Irrefutable evidence of advancing middle age. There's no way back from here.

I have just agreed (not for the first time) to do a large favour for, and thus place forever in my debt, a stunningly beautiful eighteen-year-old ex-model who is also the brightest teenager I've come across in at least ten years. Was there any kind of lecherous ulterior motive in this? I fear there was - I thought it might help me further my romantic interest in - her mother. Isn't that the saddest thing you ever heard?

A salutary lesson learned.
I am going to China for two weeks of total gonzo mayhem on Wednesday, and I needed to clear the decks on the w*rk front before going. I had about a month in which to do this, so you will not be surprised to hear that I left it until the very last moment - necessitating, in fact, taking home some of the clag over the weekend. And so I wrapped a wet towel soaked in chilli essence round my head, sat down, and did the bloody thing. And then the computer packed up on me, and I lost it all and had to do it again. So the crown of thorns was screwed a notch tighter, and I did it again. And I tried to save it, and all I found I'd saved was the previous version. So I'd written this mind-numbingly boring paper twice, and still had to go back and do it again today. The crowning glory was trying to e-mail it to myself at work, and it getting garbled into the sound-track of an Estonian porno movie.
Moral - never ever take work home, in fact never ever take work. It won't do.

Just acquainted myself with the work of a major modern poet, Attila the Stockbroker. This is a man who is older than me, (I know this because, although he would hate it to be mentioned in a public forum, I was at school with him, and it wasn't - ahem - a state school) and is still active as a Rant Poet. As he incessantly points out, being a poet is not about being accepted as a "proper" one - i.e. accepted by the cliques who run the magazines - but about actually making one's living as one. Whether one is seriously good or not will be decided by future generation. No-one has a clue whether any poet is any good for at least 50 years after his/her death. But you have to hand it to a guy who hasn't compromised anything (I once knew a poet who could command six-figure sales who said, in a strong Central European accent, "Maturity is just an excuse for all the rotten compromises people have made!"). A man like that is worth ten million boring compromised suits like me.

Gosh it's been a long time. But what would you? Finally won the battle to get my cosmic-angst medication changed, and have spent the last week coping with the transition. The other thing I've spent the last week doing is clearing the decks for the major China trip next week. This isn't a Jobbie trip - I accept all responsibility for it myself. It's an attempt to solve the problems of my love life the way Hong Kongers and Filipinos catch fish - by setting off dynamite in the rivers and lakes and seeing what the conflagration throws up.

Mind you, the organisation part is difficult. Partly because, despite all the previous rants against Jobbies, I happen to have fallen in love with a workaholic whose zeal would cause astonishment on the trading floor at Goldman Sachs. She is thus impossible to contact - during the day (and don't forget we're talking a 7-hour time difference) she's always in meetings. In evenings she's (occasionally) with her family, who mustn't know of my existence. Last time I managed to catch her between the rock and the hard place, i.e. in her car driving home, where she was happy to talk. But I wasn't. I am aware that the only flaw in her otherwise consummate perfection is that she is the worst driver since Karl Benz crawled from the primeval swamp, and if I'd been responsible for a major pile-up - no, it doesn't bear thinking about. I suppose I have the consolation of knowing my love is genuine - it isn't everyone who flies halfway round the world on Aeroflot just to attract the lady's attention....

"I am Misanthropos, that hateth Man". (Timon of Athens). Not me, actually - there are a few that I'd except from the general commination, but on the whole the human race is a bit of a dead loss. Not so much because of Original Sin - a cool concept, but one with which I have sympathy, as a sufferer myself - but because it paints itself into such awful corners, and then feels it has to defend them. A current pet hate is.....

JOBBIES!

Most of us, except the fortunate, have jobs of one sort or another. But what when the jobs have us?
People who can never meet you during the week, because of their jobs, and never in the evenings, because of either "work"-type socialising or being too tired because of their jobs, and whose weekends are entirely geared to recovering from Friday so as to get in shape for Monday. If you do by chance manage to make an appointment with them then something "jobby" will come up and they will cancel.
Now I'd be the first to sympathise if the big bad monster had really got them by the short'n'curlies. But that simply isn't the case these days. People who can read and write and know which way is up are in such short supply these days that we can almost all tell our jobs and bosses to piss up a rope with complete impunity. And we ought to be DAMN WELL DOING IT! I can see the point of putting up with all this crap if you're paid so hugely much that in a few years time you can tell the whole world to pedicate itself. Anyone paid less than £100,000 a year who is still in the office after 6 p.m. is either:
a) a total psychopath
b) a pathetic brown-noser
c) too thick to get their work done in 8 hours a day (I prefer 4 myself)
d) a poor sad git without a life.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrgggghh!

Not been around for a while. Sashaying round the exotic Orient enjoying the delicious fruits of delirious decadence? Dream on, and so will I. Working my wotsits off for the post-Osama capitalist renaissance? Sod that for a lark. Depressed as fifteen kinds of fornication? Well, yes, as a matter of fact.
Don't they have medication for that sort of thing? Yes, they do. Started on it five years ago. Recently they've produced studies saying the medication I'm on is addictive as hell, and I can endorse this from personal experience of the week when I ran out and was too wrecked to get any more. So I've been trying a) to cut it down and b) to get my consultant to change the treatment. The combination of a) being successful and b) not being, in that my consultant never fucking turns up for appointments, has led to Hyaaaarrrggghhh!!! This country doesn't sodding work. Nothing about it functions, from the trains to the roads to the postal service to the banks to the NHS etc. etc. Many people may think us unpleasant for totally destroying the internal infrastructure of Afghanistan, but at least we're not forcing anyone else to undergo anything we haven't undergone ourselves.

