Worth watiting for? Billie Piper in Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Photograph: Tiger Aspect
Do you remember the Heaven's Gate cult? You know, the ones who believed that the world was a giant bus stop, and topped themselves when the Hale-Bopp Comet came along, believing it would transport them to another galaxy and a fresh start? I wonder how they're doing.
Having been consigned to barracks since the New Year, however, and having had my mind pummelled by unmissable new television shows, January sale advertisements, and what's hot in 2008 lists, I can't help thinking - what if the Hale-Bopp-Hoppers were right? And even if their calculations were slightly off, and they are actually enjoying their eleventh successful year of not existing, what have they missed? Echo Beach, the rise of Billie Piper, Facebook, Wags, bands giving away their albums for free, botox injected handbags, Liverpool's year of culture, the Spice Girls reunion, and 9/11 - which I suppose might have been of interest to a doomsday cult. Remember, they left just as New Labour was dancing to Things Can Only Get Better.
It is just possible that I am having another midlife crisis, fuelled by a combined lack of sunlight, mental stimulation and obscene wealth, and that once the first snowdrops spring up, I'll buy a tooth whitening kit and dazzle the world with a smile. I don't deny that something marvellous might happen soon, another Sex Pistols, another George Orwell ... or possibly even Barack Obama. I do live in hope: according to my mother, Professor Gunther von Hagens is just about to plastinate an elephant, and the new Stephen Fry sitcom is quite pleasant.
I've got a column in the Guardian Weekend magazine this Saturday, and have been approached to write a book about my life - laugh if you must - and the guitars I have owned, rather like J Alfred Prufrock counting out his miserable existence in coffee spoons. It's just the task for a solitary misanthrope looking to while away the hours. Revisiting disasters, returning to crime scenes, and exhuming bodies that have reposed comfortably in country churchyards for years ... I am being metaphorical here. I can't promise that it will be carbon neutral, as I have taken to writing in the car while parked somewhere pretty - the laptop battery lasts about as long as my concentration span. However, at the end of this sentence I will get out of the car and pick up the Doritos packet and plastic bottle that somebody has dumped by the side of the lake and take them home for proper burial; the used condom floating in a puddle will have to make its own arrangements.
