So my hip’s still bothering me, about 8 weeks after it started, thanks for asking!!! No better, no worse. So I started playing tennis again, on the grounds that; if this is ‘the future’, then better start learning to ‘play through the pain’. Because I’m stupid. But, inspired by the Lionesses, I manned up and worked out I can tolerate the pain. Its the fear I can’t live with.

So, buoyed by last weekends fabulous almost-panic-attack up on the Spurs roof, this morning I went into an MRI scanner for the hip. And experienced once again the pure joy of heart-thumping, sweat-pouring, pale-facing entry into the world of claustrophobia. Or, ‘an MRI scanner’ as its known. I was out within 3 seconds. Then I embraced my inner lesbian, worked out that I could just, just, juuuuust see the room and re-entered hell. Calmer. LBC chat show on the head-set, and listened to Geoff Hurst (!!!!), bless his godly soul, discussing the world cup yesterday.

“Well the Lionesses can be really- BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG… (for 4 minutes)… the legacy for women’s football and for- EEK-EEK-EEK-EEK… (3 minutes)… another 57 years before- BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM…”

I don’t really give a shit about the noise. Just the confinement. And I love wearing hospital gowns because the world needs to see my arse.

Saturday night Mel & I were in Soho. And I mourned the loss of yet another fabulous part of London to boring, vanilla, corporate gentility and homogeneity. My first thought was: ‘where did all the inflatable ‘dolls’, which adorned virtually every shop window, back in the day, go?’ Did they just let them down, gently? Burst them? Put them all in a warehouse in Milton Keynes? Or fill them with helium and let them drift away?

Soho was London’s Little Italy. Full of coffee shops and little restaurants. All now gone. The coffee shops along Old Compton Street were where musicians came when they arrived in London to seek fame and fortune. And we’re talking the Beatles here. Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, the Stones, the Kinks, they all hooked up with other musicians and management in those coffee shops, before the gays came along and made the street their own. In the same restaurants and bars, but with more pink.

And on Saturday you couldn’t walk down there for hen parties from Crewe, day trippers from Hull and piss-heads from Peterboro’. Millions of them. Staggering from generic bar to generic bar, oblivious to the history of the area. Oblivious to pretty much everything by 10 o’clock.

Ahhhhh, there ya go.

Happy Monday

A xxxx