In which I remember that I used to write a blog

Hello. How have you been? You look good. Have you been working out?

It's been a while. We're all busy people. You know how it is.

But I'm still here, the gloves are still here, and I have definitely not abandoned the place, as someone abandoned this Barbie motorhome, just around the corner from my house.


Barbie is exactly the kind of doll who would get in her Barbie motorhome for a drive with some of the cool boys from the wrong side of town, then crash it into a wall and stroll away on her long, biologically impossible legs, leaving someone (her dad, I imagine) to pick up the pieces. And pay for them. And where's Ken in all this? Working all hours at Topdoll, just to get the money to buy Barbie some stupid necklace which she'll get bored of in about a week. God, Barbie is such a bitch.

Anyway, through the medium of poor iPhone cameraship, I can bring you the edited highlights of exactly what you have missed during my three weeks - three weeks! - of non-posting. You can tell things have turned to rust somewhat, Miss Jones-wise, by the fact that I had half my stupid finger over the lens in the picture above.

So in the last three weeks, I have been mostly:

1) Raging against the ill-punctuated.

Shame on you, TCM channel caption writers, you fool's.

Also at fault: the makers of novelty item "The Surprising Leg", found at a rainy faux-country fete.

I think you will agree with the packaging designers that yes, most certainly, it '"look's so real".

I feel there is a certain pragmatic flatness about the name, however. I have had a brainstorm with myself, vis-a-vis a blue-sky name for the product. I am suggesting 'Legs and Woah!' It is at once a hilarious play on the Top Of The Pops dancers of the late 70s, the period when, presumably, this hilarious novelty was conceived, and also suggests the expression of surprise emitted by the prankee on finding the incredibly lifelike demi-limb/limbs protruding from a closed filing cabinet, wardrobe or similar.

2) To quote the defunt we're-so-much-more-than-a-boy-band Busted, Sleeping with the lights on

That's because this dancing eyeless mask of Robbie Williams haunts my dreams after I spent two and a half hours standing behind it at a recent Take That concert.

3. What else? Well, looking for signs, as usual. The omens were particularly good ahead of the recent Marbury/Miss W (as was) nuptials. Nuptials is a ludicrous word, much beloved of magazines attempting to avoid the repetition of the word wedding by substituting it for a word never actually used by real people in the real world. I am not a real person, I'm a carefully constructed fictional character, so it's OK. See also 'locks' and 'tresses' for hair. And 'don' and 'sport' for 'wear'.

Anyway. The signs:

First, a heart-shaped crisp in my bag of Walkers on my train journey to Wedding Town.

Secondly, a double yolk in my B&B-breakfast poached eggs on the Big Day. Look at the two yolks of Marbury and Miss W, joined together in the albumen of eternity.

I don't know what it says about me that I then ate them both.

Anyway, it's nice to be back.

Happy Easter and that

It's Easter and, just like Jesus, I have been resurrected this weekend. In blogging terms, of course, not, like, as the saviour of mankind. Although I never say never.

Two and a half weeks may be my longest period of non-blogging since Miss Jones blogging records began. That includes holidays. And I haven't even been on holiday this time. Although, as anyone who lives there will tell you, every day in south-east London is like a holiday. I have no good excuses for not posting, apart from mild busy-ness and a fear of repetition. This never stopped Barbara Cartland from a prodigious work rate though, so really, buck up, Miss Jones.

Let's focus on some positives. This year, I have three Easter eggs to eat, and I didn't even have to buy any of them for myself.

This is not one of them:

It's not strictly an egg, of course. It's a Baby Basil Hollow White Chocolate Duck. Is Basil the name of the duck or an adventurous addition to the flavouring? I don't know, the modern world baffles me.

Anyway, BBHWCD – as all his crazy pals in the confectionery packing depot probably nickname him – had been jilted by the tills at London Bridge Marks & Spencer, with an affliction so severe you could see straight into his pretty, empty little head. Who knows what cruel conspiracy of fate was responsible?

