2003-03-18 - 4:41 p.m.

Our new neighbourhood is pretty...uh...colourful I guess would be the word. It's mainly Turkish / Greek / Cypriot and walking down the street puts me in mind of being on holiday in a vaguely crap eastern mediterranean town that was briefly trendy in the 1950s and once entertained minor royals from obscure principalities but now is just mainly burger joints. The streets are crammed with dark men in suits smoking cheap cigarettes and what I guess could be called bodegas, or whatever the Turkish equivalent is - kebabodegas? The high street is a long, noisy ratrun of a place, though I quite like the bustle and for some reason, every time I walk down the street I can't get the tune of "Under the Bridge" out of my head. I feel like I should be strutting along with no shirt and tatooes, though in the interests of public decency and all round good taste, I guess I'd better not.

I'm not feeling the most physically confident I've ever felt anyway, not least as this weekend I have to undergo a weekend's mountainbiking in the name of journalism, ostensibly under the auspices of "A biking weekend for beginners" though a perhaps more accurate title might be "Death on a brutally unforgiving jagged hillside" because the words "mountain" and "biking" are not even on casual speaking terms with my consciousness as individual concepts, let alone as the bastard offspring of some misguided sadistic coupling. Still, I hear being in traction for lengthy periods of time isn't as bad as it once was and they can do some wonderful things with prosthetics these days. And it will all be worth it when my broken, twisted form can be seen gracing the pages of a colour weekend supplement.