Bloggin' the Blog

So what do bloggers do when the danger recedes? Where's the event glamour, the sense of nations' destinies in flux, when all you have for material is the dullard jumble of everyday life? Last Thursday night, after the second wave of bombs, I was up till all hours posting about my own panic and mass panic, and drawing sweeping conclusions about the nature of terror and bravado. I said a lot of things which were shrill and adolescent, but I was writing from a place which was equally shrill and adolescent; when I finished, I felt that, if nothing else, I'd captured my mood at a really strange moment. Now I've got nothing but my own weekend to blog, and I'm finding it a real chore to tart it up for you. I know it's got to happen to everyone eventually; at some stage even Salam Pax will have to blog about the day the plumbers came. Still, you'd think I'd have spent Sunday doing something more relevant. I live in a city which, while no longer traumatised in the strictest sense of the word, could still do with a good backrub now and then. I could have spent the day hearing claim and counterclaim at Speaker's Corner, or walked to a cafe on the Edgeware Road and documented the growing tension and unease. Instead I sat at home and listened to the rain. It was steady, heavy morning rain, like you get in Limerick and movies from Korea. As you listen, you want to put on a folky album as a kind of deft counterpoint, a bit of Sufjan Stevens or Nick Drake. The guy in the flat upstairs beats me to the draw though, and throws on the only album he seems to own, a mid-90s mix of dancefloor chart hits, which, when you can hear nothing but the bassline, actually sounds like a robot baby learning to walk above your head. It starts off steadfast and robust, growing faster and less stable as the breakdown approaches, and then- just when it's at its quickest- there's a resonant bang, a sudden silence, and rising out of it, a querulous, electronic wail. This is the end of the line, you think. Its back in the pram for Roboboy. But soon enough the plucky little fellow gets back on his feet, and here he comes again, stomping away, as bold as ever. Yes, this is how I spent Sunday; listening to my neighbour's awful music, and anthromorphising it. For the record, I think the song in question was "Tocca's Miracle".

Lately I've received a huge amount of unwelcome junk mail about the movie The Wedding Crashers, and I still can't decide if this is the dumbest or most astute marketing tactic in history. I spent Saturday gatecrashing a barbecue on Saturday with my mate Seb, and just to say: it's not as much fun as the flyers make out. To be fair, it was mostly our own fault. We hadn't got the double act dynamics sorted out. Neither of us wanted to be the neurotic ball of energy; both of us were angling for the role of chilled out ladies' man. (From a quick look at the trailer, I guess the film may be facing a similar problem.) Plus, we forgot the golden rule of gatecrashing: you must have an agenda. Crashing itself is only establishing a platform; the real hard work is seizing the party and bringing it where it wants to go. Most parties are pretty willing to be crashed; at base, they are nothing more than the workplace in shorter sleeves, and any added value will either come very slowly from the wine rack or very quickly from the loon in the deerstalker who just fell in the door. And as Seb and I discovered, there's nothing less forgiveable than a gatecrasher who just wants to fit in. For our trouble, we ended up crammed in the corner with the only other stranger there, a guy from the army who spends his time flying helicopters around Iraq. On the face of it, he should have been a solid gold gatecrasher. He had an unusual (and uncheckable) backstory, a plentiful supply of booze, and some strange "back in the Falkands" anecdotes. Plus, he'd brought sausages. If he'd brought the helicopter instead, we could actually have a movie here...