Fear and Loathing in Belgravia

So I've heard that some people are worried about me. Nobody has told me that they're worried about me, they are stealth worried, but never-the-less, worry not. At the moment my mental well-being is in ascendancy. This is because my physical well-being is in decline, it's the kind of necessary dualism that makes sure everybody gets out of bed in the morning, even though, if you think about it, you're only going to die in the end any way and the best you can hope for is to shuffle of this mortal coil with some dignity, not with your trousers round your ankles searching for a loo-roll. So, like I say, I'm on the up. Physically though, oh dear: night sweats, day shivers, a brutal hacking cough, expelling gobbets of semi-solid sputum the size of 50p pieces with the waxy consistency of potato pulp. Makes you wonder how a man like me can go on. But on and on and on I go. Oh, and I haven't seen a doctor about the suspected hernia, suspected at this point only by me. Truly I am an idiot. A cough and a hernia are great bedfellows. Went to see the Undertones, the Monochrome Set, the Lawrence from Denim film "Lawrence of Belgravia" and Dylan Moran over the weekend. All gratis of course, thanks to Joe and Romy, or I couldn't have gone at all. There was some shouty, macho posturing argument about Lawrence in the pub afterwards, the consensus being that he was being exploited for cheap laughs by the film with cut-aways, sharp editing and his stone-faced and dour Brummie delivery. I didn't feel that at all. There are many things you can say about Lawrence but he's not stupid. A quixotic lunatic with a world view that hasn't significantly changed since he was 18 and a sense of entitlement that would see him well through the preliminaries on "The X Factor". But not stupid. In many ways I felt a terrible kinship with him: this shuffling, ghostly figure, ludicrous in shades and a rotting baseball cap, writing his terrible songs that are never-the-less, beneath the farting synth-voices and clever/silly lyrics as perfectly constructed as any of his Felt songs. In the pub somebody trotted out the truism "If you haven't made it by the time you're forty, give up". I didn't start till I was forty. You go, Lawrence. First pensioner pop-star. Why not?