Perhaps he simply had a congenital physical imperfection, and that's what led to his last-minute spurning – we've all been there. Perhaps he was an innocent bystander caught up in a skirmish over the last packet of Cranberry & Orange Hot Cross Buns. Or perhaps someone in the queue loved him a bit too much, squeezed him a little too hard, until a hot clammy digit found its way right through his skull. Again, we've all been there.

We may never know.

This is a sombre note to end on, but I feel Easter should be a time of reflection. Reflection and consumption. I could never bring myself to eat BBHWCD, though. White chocolate is disgusting.

The Man With The Yellow Trousers

*WARNING* Contains shallow class-based generalisations

On Thursday morning, the man sitting opposite me on the train was wearing a magnificent pair of yellow corduroy trousers.

In this photo, the colour is not displayed in all its true and dazzling vibrancy on account of the glare through the window. But believe. Daffodils. Buttercups. Colman's mustard. Cartoon bananas. Yellow peppers. Yellow crocuses. Other things that are way yellow. That is the kind of yellow we are talking about. He had the yellowness turned up to yellowven. I'm sorry. I haven't done this for two weeks. Forgive me.

Being acutely aware of my recent period of non-posting, I thought I may have found the perfect way to break my drought. I would become for one day only – or possibly more if it went, like, really really well – a street style blogger (like this or this). Here is a genre that's really hit a peak since I began this blog three years ago, and there's nothing I like more than being slightly late to a party. As I travelled through the city that day, I thought to myself – all the way from Dulwich to Islington and back again – my trusty yet furtively operated iphone camera would capture the fashion flashpoints of all those idiosyncratic tastemakers that make London the coolest city in the world. Apart from Tokyo. And probably New York. And I should point out that I've never actually been to Split, so for all I know they could really be pushing the asymmetrically cut style envelope over there.

Two basic problems here.

Firstly, I kept getting distracted and failing to notice what people were wearing. Secondly, when I did remember, I didn't really see anyone else wearing anything so worthy of a double take. Really, people do mostly wear bland shoes and black and denim clothes. Although I did like these ladies with matching hair, who I saw while I was waiting for my lunch dates at Angel station.

So then I was left with a photo of a man in yellow trousers and a desperate need for a new blogpost.

So I kept thinking about the yellow trousers – and the man inside them. He had a certain air of well-to-do about him. Distinguished, I might say. You may be able to discern this yourself from the sturdy brown shoes visible in the photo. To me, they say, 'I'm just going to take a relaxed yet purposeful stride around my vast country estate', as well as, 'Then I will put on a striped shirt and a blazer and enjoy an evening of light orchestral music in the expensive seats of the Royal Festival Hall.' He is also carrying a classy-looking leather binder (just seen, as we say in the world of fashion-photo captioning), which may contain information on his portfolio of stocks and shares, or perhaps just a copy of The Beano or a cut-out crossword puzzle from the Telegraph.

It occurred to me that apart from the young, skinny and hip, the only other men I had seen wearing below-the-waist colours of this intensity were... well... a bit posh. I know this is a gross generalisation. You were warned. But a former neighbour of mine was a good example of this correlation. He was a lovely man, plummy but poorer than you'd expect, primarily as a result of spending his working life trying to make things better for people less fortunate than himself which, as it turns out, doesn't pay quite as well as one might think it should. I provide this information so you will understand how he was my neighbour, and thus living in a one-bedroomed Victorian terraced flat conversion in southeast London, and not, say, a glass penthouse in Chelsea Harbour. Anyway. I would often hear the front door slam and look out of the window to see him striding in the direction of the bus stop wearing a pair of pink or scarlet jeans, as bright as a tulip.

What is the connection between the posh and their lurid pants? I welcome your theories. I have three of them:

1) I wonder if it is related to the innate, achieve-anything confidence that often seems to come with what someone in a BBC costume drama might call 'good breeding'. "Who says that just because I am not technically young, skinny and hip, I can't wear these trousers? It is my BIRTHRIGHT! And now I will climb The Matterhorn! And then do some motivational speaking. And then I will buy a 6-BEDROOMED house in FULHAM."

2) The reason posh people have money is because they are deeply, and secretly, thrifty. They only buy clothes that are heavily reduced in the sales, which means they only wear clothes rejected by the majority of shoppers who – as I have established during my street-style blogging research – plump for black, brown and denim. Not yellow, green and hot pink.

