I am not a god

Well, that didn’t last. Previously… a week ago I was the hottest and the coolest man around. Okay, so that took some pretty unlikely coincidences and it took your turning a blind eye to some obvious facts, but otherwise it was true and I basked.

This week I was mistaken for Damien Green, the disgraced Tory politician. Wait. I mean a disgraced Tory politician. I’ve lost track of how many of those there are.

Anyway, it was only for a moment but I continue to shudder.

Still, if I had a point last week, I thought it was that there is a place for each of us. There in the Canary Islands I meant it physically or geophysically but also very much in writing. I have been in situations where my writing was the worst and others where it was the best. I’m not convinced I’ve got that range so I put it down to the places.

Clearly, then, you need to find the right place for you.

But my brief mistaken identity made me realise that it’s not that simple. For you’d think I should run away from the party where this mistake happened and you’d think I should run back to the Canary Islands.

Only, after I spoke to you last week, I caught a cold in the Canaries – I don’t know why that suddenly sounds rude – and my final memory of the place is of shivering in hot weather next to a pool which in my delirium may or may not have had a fashion show form around me.

And the party where I gasped aloud was superb. It was the Writers’ Guild Awards night and, hand on heart, I haven’t had such a good evening in years. Easily the best awards I’ve been to, absolutely the most interesting room full of happy writers, I had a blast.

And a shudder. But chiefly a blast.

So if I can hang on to any possible semblance of a point, it might be this. Yes, there are places we fit in and they are fantastic. But I urgently need cosmetic surgery.

Lost week on Self Distract…

The last seven days are a hot lemon haze: I had a flu jab last Friday and took to it rather badly. I feel that rather than preventing a flu, I ordered one. But among the seven days of red hot fever alternating with shaking with the cold – wait, I’m going through a manopause – there were moments of clarity.

Such as last night. Sitting in Birmingham’s Town Hall in the interval at a concert. Everyone around me was still buzzing from Clare Grogan’s Altered Images and The Christians. I liked them both but realise I only know one and a half songs from each and this was a night of nostalgic celebration rather than of new music.

“We’re going to play a variety of things,” Midge Ure would say in the second set. “Don’t worry, it’s all old.”

But before that, sitting in the interval, feeling clammy and actually rather old from both internal and external reasons, I checked my email. And find myself saying this aloud, actually this: “Ooooh, great, the beta test of OmniOutliner 3 is here.”

“Well,” said Angela. “So long as you’re enjoying yourself.”