Why MCA?

A glass of your fancy please ladies and gentlemen, to our New Jersey correspondent, who has survived the hurricane with nothing more unbearable than a loss of power and the subsequent inability to turn the various electronic attention hoovers on.

In a recent comment he claims Italian and Polish ancestry. Well, if his first sentence before the hurricane crashed into NJ is anything to go by--""We're going to have a little rain"--there must be an admixture of English blood in there somewhere. Exactly--sixty people are dead and eight million are without electricity; don't make a song and dance of it. Well done fellah, and well done girls and Mrs Banish.

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I am postponing attending to the financial quicksand that is enveloping me once again, which requires awkward explanations I am using blogging to postpone giving; but also, for a more interesting reason.

My mum arrived last night just as the girls' Halloween party was getting going. They put a great deal of effort into it. Their costumes were entirely hand made, nothing shop-bought. Eight teenage girls in the living room, corpse brides, bloodied surgeons, victims of botched murder attempts. I made butternut squash soup, they made trifle and put plastic spiders in the custard.

While they went out trick or treating, Kirsty and I greeted visitors with spooky organ music and a spider which leapt out at you when the door was opened. Kirsty cackled behind a stuffed model torso of a headless woman as I slowly opened the door. Highlight of the evening was a little girl running frightened down the street before we dispelled the illusion to fetch her back.

Afterwards we all sat round and Mum was being entertainingly funny, although as I drank more cider, it was an effort to control my language. My mum allows no oath stronger than "blimey" or "flip" and I was constantly switching my lexical choices. Piss/urine, fucking/very, pissed off/annoyed, for fuck's sake/I mean.

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A few nights ago I was waiting for a call from Trina. She was driving back from a girly weekend in Elgar country and we were going to the boat for a simple night of eating, drinking, talking and fucking. She texted me from a traffic jam. "Two hours at least."

So I did what anyone would do in the circumstances. In the pub, I bumped into a friend of mine and Erica's, who has been offered the chance to run a karaoke night. There's money, and a fairly generous amount of it.

We started by laughing at the idea, since it's being offered in the roughest pub in Lancaster, a place which although officially named after a rectilinear shape, is more often referred to by its former name, the surname of a Lancaster doctor who murdered his wife on suspicion of her having an affair. He chopped her body up and wrapped it in sheets of newspaper and unsuccessfully tried to dispose of it in a river near Moffat. That is, after murdering the witness, his maid.

Talking herself round with double gins, she moved on to asking me if I'd like to be involved. 50/50 less expenses. There are several practical obstacles about the screen and the lyrics and the fact that the pub doesn't have a proper PA or lights, and many others. I'll have to download the cellarload of shite that is popular musical taste.

Gerry rang the landlady and said we can't get a full karaoke together in 48 hours. The landlady suggested a disco instead. A disco disco. Not rave, she said. Well, that's a bit easier. Disco is my first love, and like all things one cares about that have a popular appropriation, the latter feels like a travesty. I don't consider the Bee Gees "disco" and I realise with sadness that I will have to playYMCA, deracinated from its gayly promiscuous significance.

So tomorrow night, me and Gerry, winging it majorly. Rubbish music, shit light show, dodgy customers, 12/1 that there'll be a fight at some point and 7/2 there'll be a laughably antique bit of squaring up involving working class males and their imagined ownership of women. I'm not going to put the pub's name because I don't want it googling, but if you're local you'll know where I mean. Kicks off (I hope not) at 7.00 and I hope I will survive till 1am.