3) It is some tiny act of rebellion against the charcoal and tweed, traditions and tedium, of their social strata. 'I may have lived a childhood of rules and repression at boarding school, and still feel the need to ask permission every time I go to the toilet, but LOOK AT MY TROUSERS. I'M SO ALIVE!'

The joy of repetition

I know I repeat myself. Don't tell me I'm the only one. But this time I'm doing it quite deliberately, with my eyes open and my brain on. Somehow I still feel the compulsion to apologise.

Since the initial publication of the post below a few months ago, it has been revised a little, and yesterday I read out the new version at Tall Tales, an excellent night of stories and music hosted, curated, birthed by Dr Robert Hudson.

Marbury – a constant spiritual and intellectual inspiration to me – suggested I post the updated version. It would be, he said, like the Director's Cut. So here it is:

Shopping Centre Soulmates or In Which I Realise That No Ideas Are Truly Original

In this country, with our general reticence and limited enthusiasm for strangers, we’re not renowned for our customer service. If I am served in a shop by someone who doesn’t so much as acknowledge me, so busy are they telling a colleague about an out-of-order ex or some aspect of the holiday-leave structure that’s an affront to their civil liberties, I am seething but unsurprised. Yet when someone does offer me true, Uncle Sam-style, teeth-and-talent-show salesmanship, it seems so contrived, so commission-chasing, that I have to beat a terrified retreat to the furthest corner of the shop, and hide from anyone who might ask me if I need any help at all.

But I have astonishing news: on a Saturday afternoon in the shops of Bromley – the Bromley just south of London, the Milan of northern Kent – I recently discovered you can experience delightful customer service from an unexpected corner of the population. The youth. The Saturday girls, the college-holiday boys, the McJobbers, the saving-to-go-travellers. Those who, biologically and culturally, should be the most surly and the least giving of any kind of a shit become, on a Bromley Saturday, sincere, sunny, flawlessly nice. The Pollyannas of sales, working in the Pleasantville of retail. Like robots who have developed genuine thoughts and feelings. Almost like....wait… yes, like humans.

No one could blame a 19-year-old Starbucks Saturday girl for having an attitude problem. A sunny disposition is hard to maintain when a hard eight hours’ milk-frothing has laid waste to your eyeliner and tireless table-scrubbing has chipped away at your black nail varnish. Also people treat Starbucks really badly. Customers! Why not just crumble your muffin directly onto the carpet. Why persist in the charade that you are actually trying to get it into your mouth. Plus, if you take away the risk of actually eating any of it, it is far less fattening.

But in the Bromley branch of Starbucks, the Saturday girl who served me recently was a willowy 5ft9inches of enthusiasm and best intentions – stoically reiterating a pink-cheeked apology that the dishwasher wasn't working so all the drinks would be served in paper cups and was that OK. Presumably she thought that someone who’d been pushed to the brink by the queuing system in nearby Argos could flip out at the prospect of being denied their coffee in a massive china bucket you need two hands to lift. Perhaps she feared they would run amok, smashing the heavy glass jars that adorn the counter, showering unsuspecting pensioners nursing tall hot chocolates with a shrapnel of hazelnut biscotti and suburban bitterness.

But even in that eventuality, I felt sure Miss Starbucks would have smiled on.

In Marks & Spencer nearby, later the same day, my friend and I spent quite some time with a friendly, funny boy-cashier, all frayed festival wristbands and a fringe made for sulking behind – except… he was not sulking at all. He was patient and good-humoured and actually claimed to be enjoying our lengthy investigation into whether the top my friend wanted to buy her mum had been mislabelled. You see, the label said it was a 12, but it looked more like a 14, but when we held it up against a 14 it was much shorter, but it was still wider than a normal 12, and there were no other 12s to compare. There was a 10 but the 10 looked like it would pinch a bit around the…

Anyway.

There is a slim chance, of course, that Mr Marks & Spencer’s eagerness to please was on account of the fact my friend looks like Cameron Diaz’s sister. The one who lives in Orpington. But I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt.

