2001-12-10 - 6:44 p.m.

�I said Pat / you are fat / and you are cataclysmically desirable / and to think I used to think / that slim was where it's at / well not any more Pat / you've changed that�

The weekend was sex, drugs and rock and roll�well, actually none of the above, unless you count alcohol, and as we all know, alcohol isn�t a drug � it�s a drink. I met virtual cool people on Friday courtesy of this lil� star and actual cool people on Saturday as various dairylandistas and livejournalinos met for a lengthy attempt to numb our braincells into submission in a kind of pre-emptive festive strike. It was the usual blur of increasingly frequent rounds and discourse that I�m sure added nothing to the shreds of social credibility that I�m clinging to, but take it from me, the kids are alright. My friends down the road were also thoughtful enough to stage a recovery-halting winter barbecue, which besides providing the usual unswerving levels of enjoyment, vindicated my decision to take today off to organise various dusty corners of my life, notably getting a mobile phone (I went for the cheapest, which seems to be made of some high density lead-based alloy, and instructions in vulgar Latin) and, um, applying to go and teach in Japan next year.

Oh, that? Hmmm. Well, it�s plan W. But even failure-bound, disaffected hacks need a back-up, and mine is to hang around rice fields banging on about subjunctive clauses. I�m hoping it won�t come down to it, though � I�m not sure I could take another year in a country with no discernable furniture.

� And love yourself / and flatter yourself / and shatter their narrow image of the erotic�

The uncriticisably blind Home Secretary has pronounced that all immigrants into this wondrous sceptered isle, that�s the UK to you, bozo, should have to make a concerted effort to become more similar to the natives. Whilst this statement has caused untold outrage amongst ethnic community leaders, I am of course in full agreement. Hell, if I have to put up with descending from a nation of pale, emotionally repressed, sexually eccentric, beer-swilling, sartorially-challenged, violent, xenophobic, barely-literate oiks with little concept of the difference between national identity and outright racism, no knowledge of the world beyond our shores, no language skills, cuisine that makes Eastern Europe look like gourmands, a laughably hideous royal family, a complete passivity about accepting every moronic cultural phenomenon that crawls its slug-like, money sapping way across from the US, and no traditions or shared experience or heritage that hasn�t been soiled from on high by rampant commercialism and in fact not one solitary thing to define our ethnicity except that we give huge art prizes to people whose big idea is to have an empty room with a light flicking on and off�.well, so should they. We can�t have proud, cool-looking foreigners wandering into the country � they�d just make us look so bad.

�And Pat said / what do you mean FAT?�

Today�s poetic justice