Indira

Just back from my run - down to Battersea Park in the dark, round the lake and back. I've just re-started this recently after several years' hiatus and I've been increasing distance and freqency - 25 minutes now, once a week. My friend Bim is planning on doing the London Marathon this year, having done a number of triathlons and although I have no intention of doing the same, if I can get up to a certain level of fitness I can go and train with him. Or with Sukie my pathologist buddy, another person who can now outrun me by a considerable margin, having at one time had difficulty even running for a bus.

Returned to find the boy Muffin watching "American Idol" so I've come away to do this. The one thing I find most distressing about this household is the amount of junk TV watched. There's only so much ironic detachment and semiotic analysis you can bring to this sort of thing; after a while you just have to take it at face value, and I'd really rather not.

I've just remembered I used to keep paper diaries - a page of A4 every day in big stationers diaries which I still have sitting around in one or other of my homes. One of the reasons I stopped was that my girlfriends always eventually read what I'd written about them with disastrous consequences. So now I'm doing this, which everyone in the world can read (hopefully sufficiently anonymised). Interesting.

Anyway, I guess the reason I've started now may be to document the dalliance I may have commenced with a woman at my workplace; we'll call her Indira. She started coming into my office a few months ago and gently teasing me - "how late are you going to stay here tonight, shouldn't you be out drinking with your friends?" and I'd do my best to banter back, gaze longingly into her dark eyes and so on. Were we flirting? I didn't know. Then in November we moved office and she came in to see how my packing was getting on. She'd been putting all her stuff into boxes and was sweating slightly; her bare arm touched mine and it suddenly struck me that there might be something happening between us. Just before Christmas she asked me for help filling out an application form for a job elsewhere and I said I thought the best thing would be for her to take me out to lunch so we could go through it properly. She looked a little surprised but quickly said yes - she clearly didn't want anyone else to know so we met outside and caught a tube a couple of stops down the line, ate pasta and I helped her with the form.

I try and have a simple goal in mind on these occasions and this time it was to agree another lunch date without the form-filling. As it turned out she suggested this before I had a chance to and we went for Dim Sum just after Christmas in the lovely Royal China. Even the two hours we allowed ourselves sped by, we talked and talked, her about her parents, husband, children and community, and me, to be honest I can't remember. Again she took my planned next step for me and suggested an evening date so as to have more time to talk. As we left our hands touched just for a second - I had a feeling deliberately on both our parts. The evening date turned out to be another form-filling session, in a wine bar, but as we walked back to the tube she put her hand in my arm as I held the umbrella over us, and when my train came we seemed to each simultaneously decide to reach for the other's hand, and kissed on the cheek. A further exchange of e-mails (hers now typed in pink) and she agreed to have dinner with me at the Cinnamon Club, a very smart Indian restaurant in Westminster. I'm now waiting for her to let me know the date (she's told her husband that one day each week is just for her).

I think I know what's happening here, but I can't really believe it, it just seems too good to be true. I mean Indira is married, she has children, although I've heard rumours that her marriage wasn't that happy she hasn't complained much to me about it, she knows I'm attached, and yet she seems to want to spend considerable time in my company. This is a very attractive woman, by the way, intelligent, interesting, I would have thought somewhat out of my class, and yet we go out, we talk for hours without stiltedness or awkward silences, we look into each other's eyes and I could swear we're just looking for the right moment to kiss. It's like a dream. Perhaps she just wants to be friends. Well I'll take it one step at a time, try not to get too out on a limb, and we'll see.

The Iraqi elections are underway. 30 dead in polling station suicide attacks, not generally a problem in South London even in the rougher constituencies. The results won't be out until some time next month but apparently the turnout has been quite high. Very hard to disentagle facts from propaganda, although the truth normally emerges sooner or later. I'll be very interested to see what the new Iraqi government has to say about the continuing presence ofAmerican and British troops.

End of the Century

Mrs Krustallos not in a good mood yesterday morning, slept on the sofa for reasons unexplained and wouldn't communicate, so I got on with the day as best I could - took shoes to be resoled, collected new suit from Armani in Sloane Street, bought a coat (at 60% off!) while I was there, home - did she want to go to the cinema? - no - so back out and to see End of the Century - The Story of the Ramones.

