Shang-A-Lang

Tart tart tart tart. You know when you get that thing where a word keeps following you around? Happened just yesterday, beginning in the late afternoon when I was upstairs in the office checking the 1986 CDs I made for my sister. I realised to my chagrin I’d missed off the Happy Mondays’ first single, Tart Tart! - I take this sort of thing very seriously. Right miffed for a bit until, drawing deeply on a Marlie Light I actually fell into a little reverie right there and then, as it dawned what a great, disappearing little word tart is. I mean in the old-fashioned sense of the word of course, to describe a woman of dubious morals – the type of girl who actually enjoyed a bit of the old how’s your father before it was strictly allowed, or, possibly, an actual prostitute. A low life, a marginal - like the word ’pansy’ when it was a euphemism for the gays. I once had a boss who who called me ”Tart” instead of using my actual name but it was meant affectionately (I think) and anyway that was back in the 1980s. You don’t much hear it now.

Went downstairs and you could have blown me down because there, lying on the floor, open at the problem page, was the News Of The World, headline, ”I Want To Punish My Cheating Husband And Tart”. Result! Then, as we sat down to dinner and a new Midsomer Murders on DVD, the word cropped up at least ten times, aimed in each case at a low-bred, admittedly unlikeable character who’d somehow managed to wangle her way into an upper class family. Throughout, they were paranoid The Tart was trying to get her hands on the family emeralds and naturally she had her brains blown out about half way in, but that’s by the by. The mother (played by Sian Phillips, actually) called her a tart to her face, her sisters referred to her behind her back as The Tart, even Cook and her daughter called her a tart below stairs. Tart tart tart. My Sunday could not have got any tartier if Finton had served us a very tart lemon tart for afters. Cosmic.

Going out a lot last week almost interfered with all the television I like to watch but I made up for it by getting up a half hour early and seeing the shows before work. Finton (new nickname, Finton-On-Sea) looked at me like I was mental when he surfaced for the loo and caught me watching This Week with Andrew Neil and Michael Portillo etc., at 6.45 the other day. But the going out things were all quite good. My friend Polly’s PR-ing the new Joy Division documentary so Jels and me went to a screening of that in Poland Street last Monday. Packed. You’d have thought that coming so soon after the film Control and the book Touching From A Distance I might have felt a bit Joy Div’d out by now but nothing could be further from the truth. This had everyone in it – or everyone who’s still alive anyway – including the three remaining band members (Hooky is extremely funny) and The Other Woman, Annik, and it contains the last ever interviews with Tony Wilson, who comes across as such a hero, getting the band on the telly and putting up with all kinds of abuse and teasing. We sat in the dark, clutching red wine in plastic glasses and, yes, I might have just been a teansy bit tearful at the end. Beautiful sound in the cinema: pumped up really loud over a good system those Martin Hannett productions sounded like glass and diamonds. Gorgeous.

Tuesday night met Jelly and Richie Spit-Spot in the HK Diner in Chinatown. Obviously snow peas were in order, nom nom nom. Round the corner to meet Rob, Paddy, Ralph and Alex in The Yard. Lovely fellas, they really are. Round another Soho corner to Comedy Camp where Barbara Nice was headlining although I’d originally thought Jelly had said ”Do you want to come out and see barber shop?” on the phone and while I thought this was a little odd, imagining some kind of ghastly Four Poofs And A Piano thing, I agreed to go along just to be sociable. Like the time I thought we were going for a Medieval vegetarian dinner in the City with Jock and Ada and told everyone at work about it and when we got there it was Mediterranean - doh! It was all academic in the end up anyway because I left before she came on: work is especially busy during the early part of the week and I just can’t be gallivanting around the West End at midnight on a Tuesday any more. In fact, those wiseguys wound up dancing in the bar to Fame by Irene Cara. Shame I had to leave. I like and know Barbara (we’ve done clubs in Manchester and Birmingham with her before) who is a brilliant stand-up but's probably best known for playing Holy Mary in Phoenix Nights. Apparently she crowd-surfed from the stage to the back and then back to the stage again. "I'm coming through!", Jelly said she said. Haha.

Thursday night was a work social. Our department are up for some award so it was partly a celebration but when we reached the pub that had been hired out in Kensington it was burning to the ground! Firemen leaning out of top windows and smoke everywhere. Exciting. I would have stayed to watch for longer but it was also chucking it down, so we went somewhere else and cleared the pub out of champagne, washed down with chips and spring rolls. They’re a good bunch of people to go out with – they’re taking me out for a birthday slap-up this week and I’ve only been there ten minutes!

Yup. Birthday time again. Forty Two. It doesn’t look so old written in words as with numbers. 42. Don’t feel much different to 32, really. The good thing about being 42 is that for one year I can make good use of that old Julie Walters quote from Victoria Wood On Television, where the two middle-aged boilers go on holiday. VW plays a kind of lonely Judith Chalmers frump with sunburn: JW’s her nympho sidekick. In the sketch she gets drunk really fast in the hotel bar and picks up some vile-looking, equally drunk man. ”Forty two and no bra - not bad, eh?”, she says as she rubs up against him suggestively, ”You don’t want to phone your wife.” So that’ll be me for 2008. You have to grow old disgracefully, as Simon always says.

Great lunch in town on Saturday with friends, all ex-colleagues from Virgin. Funny how none of us is there any more and even funnier when you consider that Virgin itself no longer exists. It was only a year ago we were still all working together. Anyway, Joe Allen’s with Bruno The Little French Bear, Dan, Max and Kathryn. Ate too much meat - must get out of that habit. Encouraging, I thought, how everyone’s gone on to bigger and better things: Bruno’s at The Mail, D’s project managing, K’s spending marketing budgets unimagined at the old place, and Max is at music college in Brighton building her own synthesizers just like Kraftwerk. We drank a fair bit for the daytime – liqueurs, dessert wines the lot and then we ended up at Gordon’s in Charing Cross, the scene of a fair-few skivey Friday afternoons. Had to have a serious sleep before DJ-ing in the evening but life’s for living, isn’t it?