Naked Blog

Northern hemisphere summer solstice 2009 was at 0545 UT/GMT this morning.

This would be 6.45am BST or 7.45 am CET.

Betcha you missed it! (I didn't... couldn't sleep for excitement!) Stroked zoe and looked at the sun, already high as a pie in the sky. Zoe was warm with solar radiation. Loving the solstice, because this is the lightest day of her life.

Typical figures: Sunshine on Leith from 04.25 to 22.02

You got to grab some zzz while it's dark!

Last night I dreamt I shagged Julie Burchill. She was really just putting me up cos I was homeless, but we ended up shagging. I felt she wanted it, and hate to say no to anyone. Plus she only had one bed. Can't remember whether I had a hardon or not. Too much information sweetie. I remember she ate a lot. Had to take the baguette off her so I could shag her properly.

"Erm, excuse me, but is it not somewhat illegal to have candidates inside the Polling Building?" I asked. It was last night, after various pubs, at the Euro Elections. My Polling Place had always been Lorne Street Primary School, for decades it'd been there, but now and the last time it's moved to some Church Hall in Henderson Street. Just round the back from Lidl really, who should have been doing Election Specials, but what with being German, probably weren't. Das glaub Ich und das weiss Ich. Opened by HRH The Duke of Edinburgh in Nineteen Canteen, it said on a plaque, proudly.

So imagine my surprise on entering this royal and holy building, to see Malcolm (Carrot top) Chisolm standing there, large as life and twice as ugly, chatting furiously to a punter. Hence my sotto voce to the electoral officer in the opening sentence above. Malcolm Chisolm is a labour guy. Quite which labour guy he is remains a mystery, as here in Scotland we're governed to death. We have councillors. We have MEPs. We have MSPs. And of course we have common or garden MPs. Four people stacked above my head, like planes circling Heathrow in a traffic jam, directing my every move. And all I know is that the Chis fits in there somewhere. He came to my door once, many years ago, seeking my endorsement. "Oh, you look far better in black and white!" I cried, grabbing his monochrome poster from behind the door where it had lain unread, and comparing his photo with the scarlet reality before me.

As electoral irregularities go I'm sure it's a small one. And at least this time the voting was straightforward. "Put one cross," the seriously obese lady said to me. "Then fold the paper and put it in the box." And thus, with one small mark, I gave my support to big Gordon. The alternatives are too awful to contemplate.

ROOM WITH A VIEW

Continuing the local theme (sorry to my legion of far-off fans) I see the City of Edinburgh Council have now succeeded in removing any trace of natural view from Leith Street at the top of Leith Walk. As architectural monstrosity has followed outrage, they have chip, chip, chipped away at the previous lovely sight of Calton Hill. Well now it's gawn completely, with the space opposite John Lewis today sporting scaffold right up to the skies. Ah well. It was only a bit grass and sky for the people to look at. Trees. Who needs it, eh?

And at least you are only a few moments from Regent Road and the magnificence of Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags - but I have to say I was somewhat nervously visualising an enormous O2 shop right up there on top of old Arthur. With a huge dayglo sign. Or Vodafone. Oh it'll happen. But not in my lifetime, hopefully. If they can ruin it, they will ruin it. That's the CEC motto. Edinburgh is ours to destroy.

Read on for last night's thrilling confessional! That's right.... just like the buses... you wait for ages....

I know for most people it's a blessing. Little gadget that rings and lets you talk to people who aren't there. Magic!! What would our ancestors have said?

But whereas as it takes two to tango, so they say, although most of my life has been spent in solitary tangoing, two to do that, it takes only one to make a phone call.

That supreme arrogance.

I will phone you up.

I have the power to make that phone in your house or in your pocket ring.

No matter what you are doing, I will interrupt it. I will demand your time be given to me. I will insist you pretend to be pleased at my interrupting your life in that way. And because I cannot see you, the pretence can often be carried. That's why video phoning will never take off.

