Text Santa

I went to the dentist first thing this morning. A new lady saw me; a little Chinese woman whose stomach rumbled in a hugely comical way throughout the check-up! My ear was right by her belly and when it first happened I genuinely wondered if it was the sound of a tube train passing underneath!

She gave me a "treatment plan", which, of course, involved a visit to the hygienist, who now charges almost £60 for services rendered, and laughably feels this is a service which I require three times a year. Obviously I can't afford £60 this close to Christmas and had to suggest I'd get in touch again when I could afford to come in. It's irritating, though: the role of a hygienist used to be part of the dentist's brief and not a separate entity. The NHS gets away with charging a fortune because it's seen as "cosmetic" when really it's preventative. In an era when people still aren't back on their financial feet, it seems outrageous that a hygienist can charge increasingly large sums of money. Her fees have doubled in five years!

From Tufnell Park, I bussed it up to Muswell Hill to meet Lli and her adorable mother for soup, tea, and fabulous chats about life, death, music and a million subjects in between.  Both women haven't had the greatest of years, but Silvia (Lli's mum) astonishes me with her optimism and lust for life. She is an extraordinary lady.

I came home this evening to watch "Text Santa" whilst sorting through Christmas gifts. The charity's official single this year is an abominable karaoke cover of "I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day..." sung by the talentless and fame-hungry "class" of the 2013 Big Reunion.

For those of you who were lucky enough to miss this hideous car crash telly, it's basically an attempt by a group of has-been manufactured bands from the 90s to reform for a second slice of the fame pie.

The single annoys me for two reasons 1) I released a charity single this year which will sell a fraction of the copies, but was the product of a great deal more expense, talent and and love and 2) these dreadful turds remind me that the 1990s pop world almost exclusively rejected talented musicians of my generation in favour of these photogenic tossers. A reminder of why the British pop music entirely ignored my generation and lost its way in the process, is never greatly appreciated!

I think I'm rather too cynical to watch these charity-a-thons. I find them astonishingly cliched and I also worry how much of what is raised will go to the management teams of these charities, many of whom are being paid ludicrously large salaries. Every time today's presenters mentioned how people could donate money, they said "so if you want to donate five pounds, simply text Text Santa... That's Santa spelt S.A.N.T.A..." Thank God they thought to spell out such a curiously complicated word. I've always found Santa as hard to spell as, well, "dyslexic!" Just when I thought television couldn't  be any more dummed down, Paddy Mcguinness appeared to do a special bite-sized episode of Take Me Out, the dating show for stupid slags, so at that point the telly went off.

I sat in the loft for two hours writing music as a gale battered the roof. Turns out the frustration I was feeling this evening was the mother of all songs wanting to burst out of me and that a crazy gale and rattling house was all I needed for the music to fly! Sadly I'm now buzzing as a result, and won't be able to sleep just yet, but blimey it was worth it!