I like these fledgling magazines. I particularly like The New Flesh because they’ve selected my story to be published on November 19th. “This is a pretty weird piece indeed” they said. At last! Someone who understands. BTW It’s noir sci-fi.

Howard Jacobson keeps cropping up on TV like a strange man at the school gates. This time he was trying to resurrect pervy Victorian paintings in The Genius of British Art. Like the Starkey episode, it looked more like The Genius of Howard Jacobson. He never missed a chance to tell us how lusty he felt about naked nymph paintings. Not that anyone would ever think he was anything but a tough lusty provincial. He even found a real live nymph working in the basement to drool over.

No one would accuse Jacobson of being a “passive aggressive” type. It’s another word for “polite.” It’s deemed aggressive because by being passive you’re not giving the other person the chance to be the prick you think he is. Another fellow Mancunian, Morrissey, is often accused of being passive aggressive. If dealing with other people’s egotistical emissions in the way they least like but can do nothing about is passive aggressive then great. Back in Reading a few years ago, one of the local scallies, while barging past me said, “Why are you so ….. polite?” I think it was the worst insult he could muster. An upbringing in Manchester teaches you to be civil to psychos rather than try to plaster your will over them.

Someone seems to be stamping their will all over the local paper in terms of what sells paper. Paedos sell papers! The local paper had a full shock horror page about a man guilty of “being seen with a camera near a school”. Carrying a camera near a school warranted a warning by two policemen. No wonder kids think the world’s a personal playground with added alcohol. Juxtaposed was the News in Brief Not Worf It column packed full of 19 year olds in drunken death and mayhem.

I just finished painting eight 2.4m lengths of skirting board. Will it be too deep? Will it ever dry? What drama.