First things first. This man chews gum at excruciating volume, and maintains the decibel level long, long after any sugary minty taste has been leeched from its core. I don't know who he is, he was just sitting near me on the 134 bus on Colney Hatch Lane. But I'm glad I'm not ever going on a romantic dinner with him.

Last night I had my first opportunity in many years to demontrate the famous spoon – fork – match – glass balancing trick, which first made my mouth drop open in 1993 when a member of the little-liked Scottish combo Badgewearer set it up in my kitchen, awaiting an amazed response, which I duly provided. Here is a picture of it, for posterity. Look! No strings!

This morning I was thinking about schooldays, ah… short trousers, chinese burns, boys nicking your fairy cakes after home economics and causing you to go to absurd lengths to retrieve them despite the fact that they were probably inedible anyway. A phrase that seemed to be bandied about a lot in the playground, certainly Dunstable playgrounds in the early 1980s, was “It's a free country.” If you attempted to veto any of your little schoolchums activities – throwing your games kit over a wall, repeatedly calling Catherine Swallow “squashy face” or indiscreetly copying huge sections of your Maths homework – you'd inevitably be slapped down with the phrase “it's a free country.” And it always seemed to successfully put an end to any arguments. No-one dared quarrel with it. No child ever said “Yes, well, that's as maybe, Glen, but I don't want my left shoe to be lodged in a tree.” You accepted it as a universal truth. It was indeed a “free country”, and that gave every child carte blanche to behave pretty much as they pleased. I guess it must have stemmed from the political landscape of the world at the time… the implication being that I should have felt lucky to be savagely whipped with a 30cm ruler, because in darkest communist Romania, there were kids who just didn't have that opportunity. “It's a free country, Rhodri.” “Yeah, fair enough. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow.”

Which made me wonder if kids in America, while they wantonly deface textbooks belonging to their best friends with permanent marker pen, reply to any protests with “So? It's a freedom-loving nation.”

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As The Observer appear to have screwed up their website by failing to put most of today's OMM on it, here, for those of you who have been sick with worry and clamouring for my opinion, is my review of the Morrissey album.

Morrissey – You Are The Quarry

Here’s a man who’s able to take 7 years of bad luck in his stride. Bereft of a record deal appropriate for an artiste of his standing, Morrissey hovered around the fringes of the media, dropping hints that a wealth of material was ready to be unleashed if only the right label would come along. That label turned out to be Attack, a 70s reggae imprint revived by Sanctuary Records at Morrissey’s request, the idea apparently being prompted by a Gregory Isaacs 7” which sits on top of his refrigerator. Tidying up, then, clearly hasn’t been a priority in his agreeable Hollywood Hills apartment, but perhaps, now that the grim wilderness years have finally drawn to a close, he’ll be able to afford a cleaner.

A laid-back trip-hoppy drum loop is an unexpected way for him to return, but Moz was never going to re-invent himself with a set of loungecore instrumentals. Gigantic chiming guitars arrive quickly on the scene, flagging up stark opinions of his new homeland: “Well America / you know where you can shove your hamburger / and don’t you wonder / why in Estonia they say / Hey you big fat pig.” It’s an anthemic opening, conjuring up images of fans with arms stretched towards the stage, their gifts of gladioli crushed in the throng as they surge forward to be ritually whipped by Morrissey’s microphone lead. Throughout the record he returns to choruses structured for stadia, built for bellowing along to: I Have Forgiven Jesus, The First Of The Gang To Die, and The World Is Full Of Crashing Bores all recall the kind of fervour that There Is A Light That Never Goes Out used to inspire nearly 20 years ago, and was memorably seen at the showcasing of some of these tracks at the Royal Albert Hall last year.

The characteristic sweeps and yodels of his voice are as powerful and omnipresent as ever, and he hasn’t lost his unerring ability to deftly shoehorn lyrics into spaces that were really far too small for them, or to stretch out one syllable over several seconds of bombastic guitar riffs. “It’s all very strong and powerful”, quoth Morrissey when interviewed recently, and this isn’t just apparent, it’s sometimes overbearing. So it’s two of the more unassuming tunes that end up standing out from the pack: Come Back To Camden, which waltzes gently into key changes that could even melt the hearts of the goths in the Electric Ballroom, and I’m Not Sorry, a stunningly laid-back two-chorder with a tasteful flute outro that makes you wonder if the prevalent pomp and circumstance is really necessary; one only has to think of songs like Hand That Rocks The Cradle to recall that Morrissey’s voice is often at its best when framed unobtrusively.

In a recent interview Morrissey was gently probed about themes running through the record. “Well,” he replied, “there is a theme… and the theme is me.” It’s somewhat surprising, then, that the almost teenage self-deprecation that inspired such devotion in the 1980s is still predominant. Indeed, there are lines like “The woman of my dreams / she never came along / well, there never was one” that you could have sworn he’d already used somewhere before. Former fans of The Smiths, most of whom will now be wrestling with more pressing issues of stakeholder pension schemes and nappy changing, might find it hard to square the underlying torpor of lines like “I’m slipping below the water line” with the Los Angeles lifestyle they witnessed on last year’s intimate Channel 4 documentary “The Importance Of Being Morrissey’, all open-topped Chevrolets and afternoon tea with Nancy Sinatra. But with a whole new generation of disaffected teens ready to be seduced by his mournful wit, Morrissey was always unlikely to start rhyming “tonight” with “alright”. The most obviously autobiographical references come on the swashbuckling final cut, You Know I Couldn’t Last, a sideswipe at the industry who thought he could no longer cut it. “Yes, the royalties bring you luxuries,” he sings as the fadeout approaches. Well, Moz, until you start addressing the pitfalls of endowment mortgages, you’re saying nothing to me about my life. But I’m still perfectly happy to sing along.