Help me maintain access to my current addiction. Sign the petition to keep Blag Lady pissing about on line when she should be writing deep dark poems from the bottom of her heart. Nothing like not getting the old opiates to keep you RIGHT ON EDGE eh?

Picture of Blag Lady when she has had her fix.

What else has been happening down my way?

Had news of an engagement and a break up followed by a get-together: both of which brought a smile to my face. It’s good when that happens. Something about January it seems. The New Year is a time of shrugging off the old skin for a sleek new shell with nary a sign of a crease or a wrinkle.

Talking of wrinkles, that reminds me: La Blag got a nomination for something prestigious only to find the digits didn’t add up right. This was gutting but I’m staying cryptic.

If you can’t be a teenager again why not hang out with one? Took my nephew young Taikings out shopping for his birthday on Saturday. He is 11 now – pre teenage, yes, but this still means he is losing the ability to pronounce consonants and thus we had to go to ‘Foola’ to buy clothes that rustle. Yes, I spent my Saturday here: where we managed to talk him out of buying a cap that did not fit and some hideous garment or other. ‘Can’t we go to Hennes?’ I whined to no avail. Let me just say one final thing on this: black, white and red all over is a children’s joke about a newspaper not a colour combination.

And finally, two fat foxes appeared in the garden this morning while I was yakking on the blower. Didn’t get a pic cos I’m just not on it with the camera right now. (Gotta fix that.) I hoped they might urinate on the old hag’s plastic table, but I made too much noise and frightened them off. Must learn that silence as well as showers can be golden.

Blag Lady has become a muse! Last Mango in Paris sent me this:

There was a Blag Lady called Sharon

Who married a very rich Baron

He gave her his dosh

She became quite posh

And dumped all her friends christened Stacey

Went to a matinee at the Ritzy. Not to see Now Voyager or Top Hat, as one would expect in the holiday season, but a documentary about how the oil really is running out. There was an apocalyptic soundtrack courtesy of Philip Glass – who seems to have something of a monopoly on apocalyptic soundtracks – and lots of scenes of speeded up traffic and cityscapes (courtesy of Koyanisqaatsi).

The editing was clumsy: at one point you had live footage (including sound) of the Iraq War, mixed with the apocalyptic soundtrack and the beginning of an interview with an ex OPEC/CIA/SHELL/ chief (of which there were many) telling us that it is all over Casanova.

There’s not enough oil left, demand is growing now every rickshaw driver wants a Hummer and divining and drilling the bloody stuff takes more energy than it produces. Wind and solar power are farts in the ocean of our insatiable demand, uranium is dwindling and there’s not enough room to grow all the biofuels we’d need.

Amazingly I managed to glean this, despite the interviewees being drowned out by apocalyptic soundtrack at every intake of breath. I do have a thing about overblown soundtracks – where every emotional nuance is heralded by a cacophony of ‘appropriate’ music – just in case we can’t work out how we should be feeling. Thus good things such as neo-green family farming sustainably are identified by thoughtful cellos, while deserted oilfields, enviro-detritus and US troops barging into Baghdad are accompanied by – yes, you guessed it – Philip Glass. Okay, it does make lots of interviews with physics professors more ‘dramatic’, but there are limits.

Okay that over with, I shouldn’t be glib or unfair.This isn’t a bunch of sub-moronic dweebs from somewhere in the mid-West skillfully manipulated by Michael Moore, these are analysts, consultants and oil industry buzongos (just made that word up, but you get my drift) who know what’s what and what’s not going to last very long at all oh dear.

You could see the film, or avoid the apocalyptic soundtrack and check out this very well researched website from one of the film’s key contributors. You will be digging a hole in your cellar (to store food provisions – not drill for crude) and contemplating buying a smallholding on a hill before you know it.

Zed Bed’s NY resolution is to stop consuming anything non-essential (although essential does include mascara when it runs out) and I’m tempted to do the same. Either that or it’s naked bike riding.

Last January I started the year photographing fat and talkative trees and then as if by magic a hurricane came and blew them all down.

This year I’m out of quick quips even if I do insist on phrases such as quick quips. Which I like. It feels good in the mouth. On the train back from Marrakech (Eurostar, Paris to London – last leg) I discussed the future of Blag Lady with Dr Blog.

Quick and often. Yes. That is the future of Blag Lady. Not long and infrequent and rambling. Pictures. Yes. Not always, but often.

Should I focus and use it solely as an eco-activist platform from which I get to vent spleen about all sorts of fruit in plastic packaging? This could be good. Then I would go into detail about the layers of non-degradable but very degrading litter that surrounds every Moroccan village we passed from Tangiers onwards.

Or I could start a secret blog, which is long and rambling and infrequent but honest so I get to whinge on about how all my friends were invited somewhere I wasn’t for NYE which made me miserable even though I really was too knackered to go out what with all the international train travel and all that so fuck it.

And can the tortured poor me confessional ever sit alongside the blog as literary marketing tool, my least favoured option? And does it matter that people I work with read it? Or should I post poetry and forget about whether or not Ode X, Y, Z will not be eligible for D, Q, B if I do? And will I ever be as funny as Antonia? (No.)

Blogger-pal Yemisi Blake pointed me in the direction of a blog called Pomegranate Queen who I would link to but she has changed the strapline I was going to quote so I won’t as now I have to remember it. You know I always said I didn’t want to be an academic because I’d have to spend half my life citing sources and there I go with such preamble. The quote was from someone like Rumi but not. It said something like:

‘Words from the heart will go straight to the heart, words from the mind reach no further than the ears’.

In French ‘la blague’ is a joke and here it’s a bit of nifty shifty. Can I blag from the heart? Do I have a blague heart? Yes, always a pub, oh Freudian typo, always a pub, second Freudian typo, always a pun, my first resort. Got there in the end. Next stop the pub.

Any conclusions?

• Here is a photo of Morgan Freeman our taxi driver who took us to the Atlas Mountains past Pascha Marrakesh – ‘the biggest club in Africa’. He said people said he looked like Morgan Freeman. He did look like Morgan Freeman. I think he was Morgan Freeman. He was Morgan Freeman. He is Morgan Freeman. Morgan Freeman.
• Leave whingeing to the whingers. I am a blagger.
• Write posts from the heart no longer than my arm.
• Remember some arms are longer than others.
• Write about love, lurve and luv.
• Keep bothering Richard Branson. He deserves it.