It wasn’t just those two employees, though. There was the beaming young man cheerfully refunding rogue purchases in Gap. There was the girl with the highly diplomatic advice in the changing rooms of Uniqlo. I have seen them, my friends. I have seen the service-industry Salvation Army of Bromley.

As my friend and I wandered back to the train station at the end of the day, we reflected on the youth we had met and their uniform good character. We wondered whether they all hung out together after their shops closed, like a really well-mannered casting of Skins.

We wondered if Young Mr Marks & Spencer and Miss Starbucks knew each other. And then we talked about what an adorable, late-adolescent romantic couple they would make. What joy their kindness could bring to each other, as well as a lot of orphanages in less developed countries of the world when they inevitably went on a do-gooding gap-year excursion together after a year or so of dating.

But what if these two individuals were totally unaware of each other? Working away on their separate floors of the Glades shopping centre, Bromley, perhaps one directly over the other, a gilded thread of romantic potential running through the floor and the ceiling, connecting the pair of them in a way they could not yet understand but sometimes felt. A quivering sensation they merely put down to the building work happening in Debenhams next door.

Perhaps they already passed each other on the shopping-centre escalators every Saturday, one going up, one going down, him with his head hidden in Kerrang! magazine, hers buried in a copy of The Belljar or The Girl Who Played With The Hornet’s Tattoo.

Perhaps, of a lunchtime, he would walk into Pret while she had her back to him, picking up cutlery to go with her soup. She would spin round to leave just as he’d turn away towards the sandwiches, debating whether to have prawn and avocado or Posh Ploughman’s.

As I thought about this, I felt the sun come out a little bit in my wintery, single-and-30-something soul. If I could find a way to bring these two marvellous young people together, it could somehow thaw my icy heart and a spiritual summer would come. I may continue to be alone with my king-sized duvet and costume-drama boxsets, but I would live vicariously through this young couple, in a way that I hoped would be less weird than it sounds. I would bask in their youthful glow of contentment, at least until one of them decided they wanted to ‘do India’ alone for six months, sending the other into a cider-bingeing emotional breakdown soundtracked by emo ballads.

But how to light the spark between the two of them? I thought about it for the whole train journey home from Bromley.

Well, I don’t like to brag, but I do have a GCSE in drama. I felt sure I could fashion some kind of uniform and pose as the head of facilities at the shopping centre in which they both worked. I could enter their respective shops with the borrowed authority of a false moustache, requesting their presence at a vital health and safety briefing at which they would be the only two attendees. Then, under the pretence of showing them a fire escape, I would somehow trap them outside or on a roof space overnight, requiring them to cuddle up together for warmth, if not survival.

It would obviously tarnish the achievement somewhat if one of them died from hypothermia during my attempts at matchmaking.

Or, in a ruse that shows little concern for my own personal safety, I could initiate a compulsory fire-extinguisher training session for two in an outdoor car park. As I started a controlled fire in a metal waste-paper bin, the flames would ignite in other, clumsily metaphorical places.

Or perhaps, if I took on an accomplice, one of us could distract Mr Marks & Spencer with another mislabelled item of women’s clothing, while the other of us eased his mobile phone out of his pocket, or slipped his name tag off his shirt, and then abandoned it on a table in Starbucks, knowing that there was a sweet-natured girl working there whose devotion to duty would lead her to track down its rightful owner.

I was delighted with my plans. I would create love’s young dream. Then I would create an Oscar-winning screenplay based on the escapade. The Academy would love the shot of the lovers working one above the other, with the golden thread that ran between them.

The train was just pulling back into my home station when I realised I had essentially reinvented one of the subplots of the film Amelie.

What, I wondered, would be the market for Bromelie, a romantic comedy about a single women in a south London arrondissement who deflects attention from her own loneliness by doing good turns for strangers.

If you need me, I’ll be sitting over there in the corner, working on my pitch.

The light fantastic

When my choir friend Simon's bag was stolen, with his much-loved camera inside, an anonymous reader of his blog bought him a new one – a gesture that provided a heartwarming and humans-can-actually-be-quite-brilliant ending to an unhappy episode.

