Happy New Year, Biatches

Hello People,

So we finally reconvened for the first Perfect Ten of 2009, braving the elements as the Standard screamed about -10 temperatures in town as if London's meant to be impervious to weather. I pulled my giant parka (a coat people openly ridiculed and pointed at until frostbite took their fingers away - the irony) up to my eyes and went skidding along the pavement until I gently came to rest with a bump against a friendly lamppost at the end of my street. Phill was stuck on the tube (weather of any kind means that the transport in London comes to a shuffling halt) so I sat in the USP offices and annoyed the staff by shouting my surname out in a variety of accents. German works best. I can recommend Welsh too.

Anyway, Phill turned up in the first hat he ever bought (not technically the first he owned, that was a sailor hat that he picked up on Southend pier when he was eight - we'll post the pictures, my, can he have ever been so cute?) and a coat the size of Mammon and we descended into the cellar for our dirty, dirty business. If you're reading this then I'm sure you'll know the grimy details, but suffice to say that Duffy, Lansbury and Grant Moon all got a kicking, almost everyone who ever taught us too, they all had it coming. Oh and we want to rustle hamsters across the Thames, can anyone help, please? All of this and Phill announced that he was on the wagon for a year, my eyebrow went up and down like a faulty train signal and so we've decided on a sweepstake; guess the date he falls off the wagon and win... Head over to our Facebook group (there's a link at the top of the page, silly) and learn more. There's prizes, glittering prizes...

We keep talking about taking the Ten live, but we really are almost certainly thinking about working on it and you'll be the first to know, don't worry, I can't imagine there'll be something akin to a land-rush for tickets. And while we can't guarantee any laughs we can guarantee you great music as we'll both be playing sets afterwards so you can dance away the painful memories of us... And while I'm here, just this, contributor Kate was kind enough to draw myself and Phill on a festive camel, the words 'bumming' and 'bestiality' did spring to mind, but we're terribly grateful anyway and we'd like more contributions with an artistic bent. Think Take Hart but without any of that show's redeeming qualities. Or Tony Hart. We'll set up some sort of gallery here that we can all wander about with glasses of wine from a box while tutting and murmuring to ourselves.

That's about it really, at the moment I'm listening to Patrick Park's Loneliness Knows My Name, reading The Paris Review Book Of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Baseball, Travels, The Art Of Writing And Everything Else In The World Since 1953 and watching In Search Of A Midnight Kiss and I think you should be too, no pressure.

Until next time then.

Phil(l)

xxx