This was really interesting, if sad - three of the band (plus interviewee Joe Strummer) are now dead after all (and the fourth appears to have morphed into an elderly Hobbit). I don't know if the film managed to capture the reason the Ramones were so great - there was very little about the music, more about the interpersonal relationships in the band - but for those who are already devotees the film is unmissable.

Interesting that the filmmakers, and apparently the band themselves, considered their career a failure. I always regarded the Ramones as an overwhelming success - they changed music, made great records for 21 years and were one of the best live acts in the world.

I always felt that Joey was the Ramone I would have liked most as a person and that was borne out here - while Johnny was a right-wing control freak, Joey was a radical liberal and a romantic. Finding out he was Jewish puts a bit more of a spin on "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg" (his song about Reagan visiting an SS veterans' cemetary). And finding out Johnny 'stole' and then married the love of Joey's life puts a lot more spin on "The KKK took my Baby Away".

I also had no idea Joey suffered from full-blown Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Danny Fields' description of trying to get him down the stairs and into the tour bus was one of the comic highlights in a film with plenty of humour. Much of the humour revolved around Dee Dee it has to be said, for example his attempt to become a rap artist, the account of his relationship with his girlfriend, and just listening to him talk.

It would have been good to see more concert footage - particularly a barnstorming stadium gig in Brazil and the New Year 1977/8 gig at the London Rainbow which I was at and remember very fondly. Hopefully this will become available elsewhere in some form.

The saddest part of the film was perhaps that the band hated each other, particularly Johnny and Joey ("Joey could really hold a grudge" someone said, apropos of the Linda affair). Yet they knew they had something special and stuck at it for 21 years. It's hard enough working in an office with people you don't like...

Then to my flat to find my so-called tenant had again failed to come up with any rent - he owes me at least the cost of my new suit now and there's minimal chance of me collecting any of it I suspect. And finally to Mrs K's sister to drop off her rather belated Christmas present - a DVD of Tosca. "The only way I can take you to the opera without getting into trouble" I suggested to a rather confused reaction.

Today I'm watching a DVD of Don Giovanni as I write this. Mozart's operas seem as open to interpretation as Shakespeare's plays - how forced was his seduction of Donna Anna? - how innocent is Zerlina? (the answer in both cases "not very" I suspect). My big idea today is that Leporello should be played as gay. This would put quite a different angle on his inability to leave Don Giovanni, and on his tryst with Donna Elvira. Mozart is such an absolute master of matching music and drama - the social class and character of the three women is reflected in the tunes he writes for them and the way they sing them - he can do irony, mock-heroics, everything. It's just a shame live opera is so damn expensive - there's La Clemenza di Tito and Die Zauberflote both coming up, plus different bits of the Ring cycle at the ENO and Royal Opera House, and my credit card accounts already in a parlous state. My acquaintance at the ROH has so far failed utterly to come up with the free dress rehearsal tickets he promised me - I'll have to have another go at reminding him.

Now back to today and I really do have to get going on the spare room - seal the doorway, last sanding of the floor and that'll be it for the day. Painting the floorboards is easy and quite pleasant once the preparation is out of the way. Then I can start to move stuff out of my own room in preparation for painting that. (We're in a new flat, refurbishment work on which ground to a halt several months ago when we moved in). Perhaps just a little more Don Giovanni first...

Hello World

So here goes. Started frankly by accident, my online diary. Thought of calling it "45 and still unusual" but that would only do for the first 6 months....

I guess London is a fairly dull place to be writing from - most of the blogs I've read to date have been from Iraq. The allegedly Confucian curse "may you live in interesting times" comes to mind.

Still, we'll see how things go. Personal life may be getting interesting even if professional (local government!) and political life isn't.

Politically, my main interest at the moment is seeing how the Americans resolve the terrible situation they have created in Iraq. Has so much money and human life ever been spent to such counter-productive effect? The elections in nine days time will be extremely interesting. It seems pretty clear that the resulting constitutional assembly will be dominated by Shi'ite religious parties, surely not the effect Mr W has been trying to produce. I am sure the US will respond to this by trying to marginalise the constituent assembly - already they are tying economic assistance into acceptance of an IMF prescribed privatisation ecomony. How far the new Iraqi government will allow this to happen is moot - they are caught between the US occupiers on the one hand and the Ba'athist/Sunni Islamist resistance on the other so their room to manouevre is not great. A friend's partner has just left for Basra with the Foreign Office. It will be interesting to hear his news on his return.

That's it for now. Hopefully I'll learn how the blog-thing works better as this goes on.