Simon did eventually establish some details of the benefactor. It seemed that the gift was an act of reciprocation, a reward for the considerable amount of cheer he had gifted them over many years, sometimes when it was badly needed indeed.

I have none of that emotional elixir to offer, in terms of either quality or longevity. Nor any such Genuine Deservingness (yes, it's in the dictionary actually). Instead I have two and a half years of sporadic self-indulgence and the fact that my very expensive liquid eyeliner has dried up after only a month and the dishwasher at work never cleans the mugs properly so you have to rinse them out again yourself. I can see that the Miss Jones Benevolent Fund is still a long way from being so much as a kindly twinkle in its founders' eyes. But still, if I was to compose a wish list of costly trinkets to be purchased by anonymous wellwishers, a grotesque counterpoint to World Vision's pumps and ploughs and goats, this would be at the top of it.

It is a light-up sign. Is there anything that is not improved by the ability to light up? A disguise kit, perhaps. Camouflage, unless you are attempting to camouflage yourself in Blackpool at certain times of the year. Blackout blinds. I digress. It used to live in an actual hospital, and now it lives in the salvage yard on Vauxhall Cross, which is less a yard and more a racketty-packetty rambling house of treasures with a cosy cafe inside which looks like it might be vegetarian but also might not necessarily be. All this, in combination with its South London location, makes it a dream day out for me.

Anyway, the box. It is £300.

It would be ever so useful in any number of situations. Post-Doctor Who episode. Post-baking experiment. Post-fraught emotional situation of any description. Post-ill-advised blog posts inciting unmerited acts of charity from readership.

Coded message

Take a word from the title of each of these songs, lovingly/ditheringly harvested from my iTunes library, and you will discover a hidden and historically significant message.

(I couldn't find an embeddable version of this.)

Heartbroken I couldn't find a full version of this. Well, heartbroken is a bit strong. Slightly frowny, perhaps.

Toss-up between this and this.

*Announcement*

So the hard work is over. The seasonal loafing has begun in earnest. Paid work and familial duty are over for me, for now, so it is time for the WhyMissJones end-of-year clearout to begin. There will be no need to spend the night on the pavement with a flask and a sleeping bag, unless you are involved in some kind of extremely worthwhile charity work. I have attempted to engage the services of Myleene Klass to cut some kind of virtual ribbon, but the Marks & Spencer sale has started and they were a bit short-handed on the tills. Still, the fact remains that between now and January 1st, and probably a bit after as you know how these things drift on, I will be posting unpublished posts, purging my mobile phone photo folder and getting round to things I didn't previously get round to, blog-wise. Everything must go.

You are right, I am over-egging this slightly.

But essentially we are talking previously unreleased material. I accept that it is slightly less exciting than, say, Macca going up to his attic to try to find the swingball for Beatrice to play with, and coming down with some dusty old tapes of him and John throwing some ideas around. But it's all I've got for now.

God bless us every one

It is my first December as a blogger, so it would seem appropriate to wish you all a happy, happy Christmas. Or rather, happy holidays, since you never know who's reading and whether Christmas is their thing, worship-wise. It is important not to make judgments, as my upstairs neighbours discovered the first year they moved in. They sent me a very carefully worded non-Christmas card expressing their hopes that I had enjoyed hanukkah.

I have sent them an enthusiastically worded pro-Christmas card every year since then in an attempt to highlight their error of non-judgmental judgment.

Bloggers' fall-back brain-free post no.4098

Using incredibly complicated mathematical formulas, the robotic insects who live in your computer and run the internet can tell you various boggling statistics about the tourists who are visiting your blog.

One of the long, long ribbons of reports these creatures can print out for you, which you must read with a large magnifying glass, reveals the phrases people were googling which led them to stumble across your blog. Here are some from mine:

adrian chiles separates [I'm really hoping that 'separates' is a fashion-related noun in this context]

adult babygros

austin healey hairpiece

austin healey/tom chambers slash [Strictly is a bumper slash fiction compendium just waiting to be written]

bernard cribbins quietly bonkers youtube [Quietly Bonkers is the B-side of Right Said Fred, as any B-Crib fan will tell you]

dictionary frotting

how to make chocolate roulard [step one could be spelling it correctly]

names of girls manitals

status quo three chords [perhaps Francis Rossi has forgotten which three they are]

God bless the internet. Where else would these people turn for support?

