Note to self...

Don't pick up the phone on Friday afternoon. It might be some kind of American sales person type calling from America to encourage you to buy stuff. And being British, you're just too polite to tell him he's a bunter, and to please fuck off.

I'm on "no calls" for the rest of the day.

A lot of you have written to ask, why is it that I like those leaving-town Country break-up songs so much?

Well, I don't exactly know. It goes deeper, as to why I love the female vocals, and disdain most of the male. Am I possibly gay? I don't think so, but stranger things have happened.

Whipped, possibly. I grew up in a house full of women, and generally prefer their company. I don't like watching boy's action films that don't have girls in, and I only really watch Star Trek for the tight tops. It always struck me as, well, odd, that boys get all enthusiastic about the wrong bits of Star Trek and similar, as if the whole *cough*enterprise*cough* was a diversionary tactic, convincing their mums they're interested in it because of the science and not the sex. And Buffy, y'know, is a complex metaphor about adolescence and high school, and the demons we all have to conquer to become whole...

Anyway, what was I saying? Sometimes when I listen to those songs about leaving everything behind, I suppose, I'm thinking about those whom I have loved and lost. Country is a conversation between women and men. The women are walking out and the men are left behind; sometimes, the other way around. The women are regretful, and the men are terribly sorry. And I think about NP, who ran away to London; or AV, who ran away to Australia; and others who have run away to points of the compass, wherabouts unkown, alive or dead, unknown, christian or infidel, unknown.

Anyway, don't pick up the phone to Americans on a Friday afternoon.