After leaving the house this morning, I was stricken with a sudden melancholy, mostly due to the absolutely tragic weather that’s decided to visit us after a week of blissful sun and warm breezes wafting across the land. Nobody needs to have dull gray mornings unless they live in London or Prague or one of those places that should really move somewhere nicer. Anyway, I was having my usual cup of the black stuff and a bagel (onion, cream cheese, toasted, thank you) at Diesel (where Craig was playing some excellent Primal Scream and I had to be physically blocked from jumping on the counter during “Swastika Eyes”) and trying to get over the weather and the fact that Iain M Banks’s Use Of Weapons left me feeling like I wanted to stab myself in the neck with a sharp piece of cutlery by reading some PG Wodehouse. Wodehouse, if you didn’t know, is one of my favorite writers ever. This paragraph below really sums his writing style and why his words splash rays of sunshine directly into my brainpan when others can only nudge me gently, telling me to brighten up when I get around to it.

The next thing that happened was a bit of a lull in the proceedings. For about three and a quarter seconds, or possibly more we just stood there, drinking each other in, so to speak, the old boy still attached with a limpet-like grip to my elbow. If I hadn’t been in a dressing-gown and he in pink pyjamas with a blue stripe, and if he hadn’t been glaring quite so much as if he were shortly going to commit a murder, the tableau would have looked rather like one of those advertisements you see in the magazines, where the experienced elder is patting the young man’s arm, and saying to him, ‘My boy, if you subscribe to the Mutt-Jeff Correspondence School of Oswego, Kan., as I did, you may some day, like me, become Third Assistant Vice-President of the Schenectady Consolidated Nail-File and Eyebrow Tweezer Corporation.’

(Yes, when I really get on a tear, my writing reminds myself of him quite a lot, too. I try not to ape openly, outside of the intro to this entry, but there you are.)