Jennifer Beals was right- being IS believing.

Ok, so I don't usually do youtube links, what with being a writer and all... but tonight I am more than happy to make an exception.

I mean, it's for charity and everything, and it's a BBC link, and it's not every day one of your dearest friends enters a celebrity dance competition, puts on a wig and leotard, does Flashdance, and knocks it out of the park.

I am so, so proud of him- and for those who missed it, here is the great Robert Webb on Comic Relief

Being careful

Well, my little campaign against websites which encourage stupid people to say stupid things seems to be going pretty well. Put the phrase 'it just goes to show you can't be too careful' into google and most of the front page matches are from people fighting the good fight.

I think I'll give it a few weeks before I pension it off and replace it with another, equally banal and meaningless phrase. I quite like 'Chance would be a fine thing' although someone has suggested 'There's nothing that I can add to that'.

Any suggestions?

Exciting blogging news from the blogosphere where all the blogs are!

The very excellent Toby Davies also seems to have a blog, which you can find here.

It looks identical to this one, which just goes to show you can't be too careful.

How to destroy an unexpected, bonus, ten minute lie-in:

spend it counting to 600.

I don't even know what a madeleine tastes like.

Nostalgia has me firmly in its grip tonight, as I find myself back in the same hotel in which I first started this blog all those hours- can it really be nearly 48?- ago. Rather disconcertingly, the room the nice Crowne Plaza people have put me in tonight is absolutely identical to the one I was in t'other night, and I arrived on the same train, and Masterchef is on the telly now as then, but not everything is the same. Oh no. Everything in the room is identical but the other way round. Some people would have no trouble with that, I'm sure, and would use the evidence of their eyes to navigate the room, but I was a little too gung-ho and now have a nastily smashed shin from a coffee table being where no coffee table had any right to be (in this case, opposite the identical coffee table on the exact other side of the room).

That's not what I'm here to say, though. What I'm here to say is that the woman at the checkout at Boots in Baker Street, as she rang up my purchase tonight, turned to her colleague and said, without even slightly lowering her voice, 'Lemsip? For FUCK'S sake.'

'Do an observation'

I had a typically insomniac night. Hotels do that.

At one point, I woke up conscious of a vague tinny sound which, as I woke up more, revealed itself to be singing. After yet more waking up, I realised that my ipod had somehow switched itself on and what I could hear was the sound of music playing through headphones. It was pretty clear what kind of music it was- a tenor singing something quite lush and germanic, possibly Richard Strauss. Pleased with my powers of observation, I got out of bed and located the ipod to turn it off.

Have you ever noticed how when you think an ipod from the other side of a hotel room is playing a tenor singing something lush and germanic, possibly Richard Strauss, because you hear it through the headphones in the middle of the night, and you get up out of bed to locate it and turn it off, it's actually Alison Moyet singing Alfie?

If I ever do any stand-up, I think this will be my opener.

Not such an early adopter, either.

So, I accidentally spent yesterday reading blogs. The whole day, I mean. It started with one of those hungover whims when an email led me to a facebook page which led me to a blog which led me to another blog until I realised that I'd spent the whole day reading blogs.

That is definitely the most times I have written the word 'blog' in one sentence. Anyway, I thought 'I should get myself one of those' and then I remembered that I already had one. A couple of years ago, I registered a google/blogger identity in order to be able to post on a gay opera webzine (I'm sure most of us have posted on a gay opera webzine at some point or another) and created what appear to be two seperate blogs under the same identity. One of these is called, quite simply, 'mememe', which although I suspect is a searingly accurate title for what is to come, does seem a little indulgent.

So we'll opt for this one instead, whose name refers poncily to my poncy blogger username, which I ought really to change to my own actual name, I suppose. And I must work out how to show people how to find their way here. And what to put.

So. Yes. A blog. My blog. Look!

This is not a good start.

Owing to a confusion over international time zones, I seem to have scheduled my first ever blog post to be published in nine hours time.

Which could well mean that, to all intents and purposes, this is my first ever blog post.

But I can't repeat all the things that I put in the other one because, well, I mean it just stands to reason, doesn't it? I'm in a hotel. I'm about to order a courgette and tomato tart from room service. I'm in my pyjamas and my feet are a little cold.

There. That seems to be sufficiently portentous and detailed to be going on with. You should look out for that other one though, if it ever appears. It was REALLY good*. But you'll find that out for yourselves in a few hours' time. Not that there are any of you.


* tbc