How's the form?

The woman in the C.A.B. cafe seemed genuinely affronted when I asked her if she had any tea.

"Of course I have tea," she said in Ingrid Pitt's voice, "normal or infusions!" This last was said with a flourish and flared nostrils. I had a camomile which she presented to me in a self-assembly manner: a paper cup full of boiling water and the bag lying next to it, like a biscuit on a saucer. I chose to dunk.

An hour in the C.A.B. talking about forms and then collecting forms.

Then it was a trip to the Job Centre (or whatever it is called these days) where I haven't been for twenty years. More forms to fill in, more waiting around. Limbo.

While I'm waiting I think about David Coverdale's "Behind the Smile".

If he never did anything else in his worthless and trivial life* David Coverdale is worth it for "Behind the Smile". How any one convinced Jon Lord to play so rigidly, with such formal restraint, how the drummer managed to be so clip-cloppingly unfunky and yet so on it!How every one concerned thought that discordant toy-town synthesisers were the way to go I will never know! I'm pleased they did though.

Dave, singing in a handsome lower register and teasingly phased, assays a pretty good Scott Walker impression, right down to "the big man's" vibrato half way through which bubbles up into the ether like steam off a soda-stream.** It's a great way to spend a minute and a half.

* Dave did two other worthwhile things. The first is his video for "Is this love?" the subtext of which, actually the text of it, is "I'm tapping that!". The "that" in question being his then wife Tawny Kitaen and her long ginger legs. The second was an interview I saw with him where Dave, rattled, responded to a question about his lyrics with the line "I never claimed to be Billy Bloody Shakespeare, mate!". He said this dressed as a rear admiral in a voice like Roger Moore, if Roger Moore was a Tetley bitter man.

** I clearly no longer remember how soda streams work.