Greetings

My first venture into the realm of the blogosphere so be gentle with me. My aim is to record the cultural and alcoholic wanderings through Old London Town of a debt-crippled, lager-sodden, swollen-bellied, manic depressive ginger dilettante, who occasionally imagines himself as a character in a Patrick Hamilton novel. Tired and fatuous musings on literature, politics, football, etc, will abound with nauseating regularity.

To the Barbican for my first classical music concert - the LSO performing Beethoven's Violin Concerto and Sibelius's magnificent 5th Symphony. Emerging from Moorgate underground, pummelled and battered by flailing commuters, I seek solace in a local hostelry, John Keats at the Moorgate. Ah, little Johnny Keats! I raise a glass to the consumptive cockney scribbler. The place is full of braying City types, their laughter characterised by volume, ferocity and a total lack of mirth. Cheap lager for London though. Through the concrete canopy to the concert hall. Before the concert begins, the dread pressure from the bladder begins as the lager cries for release - and I'm in the middle of a row! Visions of tripping and stumbling over middle class legs as I interrupt the adagio with my torrential flight to the gents. Must drink wine before concerts in future.

Arabella Steinbacher is the soloist and very good she is too, although if she had been wretched I would have been none the wiser. The Sibelius is exraordinary, the brass section achieving epic volume. What would the sozzled, rumpled Finn maestro have made of Strawberry Switchblade using the fanfare from his work? Ovations follow. A quickie in the Balham Tup before collapsing in front of walnut-faced Glaswegian Lothario Andrew Neil on The Politics Show.