Give me just a little more time

I'm having a busy time of it at the moment which – and let's be perfectly honest about this – is not like me at all. It's only temporary, but this week, too much work and a modest amount of play have turned me into a sloppy blogger. 

If you are a budding writer, you are encouraged to start a blog and 'blog' every day – something, anything – just to ensure your puny writing muscles are being put through their paces on a regular basis. [Can I parenthese at this point and reiterate my loathing for 'blog' as a verb. It is way up there with 'golf' and 'holiday' in the Doing Words Chamber Of Horrors. Also 'parenthese', which I, Miss Jones, have just verbed right up without a care. Look at me, I'm a grammar maverick. Consistency? Tell it to someone who has the time. And who believes that semi-colons are still worth it.]

I am someone who likes writing, but who finds it hard to communicate more than one thing from my head to the parts of my body that carry out stuff at one time. And this week, my brain is heaving with full-time work, freelance work and the thought of having 50 fairy cakes to bake and ice as part of my ongoing plans for world domination. When is a feeble-minded fool like me meant to get any blogging done? How does anyone find the time? (Marbury, of course, is some kind of freakish, time-expanding blog-bot.)

Also, I like to work out my puny writing muscles on the parallel bars of the blog when there is something I want to say on it. There is little, at the moment, on account of the other stuff hogging all the seats in my head. As I've said before, I would like to spare you from the likes of 'On the way home from work today I bought some cheese. Isn't cheese expensive?' Even though it really is, and somebody with more time on their hands than me should look into that.

Likewise, as I've mentioned before, YouTube clips seem to be a quick-fix solution for time-pressed bloggers everywhere. Another solution, however, would appear to be the MeMe. In the blogging world, this is essentially some manner of questionnaire which you fill in, publish on your blog and, as you do so, pass some kind of cyber-baton onto another blogger, and thus a bastard, blogging chain-letter is born. The boon of the MeMe is that you need precisely zero content ideas to fill it in. You just follow the prompts. One of the popular MeMes seems to be a very long list of exotic and adventurous food items, which you annotate in various weights of font, depending on whether you've tried it, liked it, would never, etc. Since I am in no way famous, especially not as a gourmand, I imagine you, the reader, care very little about whether I've ever tried alligator or not. I once ate a pigeon spring roll at a book launch but only as a last resort. I was so hungry, it was honestly a matter a survival. Ultimately, I can encapsulate my answers to this particular MeMe for you in a few lines when I say I am essentially a wary 74-year-old trapped in the lithe body of a 34-year-old. I fear change. I respect the classics. I have not travelled widely. 

Aren't you glad I saved you the bother of reading the rest?

Really, when I don't blog, it is only because I am thinking of you.

A damp, drizzly September in my soul

I am a person who likes the winter. I like the cobweb-blasting crispness of it, and the rosy cheeks it gives me. I have congenitally pale blue legs, so I enjoy being able to wear tights, and not feeling obliged to expose my freak-limbs to the world while justifying my decision not to fake-tan. I have a winter birthday. Like many others in the northern hemisphere, I also have a winter Christmas. Those are good things. But this particular in-between time of year doesn't half make me feel gloomy – for all sorts of reasons, not just the weather.

Perhaps this is why I am not feeling especially garrulous blog-wise (was ever a hyphen more hatefully employed? remind me never to join those words together again). I could of course regale you every day with what I'm having for tea (breaded haddock) or who I sat next to on the train (no one, day off), but I do have some cyber-standards. Admittedly, few. You are lucky you have escaped my mental list of other American stars of the 80s I would like to see in panto (Mr T as the Genie in Aladdin - 'I ain't gettin' in no lamp' etc. I was scared off by the bitter-tasting subtext of slavery inherent in this piece of potential casting). 

