Your eyelids are growing heavy...can you hear me? Hello?

God save us, I'm tired.  Not a major revelation, I grant you, but this time is different.  I'm really frazzled.  It's an odd conflation of circumstances that's brought this about.  I'm sleeping plenty, but the sleep is very frivolous in nature.  Well, that's my assumption anyways.  I think I'm right in saying that REM sleep is the fella that Mr Brain needs for refreshment.  I've not been getting enough (or any) of that.

I've no real idea why this is.  Diet?  That hasn't changed.  Age?  Hmm...I am a little older than I was, say, 14 months ago.  Whatever it is, shallow sleep is a callous bedfellow; it lulls you into thinking you're going to have a blinding day: in tray decimated, colleagues lost in admiration etc., when in fact you'll spend the waking hours rubbing your eyes with the backs of your clenched fists and trembling.

My boss returned from his summer hols yesterday.  He must have been on the lash like Caligula during it too because he currently on one of this God-forgive-me purgative diets.  No caffeine, no booze - just tofu and crab apples or something.  People amaze me in their mediaeval credulity in these matters.  How the phuck is that regime supposed to do one any long term good?  You can't possibly keep it up, so what the goal of the process?  At the end of it your spirit will have been crushed and it's straight back on the Sambuca and Wagon Wheels.  

I'm quite thin, so people occasionally ask me what the secret is.  My answer is always the same: keep a food diary.  Take a look over it after a month or so.  There'll be some disgusting little habit in there that's causing the damage.  Make a small change to correct this.  If you're eating five choccy biscuits with your morning coffee, have two.  Then give yourself months for this little change to take effect, which it will.  Don't go mental and give up chocolate all together.  This is kind of stunt my sister used to pull and it always fails, unless you're David Blaine.  Which she assuredly isn't.

Death in the afternoon

I had one of those disconcerting and bewildering experiences last night.  I awoke in the small hours and trotted off to the bog for a whizz.  One does this on auto-pilot of course - not quite sleeping, not quite awake, but in that marshmallowy hinterland between the real and the imagined.  I have the radio going all night as a matter of course, and just as I resumed my station in the nuptial bed the news broke that Robin Williams had been found dead.

My head started whirling as I tried to process the information.  Luckily, I quickly fell asleep again, and this morning couldn't be sure if it were true.  It was of course.  Shock.  I didn't care for Robin Williams' films for the most part.  The World According to Garp was wonderful, but other than that, I thought they were ill-disciplined star-vehicles.  However, that is not to detract from Williams' talent.  I loved Mork & Mindy when I was a child, absolutely loved it.  He spoke to me via that character in a very direct and fundamental way - in a way that I hadn't fully appreciated until I heard of his death.  What an extraordinary life that is, to be able to move millions of impressionable minds in the that benign and joyful way.

It's particularly painful to reflect then that this man, whose work spread such happiness, was himself deeply unhappy.  He must have been in an extraordinary amount of pain to act as he did.  Goodbye, Robin.  And thank-you.

Treble-Digit Co-efficient of Arse

Mrs O and I ended-up in Hackney Wick yesterday afternoon.  For those of you who aren't au fait with the east of the capital (of England), I ought to contextualise HW somewhat.  The London 2012 Olympic site sits in a huge swathe of river valley in London's east end.  Previously this site was home to a lot of down-at-heel industrial businesses.  But during the 70s and 80s the businesses either went jugs up or relocated outside London, so the area fell into serious disrepair.  

The residential areas that abutted this wasteland were, unsurprisingly, fairly shitty in their own right, thanks to their proximity to this eyesore.  Stratford, Bow, south Leyton - none of them would set the pulse racing, unless it was from fear of molestation from n'er-do-wells.  Hackney Wick sits to to the south east of the Olympic site, and is an odd place because it's always been rather beloved by the tattooed-graduate-set, who make a bee-line for London as soon as Durham University confers a degree on them.  This is probably due to its name.  It may have Hackney in the title, but Hackney it ain't.

So while the rest of this shabby cohort of districts have tidied themselves up, courtesy of the Olympic money and the need to persuade the rest of the country that they're no longer effectively open prisons, Hackney Wick has rested on its laurels rather.  And who can blame it?  The graduates still come.

To my cock-er-knee eye, however, it's an absolute shithole, HW.  It's looks appalling.  It's like being in an episode of The Sweeney, one of bleaker, nihilistic ones too.  Shirley to goodness Britain's young things will cop on to themselves soon and relocate to nearby Stratford instead?  I suppose, however, that would require them getting some self-awareness and then getting their thumbs out of their derrieres, and that's no going to happen.

