Unoriginal ranting...

But really, for fucks sake. I have spent my last few lunchtimes trawling round Oxford Street and TCR looking for a coffee pot, as my current one is on its last legs. (And haven't found one yet: some might say this is because I am both an Olympic level procrastinator and dangerously obsessive about coffee and how it is made, I prefer to think that I am a careful shopper who knows precisely what it is he wants and is sceptical about clever new twiddly bits on coffee pots because they tend to break.)

This, however, is not about that, but about the fact that in Heals yesterday I found them putting up Christmas decorations.

Bah, as someone once said, humbug.

Went to the Borders China Mieville and Susannah Clarke reading last night with Gez: highly enjoyable it was too. She seemed to be the recipient of most of the questions, but I did note with interest Mieville's comment that he is dissasociating (there are too many ss in that word) himself from the "New Weird" label. Why he will apparently explain in due course. Clarke has apparently been writing Jonathan Strange for nearly ten years: her response to various questions (including one from Mieville) on the lines of "how the hell did you get a 782 page first novel published?" ("Well, I just got an agent" ['cos they're two a penny] "plus I told them it would be 100,000 words less than it turned out" [so, an entire ordinary novel then,,,]). None of which, of course, affects the fact it's a very good book. And then on to dinner: this is actually the first night I have been entirely sober at 10:30 in a week and a half, which is not entirely a Good Thing.

I have a sneaking suspicion that my main email personal address is regularly falling foul of spam filters, particularly on yahoo and hotmail. Which is an immensely irritating thought, though better than the alternative: that nobody loves me.

Right. Back to preparing for an utterly ridiculous case. Right at the moment I want to hit my client over the head with a hammer, several times, repeating my advice with each blow.