our love badabadabada...

...will last forever: stick this in yer pipe and smoke it, Guardian Journalist.

i'd like to be...under the sea

Of course nicked off of Al's blog, but still.

here we go again with the beat

In reply to Emma's question - yes, I'm still on the green tea. Holland and Barrett is full of thin girls deciding between rye bread with muesli and sprouting wheatgerm, they look at me in disgust when I grab the last 50 of green tea and a packet of chocolate raisins. I have a brief visitation by Gillian McKeith (what are THEY? do you WANT a big fat bum?) and get stuck behind a crazy blonde woman doing her weekly shop (that'll be £77.51, please).

really sayin something

I should have gone travelling this summer. I've caught far too many episodes of The One Show. I have, however, discovered the amazing beautifying benefits of GREEN TEA (and its common variant GREEN TEA WITH JASMINE). I had to share this with you, it's AMAZING and tastes just like normal tea. My skin is glowing with post-antioxidant glowingness (and this is coming from the most acne-ish person you've ever met). I know I risk sounding like Liz Jones (see also: Hadley Freeman) but if spots are the bain of your life, try it for a week. Phipps Out.

what a terrible thing to lose

Here is a list of Q readers' top ten Guilty Pleasures (a concept which has somewhat shot its bolt).

Surely there is no such thing as a Guilty Pleasure - if you enjoy it, then there's no problem. Just don't laugh at Crowded House if you've got a Razorlight record in your collection.

leapfrog the dog and brush me daddy-o

Warning: long, boring and possibly not worth it

Reading all of the reaction (on various message boards) to the demise of Top of the Pops got me thinking about the things people read into coverage of a subject. (I'm writing this whilst watching Top Cat so forgive the typos/non-sequiturs).

Quite a few men have heralded the coverage as evidence of 'the BBC's bias against rock'. I saw no evidence of this: Quo appeared more times than any other group; U2 did an outside broadcast. My argument would be that if the coverage was proof of any bias, it showed one against disco, funk, country and 60s garage, as neither of the programmes contained any of these (randomly selected) genres.

Someone else claimed that terrestrial music programmes never represent his taste in music (basically, Warp records). Who in their right mind listens to this shite anyway? This screams of, "I love my music more than you, I've gone to the trouble of hanging around the Record and Tape Exchange scratching my chin and looking at Aphex Twin rarities, whilst never bothering to find about about music that other people like".

No-one ever wins 'my music is better than your music' arguments because music is necessarily linked to experience and taste, so this is definitely not what this thread is about. I suppose I just thought it interesting that many of the women commenting on the programme loved the archive footage, whilst the majority of blokes found it 'not serious enough' or 'not enough men with guitars'.

The upshot of my moping is that I'm always reminded of 'Disco Sucks' every time I hear someone complain about 'lack of rock', which makes my hackles rise every time.

ain't nothin gonna breaka my stride

The final Top of the Pops last night was a national disgrace. I don't expect that many people watched it, but if ever I've seen a cobbled-together-at-5.05-on-a-Friday-evening embarrassment, then this was the worst.

Two programmes comprised the farewell, one new, one three years old with 10 new minutes tacked onto the end. Unbelievably, the new programme cadged all its clips from the old programme. I sat through the second programme open-mouthed as I was shown the same clips for the second time in three hours.

The nadir of the evening was being told by TOTP's most recent producer that, 'I'm not that sad about it, my favourite band was The Clash and they always refused to appear on Top of the Pops'. The insinuation here is that, for *real* music fans, Top of the Pops is purely a fluff-pop carousel and all of the proper fans were seeking out the gigs on a Thursday night, keeping it real.

(NB Joe Strummer was forever trying to hide his middle-class credentials from an unsuspecting fan base; his refusal to appear on TOTP was part of this act. Plus he ended up going on TOTP post-Clash, with Black Grape).

But what of the evening's pinnacle? Of course Matthew Wilder singing Break My Stride! Better than pogoing in the Free Trade Hall any day of the week.

update: Matthew Wilder now writes songs for Disney films. He's in work! Hurrah!