I were Tony Blair, I would keep her as a tasty morsel to throw to the lions much nearer the next election. It is quite useful for a prime minister to have the odd thick, docile, acquiescent minister to do the unpopular work of government."

2) Marianne Faithfull - "Marianne, in a black mac and fishnet tights, is sprawling with her legs wide apart, her black satin crotch glinting between her scrawny 55-year-old thighs, doing sex kitten moues at the camera. Oh please, stop! I want to cry - this is sadism, this is misogyny, this is cruelty to grandmothers."

Faithfull claimed after the interview that she behaved so badly because Barber asked her if she'd ever had it off with a dog. Barber denied all, but I bet she did.

More people should like Amanda Palmer

At Glastonbury last year my friends and I went to see Ben Folds play a poorly attended mid-afternoon slot. I was pretty bored as he insisted on playing songs that weren't Army. Hardly the festival spirit. But at one point he brought on a lady friend to play a couple of songs that were much livelier than anything the gun-toting, multiple-yokel-marrying Folds had been able to manage.

A few months later I heard a strange (but brilliant) Beach Boys-esque number about abortion and Britpop on the fatally flawed Guardian music podcast, but didn't make the connection between the two until my top pop chum Akira The Don started raving about Amanda Palmer on his site.

She's obviously barking mad, and has a suicidal disregard for commercial success (see the lyrics to Oasis below, the most accessible thing she's ever likely to produce). But her album (Who Killed Amanda Palmer) is chock-full of growers as well as showers like the singles below. Well worth anyone's money.

Oasis:



Leeds United:

My proudest moment

Let's see how long I can keep this up for

Me me me me. That's what the interweb needs. A page devoted to the oafish opinions and dull daily minutiae of one deeply average man, awash in an online ocean of other deeply average men (and maybe women too - you can't tell these days).

In case you somehow end up on this page through a Google search gone terribly wrong (FUCK SEX GAY KNICKERSMOUTH BUMFACE - that'll get a fun crowd in), I am a man who does dull things for a big dull company, lives with his girlfriend near the Oval in South London and has plenty of dreary opinions about stuff. Stuff I like (sometimes), stuff I don't like (often), stuff I'm not sure if I like or not so end up erring on the side of negative caution (most things).

This is the forum for all that stuff. Unless of course I get bored with this immediately and never come back. If so, this will drift for ever in cyberspace as a testimony to man's inifinate capacity for arrogance and sloth.