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Possibly the least effective attempt at sleep I’ve ever undertaken in my life. I couldn’t have moved more if I was running a marathon. I feel more exhausted this morning than I did last night. I’m useless with really muggy sticky weather. My body isn’t designed for it.

I’m slightly drunk and confused after a quarter bottle of vodka and Priscilla on TV. The film always seems very honest to me in a strange way, considering it’s made by hundreds of people with video cameras and technical equipment and focused on actors pretending to be people, so that we can relate to them and experience our feelings through it…

Dot Com Blues

I’d decided that I wasn’t happy in my job for a variety of reasons and handed in two months notice from timeout.com – so that they could find someone to replace me and so that I could find another job that I would enjoy. Unfortunately I did it at just the wrong time – pretty much exactly the wrong time, actually.

Between January and March I had a variety of interviews for well-paid and interesting jobs around the UK new media scene – among other positions I went for a role at AOL.co.uk as a broadband producer that I was really excited about and was talking to Sapient about going to work with them as a Content Strategist. Then almost overnight everything stopped dead. With one company I had a full day of interviews, and several subsequent meetings and was about to go in to discuss salary and benefits packages when they suddenly rang up out of the blue and said that they’d been forced to stop recruiting that morning. A couple of other companies that I was talking to suddenly started doing the same thing. Interviews were cancelled and the market just died overnight.

Since leaving Time Out in the beginning of March I’ve had pretty variable luck – I’ve managed to do more freelance writing, which I’ve always wanted to do (including writing film reviews for bbc.co.uk), and have paid the bills with work at at a couple of web design companies and start-ups doing HTML and design work. It’s been really interesting, and I’ve had a couple of interesting challenges – designing HTML templates for e-mail clients like Outlook and web-mail was a completely new experience for me, even after seven years of knocking HTML together. But finding the right ways to create, organise and present content online is still where my heart lies and anything else still feels a bit like killing time. And that’s when the work is coming in – which it doesn’t always do.

The UK hasn’t been hit as hard as the US, by any means, so there’s still, thank god, only a limited will-code-for-food ethos around. But it’s hard on everyone – particularly those of us who mistimed our next career step.

Guess who’s coming to London: Travelling Carnival of Fine Hypertext Products.

From the orifice of the Brainsluice straight into your cortex: Salon takes on Gay “Trek”. A stunningly interesting article, there are only a couple of things that I would take issue with. The first is that Jadzia Dax and Lenara Khan’s relationship is indicative of the ability to respect a relationship and a love that is irrelevant of body and gender – and I think that’s a tremendous step. The fact of their heterosexuality is irrelevant – they are post-gay in a weird way – in that they truly are expressing a love that is completely separate from concerns with male and female.

Have you written about Mardi Gras? If so, let me know and I’ll link to it: 8letters.co.uk | SwishCottage | Blogadoon.

Journalism: the [mistaken] belief that what you think is true becomes true once you write it down.

So Mardi Gras, then. What was all that about? Met up with Davo and Meg and innumerable kiwis before tromping off to meet Sam and Nick H. at King’s Cross where we were to meet Rachel. At this point I lost everyone but Sam, Nick and Rachel. From there to Finsbury Park – all sunshine and poofs and innumerable pop acts.

After wandering around for a bit, looking at the astonishing fairground rides and the line-dancing hairy people in leather, we wandered towards the Radio One stage where we stumbled upon a Pimms and Champagne tent, had something to drink (£3.50 for half a pint – jesus) where we bumped into Meg and Nicki. Meg took photos of us. [Tom | Sam, Nick, Rachel, Tom]. Shortly afterwards Meg and Nicki wandered off and we started towards the main stage. On the way, we bumped into Ian from Blogadoon.

The main stage was exhausting but cool. Lots of the trashiest pop acts you can imagine in the same place at the same time. We got there for one vaguely popular act – can’t quite remember which, and then watched the Human League (two cool old songs, and several weird new ones), Sugababes (dull), Steps (the crowd went wild for some reason, and I thought of Chris doing the dance all the way through) and the very entertaining Hear,Say – who got cheers beyond all reasonable measure every time Noel came to the front of the stage. He couldn’t stop laughing about this, which was quite sweet. And be warned – Steps are doing a cover of ‘Chain Reaction’ sometime this autumn.

There were a couple of tremendously amusing moments along the way. Supergirly did a tremendous version of a couple of Britney Spears classics smooshed together. They both sang at the same time the choruses and they worked together perfectly. They also slagged off 5ive for their non-attendance, which was entertaining. And speakers like Ken Livingstone and Peter Tatchell were a bit of a laugh as well. Possibly the funniest part of the afternoon though was the presence of Penny from Big Brother and a video message from Josh from same TV program, clearly filmed before he went in. As he talked to the crowds, clearly full of himself and his pumped-up body a low chant from the crowd gradually exploded into a full roar of “Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian”. The gay community have spoken and they have picked their favourite.

Somewhere in the middle of all this I managed to lose Sam and Nick who both had descended into mid-to-late-Pride ennui and a feeling of disconnection from the sheer wealth of poofdom. After several attempts to reinspire them I kind of gave up. Although I did force them to go and see EMF over at the Popstarz tent. On the way we bumped into John W wearing a plastic fireman’s outfit. One ‘Unbelievable’ later, Nick’s much perkier and Sam’s run into an ex of his and wandered off somewhere.

At which point, my mobile phone goes insane and we suddenly start receiving all the text messages that we’d waited for all day from people trying to get in touch. Of course, several hours too late. Davo comes and meets us on the park outside the Trade tent and then John joins us. After half and hour of mooching and watching the sunset (around 9.00 – 9.30) and me giving my number to the friend of a guy wearing a Number 2 t-shirt, we proceeded to wander towards the exit – finding on the way a kind of little Latin / Easy Listening disco which we mucked around in for a while.

Once that had shut down it was just a bag of candy floss, a few cigarettes, a can of beer and an endless hike to the tube station before we were in Soho, guzzling trashy bottled drinks we’d smuggled out of bars on Old Compton Street. And then I flaked and had to go home. Quite a day. Exhausting.

The most interesting part of this review of A.I. is the last couple of lines: “Movies should be rated by how much they’re worth. If you’re looking for a science fiction movie that will provoke, madden and irritate you, A.I. is worth $10 — otherwise keep yourself and any youngsters far away.” The idea of rating a film based upon how much you should be prepared to pay to watch it is actually an extremely interesting one. Hence Memento becomes a $15 film while Deep Blue Sea is a highly unsatisfying $0. I’m going to have to think about this more…