Harold Pinter is a Dude

I haven't eaten since Tuesday.

I've just been violently sick after uncovering a three week old garlic chicken pasta in the fridge. Christ, the stench! It took me 15 minutes just to bag it up and get it out of the house whilst swallowing my own bile.

I decided against going to bed and decided as I hadn't seen daylight for 4 days I'd open the windows and get cleaning, not bargaining on vomit-inducing tagliatelle.

I don't understand Christmas music in shops. Why? Why would they do that? They don't have music in Tesco's the rest of the year round and I don't think anybody particularly misses it. I can't imagine anyone complaining about a shop having no Christmas music, just like I can't imagine anybody whose seasonal cheer quotient wouldn't skyrocket if they didn't have to hear The Chipmunks' version of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" while queueing to buy fucking tampons or whatever. It's a depressing enough experience lining up with everyone else to stare at the shelves of bland sandwiches at lunchtime without being driven demented by some tired and worn-out Christmas mix tape gurgling away in the background. Jesus, those things are on a fucking loop, too. There's currently a debate about a smoking ban in pubs, focusing on the rights of bar staff not to work in a nicotine fogged environment. What about the cashiers in supermarkets at Christmas? It's only a matter of time before one of them snaps from hearing Cliff Richard's "Millennium Prayer" six hundred times a day and brings a rifle to work, or unboxes a turkey carving knife for a slice'n'dice rampage. And if I'm in the shop when it happens I hope they fucking slit my throat, too.

Last night I saw these guys at the Garage in Highbury, with their huge, caustic, beautifully ugly mess. Craig Clouse is a madman. For the duration of the last two songs he climbed into the audience with the microphone, the cord all tangled up in the mic stand, and the crowd all stepped way back to the walls while he paced around swinging the stand around his head. We actually believed he would hurt us.

Back home, furiously drunk and humming with violent tinnitus, I stared at the television, not caring what came on and hardly comprehending what did. A man was on, talking straight into the camera, but I was so leathered I could see two men and two TVs, and my eyes struggled to marry the two images up. The man looked old and frail, but there was nothing frail about what he was saying. At some point I registered that the old man was Harold Pinter. I remember that he seemed, briefly at least, to be talking about his plays. But then he was talking about something else entirely, and it swiftly became the greatest single piece of television I have ever seen. It was fucking magnetic, and it felt like something that should never have made it into a national broadcast. I thought somebody must have made a mistake somewhere, somebody will lose their job in the morning. It was like a fucking portal had opened up and a freak dose of uninterrupted brutal reality was pouring through.

This morning I thought maybe I had hallucinated it all. But it appears I didn't.

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man.

This Christmas, the Queen's Speech should be replaced by Pinter's. This year and every fucking year.

I am so monumentally hungover today I am impervious to all external influences. And it feels great.