I just knew last night’s garbled post wasn’t going to get the thing across. The thing is, Gary McKinnon has considerable charm, his story is engaging and a bit endearing, and he has compelling personal issues. But this case is bigger and meaner than all that. The treaty he is being extradited under, basically it makes ID cards – it even makes Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax -  look like a teddy bears’ picnic. Because (aside from the several legal rulings which have said it would be perfectly possible under European law for the Home Secretary to overrule it) it technically signs away the UK government’s rights to protect its own citizens.

Here is some context from the very-serious-indeed statewatch.org – “monitoring the state and civil liberties in Europe”:

This Special Report is also available in “pdf” format to download: Analysis no 18

On 31 March, David Blunkett, UK Home Secretary, signed an Extradition Treaty on behalf of the UK with his United States counterpart, Attorney General Tom Ashcroft, ostensibly bringing the US into line with procedures between European countries. The UK parliament was not consulted at all and the text was not public available until the end of May. The only justification given for the delay was “administrative reasons”, though these did not hold-up scrutiny by the US senate, which began almost immediately.

The UK-US Treaty has three main effects:

- (1) it removes the requirement on the US to provide prima facie evidence when requesting the extradition of people from the UK but maintains the requirement on the UK to satisfy the “probable cause” requirement in the US when seeking the extradition of US nationals;

- (2) it removes or restricts key protections currently open to suspects and defendants;

- (3) it implements the EU-US Treaty on extradition, signed in Washington on 25 June 2003, but far exceeds the provisions in this agreement.

An analysis of the new UK-US Treaty – which will replace the 1972 UK-US Treaty – follows below, together with a number of relevant cases and issues that raise serious concern about the new agreement (and those between the EU and US).

Ben Hayes of Statewatch comments:

“Under the new treaty, the allegations of the US government will be enough to secure the extradition of people from the UK. However, if the UK wants to extradite someone from the US, evidence to the standard of a “reasonable” demonstration of guilt will still be required.

No other EU countries would accept this US demand, either politically or constitutionally. Yet the UK government not only acquiesced, but did so taking advantage of arcane legislative powers to see the treaty signed and implemented without any parliamentary debate or scrutiny.

Guantanamo Bay, the failed extradition of Lofti Raissi and US contempt for the International Criminal Court make this decision to remove relevant UK safeguards all the more alarming”

There is more, more, much more. Download the pdf or click the link at the top.

And two more pertinent points, from Suzanne Moore:

1. that the only people who can’t be extradited under this treaty are the terrorists – because they’ll be facing the death penalty in the Us, and that is the only absolute bar to extradition.

2. that this might be a week in which the government would want to establish that they’re not at America’s beck & call!

This Thanksgiving I am not thankful to hear that the Home Secretary of the UK has denied Gary McKinnon his further right of appeal against his extradition to the US. Not thankful at all.

I wanted to blog this ages ago, and I’m not sure why I never did. So this is going to be a mishmash of a post, trying to fit too much in at once. Sorry. But listen, people – the European court can still intervene, so this is the last chance to protest. I’m not sure what the best way is, at this point – the Mail on Sunday has been running a campaign with a petition – though fat lot of good that’s done. Emailing the Home Secretary may be no use at this stage. Twitter, blogs, Facebook. You could do like Chrissie Hynde and Dave Gilmour, and make a record.

Gary McKinnon, in case you’ve missed it over the past seven years, is a vegetarian pacifist UFO theorist from north London who hacked into the Pentagon’s computer systems, looking for signs of a conspiracy, from 1995 to 2002. He has Asperger’s Syndrome, which if you’ve missed that, is a form of high-functioning autism characterised by high intelligence, singlemindedness, and – er – skill with things like computers. The self-described “bumbling computer nerd” became obsessed with this idea that the Pentagon was hiding evidence of UFOs, and technological things to do with free energy. “It wasn’t just an interest in little green men and flying saucers,” McKinnon said. “I believe that there are spacecraft, or there have been craft, flying around that the public doesn’t know about.”

He would sit in his girlfriend Tamsin’s auntie’s living room in Crouch End, with a beer on one side and a spliff on the other, laptop on his lap, and access the US government systems via network administrators who had no login passwords.