Briton's got talent

I've been having something of crisis of confidence as regards my musical abilities since I returned from the Cambridge Folk Festival earlier in the week.  The problem is I come away infused with resolve to master my instrument, the guitar.  However, as soon as I get one in the hands, the vide between my desires and my abilities opens up to remind me I'm not going to be the new Richard Thompson any time soon.

Don't get me wrong: I am a decent musician, just not a great one.  And that hurts when you esteem music and musicianship as much as I do.  I'm like Salieri, me.  Tosser.

I can't believe it's not clutter

Mrs O and I are having a bit of a furniture realignment chez nous.  These things, as they are wont to, evolve organically.  Firstly, I decided to build a new bookshelf from planks of mdf and bricks.  I know it's a student cliché, but it's miles cheaper than buying a decent bookshelf and it looks da biznizz.  Once I'd done this, she suggested I might like to move our desk into the alcove behind the telly in the other corner of the room.  This meant dismantling another bookshelf and moving that.  This I did last night.  We'll give it a couple of days to bed in.  It's a little difficult to judge the aesthetic impact of the change just yet because the front room is covered in, as yet, unused house bricks and planks.  I'll take a position on the matter over the weekend.

The one unhelpful conclusion I was able to draw from the week's manoeuvres was that we have way too much stuff, just oceans and oceans of sheight.  I have something of a hoarding gene.  Luckily I noticed this as a boy and, not wishing to turn into a bearded friendless nutter in later life, I determined to keep it in check.  Generally, I do a good job of this, but it's always helpful to have a quick stocktake every few years.  Mrs O isn't very zen when it comes to chucking away old newspapers and wrapping paper either, so we're an incendiary combination.  I told her in no uncertain terms last evening, we have to jettison some ballast or we're not going to cut in polite society much longer.

We live, just the two of us, in a reasonably large house.  And that's part of the problem.  It's the first house we've owned after five years of flat dwelling.  Living in a flat concentrates the mind.  No garden, no shed, no cellar, no loft - either you're in charge or your belongings are.  When we moved to a slightly smaller flat about four years ago, we gave 13 stuffed carrier bags full of books to the local Oxfam.  But books are still the main problem.  They're everywhere at home: on work surfaces, all over the floor, in the two toilets, on the hob, the sofa, the telly, you name it.  If we had a dog, he'd be covered in books, the poor blighter.  But not having books all over the house is a symbol of twattery, and I'm loathe to be accused of that.

I'll have to throw away the sofa instead.  Squatting supposed to be very good for one anyway.  Could someone tell the wife?

Silly Season

There was almost literally nothing to watch or listen to in England last evening.  Radio 4 had a gob on and broadcast back-to-back bleak documentaries.  They kicked-off with some wretched paean to business, presented by former CBI chief Digby Jones.  This scintillating hour consisted of the Digster gadding about the Black Country (on expenses one supposes) , talking to self-important Tory-voting yammies about why business is a force for good on Earth and not simply a necessary evil, which is what most of us, rightly, believe.  People who take extreme positions on business, or the market, or whatever are collosal arseholes, and need to be shunned by polite society.  They, both left and right, should be sent to Rockall to establish who's right once and for all.  That should lighten the load for the rest of us.

After this, they broadcast a white-knuckle piece of reportage that set out to convince me I was probably suffering from an overabundance of iron in the system, and/or paranoid schizophrenia.  I'm actually only mildly neurotic.  This manifests itself in a minor case OCD that only rears its nut when I'm  washing-up.  I'm quite slovenly by nature in most matters, but when it comes to cleaning crockery and the like, I go mental, like an impoverished cockney Howard Hughes.

Beeb, see me.  Must do better.

Joyous fatigue

I've just returned from the Cambridge Folk Festival.  It's always an absolute pleasure, this event.  The music is gerr-ate of course, but it's the ancillary things that really make this festival stand out.  The people one meets are just lovely - right-thinking, friendly and driven by the desire to be and to do good.  I always leave the place with my faith in humanity restored.  That's probably more important to me than the quality of the music available.

Having said that, the music is always brilliant.  It's so good in fact that I always come away with feelings of colossal inadequacy.  There is so much raw talent in folk.  Even the foothills of success are awash with young players who just leave you for dead.  It really takes something to make a mark in this world.  It's a testament to the love and passion that these players possess for the form that they continue to play folk when any one of them could wander into a pop band and realise a professional career with no problems at all.

My hat is off.