That crackle down the mouth piece on the telephone reminding you that the voice in not in the same room. The 'Do You Wish To Reconnect?' sign flashing on the monitor, forcing you to pause in the midst of an emotional outpouring or over-convoluted rant whilst on MSN Messenger at 3am. The backs of heads passing round the corner of the tunnel down to the platform in the tube station, heading South, heading East, returning to being words on a screen again.

Slip some Soya sauce into the pasta sauce, sprinkle a little tarragon over the Quorn, splash Tabasco through the omelette. Cultures clashing in my kitchen and yours. Me because I am a mix-up, because my parents are the same way. They brought a bit of East Africa in their back pockets and a whole heap of Indian in their soul to England. Back in the Seventies, when cheap meals were made with strange substances found in the strange cold island. Spam with baked beans, fried with onions and masala, and then torn into with nimble fingers holding folds of thin round Indian bread in a husky shade of brown.

Once the encore was over and the lights went up, I politely stole the set-list Satu wanted. Instead she lunged on stage and grabbed Chris' wine bottle and we stood outside and each took a sip. Whoever went first, possibly Satu, got to ingest his saliva from the rim and whoever went last, possibly me, got too as well from whatever was left at the bottom. We left a little bit though, which Satu spied all the way home while I wrote 'Chris Corner = Sex Kitten Extrodinaire' in the steam on the window of the cab.

I notice Milton is still babbling away in the background, "...The Salvador Dali Llamas; Headcheese; Babylon-By-Bus; Elton Strawberry & The Paperweights....". Paul, extinguishing his fifth cigarette in his third Bloody Mary, drawls, "Montefiori Cocktail; April March; Chicks On Speed; The Pis; etcetera."

Not many glam type bands are fronted my females it appears, do you play on transvestism a little or femme it up for realities sake?

I couldn't look like a man if I tried! It would take a lot of tape to flatten my up ;-). Everyone in the band wears a lot of make up. Everyone tries to look as glamorous and sexy as possible. I usually show off my figure because I can. There need to be more glamour in music! I'm sick to death of people up on stage looking like they just came back from the Laundromat!

However, I feel a fraud when not clasping an anthology of Gay love poetry ('Marianne Faithfull's Cigarette' or one of Neil Powell's great editorial do's) or a novel on the seedier said of life (step up Ms Homes and Mr Warner). It has to be obscure or my peers'll taint me with salacious remarks of being cultural and, at a push, well read.

New music I've lost interest in. Here is an over-zealous glimpse into my current crushes.

The Smiths

Maybe not a current love affair but certainly forever lasting, despite what I may have been tempted to say recently. They will always ignite a strange little flame that will soon flicker and die in the very melodramatic Sixth-Form fashion these things do when you're a Smiths fan. Buy the eponymous debut, The Queen Is Dead or Meat Is Murder and sign your happiness away.

The Memory Game - Nicci French

"When a skeleton is unearthed in the Martello's garden, others rattle ominously in their cupboards." I should have stopped at the opening line of the blurb. A fairly palatable thriller, written with a good balance between description and action but the large part of it is pointless and much is made of themes and people that have no relevance to the paper-thin plot. The gist of it all is 'who killed Natalie Martello?' and when we find that out it doesn't seem worth the trouble of reading it. There's some incest involved. Erm…

In 'Music For Torching' the dissatisfied female protagonist regularly fucks her equally bored neighbour, one of her middle-class friends who makes the pie, kisses the kids goodnight and takes the seemingly statutory rule as the one who is fucked in sex with the '9 to 5' husband. In 'Jack', the mother of Jack's best friend is beaten and abused by her husband and when that is revealed, Homes manages to idly slip it in and we jar for a moment because thoughts of "Did I read that right? Does he? When?" pour out of our own minds along with tears.

"You have a lot of faith for someone who just lost all hope," quipped the old man. "Someone might have mistaken it for belief, and filed it under B. But we ain't had no Bs today either. Had a broken lute the other week. Now, you'd think lute would go under L, but it was broken, see, so it went under B. But because it was a lute it went under the L subsection of the B section."