Alex James is Unwell...Q May 2000

This probably amounts to the most normal month of my life so far. Ever. Think of normal, stick a pin in the middle of it, round off the edges, regulate and limit the revs. That's where I live. I'm happy in a garden center or anywhere with a trolley. I've started liking weird fat inverted major VII b5 chords and petit fours with my blessed espresso. No longer will we recklessly hurl ourselves over physical horizons in search of we know not what. things are different now, forever, but it's the beginning of something rather than the end, always.

There's no Blur at the moment so I've gone back to doing what I did before - looking out to sea. It's what I've always been best at, and what I'm looking forward to spending my old age doing. we went to a cliff in Cornwall for the weekend and squelched around. There are posh hotels everywhere. You can stay in London, New York, Cornwall, Rotterdam and all that changes is the view, but that's not going anywhere. Walking out of your door due south for ten minutes is more going somewhere than this perpetual olive focaccia nonsense.

O Noctes cenaeque deum! (Oh nights and feasts divine! - Horace). We've been eating out a lot. Every day, lunch and dinner in fact. Amusing for ten minutes was the film game, where someone says the first half of a film title and someone else says the second half, so you get The Good, The Bad, & The Seven Dwarves or whatever and it's your job to cast it and explain what happens. This is amusing for 10 minutes but not three weeks. Now there are rows about optioning sequels, phoning agents, moving to Hollywood. Of course, this is how films are made in Tinseltown, as any fool knows.

An odd side effect of lack of exposure to alcohol is that I've developed a craving for pure maths, Number Theory and notions of the infinite, particularly -imagine a floorless room without walls or ceiling - those kind of rooms. Mathematics is the science of quantity and space, apparently, and its rules are discoverable in any conceivable universe. It's probably a convoluted form of sugar craving, but transcendental numbers demand contemplation. Take pi = 3.1415926535892932384626...This is an infinitely long number that really exists; you could take any sequence of digits, say a million noughts, five billion sevens then all the phone numbers in the Yellow Pages un order, and this sequence has to occur somewhere in the number! Sleep can no longer elude me when I feed that kind of information into the lively part off my head. It shuts me right up.

There's only so much room on the wagon, you know. I feel I owe it to those who are having trouble getting a table to make myself busy. To that end I have appointed a reality liaison office/gentleman's gentle person to take care of business. It's time to tattoo some structure onto the chaos. Power lies in the hands of those who own the structure, kids, and we can't beat 'em. Sitzflesich, another handy German concept, is an underrated low octane manifestation of genius - the ability to sit down and concentrate and hammer away at something until it's done. This I lack, this ability nearly everyone lacks and it's the downfall of bright sparks everywhere not to bash on with stuff until it's done. Craft and graft, that's where I'm at.

Look out! Shit-kicker in the area! Today Fat Les invoke the Nazarene! Rule Britannia!