An immaculately coiffed, Fendi swinging, blackberry carrying, thirty-something blond marching through Notting Hill Gate wearing a fur coat and a very tiny, almost imperceptible, skirt barely shielding her dignity.

So far, I have failed to progress with any one of my new years resolutions. Early days I suppose, but the whole idea of self betterment through deprivation hasn’t worked thus far. If anything it has accelerated my cravings for the forbidden. So since avowing to abstain from supermarket news stands in order to kill off my heat and hello habit, I’ve been doing exactly the opposite. Yes, I’ve been shamelessly gorging on every, single, bit of salacious gossip out there.
Today, I picked up a copy of Nuts.
I think I'm finally ready to admit I have a problem so If you happen to spot me in your local supermarket I urge you to summon a member of staff immediately. I'll be grateful, in the long term.

'Any woman with a brain has to be a transvestite.'

Seamus Heaney; the rightful winner

Tis a shame really, but what does Heneay care he has his Nobel Prize. Interestingly enough, I’ve recently learned that Jean Paul Sartre was the only Nobel laureate to voluntarily decline the Nobel Prize for Literature. I wonder why?

Green tea with jasmine is absolutely vile.

The higher up you go, the lower grade people you meet.
James Cagney – The Blood on the Sun

I think it's a dirty trick to bring me all the way to New York just to make a widow of me.
Myrna Loy – The Thin Man

I always gagged on that silver spoon.
Orson Welles – Citizen Kane

In about a week, you'll either collect or lose your shirt.
Cary Grant – Only Angels Have Wings

Let us be crooked, but never common.
Charles Coburn – The Lady Eve

The above image brought on a sudden bout of violent nausea, which has now subsided. The article that followed, however, had a somewhat similar effect which left me temporarily incapacitated and thinking that maybe in the future I should refrain from reading about fuckwit Blair. I find him genuinely despicable, even more so after learning that he’s resolved to pour more money in to Iraq in order to ‘maintain Britain's role as a war fighting power.’
Obviously a great idea. Why spend money improving the quality of life within Britain when you can blow it on blowing up another village or two.

A filthy, pissed-up, jabbering, crack-head with a can of special brew and a 'make poverty history' wristband.

Follies

Shaken,
The blossoms of lilac,
And shattered,
The atoms of purple.
Green dip the leaves,
Darker the bark,
Longer the shadows.

Sheer lines of poplar
Shimmer with masses of silver
And down in a garden old with years
And broken walls of ruin and story,
Roses rise with red rain-memories.
May!
In the open world
The sun comes and finds your face,
Remembering all.

Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967)

Song

Observe the cautious toadstools
still on the lawn today
though they grow over-evening;
sun shrinks them away.
Pale and proper and rootless,
they righteously extort
their living from the living.
I have been their sort.

See by our blocked foundation
the cold, archaic clay,
stiff and clinging and sterile
as children mold at play
or as the Lord God fashioned
before He breathed it breath.
The earth we dig and carry
for flowers, is strong in death.

Woman, we are the rich
soil, friable and humble,
where all our murders rot,
where our old deaths crumble
and fortify my reach
far from you, wide and free,
though I have set my root
in you and am your tree.

W. D. Snodgrass (1926)

Can someone please explain to me how Jamie Oliver wriggled his way on to the British Heroes of 2006 list, because I really, genuinely don’t get it. Now call me thick but isn’t he that overzealous, faux-cockney, lisp-ridden, organic-lifestyle-endorsing, over-sized-head-stuck-up-his-anus-do-gooder and all round fuckwit who fancies himself as a bit of a gastrowhizz because he can peel a frigging carrot and season a lamb chop whilst prolifically dribbling verbal diarrhea all over our telly screens?
Now honestly, I really can’t understand how his hokery-pokery cooking skills accompanied by egotistical self-publicising diatribe - the kind that makes you pray someone would sprinkle arsenic into his Shitsbury's Chilean Sauvignon Blanc or hit him over the head with a searing frying pan - could make him anything other than another surplus celebrity to be annihilated, ideally with a high-velocity rifle but even an arsenic and a frying pan over the head kind of death would do.

'For the new year.--I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought; hence I , too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year--what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor Fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.'

(Nietzsche - The Gay Science)

I wish to become a yes-sayer too, but unfortunately I’m more of a ‘NO, NO, NO, now FUCK OFF’ kind of gal. Will see how it goes.