Just got back from lunch with Jess, Phil and Mark. It's a good feeling to have my weekends back. It seems that my ex-colleagues enjoy tuning into the blog and reading about my little rants. We spoke about work (theirs and mine) and movies (Star Wars II and Tenenbaums) and had a nice waitress and lots of food. Jess went off to the gym and I came here - moaning all the way over the price of organic food, which seems to be taken from supermarket skips judging how fucked up it is. The pears we bought seem to have cancer - fuck that - I'm all for loads of chemicals to help fight off the rot. I pay about �30 more than I normally would for an organic bag of supplies and end up eating like a fucking medieval peasant. The idiots in Clapham Junction would probably buy plague rats if you told them they were organic. The Junction is an odd place. Its got the nickname 'Nappy Valley' due to all the moms who seem to do nothing but produce future middle management offspring and drink skinny coffee as they push around their 4-wheel drive buggies which probably cost more than all the cars I've written off over the years. They hang around in 'Stepford' gangs spending their husbands� money in revenge for all the extra-curricular fucking they are doing to babysitters and secretaries. They tend to name their children Cuthbert and Ula. And they always buy the worst books. Better still they belong to book-groups and sit around in a circle ignoring the few pages they managed to read before moving on to talking about their plans to buy a small place in France. They have similar groups in California but there the moms sit around naked watching each other masturbate in an attempt to make friends with their vaginas. I fell off the wagon yesterday. First I had a can of coke at lunch and then last night staggered around the house cradling a bottle of Pepsi - wasted on the sugar content. Felt guilty this morning but damn it tasted good. From today I'm back on my 'no brand names' kick. I heard that Evie found herself a new job working in a children's bookstore - stunning news. Cat is also leaving - the family is breaking up. Sad but kind of exciting too. Our Russian cleaner just arrived and I had to spend 20 minutes helping her clean up because my northern mentality still can't get its head around the fact that we need to pay someone else to pick up the crap that we leave behind... She asked me "The parents. Where they are?" Well, one of them is buried in a Jewish burial plot explicitly against her final wishes while the other is in California. Maybe she meant the grandparents - I'm guessing they are somewhere making someone else's life a misery. This week I need to get in touch with the folks over at Battersea Park where Jackie, Jess' mum, used to work. They planted a memorial tree there after she died but in the last year it hasn't been looked after properly so I need to get someone on the case. We are now considering a quick trip to San Francisco sometime in the summer which would rock and also give us a chance to see Frank (Jess' dad) and the rest of Jess' family again. Frank and I seem to get on surprisingly well after an initial rocky start but I guess all dads have an initial hatred of boyfriends. These days we seem to get on a lot better partly because I think he's realised I'm with Jess for the long run. He still raises the odd eyebrow over my stumbling career choices but then as far as that goes we are radically different. I kind of envy his work the way any outsider would - it sounds cool to have something you've constructed whizzing around in orbit but can you begin to imagine the stress a job like that must create. Lately I have realised I need to find more than just a relaxing job that pays peanuts but at the same time I'm never going to be as career orientated as he would like me to be. His family is very cool though and it would be really nice to hang out with them again. Maybe I can drop Miko (his wife) an email and see if she'll let me put some of her artwork on the site. Have you noticed that I never mention my own family on this thing? Well done. So for the rest of the day I need to put a few more rooms back together as the painting is now about half way done. Then I need to crack on with some writing and maybe rewatch a John Carpenter movie before updating the robot list and tweaking the website some more. I also have a piece on 'menstruation in movies' that I'm about half way through (entitled 'Celluloid Cramps') but at the moment its a bit of a bloody mess. I got a great email from Julia "What is a blog? And what, for the love of God, is this talk about robots?" she goes on to compare me with the nerds from 'The Simpsons' "Some guys here from MIT think Captain Picard is better than Captain Kirk". Bliss. I'm now listening to a yank punk version of the theme from 'The Neverending Story'. Wasn't the knob that originally sang that from Wigan? Yesterday we watched the Michael Caine version of �Kidnapped� from 1971. Stunning cast; along with Caine you get Trevor Howard, Donald Pleasence, Jack Hawkins and Gordon Jackson. Caine�s Scottish accent keeps slipping which adds to the fun and all the women are called �lassie�. The score is just odd � its Roy Budd of �Get Carter� fame just fucking around with Green Sleeves and bagpipes. You should track it down if only for Caine�s sexy head of hair and matching tartan jacket trouser suit. Mike is blogging to: A New Found Glory - From the Screen to Your Stereo