Hello lovelies! I've got my groove back! How? It was London. It's always London. I love London!

I hadn't realised how bad the last few weeks at work had been to be honest until I found myself wide awake on Thursday morning at 4.45am worrying about stuff. I'm not the kind of person who worries about work, I've usually put all that behind me by the time I get to the car at the end of the day, but not lately. And it was making me miserable. But getting away put it all back in perspective, thank God!

Dr Who

I had a ticket to see Russell T. Davies - writer of Queer as Folk and the man in charge of Dr Who for the last four series, and therefore a bit of a hero of mine. I booked the ticket ages ago, and he was just supposed to be talking about a book he's written about the last series of Dr Who (which I've bought for my sister to give me for Christmas), but then last week it was announced that David Tennant would be standing down from the shown and the evening suddenly became a whole lot more exciting!

It was at the National Theatre, on a big staged, and the place was packed! Not just your standard sci-fi geeks, but gay men, children, women - the man is clearly loved by everyone! And it's easy to see why - he's just lovely! Really chatty, warm and gossipy, knowledgeable and modest with it. You could really feel the love in the room!

The first question was about who will be the next Doctor, and he admitted he doesn't know because he'll be leaving and it won't be his decision. But he did say that he knows how he'll be killing off the current one and was clearly desperate to tell someone but couldn't. He chatted for 45 minutes, which flew by, and by the time it was over I was completely and utterly charmed by him. He's Welsh, so I should hardly be surprised by that. The queue for the book signing afterwards nearly brought the building to a standstill. He is a God. See for yourself here.

Andy Warhol

Next door to the National Theatre in the Hayward Gallery is an Andy Warhol exhibition. I'm a big Andy Warhol fan so I took the opportunity to go to that as well.

It's a bit hard to find something new to say about Andy as he was so famous in his lifetime, surely the first celebrity artist, and ever since then his work has been readily available - I've been to two retrospectives since he died: the first was twenty years ago, also at the Hayward Gallery, and it was the first time I'd ever seen his Brillo boxes, which were so different from anything else I'd ever seen they really changed the way I thought about Art and actually moved me to tears. The second time was at Tate Modern, and by then I'd seen so much of his stuff I didn't cry, but it's always good to see his things.

This exhibition tried a different tactic, focusing not so much on the paintings but on his TV and film work. The first room was kind of career overview, although I think the truthful description was 'muddle' - there were short films being projected on big screens, paintings, books, photograph and all kinds of bits of design work exhibited in a way that made them hard to enjoy. The soup cans were there, but so high up the wall you couldn't really see them - it was as if they knew it was what people wanted to see but were embarrassed to do something so obvious so they kind of hid it away. Which is a shame as they're popular for a reason.

The second room includes every TV show he ever made for cable TV, which is probably not as interesting as they hope, along with recorded interviews and odd bits of film they found lying around. It's intermittently interesting but would work better online rather than for real.

The third room is all about his films, which are rarely seen as they're low budget and not much happens. One of them is about eight hours long and is about the lights going on on the Empire State Building. Another is about a drag queen eating a banana. There's one about men getting a haircut, another about a man getting a blow job, and one about Andy's boyfriend sleeping. Realistically you can only watch a few minutes of each before you get bored, but the room is laid out in such a way that you can sit in one place and watch several at once. It was dark, quiet (they're all silent), and cosy - I spent half an hour in there and would have stayed forever if it hadn't started to get busy.

The final room is filled with his silver balloons, which are fun but ultimately pointless. The shop however was stunning! It took all my willpower not to buy everything! Luckily I have a long-standing no Art books policy - I have no coffee table to display them on so there's no point - but I very nearly bought a set of mugs and a cardboard model of the Empire State Building! I saw sense though.

To be continued.....

It's hard to know what to say about this week without getting whiny, and as no one likes a whiner I haven't bothered to say anything. But silence isn't very entertaining! And yet as I sit here and try to think of something to tell you my mind is blank. Bugger. Come back after the weekend when I'll have exciting things to tell you xx

Shopping madness

Before the theatre I had a little time for shopping, which proved more entertaining than I'd expected.

1. In Borders I noticed a stand with books by both Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand, who are both in the midst of a load of fuss at the BBC, but who also coincidentally have books out. I was just thinking how predictable it was of a book shop to try and cash in on there current notoriety when I noticed another book on the shelf with them:

It's Debrett's Guide for the modern gentleman. Good to see there's someone in retail with a sense of humour!

