Unblocked.

Nearly six months into this exercise and for the first time I’m struggling to find something to write about. I’m rummaging through the corridors of my memory for some amusing anecdote to tell you, but nothing leaps out from behind any of the closed doors.

There’s a very simple reason for this: I have done nothing all week except sit on the God-damned toilet.

Unfortunately, both Beck and I have been laid low by arguably the worst stomach bug to strike western Europe in a generation. For someone who’s only taken three days off sick in the past seven years to be confined to my bed or the sofa for the past ninety-six hours has been intolerably boring. The only excitement was the continual rumbling in my guts and the very real need to not be further than a fifteen second dash from the toilet at any given time.

Staying in shouldn’t really have been too much of a hardship given that I’ve become particularly adept at it over the past few months, but what’s made it so frustrating is that I seem to have lost my ability to write. Or to write properly, anyway. I can string together a vague narrative sentence, but there’s no metaphorical layer of any worth. There’s no extra dimension, as though everything I have to say went dribbling down the pan with that piece of dry toast I tried to eat for lunch.

So, I’ve just been reading, shitting and getting annoyed.

Beck, perhaps, has a more philosophical outlook on illness. She always sees being poorly as an opportunity to bank sleep. She must have spent a good fourteen hours a day under the duvet, nearly twenty of Friday, just emerging every so often, her eyes half open, heading at a semi-trot for the bathroom.

With my brain barely functioning I resorted to a disturbing amount of flickering images on the magic box. So, Thursday night, as I wondered if I’d ever be able to leave the house again, I noticed that the much hyped Ashes To Ashes was on.

Now, I don’t watch much TV, but I did enjoy the episodes of Life On Mars that I saw, so I thought I’d give the sequel a go. It was rubbish - although, I am prepared to concede that I may have missed crucial parts by having to unexpectedly leave the room. I don’t want to go into the specifics of the writing or the acting as my critical facilities have probably deserted me too, but I think the main reason for my distaste is the whole Eighties-Factor.

I liked Life On Mars, partly because it reminded me of the Sweeney - that violent-adult-seventies cop show that I watched repeats of as a kid in the mid-eighties. I liked the early seventies drabness it portrayed. Normal pubs, working blokes, family life, bad fashion that’s quite cool in a way, anyone pretentious likely to be a villain, drinking bitter, living in terraced houses rather than elaborate factory loft conversions. Great soundtrack. The eighties of Ashes to Ashes, on the basis of one single episode, seems to be arrogant glitz, champagne, really hideously bad fashion, Ultravox and Adam and the Ants for God’s sake. None of this creates the same pleasant whiff of nostalgia (which is presumably the point) for me.

The fact that Life On Mars did, however, is rather odd given that I was born in 1979 and therefore have absolutely no recollection of seventies Manchester.

This keeps happening. I seem to forget when I’m from.

I went to the corner shop for milk the other day and in front of me three nine (or so) year olds were trying to buy some sweets. Not just a Mars bar, but five quids worth of fizzy drinks, chocolate, crisps, gum, etc. The funniest part was that they kept asking the grouchy owner how much each thing was, clearly trying to get the maximum amount for their money. Between the three of them they still managed to add it up wrong and had to put a Lion Bar and a packet of Dorritos back. I told Beck about it when I got home and we launched into a tirade about kids today, eating habits and parenting. As though we have any experience ourselves, as though we were young in 1950s rural Yorkshire and only ever saw a piece of chocolate when we ran away to the big city. And then it made us sick.

Our on-running debate over cheap-chicken for all versus organic free-range chicken is another example. Is it more important that the chickens are happy or that families on low incomes can afford to be fed? The current twist in that particular discussion seems to be that actually chicken is a top end meat and should be priced accordingly. Low income families should be eating liver, pig trotters, sheep hearts and tripe, like people used to. Then we proceeded to try and work out whether one supermarket’s £1.99 whole chicken was comparably priced to enough tripe for a family of four in 1961. Again, as if we have any experience of eating this stuff! I quite like offal (well, liver and kidneys although I’ll give most things a whirl), but I wasn’t eating it every evening after Father came in from the pit/factory/fields.

My brain works in strange ways at times.

Anyway, the eighties. Still don’t like them. I think it’s a knee jerk reaction against all the media coverage in the past few years pushing it as the greatest decade ever. The music, the drugs, the money, the attitude, the sheer luxury of life experienced by a very small minority, (mainly living in London), at the expense of millions of unemployed around the country. Not that the seventies were any different. These self-congratulating pieces by anyone vaguely famous aged between twenty-nine and forty-five have been cropping up on a regular basis for a couple of years now. Oh, look, there’s another in this week’s Observer. Whoopee. Another article about how I made it as media luvee despite spending most of the decade of my tits to Wham!

I ended up in a sort of semi-argument with someone just before Christmas who claimed that all the best music came from the eighties. I, obviously, disagreed and he countered with “REM were an eighties band.”

Well, okay. Yes, technically, they were, but they didn’t achieve commercial success, in this country at any rate, until 1989’s Green, really, and besides they’re hardly atypical eighties music. Indeed, scanning my own records I’ve plenty of albums released in the eighties, but I don’t think they would appear on most themed club nights sets: The Pogues, The The, Tom Waits, NWA. Even the more obvious acts like Prince, U2 or the Smiths almost exist because the stand out against the dross.

I was thinking more of Duran fucking Duran, ABC, The Human League or worse. Will people please stop trying to redeem these bands and just let them slide away into the obscurity they truly deserve.

I guess the point is I won’t be watching any more of Ashes to Ashes even when I’m back on my feet. It left a nasty taste in the mouth, like too much hairspray, and there’s always the danger they’ll play Tiffany which might provoke me to put my foot through the TV.

Provided, of course, I can get out the bathroom fast enough.