2002-12-01 - 5:50 p.m.

Amazing how quickly Sundays go when you get up at 2pm.Last night started out pretty innocently at the ever-welcoming Bradleys Spanish Bar, who have fixed their ladies toilets, but not their downstairs jukebox. Which does nothing for ME I suppose, but it�s nice not to have to go through that whole Ally McBeal unisex public urination scenario, which is stressful enough when there�s just men in there, let alone women of the opposite gender.

Bruce had assembled a merry band of people with drinking on their minds and after the usual trauma of 11pm last orders (Way to go London! We�re a world capital, apparently�) we hit Soho for some late bar action. This would usually mean one of two things: a) cramming into a drinking den the size of a shower unit that charges hefty amounts of cash for warm cans of lager or b) going gay in one of the lurid west end hellholes and having to listen to Kylie Minogue more than is strictly necessary. Heaven knows I ain�t no homophobe (some of my best friends don�t mind poofters!) (hahaha, the old ones are the, er, oldest) � even gay people avoid those places if they have a modicum of taste.

By happy chance, one of our number lead us to a place where, for a modest cover charge, you could sit in relative comfort and not have to negotiate financial repayment plans to buy a round, a rare commodity at that time in this town. The place even had a dancefloor, though no-one (except us) was going to do anything so uncool as dancing. Everyone else in the place looked thoroughly miserable, so you knew they were pretty hip. Some of them looked like those members of Ladytron who appear to have had the corners of their mouths surgically downturned and their seratonin levels reduced as a fashion statement Thinly-veiled disdain is the new black. I read it one of those in fashion magazines where each word of editorial is written in a different but increasingly trendy font, so by the end of the sentence, you�re about as fashionable as you can get, text-wise.

I forget my point. The moral of the story is, we all had a nice time and dancefloors with mirrors are a bad idea. The end.

This afternoon I woke up with a complete cob-on for no apparent reason, and with no-one in the house around for me to vent my untapped aggression onto, I headed out into the street. Now, anyone will tell you that I am the least aggressive person since Moses, and would not normally say boo to a goose, or any other kind of waterfowl, for that matter. My grumpiness was reaching its peak as a walked along the pavement, and a car edged out slowly from a carpark, nearly brushing my leg. �Watch where you�re going�� I shouted at the driver through his open window, and before I knew anything more about it, somehow, and without any kind of intention behind it, the word ��dickweed!� came out of my mouth.

Dickweed? DICKWEED!??! I have never said this word in my life, never thought about saying it, never pondered it abstractly as a derogatory slang term, but here it was, making its ill-timed debut in my everyday vocabulary. I don�t know where it came from, but it was already too late for that kind of internal dialogue.

Needless to say, this hadn�t gone down too well with our man behind the wheel, who suddenly looked much bigger and meaner and as though he may have been in prison as recently as that morning. I thought about a �sorry�, but to be frank, I just don�t think you can apologise your way out of �dickweed�. It�s like calling someone a rancid goatfucker and then trying to retract it. He�s making to open the door, which would be the overture to him beating me to death with one of my own limbs, and I�m seeing this as a very real possibility, the fact that I�ve never been in a fight never so starkly apparent. He�s about to do me a severe physical discourtesy and all I can do is wonder what the protocol is for being repeatedly punched.

The last minute reprieve and all-round Hollywood ending came from his wife/girlfriend/female hostage � she obviously saw that I was hardly worth him breaking out his flickknife for, and held him back inside the car leaving me free to concentrate on regaining control of my bowels. He sat back down and they pulled away with only a smattering of ferocious obscenities emanating from the drivers seat in my direction.

A lesson learned there, I think. Specifically, there are less life-endangering ways to dispel a bad mood.