Yeah, you got that. Administrators who had no login passwords. He was using a perfectly legal remote access and administration software called RemotelyAnywhere, which is used by schools, etc. As he put it in an interview, basically it was like logging in.

To the Pentagon. Because administrators had not set up passwords.

“From time to time, some Nasa scientist sitting at his desk somewhere would see his cursor move for no apparent reason” – wrote Jon Ronson in an interview with McKinnon in the Guardian in 2005. “On those occasions, Gary’s connection would be abruptly cut. This would never fail to freak out the then-stoned Gary.”

2005 is the critical year, because, although Gary was caught and questioned in 2002, they never applied for extradition until 2005. They questioned him and then let him go. They even left him with his computer. Why is that? Because 2005 is when Britain, alone in the world, signed a post-9/11 anti-terrorist treaty allowing the US to extradite any UK citizen, even without evidence. The treaty, eagerly signed by Tony Blair and his lapdogs, because Donald Rumsfeld wanted them to, apparently gives the UK no say in who gets extradited to the US under this legislation. Yes, the UK has apparently signed away its right to protect its citizens. And it was done without any consultation (of course) with UK voters.

I say apparently. But all the senior judges have ruled that the Home Secretary certainly does have the right to intervene. So he is choosing not to, and using this spurious piece of legislation as an excuse.

But get this, also from the interview with Ronson:

“Once you’re on the network, you can do a command called NetStat – Network Status – and it lists all the connections to that machine. There were hackers from Denmark, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Thailand …”

“All on at once?” I ask. “You could see hackers from all over the world, snooping around, without the spaceniks or the military realising?”

“Every night,” he says, “for the entire five to seven years I was doing this.”

“Do you think they’re still there? Are they still at it? Or have they been arrested, too?”

Gary says he doesn’t know.

Elsewhere in the Guardian:

McKinnon’s search for UFO material on US computers turned into an obsession. As he investigated high-level computer systems in the US, his life in Britain fell apart. He lost his job and his girlfriend left him. Friends told him to stop hacking, but to no avail.

“I’d stopped washing at one point. I wasn’t looking after myself. I wasn’t eating properly. I was sitting around the house in my dressing gown, doing this all night,” he said.

His behaviour showed all the characteristics associated with Asperger’s syndrome – an obsession with certain activities and interests and a level of “social naivety” in evaluating the consequences of one’s actions.

Prof Simon Baron-Cohen, who diagnosed McKinnon with the condition, has said: “We should be thinking about this as the activity of somebody with a disability rather than a criminal activity.”

Then there’s this, from Ronson’s interview…

“I found a list of officers’ names,” he claims, “under the heading ‘Non-Terrestrial Officers’.”

“Non-Terrestrial Officers?” I say.

“Yeah, I looked it up,” says Gary, “and it’s nowhere. It doesn’t mean little green men. What I think it means is not earth-based. I found a list of ‘fleet-to-fleet transfers’, and a list of ship names. I looked them up. They weren’t US navy ships. What I saw made me believe they have some kind of spaceship, off-planet.”

“The Americans have a secret spaceship?” I ask.

“That’s what this trickle of evidence has led me to believe.”

“Some kind of other Mir that nobody knows about?”

“I guess so,” says Gary.

“What were the ship names?”

“I can’t remember,” says Gary. “I was smoking a lot of dope at the time. Not good for the intellect.”

This was November 2000. By now, Gary was hooked. He quit his job as a systems administrator for a small business, “which hugely pissed off my girlfriend Tamsin. It was the last straw. She dumped me and started seeing this other bloke because I was such a selfish waste of space. Poor Tamsin. And she was the one paying the phone bill because I didn’t have a job. We were still living together. God, have you ever tried living with someone after you’ve split up? It’s bad.”

Clearly typical terrorist behaviour and a major international threat. Well, the interview with Ronson is funny, and I like it – because it is very human, and it shows clearly how daft this extradition is (and how very charming, and very London, Gary McKinnon is). Daft, but potentially tragic. The television interview at the top of this post gives the full flavour of the very serious elements of this case – one fear McKinnon has voiced is of being sent to Guantanamo. Being on the wrong side of gung-ho American anti-terrorism enthusiasts is no joke. And it also comes to something when a Labour government is to the right of the flipping Mail.

