Saturday: another party, and therefore another set of steaming social faux-pas for my already-bloated shame-gland to digest on Sunday. It was organised by an old school friend at a bar in Brixton, with a fairly late continental-style start time (9.30). You may not be surprised to discover that I’d been drinking since about 5.30, so was already fairly exuberant when company arrived.

However, I’m not sure that “exuberance” excuses introducing myself to the assembled throng of (mostly) yoga professionals with a falsetto rendition of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” - followed by one of “Wuthering Heights” - although, in my defence, the girl who’d organised the party did mention that we’d once done a karaoke together. So what else was I going to do?

Later I was introduced to a girl called Salome. Having served up the obvious John the Baptist reference on a silver platter, I went one step further - something along the lines of “I’m half-Italian, so by rights I should know all about Salami; it’s a shame I’m vegetarian”. “D’you know, Michael”, she countered, “I’ve never heard that pun before in my life. Oh wait - yes I have! Every day when I was at primary school. But not since I stopped hanging around with people aged nine.” (Or words to that effect…)

Still, she forgave me and the subject turned to music - it turned out that she worked for a music exam board. We were getting on OK and I was quite keen to emphasise my chops, but sadly the conversation panned out something like this:

- “So I hear you’re quite musical; what do you play?”
- “A bit of piano and guitar”
- “Have you ever done anything with it?”
- “Erm… grade 3 piano when I was 12, and I often sit at home playing the guitar. By myself. Erm… ahem… I’m really good though; I can play pretty much anything… (uhhh… as long as it’s transposed into the key of “C” on the piano or “E” on the guitar)”
- “Really, Michael. How prodigious.”

Time prevents me elaborating on a later, very interesting conversation with a Scottish journalist which I felt the need to ruin at the end with an impromptu rendition of “Donald, where’s your Troosers”, but add to these blunderings a slightly over-enthusiastic goodbye kiss for the hostess, and a fairly vitriolic argument with my sister on the train back (about… well… absolutely nothing, if I’m honest), and you have the whole lengthy car-crash in a nutshell.

Just another perfectly normal Tafkass night out, in other words…

The latest instalment of what everyone’s still calling TTOTDOWOHOHCBATCI is “Turn It On Again” by Genesis, and yes, it’s yet another product of the early 1980s. Genesis had lost flamboyant frontman Peter Gabriel after their epic “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” in 1975, and spent the rest of the decade in something of a holding pattern. But then a) punk came along, and b) Phil Collins’ wife ran off, Lady Chatterley-like, with the painter / decorator. As a result, Collins started writing lyrically edgy, post-prog power pop which gave the band (and himself) a new lease of commercial life. This is probably their best early ’80s track, but “Mama” and “Abacab” are also excellent in the same vein (as well as Collins’ solo effort “In the Air Tonight” - which, TOG, you’d know probably know better as the “monkey-drumming song“.) Later, of course, Phil Collins decided that he was a talented actor, started writing dull, earnest songs about homeless people and became the (inexplicably) hated figure he is today.

I also think it’s a contender for best start to a song ever; any other nominations? “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana? “Start” by The Jam? “Communication Breakdown” by Led Zeppelin? “”4.33″ by John Cage?

So, as predicted back in July, a resounding win for our brave European boys in the Ryder Cup. Maybe not in the golf itself, where we surrendered tamely to an excellent US side, but we sure trounced them Yanks in their traditional “heartland” Ryder disciplines of moaning, poor captaincy and more moaning (honourable mention to Lee Westwood for a brilliant solo effort in the latter). Bah.

To add to the let-down, the BBC no longer have the rights to the TV coverage, so instead of settling down to watch BBC2 with my pipe, slippers and Peter Alliss (surely the Terry Wogan of golf), I had to lie in a darkened room listening to the charmless John Inverdale and his team of double-glazing-salesmen commentators describing the action on Radio 5. Worse still, I was tired after a long drive down from Whitby(*), so I dozed off at 9.30 with Europe still in the hunt; by 11 when I awoke they had lost. Double bah.

