An evening of Soho-ness, playing the layabout pauper wined and dined by the successful and kind. Call round artist Sebastian Horsley’s place, with his cabinet of human skulls, photos of his own crucifixion, and clippings from the times he’s been on the front of the News Of The World. He’s a fellow Quentin Crisp fan, charming and friendly, which is the way it should be for someone who gets complaints when he’s appeared in the national media. Offend the masses, befriend the individuals. The opposite to left-wing newspaper editors, who like humanity but dislike people.

He takes me off to tea at Maison Bertaux, next to the Coach and Horses, which is filled with Japanese girls for some reason. Then onto the members-only Colony Rooms, finally completing the quartet of legendary Soho Boho drinking holes I’ve read about for so long. Groucho Club, French House, Coach and Horses – I’ve visited them all several times by now. But not the Colony till today. Up the famous green stairs to the tiny bar room. Homely and cosy. No Muriel Belcher anymore (as played by Tilda Swinton in the Francis Bacon biopic Love Is The Devil), but she’s alive in umpteen clippings on the wall.

‘See if you spot my own two artworks,’ says Mr H.

I spy the photo of his ‘crucified’ hand. The other is a Bacon-esque dark painting. We stop for a drink and raise a toast to carrying the torch. Chat to his friend Carla, who’s off to see Richard Ashcroft play in Camden tonight. Throughout his career with and without The Verve, Mr Ashcroft has been given so many second chances by the UK music industry – far more than other artists of varying form. O ‘Lucky Man’ indeed. Down one glass of red wine. All the Colony Room glasses have stencilled slogans provided by an artist whose name escapes me: ‘Thief’ , ‘C**ty’ (the Muriel Belcher catchphrase), ‘Robocock’.

On my glass it says, ‘Wanker’.

Spot a row of DVD sleeves wall-mounted above the doorway of the club as we leave. I wonder why they’re there. One of them is the cover of ‘Mysterious Skin’, far and away my favourite film of the last few years. I touch it on my way out. For luck, for respect, for thanks.

Onto the Marlborough Gallery for the private view of the new Maggi Hambling exhibition: portraits and sea paintings. Mr Horsley is one of the worm-faced subjects on display here, and his portrait is sold for what he says is several hundred times more expensive than the real Sebastian Horsley, a former escort. Guzzle a glass of champagne.

Thence to the Sartoria restaurant for dinner. I wasn’t invited, but Ms Hambling thinks I’m beautiful enough to be squeezed in. Among our party is George Melly, who gives us a speech and a rude song. Ms Hambling is a fantastic host, pure Bohemian Soho, full of naughty gossip about famous names, and tales of Hadleigh, Suffolk, where she comes from, close to where I myself grew up. In fact, my father once taught art to her father, at a local evening class.

Chat to Ms Jane Joseph, who was at art school in the 60s with Ms Hambling, Ms Mary Miller, and Ms Libby Hall. The latter’s card describes her as a collector of dog photographs pre-1940. Eat a three course dinner, including duck and sea bream. Down many glasses of red wine. Am greeted by Rhodri M’s girlfriend Jenny, at a wine-tasting in the same restaurant. Kiss Ms Hambling and Mr Melly goodnight. I forgot to mention to Ms H that I once posed on her Oscar Wilde bench sculpture for a photo.

I feel very obliged to the lot of them, and must pay them back somehow. Like Mr Ashcroft, I feel a lucky man given umpteen second chances.

How Language Works, Part 379: Political Sex ‘Scandals’ in the 21st Century.

In today’s news, married Lib-Dem MP Mark Outen stands down from the party leadership contest and front bench after the News Of The World reveals a rent boy affair. He describes the 6 month tryst as ‘an error of judgement’. His words, his life and career, but not his phrase.

What an incredible modern phrase that is, up there in the Official Statement-Speak chart with the more cowardly ‘inappropriate’. I’ve seen the latter used to describe everything from a leaked email comment to the ejection of an old man from a Labour conference, to the shooting of an innocent man at a tube station. Except with the poor Brazilian gentleman, that really was an error of judgement; he was judged guilty – Dredd-like – by the police and shot dead on the spot. He was innocent. They made an error of judgement, and then an rather more irreversible error of punishment.

