Evening Standard headline, 25th February 2006:

DEAF MAN FACES RAPE CHARGES

Excessively sharp pencils intimidate me.

I have been signed up by a friend to last.fm, where you can listen to the favorite songs of any of its members. Johnny Cash rules in my corner of last.fm, mostly because 'geek', 'mid-century hardball' and 'slavishly follows hipster fashion' all overlap on my musical Venn diagram. One of his songs has the line:

I've been living on muscle, guts and luck

All the best words have a 'u' in them, in my opinion, an opinion based to a large degree on the colour of the letter. Where 'e' is red or burgundy, and 'i' is yellow, 'a' white, and so on, 'u' is either a delicate light blue (Charlie Chaplin's eyes, for example. They are responsible for most of his affairs, or at least the shock of a first meeting with Chaplin in living colour after knowing his black-and-white form so well) or a gunmetal gray like the suits worn in Strangers on a Train.

The following words are light blue:

prune/tune/picayune (see if you can work out what stripes 'picayune' has)

mumps, but not lumps

stub, but not shrub

Lull, pull and mull are halfway between light blue and gray.

Lumps but not mumps, shrub but not stub, and Johnny Cash's line are the rugged gray. 'U' is the only letter that has both a colour and a black-and-white version, which is probably why all the best words have 'u' in them: such a versatile letter.

I find it hard to write anything without sounding like Abraham or a cheap comedian, so I try to visualise a speaking position. For example, I try to write like my conception of Lenny Bruce - not to sound like him, but to speak from where his mouth is in my brain.

In truth I don't know what he sounds like, or what he looks like, and have never heard his material. The name is the thing, and it conveys to me great width and sonorousness. There is a man called Luther Blisset, who used to be a footballer and who represents Lenny Bruce visually for me. Google him, and you will see what I mean.

- I have now Googled Lenny Bruce and it turns out he is in no way like Luther Blisset. He is a white man with partially opaque skin, and he looks very much like the lead singer of Manfred Mann. Lenny Bruce doesn't work for me any more: I will have to try John Steinbeck, who, although I have read his books, looks like a coat hanger. That is weird enough to work for me.

I am currently a banker (though I don't know for how long) but I want to write screenplays or comic books.

The biggest difference between a banker and a member of society is that a banker will definitely have crapped at work today. A twelve-hour working day is two full cycles of the bowel: I defy anyone, even on a diet of reimbursed noodles and cigarettes, to go more than a couple of days without resorting to the office toilets, unless they are important enough to lunch and crap away from their desk.

Even urination at work is a cause for great worry. If your boss vacates a urinal stall just as you arrive, do you take his stall? Seems like you love him too much. Do you choose another, and imply that he has smelly urine and sheds pubic hairs? The decision has to be made while he dries his hands, as CEOs are known for their periferal vision, and if he turns for the door and sees you dither he will rightly infer that you are an idiot.

This is a great picnic, though, compared to the inevitable crap that has to be factored into the day. Here, the bogeyman is noise from the intestines. You can either wait for absolute solitude - probably more rare in a bank than in other offices, for the reasons mentioned above - or you can time your output to coincide with the hand dryer operated by strangers. The strangers, though, are less than reliable, and sometimes opt for a paper towel, thus failing to cover up a monstrous explosion followed by an even worse prolonged venting, like the door of a bus.