Harmony Rocket

12:18 am - Wikileaks latest: Obama and bin Laden in Fade Street nuke pact

12:53 am - Carrion

Oh the heavy water how it enfolds
The salt, the spray, the gorgeous undertow
Always, always, always the sea
Brilliantine mortality

10:57 am - Thatcher in trousers...

That's weird.

Last night I dreamt of waking up to David Cameron standing at the end of the bed, staring at me and clapping his hands. He told me that it's time to get up. I told him I'd be up in five minutes, please, and to leave me alone, but he tore the covers off the bed and said that "it's time to go to work now, young man".

I don't even live in that UK. What a Tory bastard.

02:10 pm

07:31 pm - "Even he's not as good as he is"

Worth five minutes of one's time, perhaps.

01:30 am - Of the extraordinary...

Have a look at this if you have half an hour to devote to the extraordinary.

01:31 am - Tender is the night/ Lying by your side...

So hello, and oh dear. I've got that 'change the world' feeling again; doubt I'll be to bed tonight. Blur at Glastonbury - at a distance of a few hundred miles - were a lesson in melodic savagery and one of the most emotional performances I've ever seen by any band.

For the past few weeks I've been happy enough that they were just reclaiming what's rightfully theirs - they'd very nearly been forgotten as both pop beasts and leftfield innovators. I was just excited to see people remembering the broadness and quality of their work and pay their respects accordingly. Plus I get to hear favourite songs again. Those sentiments took a back seat when I put on the BBC for "just one song," not wanting to ruin setlists and surprises on myself. Then Al said "are you going to be the man who turns that off?" and I let it run. The first thing I saw was Graham Coxon on the floor during 'Beetlebum'. Sold.

Just as 'Tender' closed my brother sent me a message that said "My god, that was beautiful."

So we watched on and on and I wasn't the man who turned it off and on Friday it will be time to see them. I hope this feeling lasts; I've missed it - not just Blur...

Person 1: What's that noise?
Person 2: I get that too, that kind of whirring sound?
Person 1: But what is it?
Person 2: Beats me.
Person 1: It's quite familiar, isn't it?
Person 2: It sounds almost like... but surely not.
Person 1: No, go on.
Person 2: Well, not eagerness really... more a kind of...
Person 1: I think you're right, actually... that's...
All: That sounds like enthusiasm!

***
"Everybody is becoming like ... " - he pauses - "a Stasi agent, constantly observing himself or his friends." -Ralf Hutter of Kraftwerk on social networking

***

The other night, for a few split seconds, I joined the National Grid. This was very stupid. One wire pulled another wire out of an electrical switch. The circuit breakers went. I reset them. Fifteen minutes later I saw the wire that had caused the outage, said something ditsy like "oh a wire, oh boy oh boy!" and picked up the snake-like thing as if it were a piece of lego.

Electricty: "Bzzzzz."

Ruraidh: "Aaaaargh!"

Have you ever been electrocuted? It was strangely more and less terrifying than I'd imagined it would be - and given the number and quality of my electrical repairs, it was bound to happen soon. I supposed one fell to the floor and had a heart attack. This didn't happen, thankfully. Instead I shouted and spent the rest of the night with my hand in my mouth having never felt so timid. I've still got two vampire-like pockmarks in my left index finger from where the wires struck.

Bzzzz.

***

So Old Man Ballard has gone one step closer to mapping the psychogeography of the skies. Old news now, I'm afraid. Full coverage here and here.

JG Ballard, along with Joe Strummer and a few other assorted prophets and naysayers, made my life very awkward indeed. I've a funny feeling that things would have been very much more straightforward if it weren't for hearing certain bands or reading certain books. Ballard's dystopian fiction must be at the top of the list. These things gave me a world view and a set of attitudes which time and time again have made me my own worst enemy. I'm not sorry though.

The first book of his I read was probably The Atrocity Exhibition, the second Crash, and by the time I got to the cruelly underrated The Kindness of Women the damage had been done. I particularly liked his way of surprising me - a line about wanting to fly nuclear bombers carrying "pieces of the sun" lingers.

I won't prattle on, with one exception: some time after his wife died he met Claire, his partner until his death. They had a bust-up in the late '70s and didn't speak for five years. "Then out of the blue I rang him because I had seen a car going down the road that reminded me of his. He just said, I was waiting for you to ring' and from then on we got back together." I think that's pretty wonderful and in some strange way quite unexpected.

***

For a while there was a pigeon nesting in the bushes outside my window; it was there for over a month. Every few days it would rotate by 90 degrees, but did little else. I fed it. then the eggs hatched and there are at least two chicks, little messers, almost full size now... it seems that I've already paved over my country origins by referring to the chick as the 'small pigeons' and the mother as the 'main pigeon'.

***

Also, in recent times I saw a grouse run in the front gate and across the lawn into the long grass out the back. It ran, it didn't fly. Cartoon arms flapping up and down; a funny bird. My application to become one of British Sea Power is surely strengthened.

