Great Expressions!

Graham Taylor got the ball rolling with his legendary explosion on nearing the end of his less than illustrious career as England Football Manager with the famous "Do I Not Like That."

Michael Melia once ended an episode of Dangerfield by arresting somebody with the fantastic expression "You're nicked, Chummy-Bum."

Peter Windsor in F1 Magazine has just gone one better in his piece this month (well, character assassination wouldn't be too unfair a description) on Ralf Schumacher. This, of course, is the Toyota driver who has sucked up something like $72M over the last three years for driving around the midfield - on the rare occasions he's got the car off the grid and through the first corner. Anyway, Ralf had turned up for a photo session for the magazine and demanded that for his cooperation the magazine should in turn take a more favourable view towards him. Windsor, apparently, refused, taking the wind out of Schumacher Jr's sails. Still Ralf persisted, it was only fair, quid-pro-quo. And so on.

Eventually Windsor lost his patience and ordered the spluttering driver out of the photo shoot. When he refused to go and continued trying to negotiate the improvement in his profile with the publication, Windsor yelled what surely is an immortal line:

"Ralf, Off You Fuck."

What a great expression! Mind you, "You're nicked, Chummy-Bum" is still my favourite.

The one with Facebook

I added the 'Compare People' function on Facebook the other day and I have to agree with one of my friends there that the application, wherein you compare two friends and determine which is, for example, the more famous, the better marriage prospect or indeed which you'd prefer to be handcuffed to, can be thought of as a 'bit moldy'. And yet, it's quite compelling in its own way. But it reminded me today of that episode of Friends where Ross decides that sleeping with people other than Rachel would be ok as long as they were famous and on a predetermined list of five celebrities. Rachel of course takes it all as a bit of a joke, and Ross naturally takes it extremely seriously and spends the episode agonising over who should be on his approved for sleeping with list.

And so to Facebook where today I was confronted with two of my female Facebook Friends and asked the rather awkward 'who would you rather sleep with' question (answer guaranteed as anonymous thankfully). So that's been my task for this afternoon ... trying to decide.

As the starting point for a new project, yesterday I wrote to a genuine legend of broadcasting. And on that note ...

When the sun shone

I'm so unlucky in picking the right week to take a holiday that given this year's pathetic excuse for a summer you couldn't imagine that in the meteorological Russian roulette I'd manage to pick the loaded barrel and enjoyed a week away from the 9-5 in relative good weather and sunshine. But I did. So in the run-up to the incredibly long awaited move to the freelance lifestyle (that's redundancy if you want it spelt out - but, hey, I've been a 9-5 guy for so long I can only now see the positives), I grabbed a week of what Cornwall has to offer, let down my hair and relaxed. Which was great since it included a leisurely lunch gazing over the river at the Pandora Inn, a lazy ramble through the sub-tropical gardens at Trebah and down onto it's small beach where, unprepared for such nice weather at least Janet and the boys managed some paddling.

More serious watersports (if, let's face it, a somewhat overweight middle-aged man in a wet-suit can be taken seriously at all) saw Morgan and myself surfing (well, ok, body-boarding but surfing sounds so much cooler) at Portreath with, as it happened, a sizeable seal that was picking up the waves alongside us. Quite thrilling actually.

Record Collector last month featured the Hawkwind article that I'd sent them a few months back and though it needed some trimmings for over-length, it looked really good and ran to some eight pages including the full page advert taken out in support of the piece by my friends at Voiceprint Records. Really encouraging to see that in print, and in the same issue as a quick interview with Suzanne Vega that I'd unfortunately had to conduct by e-mail when all attempts to schedule a phoner into her hectic dash to Europe and the UK in July came to nowt. I've been a bit barren of major magazine pieces since the Damned interview last year so the publication of the Hawkwind piece came at a very timely moment. I'm now working up a few new ideas for various targets - following the advice I was given recently to pick ten prospects, consider what I'd pitch each of them ... and get on with it.

I also have a couple of book projects now taking shape. The Festivals book with Bridget Wishart is starting to take shape and early contributors will be receiving a questionnaire to get them started very soon now. We've received some excellent photographs from Stonehenge and elsewhere, and I'm hoping we'll be in a position to announce contracts and stuff really soon, though the wheels of publishing grind slowly. I've also started to gather material for another solo book, this time outside of the music genre so I'll say nothing more about that until I can see whether it really has good prospects, but short of there already being a work in progress on the subject in question I think it's a great chance to broaden the literary horizons.

Finally, mentioning the Damned, those old scally-wags turned up in Cornwall last Friday for their third appearance in recent years at the Falmouth Princess Pavilions. Honestly, they are a karaoke band ... but a bloody good one. They (unwisely I thought given the strength of the material) declined to play anything written this century, eschewing any tracks from 2001's Grave Disorder and dropping last years' excellent single Little Miss Disaster and keeping the set-list to Phantasmagoria and prior. But they really get the crowd going, can still pull a decent sized audience, and Dave Vanian clearly still has the wizen picture stored away in his attic that can be the only explanation for his lack of ageing over the years. I first saw them on their 10th Anniversary gig at Finsbury Park and I'd swear that Vanian looks no different now than he did then. I had my own Vanian moment once, at the insistence of the girl I was dating at the time - though it didn't do me any good in the longevity stakes I fear. Anyway, judge for your self at the gig photos I found on-line here and this photograph that surely I should have never let see the light of day.