Yet it’s the shooting that gets officially filed as ‘inappropriate’. An ‘error of judgement’, on the other hand, is now used when officials get caught doing something they shouldn’t. Painting over The Deliberate with a thin veneer of The Accidental.

Civilians commit ‘crimes’. Politicians, civil servants and police make ‘errors’.

‘Officer, my bag’s been stolen!’
‘I’ll stop you there. You mean, your bag has been the victim of an error of judgement.’

It’s as if Mr Outen accidentally went online to the escort website, ‘accidentally’ visited the trick’s place, accidentally paid him, then accidentally kept repeating it all for months on end.

My own sordid confession is that today I bought the News Of The World in order to read the piece. I feel very disgusted with myself for doing so. To excuse myself, I have to draw upon that third euphemism for getting caught. It was in the spirit of ‘research’.

Such a sense of deja vu with the Oaten story. There’s even a MP character in the third series of Little Britain, forever apologising in unconvincing descriptions to the press about his ‘accidental’ cottaging exploits, wife and family at his side. O, for one politician to break the cycle for once. I wish Mr Oaten could have made his statement along the lines of:

‘Yes, so I spent six months having threesomes with young men dressed in football strips. So what? You’ve got to have a hobby.’

He’d get my vote if he did.

Mr Clinton proved that a private life should really be nothing to do with being fit to govern. If anything, people liked him more for being alive from the waist down.

In fact, even though this story leads the BBC News, it only makes Page Eight of the actual NOTW. Page One features the England football team manager’s corruption allegations. Oh, and a free DVD of ‘Highlander’.

So even the News Of The World readers don’t really care that much about the lives of politicians. At least, not as much as football and free DVDs.

In Britain, the idea that politicians must be dull, frigid husks in order to govern persists. To run the lives of the nation, your own life has to be lifeless. Charles Kennedy’s drinking made him interesting for the first time in his life, yet he had to go.

Seeing George Galloway mewing like a cat (in a rather kinky, sex worker client way) on Big Brother could possibly change things. Mr Galloway, I strongly suspect, won’t describe his BB antics as an ‘error of judgement’, even though his Commons colleagues want him to. On the contrary, I think he’ll cite them as evidence of being alive and trying to enjoy himself.

Mr Oaten, however, is happy to be eclipsed by this story, as just another ‘3 IN A BED SHAME’ scandal, another Little Britain stereotype. I have more sympathy for him than for the rent boy, who clearly sold his story, or for the dreaded News Of The World itself, which exists purely to damage lives and uphold this out-of-date, prurient-yet-prudish, curtain-twitching side of the country’s political and sexual psyche. More interested in DVDs and Football Men than politicians, then chastising an MP for liking Football Men A Little Too Much.

The newspaper is as much a hypocrite as the MP. From the article:

‘The naked MP then got the rent boys to humiliate him with a bizarre sex act too revolting to describe.’

As I read this sentence, I’m instantly separated from the target audience of the newspaper, as is anyone with an IQ over 10.

The News of the World is only the news of A world, not THE world.

The language they use, and the language Mr O uses in return, are the real things to be shameful about.

Thoughts after seeing Match Point, the new Woody Allen movie.

Clunky dialogue, wooden acting, touristy London references. I wince at the Banksy graffiti, now as much a coffee table London cliche as Big Ben. Indeed, there’s ads on the tube for coffee table books in the January sales, and Banksy’s book is included. Very Basquiat, I suppose: the rebel beloved by the establishment. Jeffrey Archer having the UK’s biggest Warhol collection.

As seen in Enduring Love previously, the Tate Modern is the new double-decker bus. Puts me off going to that place ever again, really.

Scarlett J manages to be an asexual fat-lipped brat, a shame given her character is meant to be fantastically irresistible. Jonathan Rhys-M is too Malcom McDowell / Tom Ripley-esque and effete (at least here) to be a convincing heterosexual- he has more onscreen sexual chemistry in his scenes with Matthew Goode, the family’s son. I was watching a different movie in my head.

Various names from the Brit comedy and acting worlds are wheeled on and off. Mark Gatiss is a ping-pong player with no lines (!), while Steve Pemberton is a bland police officer with about three lines. Paul Kaye is a cliched cockney estate agent. When you’ve got versatile comedy actors at your disposal, what on EARTH is the point in wasting them? Ye gods. I’d kill for the chance to write scenes for them myself.