Other supporters of McKinnon, incidentally, include Sarah Brown, the Prime Minister’s wife.

Lord, this is getting long. I’d almost forgotten about Boris Johnson’s wonderful column in the Telegraph - which we should appreciate, as he gets £250K a year for writing them…

He may believe in little green men (writes our moptop Mayor), but he was not operating as a fifth columnist on behalf of these Venusians. He was not trying to cripple American defences in preparation for an assault from outer space. He was simply following up a weird intuition that UFOs exist, with all the compulsiveness that he has exhibited since he was a child.

In so doing, he has generously helped America to prepare against attack from a more sinister foe. If it was so ludicrously easy to penetrate these encryptions, then what could al-Qaeda have done? Just imagine if America’s defence establishment had commissioned IT consultants to probe their systems as exhaustively as Gary McKinnon. The contract would have been worth far more than £500,000.

McKinnon did it without charge, sitting up all the night, hardly eating, smoking heavily and spending so long tap-tapping in his dressing gown that his girlfriend gave up on him. The Americans shouldn’t be threatening him with jail. They should be offering him consultancy.

My recent post on Zadie Smith’s essay on essays highlighted the strange tension between fiction, and what it does and doesn’t seem to be doing for us – denizens as we are of a restless, confused age. Well, there is clearly something in the air, because here is proof that the novel is not quite dead – despite what the CEO of Borders might think – yet:

Noveller, the online macroblogging service that lets users post their impromptu narrative ruminations on modern life, society, and the nature of existence itself, celebrated its millionth post late last week, officially making it the world’s most popular prose-sharing tool…

“You know, before we came up with Noveller, we had all these friends creating these great 75,000- to 300,000-word works of fiction, but there was no quick, easy, fun way to share them,” cofounder Chuck Gregory said. “To be honest, we were stunned there wasn’t already anything like it out there. It seemed so obvious.”…

At 10 a.m. Pacific time on Mar. 13, Gregory and his team of programmers launched Noveller. By 10:03 a.m., the first-ever Noveller post—a primitive but vigorous account of an insurance salesman who becomes obsessed with his father’s boyhood on a Philippines naval base—was put up by user johnnyK_67.

Within an hour, more than 300 user-generated “Novels” had been posted.

“I love it,” said Sheena Wulf, a Novellist from Kansas City, MO. “If I’m ever sitting in a coffee shop and my sense of alienation and utter detachment from contemporary life provides me with sudden insight into the world that helped shape my family, I just grab my phone and Novel it out to people.”

But according to the Onion, not everyone is so sure…

“Nobody wants to go to their computer and read about what you had for breakfast and how it called to mind your boyhood, which morphed into a meditation on the relationship between life and art and, by extension, a metaphor for all social interaction,” said Sam Alger, 24, who claimed to be “disgusted” by his friends’ constant Novelling. “But some of them, it’s all they do. It’s like no one just talks to you for hours and hours on end any more.”

Watch this space, novel-lovers! (Coming soon: more on Borders. And Cyril Connolly.)

Sorry – I’ve been sick in bed for days! I didn’t even know the date today till about ten minutes ago – and there are still almost ten minutes left – and I never did get to that meditation on the demise of Borders and the Net Book Agreement that was in my head all day… bit ambitious maybe.

Anyway, I’ve quickly watched a few Queen videos, and I think this is really it. (I was thinking of We Will Rock You, but the official video  is too funny, with Freddie tinted star glasses and Brian May’s moon boots…) So here’s to Freddie. Aka Farrokh Bulsara. 5 September 1946 – 24 November 1991. And you know, I never really listened to Queen myself, but I can still feel the sadness a little bit. He was something else. And there he is now, in the middle.

Awwwww…

Oh no! I have accidentally deleted the spam I was saving for a rainy day!

There were several good ones, including a name I liked very much, something M. Horvath; but the star was the one called Tiger in Underwear.

