This particular TC editorial comes under the category of ‘cathartic’ — as can probably be told from the fact that, for the first time ever, the heading is exactly as written on the title page. Combine this fact with the significant beer intake this evening, and you know that you are heading for a full-scale JhM rant. But at least the caption should trigger a few misdirected hits from the dumber members of the Internet community, seeking undressed postwomen…

I got a card through the door from Parcelforce the other day. Y’know, one of those “we tried to deliver a parcel but you weren’t in” ones. In this case, with some Ł37 excess to pay on it — which gave me a damn good idea of what it actually was, HK laserdiscs. Though, as yet, I still don’t know. This is because trying to speak to Parcelforce is like contacting the dead, except only less likely. The South London depot of Parcelforce do not answer their phones; thus, when you call them up, you generally get an engaged tone, because some other sucker has got there first, and is waiting on the ringing tone, in the forlorn hope that someone at the other end wil be stupid enough to pick it up. On very rare occasions, however, you get the chance to *be* that sucker, and are left to contemplate how the employees at Parcelforce must have have their auditory functions surgically removed.

Finally, I got through, and was told the computer systems have been down for the past couple of days. Yeah, sure — coming from a work environment where five minutes of computer failure is deemed unacceptable, I was less than sympathetic, but I gave them my details and asked for the parcel to be delivered on Saturday. They took my number and said they’d phone me back. With the benefit of hindsight, I can hear them cackling manically as they put the phone down, “I said I’d phone him back, and he BELIEVED me!”. For no call ever came. At 5:30, I tried to find out what was going on, only to get the engaged/ring till Doomsday approach once more. I even tried to fax them, only to find that their FAX had also had its auditory functions surgically removed, as it wasn’t answering the phone either.

So, as it stands, I have no idea what’s going to happen tomorrow. I know if I go to the depot to try and collect the parcel, it’ll have been put in a van and sent to Perran Road, and I’ll get back to find another poignant little card saying “we tried to deliver a parcel but you weren’t in”. However, if I sit here and wait for it, the package will be stuck resolutely in their warehouse. This should, theoretically, be a 50/50 chance, but few things are less certain than Parcelforce.

Do you care about this? Probably not. Do I? Not really. I’m sure that my parcel and I will be united at some point. But is it just me? Or is there some larger, demonic scheme at work? And at least it did help to pass an otherwise tedious Friday in the office. Oh, fuck it — I’m going to have another beer…

Someone tried to break into the house the other day

This small phrase covers a host of paranoia, starting with the sudden clenching of your stomach into a small, hard knot as you realise that the gouge marks in the door-frame are unlikely to have been caused by a genetically engineered strain of giant woodpecker. That they didn’t get in – we replaced the door last year, and it stood up to the test well – somehow makes it worse: are they going to come back and try again? I like to think not; if they have any sense, they will have gone off to find an easier mark, knowing we’re now on our guard. But these people were dumb enough to target one of the very few houses in the street with a burglar alarm, so who knows how they think?

After such an incident, you start to view everything in a suspicious light. That guy who came round selling double glazing last week — was he legitimate? What about the building site that started constuction at the end of the road? And perhaps most tellingly of all, a housemate bought a video recorder from Curry’s down in Brixton last weekend. It seems MOST suspicious that within days of that (when he gave his name and address — as you must, for TV licencing purposes), we suffer an attempted burglary. Now, I don’t think that this is a Curry’s sanctioned scheme to repossess their stock (though it does make me wonder where ‘Manager’s Specials’ come from!), but it’s not a mistake we’ll make again. The next electronic gadget we get will be bought by Max Renn, of 83 Channel Road.

Further security measures are now in hand for TC Towers, turning it into a fortress worthy of a crack-dealing paedophile with a persecution complex. Mini-nukes will be installed to cover the hallway, while a pack of leopards roam the stairwell. Capsules of nerve gas have been attached to the VCR (God forbid I forget to disarm them, while seeking some post-pub entertainment) and we’re negotiating with the SAS to see if they can spare a regiment for the cellar. I am, of course, just joking. But only JUST. If this is what a mere attempt is like, we do *not* want to go through the real thing. And if that means we have to spend three-quarters of an hour unlocking the deadbolts, so be it.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I feel a strong urge to go and check all the doors and windows.