The movie picks up when murderous intentions are introduced, but this should have been foreshadowed from the off. It’s a thriller that only realises it’s a thriller in the last 30 minutes, as if out of desperation. ‘This drama really isn’t going anywhere… Oh, let’s make it a thriller instead.’

It staggers me how a whole movie can be allowed to be this bad, given the huge amounts of money, time and personnel involved. Someone should have gone up to Woody Allen and said, very gently and very nicely, ‘This isn’t working. You’re surrounded by fantastically talented people who know what a great script is. Ask them to re-write it with you. Ask anyone to re-write it with you.’

Mr Allen famously never re-watches his own films after completing them. He really, really should start doing so. How can the director of Match Point be the same man who made Manhattan and Annie Hall?

Okay, so what would I do with the script? Well, I’d enhance the Patricia Highsmith thriller elements, getting them in place from the start. Use the homoerotic chemistry between JRM and Mr Goode – think Hitchcock’s Rope. Put in some lines about how crowded and overrated the Tate bloody Modern is. Put some dark jokes in. Give Ms Johannsen a decent character – girlish, awkward and endearingly sulky rather than sophisticated-young-womanly. She still looks a teenager, for goodness’s sake.

There’s a great film here, but it’s not the one that’s been made.

Match Point is what happens when the entire UK film scene is too polite to tell Woody Allen that he’s wrong. Which says more about the English than anything in the script.

To the ‘Public Disordar’ club night at Camden’s Black Cap, for a Burns Night.

Celebrating Pete Burns of Dead Or Alive, of course. Currently in the Big Brother house; an absolute tonic. Some people have gotten in a huff about his fur coat, and the police were even called in to check the coat wasn’t a former member of an endangered species. Given the alarming reports of stabbings in London, I’d rather the police concentrated on protecting endangered human beings.

Meet up with Marc Massive Ego, whose club it is:

To the Camden Head for Martin White at Short Fuse. MW excellent: his song The Excitement Is Over At Last is a catty Sondheim-esque gem, along the lines of Could I Leave You from Follies.

Chat to Rob S and Lou FK, charming company as ever. Get a little drunk and silly with it, though more harmlessly (I hope) than the tedious heckler who was a pain in Simon Munnery’s set. Enjoy the ultra-skinny host, Nathan P, who’s sorted out his hair and trousers since I last saw him; from scruffy poetry geek to slick and sexy Franz Ferdinand-type. Also on the bill are a brilliant young comedy-magician duo called Barry and Stuart. The tall Welsh one who does most of the talking looks, again, like he’s in some sexy rock band.

I’m noticing this a lot lately. Not that I’m enjoying ogling sexy young men any more than usual (though I have been pretty lonely of late), but that people working in non musical mediums often seem like they’d rather be playing guitar in the Kaiser Chiefs if they had the choice. Possibly a grass-always-greener sensation. Novelists, artists, film directors, actors, all seem to be musicians manque. One artist told me he’d give his paintings up if he could change places with a member of a big rock band.

Book Publisher: You look like you should be in a band. There’s more fun and money being in a band, you know.

DE: (sigh)

People who look and dress like they’re in trendy indie bands, or wish they were in bands:
Cillian Murphy, rising Irish actor
David Tennant as the new Doctor Who
Russell Brand, comedian / TV host
Noel Fielding, comedian (The Mighty Boosh)
David Cameron, new Tory leader – Smiths fan, incredibly.
Tony Blair – failed prog rock musician
Jonathan Caouette, director of Tarnation – would be busking in NYC if he knew how to play (never stopped many)
Scott Heim, author of Mysterious Skin – failed rock drummer.
Daniel Handler – bestselling author of Lemony Snicket books – accordionist
Conan O’Brien, US chat show host – drummer who once lent his kit to Galaxie 500

The list of comedians who appear to want to be in bands is particularly extensive. I’m reminded of Bill Hicks’s pointless musical interludes.

A male thing, perhaps? Then I think of Smack The Pony’s baffling musical sequences.

Film directors, actors and comedians envy musicians.