But I digress. Phoning is extremely demanding. It presumes so much. And me, I've stopped that presumption. I haven't phoned anyone for almost a year. Just can't. Can not make that step to say TALK TO ME GODDAMIT I OWN A TELEPHONE.

Oh texting was a small possibility for a while. Ding, ding rather than ring, ring, ring, ring, ect ect. But now I can't do that even. Can't occupy their telephone with my miserable writing. Put words on their screen.

Today I saw Stewart in Wetherspoons, surrounded by adoring fans of his Thursday radio show. Me I sat silently and read the menu, did some sudoku. He didn't see me, or if he did he pretended not to. Speaking to him was out of the question, even though he's close to my only friend.

It's lonely, being so shy I think they call it. That's why I write here, and love your replies so much. There's no demand you see. It's an "opt in". While I have long since opted out, I fear. Maybe there's a tablet you can take.

A decade ago when the internet was young, and blogging was a word no-one had heard of, Dusty Springfield died. That's right. Went and gone and died, with nary an HTML opinion to be read. Except strangely here. Well not quite here. The site before this, which was called magnificat's home page. And it went ballistic. Big, bigger, maybe even the biggest. Put my website on the map, our dead Dusty did. Offers coming over the phone.

But nowadays the internet is a different kettle of fish. This week my thoughts about Susan Boyle would have to fight (if I even were to write them - I'm still not totally persuaded) to fight with the Grauny (their most-read story), the New York Times Online, God Knows Who Else Online, and so it goes. My small window of importance has quite gone. In short, nobody gives a fuck about the small man any more.

---

Can you see where I'm going with this? Can you realise this is not simple why me-ism?

Because Susan and I have more in common than you might realise. Obscurity to The Priory. "Makes Amy Winehouse look like an amateur," some wag wrote in the Guardian. But the difference, the huge difference, is that the car crash called SuBo can sing, and sing her socks off. And can do that for the foreseeable future. Which means megabucks for all around - except, bizarrely, for her herself, of course. Herself who will be lucky to scoop up two or three pence per album sale. And that contract will have been signed yonks ago... as fleeting yet impoverishing as a Download Terms and Conditions that no-one ever reads.

Susan I wish you everything you wish for yourself. You are the most important person for ages really. From over a decade of writing shite online this car crash blogger has made nothing. Nada. Because opinions are like arseholes. Everybody's got one and they all stink.

And yet, and yet...

Walk The Forest Path

Me I'm kinda fine, although rarely to be seen in the real world these days. Fantasy is more enjoyable, and in time it will come to everyone. There will be no more rainy grainy streets where you get stabbed. Instead life will be lived in front of your screen, where dinosaurs gambol in the greenery and Susan Boyle sings Memories in the background. Don't laugh. It's not me who's the idiot. As ever we lead not follow. Warcraft is advertising on the telly again. Just say no. ROTFLMFAO

Tired of previous guilds, I've started my own, exclusively for people like us. People over thirty. We even have a guild blog and blogmaster, to whom I give the occasional bit of advice, never not ever telling him about this one, my own personal albatross. Oh it'll run and run.

But here, on Naked Blog, it's been a long time. It's taken the cultural and social enormity of SuBo to drag me back. Who lives only a bus ride away. But here we are. For a mo. And dead Dusty still rules all.

Susan Boyle, by Euan Ferguson in the Observer yesterday. The money shot.

And in case there's anyone on the planet who hasn't heard her sing, well look no further.

It's been a huge joy.

And hi! That's right! I've left the guild.

Guild? What guild? I hear you asking.

Well it's (or rather was) my World of Warcraft guild, which I won't name for reasons of privacy (and Google, natch).

So what's a damn guild then, and why does it matter that you've left? In a world full of dead Jade Goodys why should I spend my time reading about a game I neither know nor care about?

Well I can tell you, because the answer is simple humanity. Human community. The company of others through the medium of type. Typing to people you will never ever meet, yet still strangely care about.

Sound familiar?

Well it should. Because you're in a sort of guild yourself, whether you like it or not - the guild of Naked Blog readers. Except this one isn't 24/7.