Despite what one may think, this story is not insignificant. I just want to know where he was going.

***

Lambchop: Hawley of America (note to self: check chronology - possible pigeon/egg situation).

***

And that's where I leave things tonight, to the wondrous sound of my ears ringing because of a gig I didn't attend. No matter. Big news on the way, I feel. If nothing else I've just written the word 'enthusiasm' without any qualifying negative, and that is a rare achievement in these times. Onwards.

07:42 pm - With Love and Napalm...

06:11 pm - Fifteen feet of pure white snow...

Flakes falling from the sky - my favourite. But is there anything original to be said on the subject of snow?

Not much.

Here's a story. When I was ten years old there were two options at lunchtime: attempt to play football or attempt to gossip about Home and Away. I didn't know much about either, but threw my lot in with the football anyway. This involved religiously avoiding the ball either because I didn't know what to do with it or because I was too fat to catch up with play.

The situation couldn't really be taken too seriously anyway: run more than a few paces and you'd fall into a big pothole; our pitch was like the Somme. The rules were interpreted according to the whims of the toughest player on the field, which led to abuse on a comical level. Penalty re-takes were frequent: on the right team your penalty was taken until it was scored. On the wrong team your penalty was re-taken until it was missed. For some reason everyone other than me could take this seriously.

Every now and then a past pupil, Brian, would hop the wall and join in. He was about twenty and had a motorbike. Whatever team he joined seemed for some reason to automatically win, and after a while it was realised that the only evenly matched game he could play was on his own, with a goalkeeper, against 15 of us. He still won regularly, even if all 15 of us lined up in the goalmouth. This, however, simply induced him to kick the ball against our defences as hard as possible. Thighs were bruised and testicles were threatened, a situation far from ideal.

Other strategies included a slick passing game in which he was denied possession at all times. This failed due not to our lack of passing prowess, but the poor playing conditions. It always bobbled, I swear. And sadly the Roman Centurion Tortoise formation has never quite caught the imagination of football tacticians, but don't say we weren't innovative. I still harbour hopes that it will appear in the Premiership within my lifetime.

Childhood was snowy. Whether it came down lightly or heavily, it would always stick around - west Wicklow is a dismally cold place when it wants to be, which is most of the time. This occasion was the first time we had been allowed out for lunch after the winter's snow, which had become ice and was therefore deemed unsafe to play on. For days we stayed in watching the greatest toy in the world dissolve before our eyes. By the time we had been freed it was almost too late.

I needed a snowball. Alice had one. She was going to throw it at Grainne, which would have been a waste because she would have missed. This was the last snowball of the winter and it deserved a higher purpose. I bought it off her for 10p. She didn't really want to throw it at Grainne because they were best friends, but she had the snowball and there really wasn't anything else she could think to do with it.

And what a snowball! This was solid ice, with lovely bits of mud and pebble in it. It was a vicious bastard of an ice-grenade and not only was there no defence, there was no retaliation. Unless your opponent remembered the assault a good 11 months later there could be no reply because there was no more snow. And remembering was completely out of the question. Hitting someone with this yolk guaranteed certain victory; name your price.

So why not use it to guarantee certain victory on the football field? It didn't take long for an opportunity to arise. The game was finely poised, probably something in the order of 20-all. I waited until what was going to be the last play before the bell went. Right on cue, Brian went on an epic solo run from one goal to the other, neutralising the opposition with use of a rugby-style hand-off. I stepped back to allow him past and fired the hateful thing right in his face at point blank range.

I still have this freeze-frame image of the look of unbelieving pain displayed on his face. It was like 'The Scream' had Edvard Munch been brought up in a shack on a bog reading the Farmers' Journal aloud to his sheepdog. I might as well have hit the fucker with a rock. He shouted in torture and booted the ball forcefully, defeating our 'keeper and winning the match. And he kept running, his hands raised to his face, and leapt the wall and rode off without saying goodbye. The bell rang. Nobody moved. They just stood there contemplating the weirdness that had just happened in front of their eyes.

It was just as difficult for me to know what to think. On one side of the argument, I had contributed everything I possibly could in the absence of knowing how to dribble, tackle, pass or indeed play football. But be that as it may, I had failed. The toughest player walked over to me, and a binding judgement on the matter was inevitable.

"Eh... that was really low."

Mabye I should have gone for Home And Away.


***

This weekend I read that Stanley Kubrick, while finishing his 2001: A Space Odyssey, attempted to arrange insurance with Lloyds of London to cover the possibility that Martians would soon be discovered, thus scuppering the appeal of the film.

In light of this I don't think I should ever feel the need to apologise for being paranoid or neurotic. We already have a winner.

07:49 pm - I wish you could swim/ Like dolphins can swim...

My options, the way I see them.

1. Ignore this journal
2. Tell it about everything that has happened in recent times - ridiculous highs and soap-operatic lows
3. Make a mockery of this journal with ill-judged attempts at satire
4. Close this journal, pout and walk away and perhaps have a bath and watch Newsnight
5. Post a photograph of something weird