Beautiful, isn’t it.

(It’s a theme, I find; click the link only if you dare.)

PS – Editing in: I’m a nuthead. I did this when I was sick. I thought it was going out tomorrow. Forget the Wednesday tag. Useless. But to continue the nursery-toy theme of the spams, you might like to know I had one today called “Become her drillosaur!”

So… Zadie Smith is publishing – that is, she has written, so Hamish Hamilton is publishing – a book of essays, and thus has essayed to write an essay about it, which is in yesterday’s Guardian. Most of her essay is about the essays of one David Shields, whose book of essays on the essay (or “stupendous conterblast to all conventional literary pieties”) will be out in February, simultaneously here and in the U(essay).

Zadie, like everyone else who is anyone, has been reading Reality Hunger lo these many weeks in proof. (She was given it by a student, apparently, but to read the HH website is to feel sadly out of the loop if one has not been given a copy. Not only do they reference Smith’s piece, a month ago, but they talk excitedly about all the people who have been reading Shields in proof, as well. I for one fall well outside this beautiful circle, but I’m blogging here anyway.) So we have to go with what she says; not yet is it for us to have an actual position on things. But we can read, and think on however little. It is a subject never very far from my mind, in fact, the stuff she’s writing about here: it’s about what I write, and why.

She  says she disagrees with much of what Shields says, even when she finds him interesting: “Shields likes to say such things as ‘Story seems to say everything happens for a reason, and I want to say No, it doesn’t'; to which I want to say, ‘Bad story does that, yes, but surely good story exists, too’.” Referring to a quote from no less than JM Coetzee, where he also laments the rise of the “well-made novel,” she says:

This easy dismissal of well-made novels deserves a second look. In the first place, “well-made novel” seems to me to be a kind of Platonic bogeyman, existing everywhere in an ideal realm but in few spots on this earth. Reality Hunger wants us to believe that this taste for “novels that don’t look like novels” is in some way unusual, the mark of a refined literary palate.

According to Smith:

Shields argues passionately for the superiority of the messy real – of what we might call “truthiness” – over the careful creations of novelists, and other artists, who work with artificial and imagined narratives. For Shields it is exactly what is tentative, unmade and unpolished in the essay form that is important. He finds the crafted novel, with its neat design and completist attitude, to be a dull and generic thing, too artificial to deal effectively with what is already an “unbearably artificial world”. He recommends instead that artists break “ever larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work”, via quotation, appropriation, prose poems, the collage novel . . . in short, the revenge of the real, by any means necessary.

So naturally this is where Ms Baroque wades in! Because I have this very love-hate relationship with the novel. There is a kind of politeness in the novel, or at least in most contemporary UK novels that I’ve read (which, okay, isn’t very many in the scheme of things, as every time I do read one I regret it bitterly, thinking Why, WHY did all those reviewers and everybody think it was so flipping great??). It’s a politeness that extends even (or especially) when the auther thinks he or she is being really iconoclastic, blowing away the cobwebs of taboo, etc etc. It’s a paleness, a predictable mannerliness; I’ve battled with it for many years and find it almost impossible to articulate what it is I mean by it… sort of, as I used to put it, the thing where the novels feel they have to tell you what colour the person’s front door is. It’s so tiring. Who cares?

It’s this detail, which every writing workshop will tell you is better than just the facts (not just cereal – what kind of cereal?), which to my mind takes one further and further away from what the story is supposed to be about. The story is clearly not about the front door, or the minutiae of utilitarian life. It’s an intrusion of the kind of clutter and noise we all seem to think passes for “reality” these days. And it’s the kind of reality we all know human kind cannot bear too much of.

One exception to this is The Corrections, a masterful work about which I will brook no dissent, and another – ditto – is The Ice Storm. But in those books that is the whole point: the intrusion of the noisy external world into people’s inner imperatives, with – in both cases – pretty dark results. (And of course both Franzen and Moody are great stylists.)

