James Bailey

Loved the interview with her neighbour: “she was toastie-mad!”

Mrs Merton to Boy George: “What makes you happy? Bearing in mind decent folk are watching”

I miss Caroline Aherne - watching an old episode of The Mrs Merton Show, and she’s just asked whether “we should save the environment, or can we live without it?”

God, I love The Human League

A lounge area, with a long purple sofa and a red rug over blue and peach chequered tiles

Another sitting area, with a fire, large lamp, and a pink and orange-striped wall

Another sitting area, with a multi-coloured-tiled fireplace, and sofas and armchairs.

A kitchen, with matching baby blue refrigerator and cupboards. Red and yellow chequered linoleum floor.

More pictures - I would simply never be in a bad mood here!

Brightly-coloured interior of a motel, including: white and turquoise chequered flooring, spiral staircase, wood-panelled walls, red and yellow kitchen

Wood-panelled bar, including art of B-52s, Peggy Lee and Etta James

Dining table, with fruit bowl full of plastic fruit and vegetables

Lounge area with yellow sofas, wallpaper depicting a forest scene, and a bright orange wall on which a framed painting of some puffins hangs

I spend a lot of time thinking about when Kate Pierson from the B-52s put her motel up for sale (furniture included)

Avanti Panky?

Ah yes, the one where she introduces Colonel Sanders 😐

Very embarrassing that it’s taken me over a week to come up with this, but… Border-LNER? Is this anything?

The naked folks nibbling on that massive strawberry might have looked quite nice by the fruit bowl, to be fair…

Also deeply unquiet at all times

A grey Staffordshire Bull Terrier puppy, sitting down on a lawn and looking at the camera

A grey Staffordshire Bull Terrier puppy, sitting down on a lawn in profile

Greetings from Pascal the Puppy

And yikes, that corkscrew 🫣

Such a great novel - I write about it a fair bit in my forthcoming Spark book

Hope so - don’t rain on my parade

Oh yes, I do like that album- bold in several different ways!

He’d need some stamina…

Jarvis would give us a pretty filthy “see it, say it… sorted”, I suspect

Also, it pains me that Pulp never covered this song, ‘Acrylic Afternoons’-style. I can just imagine Jarvis ad-libbing about wanting something from the trolley.

I like how, when Madonna delivers the line “I wanna make love on a train…” in 'Justify My Love', she adds “…cross-country”. Lest anyone suspect that her lover could only last the length of the 0.8-mile trip from Stourbridge Town to Stourbridge Junction.

That means so much 🦔

Spark also has a short story called The Thing About Police Stations, which sounds like a Fall song title

“I hear you, Telephone Thing, listening in…”

(I’m afraid I don’t know - but there’s a certain something to The Comforters, Memento Mori, The Ballad of Peckham Rye and The Driver’s Seat that I imagine he’d have appreciated)

(so glad to see you On Here, by the way)

Well now I must of course ask what’s number one…

YouTube video by BTAN Oneline Don't Worry Baby

It might be because I’m massively sleep-deprived, by my god I don’t think there’s another song that so perfectly expresses what it is to know that someone cares about you

(and now I have to reply to emails? In this state??)

youtu.be/9Y-0nWVdBH4?...

I love this so much: Brian Wilson hearing Ronnie Spector’s cover of ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ 💜

Books on Wallace and Gromit’s shelf: Waiting for Gouda, Fromage to Eternity, Grated Expectations, East of Edam

Continued: Swiss Cheese Family Robinson, Brie Encounter, How Green Was My Cheese, Brighton Roquefort, The Hunt for Red Leicester

I’m coveting Wallace & Gromit’s entire cheese-centric library 📚

Pascal update: outrageous behaviour!

A drowsy-looking brown cat mascot wears a blue jacket and bow tie and a yellow hat.

Van Meowogh is an artistic Parisian cat from the game Cats Atelier.