Shang-A-Lang

A-BEEP BEEP BEEP!!! I’ve started so I’ll finish…

So we came in from the club on Saturday night in a really good Easter-lazy mood and the boiler wasn’t effing firing or something. No heating, no hot water. Seven months old! We’ve subsequently gleaned that it was probably a temporary dip in water pressure, which would have righted itself eventually and if I’d known this I really wouldn’t, I promise, have fiddled with the knobs and screws and dials at 3am but I did of course because I can’t ever let alone in these situations. This meddling of mine led to a flaming row with Fints, who stomped off to bed, and it may also have prompted said boiler to suddenly begin expunging itself of all the water in its pipes or wherever the hell the water comes from. Standing there exhausted at 4 in the morning holding a chuffing blue plastic bucket catching filthy drips – not one of my best looks. The evil man who put it in is due tomorrow but I don’t trust that these people will ever turn up and make good. Old person’s oil-filled radiator out again for the cold snap - “Hello, old friend!”

Bad Friday drinks in Soho. Our annual quackfest of - what did Mez call it? - drinking and shouting. Just about sums it up. Fourth great year! There’s usually a perfunctory lunch of some description, moving crab cakes or a steak around a plate or some such, and lots of wine and then a bit of a pub crawl round the West End. On previous occasions people have, variously; laid down in the road, removed their trousers in Greek Street and danced on those clattery, unstable chairs in Bradley’s to Uptown Top Ranking. One year we hijacked a Chinese couple who spoke almost no English and press ganged them into taking hundreds of group shots of us on my camera, right under the shadow of Centre Point. When I got them home all but one were blurry and useless.

The (small but definitely in there somewhere) God-fearing part of me does, I’ll admit, invariably feel a twinge of guilt about invoking the Feast Of Bacchus on the day of the Crucifixion but, being the time of miracles, these feelings are usually assuaged after onetwothree red wines. But this year I really wasn’t in the mood for debauchery and I missed lunch completely having had a pretty late one the night before, as we shall see. Great to see everybody – is Good Friday the day of the year when people feel at their most Devil-may-care? - but by the time I arrived at the restaurant most of my friends were three, four, and in some cases, five sheets to the wind so I sipped water and, later in the pub, the boringest lowest alcohol lager on offer. Thankfully, Mez out on the town herself the night before was in a similarly fragile condition so I felt safest with her, and I talked to Grace and Toby quite a bit – they’re usually pretty sensible. Reliably avuncular Martin mapped out for me exactly where in Soho you could get a cheap pint, Lou told us about a Czech woman in her 90s who has thrown open her house in north London to complete strangers for tea and cake every single Thursday night since the War, and game old Jody left veering left and right on her heels to go and DJ at the Notting Hill Arts Club for five hours. Oh and Our Jimmy Brown came along after work – he really is turning into a silver-long-haired Californian - it suits him. Got some lovely presents and cards but limped home sober, wishing that that damned full moon wasn’t looking at me. Bought Private Eye, had a super dinner with Fints and crashed out on the settee at 9.30.

Had applied no brakes whatsoever the night before, however – ‘Easter Eve’ as Jelly calls it and officially my birthday party for those nearest and dearest. Round Jock and Ada’s with Jelly and Ritchie Spit-Spot and Fints. It had been my idea to spend it pretty soberly, watching Alan Parker’s Fame with the guys and eating hot dogs and popcorn, all of which we did. It just wasn’t really in the plan to sit there gassing and playing music quite so late but at some point after the popcorn was finished some Bacardi was retrieved from the kitchen and… oh you know. In truth, Fame was nowhere as good as I’d remembered, which was as some kind of gritty slice of late-‘70s New York City, sleazy and bankrupt. It sort of was like this, but so much more schmaltzy and soapy than the film I'd been playing in my head since 1981 and it seemed to end very abruptly after what felt like an hour and a half of auditions, auditions, auditions. The songs were still good, though - ”Hot lunch!” Fact Fans: the first track I ever downloaded from the iTunes store was the film’s version of Weather Report’s I Sing The Body Electric - even if I’m always saying it was Steely Dan’s original, when of course it sounds nothing like something Becker and Fagen would ever write.

Great presents from the guys. Ada’s taking us to see a show next Tuesday, Ritchie brought me a set of new Simon Carter midnight blue fibre optic cuff-links (amazing) he designed, Jels got us the complete every-single-episode box of Man About The House and Jock did me a Throbbing Gristle / Genesis P. Orridge-themed package involving that book I should have bought in New York but didn’t, a CD and this brilliant T-Shirt with a big fetish platform shoe on it with the ominous legend - ”She. Is. Coming.”.