Will I meet my Match?

I've finally subscribed to a month's worth of online dating courtesy of match.com. What a great time to take out a £25, month-long subscription when I'm going away for a week!

I've just emailed my first three girls. Feeling slightly seedy after looking at their profiles for the last few days wondering whether I should email them or not. Kind of like looking through their knicker-drawers! I'm very aware that I don't want to come across as desperate (me, desperate, no!).

I can't wait to get out dating again. I'm just not the kind of person who can go up to someone in a club, or a bar, and start chatting so I reckon this is a good way of getting round that initial meeting stage. It's a bad place to meet anyone in a club anyway. You just end up in bed with them and that just complicates matters in my experience.

4 days to go

I'm going in to hospital for some surgery in 4 days and I'm absolutely crapping myself.

I won't go into what it is. You don't want to know. –This has been my favourite phrase amongst not-so-close friends and colleagues for the last four months. And here it is again – just for you.

I'm terrified. I've had operations before and not been too worried. A weird one was having a screw taken out of my knee after having one put in after breaking my leg falling off a skateboard. I walked into hospital and came out on crutches. When I had the screw put in, as I was being wheeled to the operating theatre, high on temazepam, Grandad from 'Bread' came and said hello to me. He sang "Wish him luck as we wave him goodbye" to the ladies ward he was visiting as they wheeled me off.

Scared. Scared. Scared.

Winners don't use drugs

For some reason I've become Nancy-Reaganist in my attitude to drugs. The mention of cocaine drives me wild with outrage and hearing young adults talk about getting stoned makes me weep for civilisation.

My last girlfriend did cocaine occasionally. To be honest, you could tell. She was never short of compliments for herself. The night she went off with her friends and did cocaine I stayed at home with unsupressable jealousy, anger and bitterness.

A few years ago, when another girlfriend did a pill in a club, I stormed out, ten minutes after paying half of that months salary to get in.

What in the hell's wrong with me? I used to go out every weekend and do pills, speed, acid, smoke weed, sniff poppers, poke Vick's sticks under my eye-lids and smear tiger balm on my tongue. I went to a club in Stoke a week after a kid had died there of an overdose and nearly did the same myself. I had a part-time job in a warehouse that paid £40 a week and all of it, bar a nominal amount of rent paid to my Mum, went on drugs.

But now I just don't think it's right doing drugs.

I think it just reminds me of a time that I don't want to go back to. When I was going out doing drugs that was It. That was my life. College and my future didn't mean anything to me, I just wanted to get wrecked. Now I associate drugs with that aimless, pointless way of living. It's fun at the time but it's no real life and I don't want to go back there. I quite like having a point to each day thank you very much.

You soon find out that way of life is false when you stop doing drugs and suddenly lose half your friends.

Cheese/bread/marge ratio

This really disturbs me. Why is it that when I buy some bread I get back and find out I've run out of vegan cheese? Why, when I buy said vegan cheese, have I run out of vegan marge? And why, when I've bought the vegan marge, do I find that the bread has gone mouldy?

For me it's symbolic of the constant struggle that is my life. Like when I'm happy with a girlfriend I run out of work and therefore money. Then when the work comes in I get ill and can't do it. Then when I get better my girlfriend dumps me.

OK - maybe I'm over dramatising. But it would be nice to have a decent sandwich occasionally.

At last... a good film!

Watched Somersault last night and it's a great film. Just what I was in the mood for. A nice, slow, reflective, moody film. Beautifully filmed; characters who you can empathise with; good soundtrack. Great stuff.

I've seen so many duff, unsatisfying films lately. As previously mentioned on this blog, 'Milwaukee, Minnesota' is rubbish, but also 'Innocence' is a well made film but is so arty that I left just feeling really unsatisfied. Then 'Claire's Knee' is OK but nothing amazing - just a very typical French film about affairs and obsession (the common theme of French films!). Then some other foreign film which I can't even remember the name of: once again, OK but nothing to write a blog about. 'Last Days', a film based on Kurt Cobain's last days is OK, but there's very little dialogue apart from Kurt muttering and it's incredibly depressing.

So thank goodness for Somersault!

What the hell's wrong with me?

I can't stop thinking about the girl I split up with 3 months ago. I only went out with her for a couple of months. I knew that we weren't right for each other too. But, being a bloke, I only want what I can't have.

I'm such a sentimental fool. The slightest thing reminds me of her. I can't listen to the Kings of Convenience without thinking of her. I've banished myself from town on the weekend for the last 3 months for fear of bumping into her. I found one of her contact lenses down the side of my bed the other day and it just brought it all back and I felt gutted again. She really doesn't deserve to be thought about this much.

I get it with other exes too. Even words remind me of things. I had an ex who used the word 'investigate' a lot. I heard the word on a reggae song the other day and had a wave of sentimentality wash over me. 'Aaah," I thought as tears welled up in my eyes whilst sitting in my car with the stereo on. "Investigate".

I hate...

Miquita Oliver

She used to be a quite nice, b-list pop presenter; a calm antidote to Simon Amstel's annoying nerdishness. She's now got that coke-sniffer's cooler-than-thou, god-look-at-me-I'm-so-droll, sneering, lip-curling attitude common amongst Channel 4 presenters, Radio 1 journalists, Londoners and my ex-girlfriend when she got together with her friend from London who had just got a job as a Radio 1 journalist.

Incidentally I saw Simon Amstel at the Duke of Yorks cinema in Brighton at a film about gay Jewish weddings.

A heavy night's dreaming

Jet fighters flying down my street, my ex was pregnant, helicopters, dreams within a dream ('metadreams' as Jeff Noon called them in Vurt), a text from another ex but my phone wouldn't work when I tried to reply, getting intimate with an old housemate...

I was exhausted when I woke up and was still certain that everything I'd dreamt about was true.

Or maybe I haven't woken up...?

Hobnobbing with the stars

Remember Brookside? Remember Ron Dixon, the shop owner? Remember his wife, Didi Dixon? The actress who played her is sharing a studio space with me. She's no longer an actress and is a painter.

My dog, Juju, welcomed her to the studio by sniffing through all the bags of oil paint and brushes that she brought as she moved in today.

Me & Tel

I wrote a song a while ago. It was meant to be a kind of country and western stomping kind of song. I thought it was OK.

I just put on Terry Callier's 'Acoustic Soul' and realised that I've totally ripped his tune off! It's so annoying when that happens. I just can't write an original song. I've even borrowed the song's subject matter.

It's amazing how you can have all these tunes in your head without even realising it. I wonder how many songs are stored in my head. I downloaded a load of TV theme tunes from TVCream recently and was amazed to recognise all these tunes that I hadn't heard since I was a nipper.