It's not often I go to the pub, but I was in one today. Five of us threading the conversation with different stories, curious anecdotes, odd facts, and bold rhetorical sweeps. Pub talk.

Female pub talk, I've been told, gets to heart of the matter more or less straight away: " Your boyfriend, how good ?...big ...?"

What did we five men spend thirty minutes chewing over ? Films that have us in tears. And don't expect there to be someone saying it's when it's the final Top Gear show the season cuts to the credits. No, we were listing serious handkerchief movies, like the Incredible Journey, Marley and Me, or Up, and in my case, the film that always has me sniffling, Rabbit Proof Fence.

I'm sat in Jimmy's waiting to get my hair cut. He's busy, talking, and clipping away at someone's hair. Conversation turns to marriage:

"How long you been married?"

"Five years. Together for four before that"

"Ten year's time you're wife won't notice you. My wife she's says to me 'you look nice. Had you hair cut?' 'Yes... a week ago"

This morning I read an article about James Agee, the film critic; my only experience of him, and I realise now to my somewhat shame, was as the author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a classic of the Depression era. I'd no idea of his life as a critic, and certainly none of just how wonderful a writer on film he was.

Visionary, insightful, a thoughtful critic, and blessed with great images. Take this one of Buster Keaton's face, so impassive and featureless, that "when he moved his eyes. it was like seeing them move in a statue"; or this one or Orson Welles in the role of Rochester in Jane Eyre "...his eyes glinting in the Rembrandt like gloom...."

I love that image, it's everything you could imagine of Rochester, dark, shadowy, furtive, hidden secrets, off stage mysteries. Great writing, certainly memorable writing depends on people like Agee and the images they mine from their creative depths.

Someone sent me a link to site that specialises in publishing 90 word stories. No more, no less, just 90 words on the button. That's it.

I like the idea: you pluck something out of the air, trap it between your hands, and ultimately mould into a recognisable shape, using the tiniest amount of material. Concision, precision, and a swift conclusion.

The person who forwarded the link on is a gifted writer, a published writer in fact, and one who is more than capable of turning his hand to any one of the numerous literary forms there are. So rustling up a light lunch of no more than 90 words was pretty straightforward for him. In this respect I'm still stuck at the beans on toast stage, whereas he's a Jamie Oliver, whatever is to hand in the fridge, slice it, dice it, whizz it around, and hey presto, filling fare.

His 90 word story is a good one; to be frank, knowing him as I do, I'd be disappointed if it was n't.

Quite unexpectedly, though, I did get a chuckle out of it, (and by the way, here are those 90 words). I saw, elsewhere, a thread of conversation develop around the electric blanket that's mentioned in the story, which could only be American.

Was anyone sued ?

Three weeks since I came back, and I can still smell those corn tortillas cooking even now sat on a sofa in my small West London flat, and see those gorgeous, overflowing heaps of plump red tomatoes and succulent green beans, the mounds of fleshy fruit, ripe, tiny yellow bananas, golden carambolas, generously sized carrots, the juiciest pineapples, carpets of coffee beans drying in the sun.

The chutzpah of the Tory party and their excitable press claque... I can't think of anything to match it in Europe...well, there's Silvio, but he's really in a league of his own, somewhere between denial and disdain. Still, il Cavaliere must be hearing them panting behind him, constantly self-referencing themselves as the Government already. Did I miss an election somewhere ? Did it happen whilst I was asleep ?

Conservative Central Office must be busier than Heathrow, every day there's a new edict or pronouncement cleared for take-off, their busy army of worker ant newspaper columnists sweat like galley slaves frothing everything up.

I understand why they do this: they want their team to win, so it's get in there early and impress the waverers, the floaters, with just how businesslike the boys and girls in blue are, tell them about the preparations they've made, how they'll hit the ground running and straight into action.

All understood, I'd do the same, but there be monsters here; the constant repetition, the never ending implication that they'll win (sad, but likely), might actually back fire: there's so much froth to step through - more than you'd find on a cappuccino - that there's all the likelihood that some people will give up trying to understand them, or actually believe they are the government, and not vote. Please let it be the latter.

Of course, there is the minor matter of the Tories winning the next election, but that does n't seem to bother their thinking.

I agree: it is almost Beckettian, if it's late, and you're still in the office, and the only other company is a fly trapped in the fluorescent light fitting. Not me, I'm sat on the sofa, idly surfing, it's someone I've just heard asking for a request on the radio. Late night working....many unhappy memories...