2. I found myself in TK Maxx looking at expensive underwear. The same brand of expensive underwear that the 24 year old likes. Not with the intention of buying it for him you understand, but for myself, to impress him. Why one earth would I want to impress someone else's boyfriend?!

Alan Bennett is God. Well, he is in this house anyway.

And yet strangely I've seen very little of his stuff on stage: The History Boys (twice) and Single Spies earlier this year, but that's all. Shocking isn't it.

But last night I had a real treat - I got to see one of his early play, Enjoy, and the marvellous Alison Steadman was in the cast! She is utterly fabulous in everything she's ever done, but recently I've been loving her in Gavin & Stacey. I've never seen her on stage before so I was very excited!

The play is about an elderly couple who live in a terrace house in Leeds, one of the few remaining that hasn't been knocked down to make way for new flats. The council sends round an observer to watch them, to record their way of life in the hope that it won't be lost when they're rehoused. So with a stranger in the house silently watching things slowly start to go awry.

In some ways it's very Alan Bennett - the setting, the themes - but in other ways it really reminded me of Joe Orton - the corpse in the living room, the men dressed as women, the slightly surreal ending. I wonder if it was a coincidence that a few years later he wrote the screenplay for a film about Joe Orton?

Anyway, it was fabulous. Very, very funny and yet sometimes so poignant that I could feel myself welling up. Alison Steadman was as fabulous as I'd hoped. Thank God for good theatre!

I went to bed in a sulk at 8.30pm, which actually turned out to be a good thing: I'm bright-eyed and bushy tailed this morning, and I got some reading done.

I finished Edmund White's Hotel de Dream. Edmund is something of a big gay hero - his book The beautiful room is empty was the first gay novel I ever read - thank you King's Lynn library! - and I identified with it so strongly that I read it several times after that. Little did I know at the time that many men of my generation had exactly the same response to it!

Since then I've read nearly everything he's written, which has sometimes been a bit fo a struggle, particularly the 800 page biography of Jean Genet! God knows why I bothered, it wasn't like I was a fan of Genet before, and I certainly wasn't afterwards! The only fact I've retained from the whole experience is that he spent a few weeks in Norwich in the 60s, which sounds so unlikely it must be true! I thought this fact had the makings of an interesting short story, but realised I wasn't the man for the job!

So to Hotel de Dream, which is about a real author who supposedly wrote a story about a male prostitute, which then got destroyed. Edmund imagines the last few months of the writer's life, during which he wrote this story, and makes up a story of a male prostitute which alternates with the story of the author. Obviously it's beautifully written, but ultimately it feels a bit pointless, like some kind of literary game to amuse academics. A piece of elegant fluff perhaps?

I think part of my problem is that I've read too many novels in the last couple of years where real people are reimagined, including another by Edmund White called Fanny, a fiction, about a female writer who goes to America to start a new life and fails. Strangely most of the books I've read seem to include Henry James in them, so although I've got no inclination to read his work I seem to know an awful lot about him!

And now I guess I better get up. It looks damp out. I wish I could stay at home!

I'm listening to Saint Etienne's happy/sad disco gorgeousness in an attempt to bring back the soul a cheeky teenager thinks I don't have, so there may be tears over the keyboard...

Today is Mum's birthday, so I've spent a lot of it doing Mum things. Inevitably the gifts were a little on the dull side: there's nothing she really wants, she has no time for anything frivolous so unless you can think of something practical it's hopeless! This year we got her a slow cooker, which she seemed excited about, and once I discovered you could use it to make rice pudding so was I - imagine coming home to find 2.5 litres of gorgeous, creamy rice pudding waiting for you! Of course the Credit Crunch gave her the perfect excuse to say, "you shouldn't waste your money on me!", the unspoken bit being, "you'll need it to buy food when you get made redundant" - my mother's glass is always empty. And broken. Still, the cake was nice and the kids were in high spirits.

This afternoon I've mostly pottered around the house, thinking up new and exciting ways to avoid cleaning the kitchen floor. I'm not Cinderella, I don't like getting on my hands and knees and scrubbing! So I ironed instead, which is far more fun! And fell in love with Flight of the Conchords, which I'm a bit of a latecomer to, but which could have been specifically designed to appeal to me! It's about a folk duo from New Zealand trying to make it big in New York - see, folk - my musical genre of choice this year - and New York, or what looks more like super-cool Brooklyn, which I'm starting to think of as my spiritual home - what's not to love! They won my heart in the second with a Pet Shop Boys parody.

And my soul? Apparently I don't have one as I sleep with people who already have boyfriends. Thanks for stating the obvious teenager, I'd managed to avoid thinking about that for ages!