Things they don’t tell you when you sign up to the gym: You can’t quit. Not even for a little while. Between illness and holiday, it’s been about three weeks since I last went to the gym. When I went tonight, I was expecting to be a bit behind where I was three weeks ago.

This is not “a bit behind”. Before I went on holiday, I was doing 4 miles in 25 minutes. Tonight, I barely managed 2 and a half in fifteen before needing to stop. Likewise, I was about five kilos down on all my weights. It’s going to be a month or so, just to get back to where I was, dammit.

Saw the film last night. Were it not based on a true story, it would be revoltingly schmaltzy, and I’m sure the true story has been heavily fictionalised in order to make it play well as a film, but it was an excellent film, which surprised me quite massively, as normally Akiva Goldsman’s (the writer of the screenplay) involvement in a film is a pretty clear signal that the film will be shit. But no, this was good, and well worth the time.

Went to The After Skool Club with some of the Pure crowd last night. Good night out, marred slightly by running into a bunch of folk that I went to school with on the night bus back. They were very drunk and behaved like arseholes, which was slightly embarrassing since I was trying to have a conversation with Juamei and Sarah at the time.

A while back, I was reflecting that no-one I went to school with would have any trouble identifying me – I weight a bit more, and my hair is a slightly different colour, and I’m older in the face, but I am otherwise unchanged from school – I’ve still got the long hair, and I’m still dressed in black all the time. And indeed, most of the remarks were about how I was unchanged from school.

I’m sure that if they were thinking about it, they’d have be writing that off as sad, but then, I’ve always looked how I feel comfortable, and anyway, I’m not the one that’s still going out drinking with folk from school. That’s the thing I find sad – maybe I look the same, but I’m not even close to the same person I was when I was eighteen. I got no sense from these people that they had changed (although I’m sure they have). Same social groups, same ringleaders. I can only assume that they were at the Still In Skool Klub for the night, or something.

Still, weird coincidence.

I’m back. I think I’m losing a battle with jet lag, to be honest, so this is going to be fractured…

The weather’s gone odd on me. I leave, it’s winter. I’m back, it’s time for the summer wardrobe. San Francisco in Macrocosm.

Some notes from the road:

One: Head Weather

This is the place where the hippies won, is it? This city of homeless people pushing shopping carts, and drug-fractured mental wiring? Clear blue skies, but the fog and cloud is ready to roll it at any time, obscure the way things are. This is the city where they beat The Man, apparently. There’s a Gap on the corner of Haight and Ashbury, opposite a Ben and Jerry’s.

A Beat city, or a Beaten city?

Two: Protest God

Berkley: Birthplace of student protest. There was a man with a cross dencouncing the inhabitants of the campus and sinful, and exhorting them to give thmesvles over to Jesus. Another man stopped to argue a semantic point of religion. It got heated. I thought I was going to see a proper protest. Imagine my disappointement.

Three: Stag Night Blues – Stripped Down

I was flagging when we hit Kerouac’s bar, Vesuvio. A couple of coffees and a healthy dose of whiskey, topped off with a tequila, and everything was going great guns. Then it was off the stag-night staple: a strip joint. I don’t like them. I have a friend (well, we’ve lost touch, but anyway) who worked in one. This isn’t a sob story about her being forced there: she was there because the money was good. I used to meet her after work, some nights, when she finished early.

It was interesting, hearing her talk about work. She didn’t hate these people. She didn’t feel used by them. She just felt a bit sorry for them. Sure, there were the really weird and frightening ones. There were the ones for whom this was the closest to a proper sexual experience they were going to get. She pitied them, I guess, when she wasn’t unnnerved by them. No it was the others. The normal guys. She used to wonder what it was that was wrong in their lives, that this was a satisfying sexual experience. Sure, the stag do, the lads nights out, that she could understand, sort of. But the normal guys that would come in on their own, or in ones and twos. Sober, ordinary people. People who, in her view, should not have had serious trouble getting a date. Not bad looking. Not, as far as she could tell during her (admitedly short) conversations brain damage cases. Normal people. She couldn’t see why they would chose this, this thin fake, over a chance of something better? I don’t get it either. Nor, if I’m honest, do I get why this is a stag night staple. It’s not like any groom worth marrying is going to have any serious reaction, beyond “yes, yes, very nice, now can I go back to my wife-to-be?”