Still devastated by the effects of Sunday's outrage. It comes amiss to contradict one of my earlier posts, but my alcoholic carapace is not as impermeable as I had thought. Every Sunday evening some enlightened spirits among my friends have decreed a gathering in a Central London pub. This is a thoroughly civilised institution, not least for taking place on a Sunday. The horribly regimented lives most of us lead prescribe for us that we may get pissed on Fridays and Saturdays, but under no circumstances on Sundays - one ought to spend the whole day in sackcloth and ashes, bowing cravenly before the triumphant spirit-crushing idol Monday. Well, we've decided to tell Monday to Fuck Off. Unfortunately, I chose to preface my evening on the piss by insufficient eating and an eight-mile walk, in the interests of Getting Thin. This removed my immunity entirely, and I got grotesquely bladdered. Only too late did I realise what had made me so fat in the first place - the eating of vast quantities of food to enable me to drink without dying. Remove this precaution and.....The trouble with telling bullies to fuck off is that occasionally they'll turn round and paste you one. And Monday did just that.

What am I going to do about Anna from Uzbekistan? I’ve been flirting with her gently on the Internet for a while, and now she’s convinced she absolutely must marry me, that I must go to Tashkent to claim her immediately, and that I am the answer to all her problems. Stroll on. If I’m the answer it must be a bloody silly question. I suspect it’s “I wonder how things could possibly get worse than they are already?”

I heard my first WTC joke this morning. It wasn’t very funny, and it was in German and won’t translate, so I won’t repeat it. I was wondering how long it would be before the jokes started to emerge, and nineteen days is a long time (if one remembers how quickly the Challenger space shuttle disaster started generating them). I still expect the blockbuster disaster movie by 2004 at the very latest.

And yesterday I had my first Hungarian lesson. Like weird or what? None of the words look like anything you’ve ever seen before. I accused my teacher directly of making them all up. I assure you I won’t be blogging in Magyar any time soon (though Mandarin Chinese is a possibility when I’ve blagged some pirate software from Beijing). A viszontlátásra!

One of the difficulties in being a lefty is that one must try to combine a commitment to alleviating world poverty with anti-imperialism, and I’m not sure one can. Some cultures are simply better than others at making people better off. The two greatest poverty reduction programmes in history were the Roman and British Empires. To anyone (and I know there are many) who doubts the latter, and might claim that it’s impossible to make a direct comparison between places under British rule and precisely similar places which weren’t, as there are so many other factors involved, I have only three words to say: Hong F**king Kong.

(Mind you, it has to be said that Deng Xiaoping’s poverty reduction programme in China wasn’t bad either, though it has to be viewed largely as a pendant to his predecessor’s hugely successful poverty creation scheme.)

Back in the gym agane.
I suppose from time immemorial shower facilities at gyms and such places have been used to enable chaps to sneak a look at one another and unobtrusively to compare sizes. Most of the men who use my gym have much smaller ones than me, but there was a chap in there today and his was far bigger, an absolute stonker. Wow, was that a relief. And mine's definitely shrinking - day by day it gets perceptibly smaller. I can almost see my willy over the top of it now.

I see the Italian prime minister has got himself into trouble for talking about the superiority of Western civilisation. Obviously not a very clever thing to say at the moment. But there is an unconquerable niggle at the back of my mind which says that, appropriate or not, he’s telling the truth. There was a time when Islamic civilisation was ahead of ours on most counts, not least that of religious tolerance, but it was a long time ago. The uncomfortable fact is that for the last five hundred years Islamic countries have been hell-holes, and the more Islamic, the more hellish. That accounts both for the large-scale immigration from the Muslim ummah to the decadent Christian West, and for the envy and hatred that produced the 11 September spectacular. The world desperately needs a revival of Islamic civilisation, so that young Muslims who take their religion seriously have something better to look to than the loonies.

Have a new fave piece of music. Coincidentally it’s the same one I had when I was seventeen. It’s Mahler’s Lied von der Erde, and this and subsequent posts are likely to be written under its influence. A collection of six ancient Chinese poems translated into German and set for tenor and contralto, the stuff does your head in. I’m aware that a taste for Mahler is regarded as an adolescent taste, but what the hell, I’ve got a taste for adolescence too. Most of the poems are devoted to frustrated love and angst, but two are essentially pub rants about getting pissed – both factors which the 17-year-old self have in common with the middle-aged one…

There's no point in trying to describe music in words, but if there could be a musical depiction of being wildly and hopelessly in love, while at the same time looking unflinchingly straight down the barrel at all the ghastliness of life, this would be it. He is supposed to have been worried about releasing the last movement, on the grounds that listening to it would inspire people to suicide. It does nothing of the sort, but it does make you want to go right out and fall in love with the nearest tenor or contralto. (It so happens that contraltos are extremely good in bed. Don’t know about tenors.)