I think, thinking about it, that there are two things to say about Smith’s essay. One is about her definition-confusion about the word “essay” itself:

For Samuel Johnson in 1755 it is: “A loose sally of the mind; an irregular undigested piece; not a regularly and orderly composition.” And if this looks to us like one of Johnson’s lexical eccentricities, we’re chastened to find Joseph Addison, of all people, in agreement (“The wildness of these compositions that go by the name of essays”) and behind them both three centuries of vaguely negative connotation. Beginning in the 1500s an essay is: the action or process of trying or testing; a sample, an example; a rehearsal; an attempt or endeavour; a trying to do something; a rough copy; a first draft. Not until the mid 19th century does it take on its familiar, neutral ring: “a composition more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range.”

(I love that cosy “of all people”: why??) The thing is, as I’ve tried to say in my title, the word has a simple, clear meaning, “to have a go at.” The archaic “assay” is related, clearly. Sure, it’s old. To use it as a synonym for “try” would be very anachronistic now, but in terms of the written thing, the written article, it is still very much in the way of an attempt upon a subject. I can barely see that the meaning has changed at all, except to develop another sense in relation to this specific usage. It’s not an “unstable history” in the slightest. It’s just that we like things literal and plain now.

Like fiction, like poetry (an alternative to fiction that barely gets a look-in in this discussion, even though the author is married to a well-known poet), essays can take many forms. When I was at school we were taught to write “compositions” which were essays. There was a form. Say what it’s about, then lay out your items for discussion in  paragraphs, with each item containing all its subsidiary points, and finish with some kind of conclusion. In practice it can be memoir, philosophy, free-association, scholarly, newsy, scientific. It can be like the long essays by John McPhee, that went all over the shop, or like Annie Dillard’s spiritual-biological musings on life and nature, or like Lamb’s amazing shaggy dog story, A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig, which made me weep with laughter in school at 14. It can be a book review (or “book report” as we called them), or high-falutin’ critical analysis, or polemic.

But listen. The other thing Zadie mentions, as quoted above, is this big thing we are all too much in the face of. Reality. There’s a very interesting sentence embedded in the quote above, which goes:

He finds the crafted novel, with its neat design and completist attitude, to be a dull and generic thing, too artificial to deal effectively with what is already an “unbearably artificial world”.

This is it.

The mediated, postmodernist, commodified, photographed, regulated, politically correct, plastic world. Think about it. And I mean plastic in both senses. Firstly it is largely made of plastic these days. Look at your nearest bus, or what your apples came in, or warehouse store. Secondly, everything is endlessly plastic, malleable, conditional, attributed, relative, up for reinvention, redefinition, redesign, restructure, realignment, reassigment. Even personal relationships, even gender!

There is now, more than ever, no such thing as empirical reality. So we are lost in a cacaphony of processes, procedures, targets, objectives, appraisals, reviews, emails, brands, cultural signifiers heaping up and up and up in an endless mountain, jargon, disposable coffee cups, fan crazes, other people’s mobile phone conversations, and a complete fall in standards of behaviour – which means that, among other things, other people are just in our faces more than they used to be.

Oh yeah, baby.

I mean even Jack Kerouac didn’t used to text on his BlackBerry while Neal Cassady was trying to talk to him, and crazy as they were I bet they didn’t eat fried chicken from a (plastic) box on the bus and then leave the box under the seat.

And their girlfriends did not talk in an endless infantile highpitched nasal whine, that went up at the end of every  phrase, like the annoying actresses in Mad Men (and every other current American TV show) do?

Ranting? Maybe. But I think fiction can’t cope any more, because frankly we just don’t want to know. There’s too much of it. It’s all too irritating. Fiction either becomes just as shallow as the so-called reality TV we now watch – as if only what you can see is real – or it tries for the historical effect and as often as not wears its research naively on its sleeve. (I don’t mean Wolf Hall here. And I don’t by any means mean all contemporary fiction, either. There are a handful of novelists I would follow around the supermarket, hoping to hear them say something to an aisle attendant.)

Ranting aside, all this imageness and process and positioning, and the way fiction publishing is being run by marketing teams and brand-builders, mean we are hungry not for “reality” – not as in “reality TV,” which is another kind of mediated pre-packaged unreality – but for the real. Something real in our literature. After all, literature is our letter to ourself, that tells us where we are and how to get along there. Fiction used to do that for us.

