Day 111: I Am A Pumpkin, Not An Artist

What with it being Halloween and all, I send matching skeleton costumes, fake scars, plastic squeaky rats and False Teeth to my two favourite Small Boys (who live in Glasgow).

Their mother writes. "Boy wants to know what YOU'RE going as". In my head, I am going as a pumpkin and will look like this:






















I have sent them the Picture, and hope they will be able to Visualise me in my New Outfit. However, the quality of drawing is not good, and I am Concerned, particularly as their mother is an Extremely Talented Artist and once, not so long ago, drew a juggling elephant without even drawing breath. I can only aspire to such things. Still, I like my green curly shoes and stalk hat VERY much.

Day 111: I Am Left With A Vista

Noel has left, whilst telling me that Bob Marley sounded like an Old Etonian. This is highly improbable, but entertaining nonetheless. Still, he has Cleared The Garden and I think there may be some Hope.

Check this mother out. New View From My Bed (taken whilst kneeling on the bed - this is London, remember; we have no space). I have cropped the drying rack, Cecilia Aherne novels and cakes out of the photograph.












Photograph of garden taken from inside the shed. (Not a pleasant experience, but still.) I think the red thing is a Christmas tree stand, but I am not sure where it came from.














There is a plant behind the door in a laundry bag. Again, I am not entirely sure where it came from. What the pots are doing in the middle of the lawn I cannot say, but they can be moved and filled, perhaps, with a Playmobil hospital, a Lego garage, or a crop of broken Barbies.

It doesn't usually look that gloomy, come to think of it, but the weather is grey and flat today, and it makes everything else grey and flat even if it is usually Cheerful. Including me. I shall go and run for a bit and try not to fall over.

Splendid Monkey Gallery: Picture 4

Hot News! Lucy Pepper writes with her kind permission to reproduce this SPLENDID drawing of monkeys in trees (and one dead and bleeding one). It makes me weak with joy.






















The tension is mounting. I can hardly bear it.

There's Dave Shelton (who I entered without his permission), Lee with her drawing of someone she once dated, and an Anonymous Contributor of Monkey. I know for a fact that Clare Sudbery has one up her sleeve, but she refuses to send it until she has finished her novel. (Selfish, I thought, but still - at least I've got something to look forward to.)

There are at least another three weeks to go until I decide who has Won the coveted Splendid Monkey Of The Month award. So come along; send me your monkeys. Terms and conditions of entry up there on the right. And remember: monkeys drawn by monkeys are particularly welcome.

Day 111: I Can See My Lawn

Noel is here again. This morning, talk has been of Richard Branson, air miles, mobile phones and a penny on your pension. The Peugeot estate has been emptied, allowing him to put more than one leaf in the back of the car. The trips to the dump (just behind Norwood Cemetery) may be more cost-efficient than I thought.

He has taken his jacket off, and Means Business. I hear the occasional thump and muttered curse ("for fuck's sake"); he is worried about dropping vegetation on my bedroom floor. I have reassured him, opened all the doors, tied the cat to the table and hidden in the sitting room, from where I am counting traffic wardens (seven so far, and they've only been at it for fifty minutes) and praying for a few more squirrel corpses before the day is out.

Day 110: I Go To The Pub

Here is a photograph of the interior of my local where, on Friday night, I was sipping gently from a glass of sweet white wine and eating peanuts whilst lying on a stained dark green velvet sofa, watching a fupbal match and trying to understand computers.

From the outside it looks like it has been Done Over with a blowtorch and a packet of chalk. It looks dangerous. Until about five years ago, there wasn't much point going in it because the only things you could sit on were sofas taken off a tip, cut in half with a chainsaw and propped up on bricks. Anyway, they had a Makeover a while back and now it's got chairs in it and everything.

It struck me on Friday night that it looks like what people from Foreign Lands think British pubs look like. Except none of them do, apart from my local. The same people are there every time I go, but I have never seen them on the street, even though I've lived here for eight years. Everyone smokes Lambert & Butler and ignores when you come in. It has an excellent and strange jukebox that I do not use and is the last remaining outlet of Scampi Fries in the Southern Hemisphere. The barlady remembers your round, and there is an old bloke in the corner who winks and drinks Advocaat. It is Devoid of Media Twats, unlike every other pub in Brixton. (TwatBoy tried going but I think has now stopped; he went a lot, then went with his silly City friends and had a bit of a fright one night, but he still hasn't told me what happened.)

On Thursday there is Quiz Night, at which you can win beer cash. This is not money with which you could buy beer if you chose, but free beer to the value of - I think - £20. Except I have never won the pub quiz, because it is too hard.

(No doubt TwatBoy would go with his City friends and guffaw, and say "Oh, but we've all got degrees, so we're bound to win", and then someone would hear him, and they would call him a twat if they could be arsed.)

There is a pub called The Trinity Arms in Brixton which is a nice pub. It is often described as "a real pub", but the problem with The Trinity Arms is that it is full of people looking for "a real pub"; people who go to Borough Market to buy bread for £5 a loaf, belong to CAMRA and waste their lives in pursuit of authenticity. It has strangely glossy people working behind the bar; they sell white Rioja and people use BlackBerries openly and without shame in the beer garden.

My local hasn't got a beer garden. It is full of people I don't know. It is like something out of 1957. They sell terrible booze, and you can't breathe for the fag smoke. It is probably funded by the IRA. I don't even love it, or feel possessive about it. It's just there, being a pub, smelling of Lambert & Butler and stale Carling, down the road a bit and round the corner.