Since watching that programme about chucking out all the things you don't need, and re-listening to the Spearmint album which has a track “Giving It Away” concerned with exactly the same thing, I've become obsessed with re-arranging my flat. Everything must change. I started making a list last night and worked out that it would cost me about 1200 quid to sort out my living room / bedroom / office / bathroom, and the same amount again to sort out the kitchen. Two and a half grand is not easy to come by. I think I need to learn how to rob, and embezzle.

A list of things that annoy me about where I live:

a) I sleep on a mattress slung on the floor, because the bed frame I had broke about 2 years ago. For far more mundane reasons than vigorous lovemaking, may I add. Sleeping at floor level reminds me of squatting for 18 months in Lambeth Walk – a most wondeful period of my life, but certainly not one characterised by the fine linen and expensive cigars I'm used to these days.

b) There has been so much drilling in the walls over the years for various spur-of-the-moment makeovers. It's a mess. Urgently needs Polyfilla and paint. It's like the Berlin Wall(s). Or Hadrian's Wall(s), after he'd taken the shelving down.

c) My working space. It's hastily cobbled together. It's not functional, it's not comfortable, I'm surprised I get anything done other than slumping back in my chair and sighing.

d) There is a small living room. It's barely used, except when I want a change of scenery, and I could get that by going into 's room. So it's time that it became a proper office / music area. Which would mean lobbing the sofa. It's a cast off from a good friend of mine, but phenomenally f*cking irritating because of two throws that go over it, don't quite cover it and continually slip off. When Alison gave me the sofa she said “look, I'll warn you now, you'll get really pissed off with these throws.” She wasn't wrong. I'd throw out the throws but that would reveal a filthy flower-patterned sofa. And who wants that? The only problem with this “dispensing with living room” plan is that and I co-own a DVD player. And for it to remain on neutral territory would mean having it in the kitchen or the bathroom. Where it wouldn't really be utilised to its full potential. Also, if gets this job he's got an interview for in Oxford, I'll have to replace him with someone who'll probably moan about the lack of opportunities for socialising within the flat.

I could actually go on about this kind of thing all morning, so I'll shut up. Suffice to say all the plants in the flat are dying and need chucking, the water pressure in the bathroom is knackered and to sort it out will initially require several hours of hacking with chisels to get access to the pipes, all the light fittings are old and knackered, the gas and electricity meters are in a ridiculous place and need moving, but for some peculiar reason you can't just pick them up and put them somewhere else in the flat, etc etc etc.

Enough.

I don't know if anyone saw the Channel 4 programme last night on “Can We Talk To The Dead” or whatever it was, but it was an excruciatingly abysmal hour. Especially near the end when this ex-policeman, who now claims to be a medium, attempted to contact a dead relative of a man he'd never met before standing on the other side of a screen (despite the fact that he said that he couldn't do that kind of thing earlier in the programme). Anyway, he started firing off all these pathetic attempts to connect with this guy (mostly on the level of “would I be right in saying that you have legs?”) but didn't score a hit with a single one of them. The guy behind the screen just kept shaking his head, and looking gormless. So the ex-cop said “oh, it must refer to someone else in the studio audience” (probably about 200 people) – and of course, someone put their hand up. At which point he tried to come up with more facts about THAT person “from the other side” and failed again, time after time. So he had to go back to “I'm getting a very strong feeling that you are a carbon-based lifeform”. It was woefully, hideously pathetic. I was rolling around clutching my head, willing for it to stop. And THEN, when another guest dared confront this policeman about his readings being a pathetic sham and an exercise in cynical manipulation, there were gasps and cries of “rubbish” from a bunch of gullible old f*cking idiots in the audience.

It was just staggeringly bad television. They ended the show with a card trick. A card trick! Jesus.