13th October 2002 - 12:51 p.m.

Hey, the kids.

We move house, if you didn’t know; we move cities, we move away. Away from the capital, from grand hopes on a grand stage. And from two years of memories.

It’s sad, of course, when things end. But it’s sadder, I say, that I regret the conclusion of the chronology of memories far more than I regret having put the full stop on the living of new experiences. If I had my way, life would be an endless stream of reminiscences, the gravity of the past so overwhelming that even events now, events in the future, would go tumbling past before I had a chance to lift a finger, and every single thing, every little moment, would be lived for the first time as reminiscence, as the ache of nostalgia.

And that’s the saddest thing of all.

Forgive me my indulgences; I have taken to pampering myself during these quiet days, and those ahead. I have turned to the simple pleasures again. And very little pleasures me – and nor, I suspect, will it ever – so much as Model Behaviour, now showing on Channel Four for a few evenings a week. There’s something about beauty, about a certain affected gaze, about cheekbones like so, that has me in raptures, again and again. I don’t want to talk about ideology, about the construction of cultural myths, and so I won’t. I’m pampering myself, remember. And when one has only one or two affections, a little thing here, a little thing there, one would do well to keep from threatening those few things with the doubt of analysis.

But you know immediately, you watching alone at home, who will and who won’t. You know, because you’ve been taken from the first moment by those same individuals, you’ve fallen for them now and again as the lines file in and out. It’s a delight to be so enamoured so frequently during a half hour program.

One small aside on the subject of an inherent danger, and then I promise myself that I shall stop. It’s to do with voyeurism, and to do with those who don’t get chosen, would clearly never get chosen, and who you, watching alone at home, titter at for having somehow maintained the belief that they would. The absence of self-awareness – as I’ve told people many times, not recognising how preposterous it makes me sound – amazes me ceaselessly. And the problem is that beauty is absolutely fundamental, an ideal on which we make judgement daily. We know it, we accept that it transcends all, and we stand in awe before it. And to see people getting it so wrong, and, instead of prostrating themselves before the ideal, mistakenly believing that they are the ideal.. ..it’s horrifying. And the derisive laughter with which we greet some of the entrants bears the weight of that horror.

Make what you will of the above paragraph, for I promised myself a small aside and you really don’t need me to point out the implications. But I am not naive, am not without self-criticism, and you can rest assured that I am utilising that derisive laughter at this very moment. Although I will say that one of the pretty male semi-finalists reminds me of myself, if only my features didn’t also show a dash of Gary Neville.

Yes, I know. Not good.

Damn right; the other delight of my life is Avril Lavigne. The music pages of various teletext forums are presently buckling under the weight of splutteringly indignant letters from buck-toothedly unhappy teenagers, decrying Ms Lavigne for singing the above whilst being herself, incredibly, a fake. The grounds for this criticism are dull – she pretends to skateboard; she has her hair artificially straightened – but I thought I’d pick up on it nonetheless. Any excuse to talk about her, frankly.

This is pop music. Don’t forget. If pop music is anything, it’s a lesson to us all. And whether you call your pop music ‘Nu-Metal’, ‘Electroclash’, ‘Indie’, whatever.. it’s still pop music, thank fuck; it’s still marketed, it’s still honed and toned and manipulated for the benefit of we, the masses. You’re keeping it real, you say? Nonsense. You’re just lying badly.

One simply cannot be both eloquent and honest. At best, one might be honest when it comes to one’s lies. Take this diary as an example. You don’t mean to tell me that you believe in it, do you? The truths are in the gaps between the words, in the weight of tone which implies those things which are never said. And, just as long as we accept that we’re simply affecting a pose in order to keep ourselves lively, life becomes less of a burden and more of a pleasure.

Ms Lavigne lies beautifully, and she has my highest praise for that. I don’t recall having been so excited at a TopOfThePops performance since a smouldering Mandy Moore lied “I wanna be with you” some time ago now and I believed it. Thus, she won. It’s really very simple.

And if that’s too much for you to bear, then consider this: any imposition of ideology into this debate is a fraud and, which is more, a capitulation. I’m not telling you to languish in relativism, I’m simply telling you that you can’t buy truths. And that it’s impossible to build a value-system to support lies. It negates itself seven times over.

Don’t despair! Pop music is liberated and liberator, and the struggle is elsewhere. And if we must fight, let the fight be against the false prophets, those who would have us waste our energies on futile divisions. And let the first stone be cast at the critics of Avril Lavigne. After all, who’d fall in love with a true skateboarder?

Victory to pop music! All peoples, all lands, all causes!