Musicians envy directors, actors and comedians for appealing to more people across the board, and having a longer-lasting career.

Musicians are at best a soundtrack to something else – a film, a story, a commercial for furniture (Suede’s She’s In Fashion on the recent MFI adverts – the ultimate resting place for bands?)

Storytellers wish they were musicians.

DJs are the saddest people alive.

I need to work out what the hell I’m meant to be doing with my life. I am 34.

Recently: to the top of 30 St Mary Axe, the London tower block better known as The Gherkin. As featured in the new Woody Allen film Match Point, the recent Doctor Who Christmas special (where its windows were blown out by aliens), and voted the Most Admired New Building in the World by a major firm of architects.

I am delighted to discover that the floor at the very top of the building is a VIP bar of sorts. The building comprises private offices, mostly for the Swiss Re company. The bar is staff and friends only. So to gain access to the top of this skyline landmark, you need to either work for Swiss Re, or know someone who does. So, via the kindness of my mother’s hairdresser’s daughter’s fiancee, my father and I paid a visit.

Best of all – there’s a dress code. ‘Strictly no jeans or trainers’. I’m in heaven, in every sense.

Acutally, I wonder if the real Heaven has a dress code. St Peter at the gates – “You’re not getting in looking like that. This is the Afterlife! You could have made an effort…”

The Bar itself:

Looking across to the NatWest Tower, or Tower 42 as it’s now known,and to Tower Bridge:

DE looking down on the world as usual:

To the 12 Bar Club for a wonderful concert: John Howard and Pete Aves playing a joint gig. Mr Howard is promoting his new album As I Was Saying, which I reviewed in Plan B declaring it my favourite album of 2005. I didn’t realise it wasn’t released until early 2006, but I suppose that makes me like all those proper UK film critics who nominated Brokeback Mountain in their end-of-year best-of lists, even though the movie was only released to real people last week. Those best-of-year polls are highly suspect, anyway. Non-blockbuster movies often do the festival rounds a full year before proper release, in order to garner the best possible ‘opening weekend’, poster quotes and national distribution.

My favourites of 2005, by the way, are:

FILMS:
1. Mysterious Skin
2. Tarnation
3. Palindromes

ALBUMS:
1. John Howard – As I Was Saying
2. Final Fantasy – Has A Good Home
3. Robin Guthrie and Harold Budd – Mysterious Skin: Original Soundtrack
4. Gentleman Reg – Darby & Joan

BOOKS:
1. Alan Bennett – Writing Home
2. Guillaume Lecasble – Lobster
3. Nina Antonia – Prettiest Star

I genuinely can’t think of anything else I really, really enjoyed as opposed to quite liked. That’s a pretty poor showing. Clearly I need to read, watch and listen to more new releases. Thing is, it’s just been obscure Victorian novels and Nico solo albums round these parts lately. Oh, and the new Best Of El Records compilation. ‘I Bloodbrother Be’ is still one of the most remarkable songs ever recorded. Having that next to classics by the Monochrome Set, Would-Be-Goods and Vic Godard’s sublime Nice On The Ice makes this CD essential to any discerning soul:

Back to John Howard. ‘As I Was Saying’ is his first new album in thirty years. In the productivity stakes, this makes Ms Kate Bush look like Terry Pratchett. Not entirely Mr Howard’s fault: he recorded albums, but either the labels involved declined to put them out or some other obstacles reared their unkind heads, and he understandably turned his energies to other pursuits. Mr Howard’s last proper solo release was his 1975 debut, Kid In A Big World, a treasure of early Elton John and Bowiesque cinematic melodies with arguably the greatest album sleeve ever forged:

Although commercially unsuccessful, the album became cited as a Lost Classic by those who write books about such things, and its CD release on RPM a couple of years ago generated new interest, not least aided by reviews in magazines like Uncut (proving their worth for once – there IS life beyond writing about Mr Springsteen every single month). So Mr Howard finally returned to the studio knowing that there were people out there who cared after all. The sleeve of As I Was Saying is particularly poignant: the fiftysomething Howard clutching a vinyl copy of Kid In A Big World:

At the 12 Bar, he performs most of the new LP beautifully, along with debut single Goodbye Suzie from the first album, and ends the night on a fantastic rendering of Mr Bowie’s Bewley Brothers – arguably superior to the original. It’s clear that this one Bowie song in particular has informed much of Mr Howard’s style, mixed in with vaudeville, Sondheim and Randy Newman. I can’t recommend the new album highly enough.