Oh - it's available 24/7, but except for my posts and the occasional but much-loved comment like all blogs it's totally inactive. Whereas a guild is always there, always on. Since December there's been only one occasion, exactly one, where I logged on to Warcraft and no-one was there in the guild list. I was alone. And that's now where I am again.

At the rising of the dawn they were there for you. At the going down of the sun they were there for you. If you logged on about 6 or 7 am you would meet the nightshift stumbling to bed after a night of slaying cartoons, while the dayshift staggered groggily to their keyboards to start their daily fix. Start at 6 and be buzzing by 11 I discovered. It's so addictive, they say.

AYE FOND KISS

So there they are, gone now. A, the single mum of two, bossing everybody about and foot-stomping when things didn't go her way. L, the cyber-trannie, a man running a female character. (Most of the female toons are really men, they say. Take a walk on the toon side.) B, the trainee mechanic, very friendly, who I took a more than fatherly interest in. D, my own the father figure and mentor, who kindly lent me a small fortune in game money for my first horse. T, the guild master, who also had her husband, son and nephew in the guild. (The family which plays together, stays together.) All of them my new family. Since December. The ones I spent my entire ten day holiday with. The ones I truly didn't abandon you for, I'm now so glad to say.

Sounds quite nice, once you allow for terminal sadness and geekiness. So por qua did you leave? Bust up? You being stroppy and demanding as usual?

Well no, not really. I understand that in any community you have to take the bad with the good. You won't ever find any group of people one hundred percent to your liking. Nor even one person, if you think about it. Good and bad. Ups and downs. Give and take. Yin and yang.

But it's when the bad starts to outweigh the good, and the truth sinks in that the community is causing you more grief than pleasure, that after much delay and consideration you have to grasp the bull by the horns firmly and pull the plug. This causes a storm in a teacup, and then of course you're rapidly forgotten. I'm sixty two, ffs. No illusions about my importance in the scheme of things. Any scheme of things.

So are you giving up World of Warcraft, Peter?

Hell no! I'm looking for another guild. Anybody want a level 60 warrior and 65 deathknight?

IN OTHER, NON-WARCRAFT NEWS

Last Sunday's Pentland walk was a genuine pleasure. Stewart's friend, a lady in her fifties, was delightful. And her being a bit of a beginner meant that for old lags like me the walk was non-strenuous to the nth degree. In fact I even got in a bit of "showing off" at the beginning, where I ran up the hill ahead of them both. (It's no wonder I have no friends!) Well, everybody does it...

I've been back twice since then, most recently yesterday. Fitness will return. It always does.

The Flot was quite funny yesterday. A funeral party was bigging it up in the function room, all black ties and pints of lager. (It really irritates me when people refer to these parties as a wake. A wake is something quite different, and takes place before the funeral.) But then lots of things really irritate me.

Sixty people were there, Scott the bar manager told me. "Sixty!" I cried. "I'd be lucky to muster six!" Then a party of handicapped adults came in. Severe learning difficulties some people call it. Mongoes, some others say. (Unkind term, do not use.) I envisioned some sort of post mortal clash breaking out between the two factions, but the Flot is too classy a place for that. Really I have no time for trashy pubs these days. Misspent youth. And middle age. Now I'd rather misspend my time in Azeroth and Outland. Cheaper!

Right, that's yer lot. I've got an hour before work to run about in Warcraft. Alone there now, as I am everywhere else. Sigh. But it's not so bad. Beats people and their annoying ways.

And hi! Howya doin? It was four in the morning about an hour ago, and now it's just about five. At nine I'm due at Stewart's and after that we're tackling some Pentlands. Just a few, like the old men we nowadays are. A lady friend of Stew's will be there whom I haven't met, yet strangely I'm not feeling terrified.

This is progress. As is me not logging onto Warcraft since Thursday. That's right. Clean for two whole days and it feels good. In fact Thursday was the first social day of the year, when Stewart and I had a couple of pints in George Street Wetherspoons. He really is a treasure. This is how it happened...

