I was wined and dined last night (though mainly wined) and perhaps it was my finally-receding hangover that led me to think that venturing into Camden Town at 6pm on a Saturday evening would be a Good Idea. For some reason it reminded me of the fairground in Ribblesdale Baths carpark, though I think this is mainly because of the strong smell of cheap fast food and the fact that it was drizzling. Either way, I ended up seeking solace in Fopp, and then, inexplicably, buying a Nelly Furtado CD, and, worse, breaking my rule that I never spend more than £9.99 on a CD. (I spent £10, because Fopp doesn't piss about with its pricing.) I'm listening to it now, and thus ends my brief flirtation with almost-contemporary music. (It's worth pointing out that the only other thing I bought was Mojo, because it had a picture of Joe Strummer on the front.)

If any of you were disturbed by the whole Grace post, the last couple of weeks have rather straightened things out of the whole grace front. Having missed my train last Friday by only 2 minutes, just before every screen in Waterloo went blank, resulting in a rush of polite men in suits proclaiming "but I MUST get back to Esher!" I came back on Monday night to find Julia, the only neighbour who ever speaks to me, panicking over her leaking ceiling, which, having soaked through her bed, sofa and carpet, now seemed to be threatening to fall through altogether. The upshot was that, in order to solve the problem (or maybe redress the balance, so the rest of us knew what it felt like) I came home to find a huge hole in my bedroom wall, pieces of the plaster that used to fill it in my sock drawer and recycling bin (though none in the real bin), and evidence that whoever was responsible had helped themselves to tea and toast and finished our bog roll. The hole is still there.

In other news, the Sinner or a Winner guy has got an ASBO, and consequently is no longer hanging around Oxford Circus telling us in his sweetly deadpan manner that we're all going to hell. I am slightly miffed about this: the Home Office sees fit to let loose onto our streets a not insubstantial number of rapists, murderers and paedophiles, but hey, as long as they managed to silence the bastard who's exercising his right to freedom of speech, we're all happy, right? Even more annoyingly, they hanen't ASBOed the dickheads who are standing metres away from my office window dressed in unsettlingly bright colours (black will always be the new black, as far as I'm concerned) shrieking "Come to Debenhams!" into a megaphone and thrusting fliers into your face if you have the audacity to walk past them. Assuming these guys don't have a deep-seated faith in the power of retail therapy at middle-of-the-road department stores, I don't quite see how their right to piss me off overides his. At least the Sinner or a Winner guy (who I'm sure has a real name, though I'm not sure what it is) allowed you to ignore him if you wanted to. And most did, quite happily.

Is it me, or do all Nelly Furtado's songs sound the same?