(* - I’d been practicing my Yorkshire accent all the way up in the car to the chagrin of my parents and sister, and on arrival, whilst quizzing the Whitby tourist information office about getting online, I failed to resist the temptation to ask if they had “t’internet”…)

Rick(*) Wright, keyboard player with Pink Floyd, lost his battle with cancer earlier today. Whilst not one of the main creative forces within the band, Wright was responsible for “The Great Gig in the Sky“, one of the best tracks from their best album, “Dark Side of the Moon”. Those of you who know the track will be familiar with people always banging on about the female vocal (which, to be honest, I can take or leave), but for me the clever bit - and one of my favourite Floyd passages bar none - is the piano at the beginning, wherein Wright engineers a fantastically haunting and effortless key-change from B-minor (the key in which the last track ended) to G-minor.

RIP.

(* - Amended from earlier “Richard”, in case anyone reads this and worries that Ipswich Town FC are suddenly bereft of an underachieving simian gaffe-prone goalkeeper.)

Not often you see Gianfranco Zola and Rob Brydon at the same charity football match, is it…?

In reluctantly tidying my disgracefully messy house in anticipation of my parents’ arrival next week, I’ve come to understand that I’m very much like nature - I abhor a vacuum.

Those of you who are familiar with my work will know that I’m not the greatest morning operator; I can wake up fairly quickly, but will then proceed to bumble around in a semi-daze for several hours (more often than not working off that last glass or three of wine which I promised myself I wasn’t going to imbibe yesterday evening), before eventually beginning to operate at full capacity at around midday.

Now, as you may also know, I buy a lot of my eBay stock from car boot sales, which generally start at 6.30 in the AM - so I’m unfortunately forced to be up with the lark at weekends. I can’t stomach coffee first thing in the morning, so have always relied on dodgy boot-sale burger vans for a caffeine hit an hour or so into my day. That was until yesterday. I found this amazing contraption for sale for only £2.49 (!!!) -

I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s incredible. You can place whatever hot liquid you like within, and it RETAINS THE WARMTH! In the apparent absence of a name, I’m calling it “Liqui-Heat” (TM). Now I can make my own real coffee (rather than Nescafe’s instant ground-up-African-baby powder, or whatever they make it from) and drink it in my own sweet time, from a stylish, rather sexily ribbed stainless steel container! No more over-filled styrofoam cups; no more sharing unwashed spoons with the great unwashed; no more negotiating over ludicrously high charges with ghastly, lank-greasy-haired stall attendants who I’d normally keep away from my foodstuffs with an electric cattle prod! Thankyou, Liqui-Heat (TM)! Thankyou for showering me with the gifts of morningness!

(Seriously - I can’t believe that it’s taken nearly 6 years of morning torture and rancid, expensive instant coffee for me to figure out that a flask would be an intelligent purchase… I’d be interested to hear if any of yous have had similar long-term blind spots.)

(… or “Palin to insignificance” if you want an already-much-used pun in the title).

I dunno about you, but I suspect that I (and many bloggers besides) have long since lost sight of the original intended purpose / format of a “web log”, which was to be a diary of thoughts and happenings. I may have fallen somewhat into the lazy online journalist’s trap, i.e. waiting until I come up with  some vague collected thoughts on something, then penning a half-baked paragraph on something I should have researched better, pre-excusing the poor quality by calling it a “blog”, and sidestepping the whole research issue by prefacing it with “I reckon that…”

So here’s some old-fashioned out-of-the-air thoughts / Tafkass life-updates (in other words, it’s a Zoe-style mish-mash post);

1) My eBay business is currently a monster growing out of control, and I now have genuinely serious need of a gimp to package CDs / leave feedback / correspond with customers / wear a leather (or vegetarian alternative) mask and live in my understairs cupboard subsisting largely on spiders which he / she catches through his / her own initiative.

2) Sarah Palin is of course a complete headcase; the hypocrisy of the whole pregnant daughter scenario is beyond belief. Because she’s a rich white girl, it’s all “let’s show family togetherness at this difficult time; not everyone can be a promise-keeper”. Ask most Republicans to pass judgement on a young black / latino 17-year-old unmarried pregnant girl in the rougher parts of any major US city, it would be “burn the jezebel whore Satanist Islamist witch and repatriate her parents to bongo-bongo land unless you can find a nearby tree to hang them on whilst shooting some guns and global warming isn’t happening and Jesus and stuff.”

3) It was the first game of my table-tennis season on Monday; I lost all three games, but played as well as I can remember for ages. My goal for the season is to get my attacking game - and especially my “widowmaker” forehand drive - working better, even if it means I lose a lot of matches along the way. Glorious failure rather than boring victory. (Very un-Italian…)