MIXED MESSAGES

I was walking along the banks of St Margaret's Loch in Holyrood Park. The sun was high, geese, ducks and Mute Swans were cackling away, when my phone ding dinged in my pocket. The phone I haven't dared answer for two months. "It's now or never, kid," I thought and reached in and nervously pulled it out. Thirteen new messages. Eight missed calls. One voice call. I noticed a grassy bank, remembered you're allowed to sit on grass, so sat and read my texts. Oh - most of them were from Vodafone and Phones4U wanting to sell me stuff, but a handful were from dear dear friends. Thank you. True friends are those who don't mind if you go away for a while, those who don't demand continuity.

TYPED CAST

There's friendship of a sort on Warcraft also. Oh yes, it's very sociable. Typed sociable. You get to know in type people you'll never ever meet. Bit like this, really, except they're much more sparse with the personal info. As am I. But again that's part of the fun... double identities. Oh, I've got them all mapped on to some of you! I especially have a new zed and a new mike. Quite awesome. (But they'll never really replace the originals. Don't worry sweeties.)

Looking back now I can see Thursday was a bit of a watershed in more ways than one. I'd wowed (World of Warcrafted) fromm about seven in the morning till early afternoon, then it really was so sunny that "should go out" overcame "want to stay in" and out we went. To the Regent, for a couple of lagers with PJ and a big beardie kiss from Alan the owner. He really is a treasure. And then... Arthur's Seat. Get back to where you once belonged.

Strange it was, moving again after all this time. Did I mention my recent holiday? That's right. Ten days of total Warcraft immersion. Five, six, seven in the mornings till falling asleep at night. Why? Because it was there. And because I've done something similar much earlier in the internet, in IRC, when the typing was dirty and the pictures you made up in your mind. But I did huge immersions then also... whole holidays sat on my arse typing. I know it well. You meet the strangest people. And the nicest. And you can be whomever you want. Several people a day if you want. But now I don't lie. I just don't answer some of the questions. Oh, I changed my job very very slightly, because people have a whole bunch of conceptions of bingo, most of them wrong. Oh also, I became heterosexual. But that isn't such a lie really, as it's been close to two decades since I've been any sort of sexual. So one celibacy isn't that much different from another, if you get my drift sorta. I actually hate sex - the very thought is repellent to be honest. Strange, when you consider the amount I packed in. But I digress.

FORD EVERY

Climbing Arthur was funny. Hurting a bit, despite the lager and jammy scone I'd bought in the Regent. "You must climb the hill," I kept saying. "Just climb the fecking hill. Put one foot in front of the other. You must climb the hill. Your entire future depends on climbing this hill, on this day, in this time. Climb the hill. After you climb the hill you can Warcraft all you want. But you must climb the hill."

So I climbed the hill, and it was good. Sweet memories of when I had hair, and used to get myself photoed and later post the piccies here for ya. Proud. Happy days, glory blogdays. We'll get them back. We have built too much, travelled too far together to throw it away to a mess of cartoons.

VIDEO KILLED

"MSPs are queueing up to be on my show," Stew said later, in the pub. He's back on the radio. Thursday mornings. Catch his show on the interweb. He really is quite splendid. (MSP means Member of the Scottish Parliament.) Scotland is governed just twenty minutes walk from my home. That's right. There's more to Edinburgh than tramworks, although you wouldn't think it, looking at the state of Princes Street these days. Ruined. A city brought to its knees by the malevolent vainglorious ineptitude of our elected representatives. And yet nothing can be done. They are accountable to no-one, and their idiocies go unpunished.

Well, my six o clock alarm has newly rung, and it's time to get ready for the Pentlands today. Three of us. Let's hope three's not none.

It's been lovely writing to you again... such a change from the lmao and lol of warcraft correspondence. Some people put lol and the end of every line... as automatic and thus meaningless as the x at the end of a text. Or the yours sincerely at the end of an old fashioned letter.