1997 looks like being a truly bad year for celebrities; the Dead Pools must have been working overtime, especially over the past few months. I blame Princess Diana, for triggering a wave of copycat terminations. Mother Teresa, Jeffrey Bernard, John Denver, and now Michael Hutchence, joining the list of rock ‘n’ roll suicides — at least pending the outcome of the coroner’s report. However, at least no-one can mutter about unfulfilled potential in this case, since INXS’s last hit was years ago — Hutchence’s funeral was the biggest crowd he’d pulled in quite some time. And there’s been no polite period of mourning before the Hutchence jokes started to fly. Tuesday morning, and the following landed on my desk:

What’s the difference between Michael Hutchence and Manchester United?
United can still play Giggs.

But it remains the ultimate publicity stunt, guaranteed to revive the most flagging of career, at least briefly — for any publicity is good publicity, more or less (though I think Gary Glitter may have overstepped the mark a little). Even I must confess to having pulled out the one INXS album I possess, and putting it on — perhaps in some ghoulish attempt to see if there was a subliminal message in there. [Of course, it could be in there, backwards masked, but that’s a problem with CDs, that they don’t really lend themselves to such things — unlike record players, which needed no more than your finger, and an absolute disregard for the state of your stylus] Hmmm, does ‘Suicide Blonde’ indicate anything? God knows, when you can make out about one word in six.

His wake was, admittedly, a kind of who’s who of Antipodean tottie, and I almost expected Kylie Minogue and Paula Yates to engage in a hair-pulling catfight in the middle of the floor. [Ok, make that “hoped”] And for all his faults, Hutchence was a rock ‘n’ roll star. None of this clean-living, sandal-wearing, rain-forest saving nonsense favoured by the new generation of pop stars (Liam and Noel Gallagher excepted — though the size of their egos negates any praise due). It’s hard to imagine, say, Baby Spice hanging herself with a black belt. Er, actually, it’s not, but that probably counts as some kind of hopeful wish fulfillment, alongside thoughts about their tour bus crashing into an enclosure of ravenous panthers.

But perhaps it’s not so hard to understand. You wake up and suddenly realise that a) you have a daughter called Heavenly Hirani Tiger Lily, and b) you gave up Helena Christiansen for Paula Yates. Given that, who can blame Mr.Hutchence for taking his own life…

I have a theory about the 70 tourists who were killed in Egypt earlier on this week. It’s easy to blame the usual Islamic fundamentalists, but my theory would be that the Luxorites just got pissed off with enormous hordes of dumb foreigners wandering round their city, and decided to take the direct route to…well, to quote that fine philosopher T.Bickle, “Someday a rain’s gonna come and wash the scum off the streets”.

I fervently pray that someone does something similar here, and if I knew their address, would even write to the Islamic Jihad committee (or whatever they’re called), and hint that London is a hotbed of seething Western decadence, worthy of being put to the sword. And the centre of this evil empire is Leicester Square, which you could safely napalm and not even touch anyone with a London bank account. In fact, pretty much anywhere in Zone 1 would do — chalk up another reason why South London is superior to North London, any tourist who ventures down here is embarking on a trip which makes ‘Heart of Darkness’ look like a ride at EuroDisney.

“But think of the damage to the economy”, I hear you whine. Well, let’s look at the businesses most likely to go under if we practiced a little ethnic cleansing:

• Shops that sell plastic policemen’s helmets
• Theme restaurants — the Rainforest Cafe, I *ask* you! Bring on Belsen King…
• Most of Covent Garden
• Rock Circus and Madam Tussaud’s
• English language schools
• Fleabag hotels charging fifty quid a night
• Europa Food Stores

With regard to the last, can someone explain to me why a loaf of bread should be twice as expensive because you’re buying it near Trafalgar Square. And don’t give me that ‘rent’ bullshit; neither HMV, Books Etc nor anyone else feel the need to jack their prices up. But that really deserves an entire rant to itself. Suffice it to say that I fail to be overly heartbroken at the prospect of any of these places biting the dust.