Anyway I have learnt from my peers that the YouTube inbed is the lazy blogger's friend. And I have also learnt that music is one of the great modern medicines. Of course, it is also one of the great communicators, and not just because the Red Hot Chili Peppers said so. It always make me feel connected to my dad, who I am thinking about a lot at the moment, so here is a favourite of his, and of mine. I suspect Bolan might possibly be miming here, but as the French say, ce n'est fait rien. Over to you, Pop Match.

Hello Kampala!

While I am now a blogging grand dame of 100 posts and more, I still feel like a rookie most of the time. From observing the big kids in the playground, it seems to be a rite of passage to post at least once about the quirks of your blog statistics. And so while this is a predictable outing, please indulge me - it has been a long week.

One of the things I can tell, using deranged internet science, is that there are a surprising number of people in the world who are googling David Batty. Another thing I can tell is where in that crazy world people are coming from to visit my virtual corner of it. Was that sentence in the right order? Technically, perhaps not. As I said, a long week. Anyway, who would ever have believed that after the predictable ol' UK and USA, I would be getting the most blog tourists from Uganda. Uganda! Sending me more traffic than the far more proximate France, or the famously friendly Canada. It sends quite the international frisson through my provincial world of baking and bad shoes, let me tell you.

So in short, hello Uganda. Two words I wasn't expecting to be saying a few weeks ago.

Many blogging returns

Why Miss Jones is 100 posts old today. I know, we don't look a day over 75.

Thank you if you have read or commented on any part of it. Just dump your coat in the bedroom. And why don't you wear one of these?

Party ring?

Now, let's dance.

Apologies for the sound quality, but just look at the awesomeness of the Ikettes' moves. And Ike Turner here just reinforces the lesson that you should never trust a man in a poloneck.

'I do my moves, I do my dance moves'

I began the Jones blog without a fanfare. And by that I mean, like, 'Hi, this my blog and, like, OMG, here's my first post. So, a bit about me. I like bichon frises and walking in the rain.'

I don't, by the way. I am allergic to dogs.

This could be because, despite publishing all this nonsense to the technoverse, I don't like a fuss. But mostly it was just really, really tricky. Goodbyes are hard, this much we all know. But hellos, it would seem, aren't so very easy either. What I kept coming back to, when I was trying to start the starting was: Is there a reason to write one of these things that doesn't amount to it just being a big old work of ego? Like, 'And this, dear, dear readers, is what I think about the world, and everything in it, and you must all read it and chuckle and nod and agree and wonder why you'd never looked at life that way yourself.'  

I don't know, that's what it feels like anyway. But for whatever reason, here I am, a proper, official blogger – only about 5 years after the rest of the universe, which is out of character for me. I'm usually an Early Adopter. I had an ipod before anyone else I know, apart from perhaps Boyd Hilton, and he probably got his free. I was the first person in Norfolk to wear leggings. But it's a lonely business for me, blogging. When I look at the grown-up blogs, they all have a long, long list of their blogging pals down the side. I do not. Like the best assassins, I work alone. That is, apart from my friend Eva and her blog, which is about the adventures of the world's cutest toddler, Little Ivy Green. Perhaps Eva's lonely little link will go forth and multiply until one day I am like brothers in blogging, over the mist-covered mountains, with the rest of the world. As I'm typing this, I keep thinking of Geraldine McEwan in Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. 'Come in, Manchester, this is kindly light.'

Anyway, let's move on. In The Observer's woman's supplement today, there is an interview with the Flight Of The Conchords by Polly Vernon. I am very glad about this. But the best thing about it is there really seems to be no good reason for it. I thought it must be because they're showing the first series on terrestrial TV. But no. All they're plugging at the end of the feature is the DVD and an EP that were both out last year. I can only hope Polly Vernon thought, 'I really think we should do an interview with Flight Of The Conchords because... well, I just really want to meet them and find out what they smell like.' Because, after all, what is the point of going into journalism if not as a means to insidiously creep closer to famous people you fancy?

And because I  am still excited by learning how to post video clips:

Meanwhile, in a newspaper across town, I can't quite believe this headline.

This post was brought to you by my deep, abiding and unfashionable love of Paul McCartney.

xxxxxxxxxxxx