NUMA NUMA

But writing is truly over, and now we live in the YouTube generation. Or just Tube, as they call it. Usually my recommendations here are ahead of the game... think Franz Ferdinand, Russell Brand, and so many others too numerous to mention. But today I'm going to point you to a Tube from two or three years ago, which you quite possibly have already seen. It's Gary Brolsma miming to Numa Numa, and it's had over twenty seven million views. One minute 38 seconds of material, and Gary is more famous than Stewart could every dream of. Or even me - and I've been on the telly twice. One minute 38 seconds of material and he's appeared in both Simpsons and South Park. One minute 38 seconds of material, and what do you do with the rest of your life?



Tomorrow, or more realistically next time... more of the Numa Numa phenomenon. It's actually far bigger than Amarillo.

Must rush, darlings... the hills are alive and the Lidl Weather Station is set to sun!

Sitting in a delicious bar in Rose Street, watching the early evening, after work, not-yet-going-out punters. The music is mellow, the system above average.

Nothing unusual about that, I hear you think, and you would be right. No, the unusual bit starts in about one hour when I go home. Home to the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) where I spend all my time these days. A type-fest. And typing is something I do rather well. And there I will be till my eyes can no longer keep open. But knowing full well the game goes on all night - it can never stop - and at six the next morning you can chat to the redrim overnighters as the gagging on it early starters log on and wait for the rush, and yet the calm. For what other drug gives you all the supply you want for nine quid a month? What other? Stephen King would write a novel about it.

Coming soon. Or mebbe later. Or quite possibly not at all: The People Of Warcraft. Just who are these people Peter is spending his online time with these days? Are there single mothers? Are there the newly redundant thanks to the credit crunch? Is anyone dying of cancer as they shoot monsters across the galaxy? And what about Eastern Europeans?

I think we should be told.

Make no mistake: the December Warcraft intake is now several million people glued to computers and screaming in their lucid moments:"What the fuck has happened to my life??!?"

Dude. LOL. BRB. LMAO. PMSL. LMFAO. Dude.

For of couse there are two levels of deception. Clearly no-one is really an orc. Or a mage. But is the guy who chats about being a big hairy ass builder (and gets my goat up I can tell you) really a big H A B ? Or rather a bank clerk with the doomed RBS? A middle-aged and getting desperate spinster? And what about me?

In IRC in the nineties I made sure I was young and plump. And not plump in a fat way. So what now? In the nineties also I learned to type in character. To lie without lying. So what now? Sixty two or thirty two? Rich or poor? Married or single? Straight or gay? The choice is yours, but whatever the game rules all. It owns us. And owns is a big new usage you could learn. Wicked.

Oh. My. God.

What's to become of us all. And now I must log on. Being off for six hours has been great, but it can't go on. Tonight, before bed, must reach level 54 and then on Thursday 55 and Death Knight. Be very afraid.

Listen. If this is to happen right now you've got to excuse the typing and stuff. If we wait for typographical perfection it just ain't gonna happen. (Says he, after three perfect sentences.)

Reason is my head is full on. Full on, but not with the three pints of cheap lager I#ve just had, the first for over a week. No, not with those, but much morfe iwth the compugter game i logged on tgo at 6 thiw morning, after 5 hours sleep the night before. That's right - cos logging on at 6 gives you a bigger rush. And you get to chat to the redrimmed ones who've been on since the night before. Over nighters.
Owls and larks. But all after tghe same thing - the online high. Just somse of us recognise it and some seem to not.

Oh. Mhy. God.

Eleven million active players.

So not much chance of making friends.

Broken down into discrete servers, not commiunicating except in certain cirucmustances wich I wont bore you with, cos if you are to get anytning from this its the human side.

And ;then, in a masster stroke, comes the software to make Guilds. And that#s where we differ fundamentally from the Doom Leagues amd IRC of the nineties. Becuase the guilds are entirely human - actual people you get to know and type to all day and all night if you want. It is Internet Relay Chat for the new millennium, except with added cartoons and a shared common interest. Interest spelled A.D.D.I.C.T.I.O.N.

