Your contribution, Dudley, was to interrupt a lot and corpse a bit.

( Not Only But Always )

On Boxing Day, in search of some suitably festive programming, Channel 4 finally deigned to start showing the brilliant prison drama Oz again. Over the course of last week they showed all eight episodes of the fifth season*, and reminded me just how good television can be. Rather than carry on with the sixth season, this week they begin saturating the schedules with Celebrity Big Brother. Granted, this is still a programme about the psychological impact of confinement but the characters are far less believable or interesting. And it's distinctly lacking in shankings and @n@l r@pe.

This whole 'three minute silence' idea? Sod off. The two minutes for the twin towers was bad enough. The minute's silence is a flat-rate currency, because otherwise compassion inflation sets in, and before you know it we'll all be taking Cistercian vows of lifelong silence because some particularly photogenic toddler has kicked the bucket. Hell, it's not even as if the tsunami claimed more victims than 1914-18.

*Including one double bill which became a triple bill at the last minute, so that even those few of us who scan the late night schedules diligently and set our videos with a margin of error were guaranteed to miss it. For this, they shall one day taste my steel.

Flashback: December 27-31, 2004

I've already polished off The Black Dahlia (entertainingly sordid) and The Leopard (magnificently depressing) since I finished work; now I manage to conclude Veniss Underground (acceptably baroque) and How To Be Idle (gently inspirational) before the birthday festivities commence. This year I find some of my homies on the route down and two more already ensconsed, so am spared last year's anxious wait. The T Bird's resident bankrobber is, unsurprisingly, in attendance but this year he doesn't remember me, instead having a go at us for being fooking students. After we prove him wrong with a show of hands, even the landlady gets tired and he's out on his ear. Sure, he's a regular customer but drunk as he is, 30-odd of us are going to drink more, innit? And he'll probably have forgotten the slight by tomorrow. Alas, similar democratic thinking doesn't stop them turning off the jukebox and installing a DJ, even if he does pay me brief musical tribute. But all this is distraction; the awkward date notwithstanding, many of my fine friends attended and took much of the edge off the annual notification of my entropisation. For this I thank you. And I even managed not to pass out until the aftershow, and that in the company of those rare beasts, friends of mine who don't write on me.

I'm back in the venue of said afterparty within 24 hours. dickon_edwards brings a plush Cthulhu to dinner; there's not really anything one can say to that, is there? I am consulted the next day as to what actually happened; non-drinkers aren't the only ones who can serve as a "repository of good times".

On the 29th I find a Violet Indiana single I didn't know existed; fortunately, so doing also enables me to contribute effortlessly towards the tsunami victims. In the magnanimous spirit this engenders I head for the pub where for reasons which don't really bear explanation, atommickbrane's crew are attempting to drink a Star of David around the British Museum. Unlike the last pub crawl I attended, this one's ridiculously slack, and by the time I depart they've already settled. That's the spirit!

Catch up with saraviolet et al in Dread Hoxton on the 30th; having read a Gaiman story in which Cthulhoid murders occur in Shoreditch on the Tube over, and had quite the worst pesto of my life just before that, I'm a little on edge.

I'm a late starter on New Year's Eve, which is probably for the best; on top of that I'm drinking Archers & lemonade that the sugar might counteract my narcoleptic tendencies. The first impressively hammered performance is missfrost; it takes a four-man relay even to get her to the party. As she's carried in, I ask,
"When have you been drinking since?"
"1984."
Most of us make it down to the Crouch End clock tower for a somewhat befuddled guess at when midnight might be. Proceedings decline inevitably into various flavours of carnage. Goodbye, 2004. Many of my friends have made grand pronouncements about how you treated them, but I just carried on along my orbit, no more discontent than this parallel guarantees. I suspect 2005 might be fairly similar.