The fiction Zadie lists in her article does do it. It engages with the inner life, the real imperatives, as reflected in the external. But it’s all old; she ducks out of her own argument a bit to give us classics instead of taking an unflinching look at the now. After all, it’s the now that David Shields is talking about.

Our external now is so managed these days that fiction can’t cope; we need a place to process it and have a think. Because everything else – even the education system itself – is set up to mitigate against thinking. Our society has grown terrified of thought, of deep reflection, in favour of “skills” and “results,” and our literature is desperately trying to regain a foothold. It comes to something when the narrative imagination, which used to be the way to pattern reality in prose and make it bearable, is no longer enough. Franzen writes brilliant essays, for example.

John Gardner saw all this coming decades ago, with his famous, churlish remark that if the New Yorker published any real fiction at all the Steuben paperweights in the side columns would explode. So did Cheever. So did Marshall McLuhan. (So did TS Eliot.) Well, it was the mid-century lament, and Mad Men (whose women speak so differently from the women of that day) charts it too. Life on Mars was a reaction to it. (In Life on Mars the John Sims character literally gets to go back to 1972 and have a think from outside his own life.)

Now, what is most needed I think is a good step back from the clutter and noise and static and trappings, of which there are just so many. And some quiet in which to reflect and think and find ourselves, away from the shopping channel. (Everything is the shopping channel.) A chance to look at it, instead of watching it, and to assimilate.

And that’s why I write poetry. And essays. And a blog.

Even my much-vaunted half a novel was half assemblage, scraps, un-permissioned quotes, pages and pages of them; it was simply not possible to do what I was trying to do as straight linear narrative. People keep telling me to have another go but I don’t know. This article is one of the first things I’ve ever read that comes close to describing why I feel so conflicted about novels. I do kind of miss them; recently I read The Thin Man and The Turn of the Screw…

Thank you Zadie and good night.

Oh, arf. I posted this as a draft, and scheduled it to publish today, last week – and then forgot all about it! Sorry fellas. Someone posted it up somewhere and I can now no longer even remember who, for which I am also sorry. Signs of strain, methinks. I had thought I’d have a week of peace before starting my new contract, but it was completely eaten by bureaucracy, worry and care, with the light relief of my first trip to the hairdressers in a long moon, so that I at least showed up at the place of employment looking like myself. But rather haggard with the effort of the preparations.

Unfortunately, the crazy Lemon Monkey night on Saturday, Magma launch on Monday night, insane levels of rushing around on Tues, sudden descent into 9-5, rush-hour tube, daily air-conditioning, sweaty-cold-sweaty-cold, teaching on Weds night, O&H proofs and attendant excitement & work, and the cold I’ve been fighting off for the past few weeks have all now rolled together into a ball – resulting in a truly nasty sore throat (the kind where you can’t swallow anything, & feel sick) and relapse into coughing uselessness, and – which you’ll have all noticed – a sad lack of care and attention to the Halls of Baroque. (The real actual Halls of Baroque are much the same right now, let me tell you.) So I’ve spent today – after a ten-hour sleep and a rummage that revealed a glorious cache of Vit Cs, echinacea and Nurofen – lying in bed listening to Melleas et Pelisande on Spotify, reading The Turn of the Screw, planning 2010’s Lemon Monkey readings, prepping Wednesday’s class, and looking for blog posts.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered I already had one! So tomorrow, when I hope my head will be clearer, I will essay upon Zadie Smith’s essay about essays.

Meanwhile, I do think this guy is great. Why not whistle a happy tune? Just not near me, my head is splitting.

(I wouldn’t even mind but I really had to go to the bank this morning…)

Here, apparently, is a real sentence from Sarah Palin’s book:

“As the soles of my shoes hit the soft ground, I pushed past the tall cottonwood trees in a euphoric cadence, and meandered through willow branches that the moose munched on.”

She’s certainly something, all right, but she’s no Donald Rumsfeld.

With thanks to wildlife scout Laura Orem.