All is about encouraging friends to progress in the game. All. Move up levels for better and better experiences. Yet they don't realise, most of them, what the guilds really are, which is shooting galleries for the addicted.

What's to become of us all?

All of Sunday ;was spent playing warcraft. Monday too. And all of Tuesday, ,just to keep tha t progress progressing. Level 45, 46, thden 47 soon later this evening. Darling zoe has just made an olympic leap from floor to chest, totally without claws,k and byupassing Tosh the lpatop completely. Becuase she loses out. As do my once real life friends, one fo thwom kindsly phoned even just earlier today, And not that I had very many a;of those anyway. And then, in no espcial oreder, youo;.

Phones go unanswered, emails unopened, doors never opened but then they never were. No-0ne can invade your loife... no-one that is who doesn't understand. Whjo hasn't got the bug. Whos doesn't "use" him/herself.

I have to go. Three more bars and its level47... where bar means increment on the progress meter, rather than drinking emproriumj.

I see Jade Goody/Tweed is on tghe way out.Shame. I see Grodon was in America seeing Barack. Goodl. Got to go now. Friens has started. It's the only interest I still got left, although mostly i just odnt bother even with that. They'e stareted again. I never can.

Peter x

It was so lovely, Sunday, writing to you twice and reading your replies. Such loyalty is rare these days. So lovely, Sunday, that I made today something of a reprise. That's right. Back to da Pentlands, and then back to you on my nice new laptop. The laptop which has cost me my hair once again, but there ya go. Hair today. Never, ever get a Wireless N card and sit two feet away from it for hours on end. You'd think they'd issue some warning. Plenty of warnings about diabetes this morning on the news... all those fat arses falling like flies. Well, not exactly falling, but being kept alive by no less than ten percent of the NHS budget. Ten percent. Of a million trillion. Oh yes... sickness is one mofo of an earner. But I digress.

TRANSPORTS OF DELIGHT, OR MEBBE NOT

On the Edinburgh Tram Works, or lack of them

Regular readers can hardly have escaped the earlier posts about the tram (non) workers. So often we wrote about the lack of application of these yellow-jacketed men as they smoked with one hand and phoned with the other, leaving no third hand free for useful effort. In fact it was a running joke with bus passengers going up Leith Walk on the 22.

"Look! There's six of them doing nothing!" sexy Samantha would shout.

"I raise you nine at that hole over there!" chipped in Tristram on his way to the office.

We laughed. Made fun on our blogs.

But not any longer. Princes Street (Scotland's most iconic street - "The Scotsman") is closed. It is very closed. It is so closed you can chase the tumbleweed rolling from Boots the Chemist along to Carphone Warehouse. So iconic. There's a kind of hush.

And why?

Because the German contractors (British jobs for British workers?) are demanding 80 million more bucks and a 70 week delay. Or both. Or neither. Or mebbe the other way round. But who gives a fuck? Who is even slightly surprised at the sheer mind-numbing incompetence of the City of Edinburgh Council playing Monopoly with the public purse? They should be taken from their Morningside homes and shot at dawn, along with the maleficent Scottish Government. Bodies tossed into a tram hole - there to get covered possibly in 2012. Possibly.

HILLS ARE ALIVE

It was good to walk the hills again today. Good to feel the body I inhabit beginning to respond to these entirely reasonable demands. It's what your cells are for. The alternative is Type 2 you know what. Obesity related. So get off your derriere and join me. You know it makes sense.

SWEETS FOR MY SWEET

Love, of a sort, to Jade Goody, killed by the Press which initially made her. And no, she still never racially abused Shilpa Shetty. I saw every minute of every daily highlight, which is as much as did any newspaper. And she never done it. Just didnae. And now her body has collapsed and she has weeks to live. And they even took her lovely hair with their pointless "therapies". Doctors make you worse. And make no mistake, dying will never be the same again if this runs the course I think it might.