Now available at the usual place. Be warned, some of them (especially of the wedding and reception) are monstrously large. I’ll re-size them when I get a few minutes.

Yes, I know I need to sort out some means of ordering the links on that directory page.

In Berkley rocked my world, so many thanks to the various people that suggested it to me. I managed to find “All Virgos Are Mad” which is a source of immense pleasure to me – I love 4AD compilation CDs. Also got albums by Le Tigre, Black Box Recorder, Indigo Girls and VNV Nation, all for cheap, which was lordly and good.

Except that I have five spare minutes in an internet cafe. In San Francisco having a whale of a time. Will catch up on correspondance when I return. Hope you’re all having fun.

A thread on the WEF. The question: how did you meet your partner?

One story involves a man attempting suicide (and failing, although seriously injured) by jumping in front of a train, leading to meeting of bloke and lass, who were witnesses. Somewhat later in the thread, it transpires that another forum regular *knows* the guy who jumped in front of the train. Fuck!

Appalling Gut Horror, caused, I suspect, by a dodgy prawn in my cha han at Wagamama on Thursday night. No sleep on Thursday night at all, as a result of said intestinal nightmares. Failed to go to work on Friday. Wound up at Mum and Dad’s on Friday night, where even Mum admited I looked bad. This means I must have looked like I could have died at any moment. I went round there because, come hell or high water, I had to get money changed and measured for a suit, in order to go on holiday, and it was easier to start off from their place.

Mercifully, by Saturday morning, the worst was over, so, slightly over half a stone lighter than I had been (and I do not recommend this as a diet technique) errands were run with only mild exhaustion and queasiness to deal with.

Then it was time to get a tattoo. When things began to Go Wrong on Thursday night, my first thought was “Oh, fuck. I can’t get my deposit back now.” (48 hours notice required for cancellation). But, thank god, I made it. It was painful, but by no means even close to unbearable. Photos when it’s healed a bit, and the current reds and browns have faded to the greys they’re supposed to be. The I met up with Hugh, (who was in town en-route to San Francisco and needed a place to sleep for the night) and James, and since I’ve eaten almost nothing since Thursday night, was talked into another trip to Wagamama.

As Hugh remarked: there’s a weird jet-set tone to your life, when you find yourself sitting with a friend from Edinburgh, in a trendy(-ish) London noodle bar, arranging to meet up in a week’s time in San Francisco.

And tonight, I’m off to see Godspeed You Black Emperor at Ocean in Hackney. Hurrah!

I can never say it enough: I love London. I love the nightlife, I love the tube, I love the shops and the crowds, I love the history, all of it. But what I love most today is, well, it’s intangible. Let me try and explain the moment for you, expanded from my notes. I’d have taken a photo, but I had cunningly left my camera in the office, for no good reason. Anyway:

“A London sky moment. Dead-ice grey, agitated by the high wind. I’m sitting on a bench by the Thames, in a little concrete courtyard surrounded by office space, out of the way, enjoying my lunch in an oasis of quiet. One of those little places that no-one knows about, a single tree winter-bare, the only concession to nature amid the flagstone and steel rails. The wind is biting, snapping my long coat and hair about, as I stare across the Thames at a construction site, high-rise going up, old buildings coming down, watching the waves whipped up by the gusts break against the wall on the far side. My MP3 player, on random shuffle, seems to tune in to the mood, playing “London Calling” by The Clash, following it with “Haunted” by Shane MacGowan and Sinead O’Connor, and topping it off with “Dead Beats” by The Paradise Motel.”

Now, here’s the bit that you might have trouble following: In another city, or to another person, that would be dull, bleak, even depressing. Not in London. In London, to me, that’s a moment like a living, breathing thing, wonderful and dancing with magic. I have a grin from ear to ear, right now.