When the Libyans and friends were blowing up American planes, life in London was great, because tourism dropped so much. You could shop, eat, live in comfort, even go to the theatre if you wanted (though, let’s face it, only tourists do that sort of thing). And I still treasure memories of walking through a deserted Camden Town just after the IRA set off a bomb there — though admittedly those memories are mostly ones of fear and panic because I was carrying a suitcase of ‘questionable’ video tapes through an area where there were more police than pedestrians.

But that’s still preferable to thoughts of “get out of the way, you STUPID tourist”, as they stand on the wrong side of the escalators on the tube, then when they get to the top, fumble around in their bum bags for their one-day Travelcards, seemingly surprised by the presence of a ticket barrier LIKE THERE IS AT EVERY OTHER GODDAMN TUBE STATION! And after they get through, they don’t move smartly away, but hover around, blocking it up as they wait for their friends. This is just one facet of London life, a single area that they make unbearable.

It’s all an interesting exercise in divisive intelligence. If one tourist has an IQ of N, then two will have a *combined* intelligence of N. So will three. Or five. Or twenty. Get enough, and you have something which would lose at Trivial Pursuit to a dish of penicillin. So, pretty please, I’m begging any terrorist groups who feel a need to kill tourists. Come to London. Shoot all you want. Just don’t stand on the wrong side of the escalators…

“Schadenfreude” is one of the great German words, alongside “kugelschreiber” and “Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte mit Schlagsahne” [sadly, Notepad is unable quite to deliver their full umlaut-laden beauty]. However, if I was to write about ball-point pens or Black Forest gateau with whipped cream, I would be inviting sarcastic comments from Lino about it being another slow news week, so I am forced to talk about the delight one feels at the misfortune of others, especially when the “other” in question is Tony Blair.

So high, so mighty, so Christian bloody Socialist in opposition — I never forgave the twat for being the first to sign up for David Alton’s anti-video bill. And now, he’s finding out that it’s a goddamn sight harder to actually govern the country, rather than merely whine about how it’s being done. There are all those nice vested interests: people do not hand you seven-figure sums out of the goodness of their heart. Oops! Better U-turn on that decision to ban tobacco sponsorship in motor racing. Except it becomes doubleplusoops when the details of that million pounds crops up; even if you hand it back, its stink lingers around. Not so smug NOW, are we, Tony? And that’s aside of them making you pay to go to university, dumping wind-chill payments for OAPs, and abandoning the bill to ban fox-hunting. Principles are the exclusive prerogative of being in opposition. It all goes to prove what I’ve said all along: one bunch of tossers are just the same as another.

Mind you, ‘new’ Labour and F1 Racing would seem made for each other, going by the jaw-dropping fiasco of Michael Schumacher. German sportsmen with that name are apparently able to cheat blatantly, and with disregard for life and limb, yet escape punishment. Readers may recall a goalkeeper called Schumacher who launched one of the fouls of this, or any other, century on a French forward and got away scot free. A decade later, Michael has been given a non-punishment of jaw-dropping stupidity; he loses the points he won last year, but not anything else – such as the money or the trophies. This is a bit like penalising the FA Cup runners-up by taking away the goals they scored in the final, so that they were defeated 3-0 rather than 3-2. Who PRECISELY does it hurt?

I have bizarre nightmares in which Max Moseley sits in judgement on Louise Woodward: “The bad news is, you’re going to prison for 15 years. The good news is that it’s back-dated to 1982 — we want you to pretend really hard that you’ve been in jail since then. Case dismissed.” Still, what do you expect from the son of Sir Oswald? Given this “interesting” approach to justice, if I was Ralf Schumacher, I’d mount a bazooka on my car for next season, ‘cos he could probably nuke the rest of the starting grid without fear of repercussions…