TRANSPORTS OF DELIGHT, OR MEBBE NOT

I missed the bus today, back from the Flotterstone Inn and the Pentlands. It was five minutes early to be honest. So what could I do but pile back to the Flot and order another hour's worth of lager. "Would you like a lift to the edge of town?" asked this middle-aged guy I'd watched writing in a notebook. "Is that a novel you were writing?" I asked him then. "No, just a diary," he replied. We swapped names as I declined the lift. When I was a kid, my mother threatened fury and damnation if I were to get into a car with a strange man, and to this day I still cannot do that. Roger his name was. He seemed a bit strange, but I felt I could have coped. Did I tell you I got four Valentines at work? And only one of them from a man?

On top of Turnhouse Hill, in the Pentlands. Not playing World of Warcraft. Even though it was a great struggle just to go out of the house.

Had to stop five times just to get this far. The future is bleak, but richer, as the alcohol bill is now zero. As are company and conversation. But I don't care. Warcraft owns everything. Level 40 now.

LATER, BACK HOME, STILL NOT PLAYING WARCRAFT

[Ed: you know that crap above won't get you anywhere, dude. If you wanna get even one percent of your readers back you got to give them something they can relate to. I'm talking knock em dead with one of your famous, true-life anecdotes. The sort others aspire to, but usually end up dipping into the fiction bag. No names, no pack-drill. So. You up for it or not, big guy? Level 40 big guy? Can you still write or what?]

[Me: OK... ]

This morning at the bus stop there weren't that many waiting. Sunday... 10 am... not the world's most eye-opened time. A young man was moving around the few who were there, talking to each in turn. He came closer. He stood right up to me, eyeball to eyeball. (We were the exact same height.) Paused, didn't speak at first. I felt a frisson of remembered excitement.

"I am Polish," he began, smiling. "My English is not that good. I need fifty pence for the bus."

Instant maelstrom of conflicting thoughts - a turmoil I didn't dare show. He might well have had a blade, for all I knew... lose my life for a fiver. The first person I didn't actually have to speak to for weeks, and it was a Polish beggar. A gorgeous Polish beggar. "OK, I said, fifty pence." And gave him it.

I have a thing about beggars. Basically I don't respond. We are supposed to have a welfare state, a Labour government, a million social services to look after even the most needy. Especially the most needy. I've paid taxes for that for over forty years.

And yet. Fifty pence. "Is that enough for the bus?" my handsome hunk asked then. His sweatshirt was black with white writing. FCUK IN SIN CITY, it read. YOUR PLACE OR MINE, it didn't say, but had I only been forty years younger. Or even thirty. Or let's not do any more sums.

"I think it's about a pound," I said.

"So you give me a pound?" he asked then.

"No," I replied. "I've given you a start."

"Thank you," he said, and then continued to work the queue.

---

[Ed: Now that's a bit more like it. No mention of warcraft, and not even any of Jade Goody.]

[Me: STFup. I haven't finished...]

A number 22 bus came, and on I hopped. Who should be sitting right at the front but Bernice, one of my bingo ladies. "Hello Peter," she said.

"You looked like you didn't know whether to get on or not," she continued, and I told her about the young man I'd given fifty pence to. Most of the bus would have heard this tale, the way I was facing, and I knew they'd given him nothing. (His hair was gorgeous in that animal way of skunk stripe from brow to nape of the neck.)

"I'm just back from the day centre," Bernie said. "They're lovely young men, most of them. One or two not, but most are. They get home made soup, and a bacon roll and a cup of tea. Two cups if they want to."

"Is this for poor people?" I asked. "Homeless," she said. "It's a church hall."

And then, with clarity, it struck me. This old lady here had given two hours of her life to the poor, while I was feeling righteous at fifty pence. I thought of the Polish man on and off all day, how he must have come here hearing of a better life. How someone so beautiful should not be so poor, just shouldn't. And it wasn't a good feeling. I need to give and give big, real soon. Let this be just the start. Love you and thank you.