For this gig, he’s backed by fellow Cherry Red singer-songwriter Pete Aves, and they perform two sets comprising songs by both artists. Mr A’s pregnant-with-twins partner Sarah accompanies the two gentlemen on bass, guitar and keyboards, somehow managing to fit all these instruments plus amps plus her enhanced physical form into a corner of the 12 Bar’s famously tiny stage.

Mr Aves: You realise we’ve given a pregnant woman the most work to do onstage?
Mr Howard: It’s because we’re misogynist bastards, darling…

The last small gig I attended (aside from my own) was Sing-Sing at the Water Rats, where singer Lisa was equally encumbered with child. As these things usually come in threes, I suppose this means there’ll be a pregnant person onstage at my next scheduled gig. Which is Martin White at Short Fuse. Now, I know Mr White is multi-talented and artistically prolific, but I sincerely hope he draws the line at physically giving birth.

A car alarm chirps in Southwood Avenue. On for two seconds, off for two seconds, on for two seconds, and so on. Intermittent electric birdsong. It’s the middle of the afternoon, the car owner presumably at work. It drives me mad. I leave the house and go shopping.

Two hours later, it’s still chirping away.

Quite why car alarms that don’t shut off automatically after a minute are allowed to exist, I wish I knew.

It chirps on. I feel under seige.

Reading the news about our Opus Dei Education Minister and the storm over allowing sex offenders to teach, I am far more shocked to find a photo of Ms Kelly where she rather resembles me:

Apologies for the diary’s RSS feed going haywire in the last 12 hours. I’ve been renaming the URLS of individual diary entries with something called ‘Permalinks’, for the sake of Google. Clearly that’s the cause of the RSS efflux. It shouldn’t happen again.

Finally emerge from an extended spiral of bed-centred fluey gloom, convince friends and family that I’m more or less okay, and face the world once more. Onwards and upwards.

Today – polish off a live review of the womanly dream-pop duo Sing-Sing for Plan B Magazine. I muse on how guitarist & songwriter Emma Anderson looks exactly the same as she did when I saw her play Norwich Arts Club in 1990, then in her former band Lush. Sing-Sing are far more musically multi-dimensional and far less at the mercy of Faustian music scenes than Lush were, though I fear the latter matters more in the UK success scheme of things, as ever, but I’m happy to be proved wrong. The new album, ‘Sing-Sing & I’ is classy and contagious, the CD featuring a curious animated video about a transvestite courting a male mannequin.

To the Horse Hospital for the latest Dedalus Books event. It’s a showing of a new 25 minute black& white silent film, “Prayer-Cushions Of The Flesh: An Irrational Erotic Fantasy”, starring dapper pencil-moustached London club host David Piper and chanteuse Anne Pigalle. Adapted from a Dedalus novel by Robert Irwin, all manner of surreal and naughty things go on in a harem, including puppet giraffes, zips on mouths, stop-frame animation, fetish wear, tattooed nudity and more, though it’s more funny and sinister than actually explicit. Good value for the duration. Kenneth Anger would approve. The showing goes down well, and DVD copies are snapped up.

The event is also to launch Phil Baker’s ‘Dedalus Book Of Absinthe – Premium Edition’, and appropriately enough there’s free green stuff on hand. A chapter toward the back of the book carefully grades all the various available brands of absinthe, and gives the highest mark jointly to Mari Mayans (Spanish) and La Feé Parisian (French). The latter is served at this event.

I hadn’t realised that the whole business of setting a spoonful of sugar soaked in absinthe alight (without setting the whole glass alight) is specifically for a 1920s Prague recipe, known as ‘Bohemian Absinth’ (note Czech spelling, with ‘Bohemia’ referring to the actual place). The more traditional nineteenth-century Parisian drink is rather more sedately prepared with a slotted spoon, a sugar lump, and chilled water. I’m pleased about this; knowing my inner slapstick child, I’ve always steered clear of any drink that involves playing with matches. So Parisian Absinthe it is.