Agh! Work, teaching, sleep. So here’s John Berryman for you. 1967. Stone cold sober. Many thanks to Michael Symmonds Roberts for bringing it to the Baroque attention.

Okay well it isn’t very poetic but your correspondent here has been very busy the past few days and will continue be so for the next few. Today I begin my new job, a new period of employment, muffled under the protection of an immense bureaucratic machine; the helicopter arrives in an hour. (Editing in: now half an hour.) I have had about four different kinds of paperwork to do in the past week; five if you count the entire day I spent researching a layer of bureaucracy I turned out not to need. The negotiations were hair-raising, nailbiting, touch-&-go. Truly, not having a job is much, much harder than having one. There was one day, in the period I had designated as “my remaining week off [sic]“, which I spent collating two big folders of documentation for this ‘n’ that, plus copies and signatures and other things to be sent elsewhere – I’m sure I’ve lost some of my bits & pieces over the past few months, you know. Proof of name etc. (That’s no joke; I’ve had a few in my time and even, for example, Customs and Excise has just weirdly reverted to a long-defunct one. Now, because their computer has done this, it is down to me to make them a written request in writing and find and envelope and a stamp and their address and my NI number, and ask them to change it back. Why could they not have just used the right one in the first place?)

In happier news, I’ve just sent in corrections on the proof of Oscar & Henry. The pamphlet will be out, as regular readers cannot have failed to notice, on January 14th. There are plans growing now for an Oscar Wilde evening at the Lemon Monkey Café in February – details in due course -  featuring drama, poetry, Ernest Dowson, Tim Turnbull as Oscar Wilde, and (I hope) some green carnations. I hope we’ll all be laughing through our tears… sugar cubes all round. Not sure if Lemon Monkey’s licence stretches to the green fairy liquid.

I’ve also been planning the reading series for the New Year – booking in everything, so it’s done – and it’s going to be cracking. Highlights so far include John Stammers (with his new book out in April), Heather Phillipson, and Matt Haydock, whose video I gave you just the other day. Plus our Oscar night. As it were. Yes, it’s going to be good. The readings are going to be every six weeks, as being more manageable for me and also, I feel, for the poetry-going public.

This past Saturday we had three marvellous readers (Henrietta Cullinan, Martina Evans and Patrick Brandon) and an atmosphere of almost crazed conviviality; then I read at the Magma magazine launch on Monday night. (They are wonderful people, and I’m very sorry to hear that David Boll is stepping down. But the Troubadour, I’ll come out and say it, is probably my least favourite venue ever. I just don’t care if Hendrix played there in the sixties. So what. Make it cheaper, easier to get to, and make the lights less obnoxious – my poor old glaucoma-riddled eyes can’t hack it.)

I’ve been reading scripts, planning poetry workshops, having lots of dreams, and gazing fondly at the Complete Letters of Wilde, which is very beautiful indeed in purple cloth but far too heavy to lift. I’m worried that Oscar doesn’t come over very well in the pamphlet. It’s true he was troublesome; and the pamphlet is hardly the final word. Last week I was having nightmares almost every night, though not about Wilde. Anxiety setting in. Time, time, time, is the refrain (the other one is bills, bills, bills, & there’s the rub), but paradoxically I think the more one does, the easier it is to do more; up to a point. I mean, sitting home looking for work and pitching for freelance jobs you never hear back about again just saps you. That is why I have suddenly found myself offering to write reviews again; and I’ll also be writing something short for Frances Leviston’s new website this month. Maybe there is actually ore poetry in running for a bus;. I tend to think so, though maybe not the 277 I broke my foot running for in 2001. (I never actually run for a bus these days, especially not with the ankle.)

Anyway. Should probably get up and get ready. There is clean washing, there is food, some of it already in tupperware containers. My phone is charged. I have shoes. There are invoices I should have written when I had the time. You know who you are.There are two people I needed to email but haven’t – apologies – though I did manage to email lots of people yesterday.  The plumber never made it so the sink is still blocked. I haven’t got my travelcard yet. But I have prepared my workshop for tonight, and now all I need to do is get access to a photocopier. It is four months since I last absolutely had to be anywhere before 11am.