They're everywhere but you don't see them.

Three times this week I've ridden through police tape in Brixton. Monday morning, Wednesday morning and this afternoon. Three times the whole place was at a standstill. Three times the air ambulance was landed on Rush common. Three times young West Indian boys had been shot. I've got 2 links I can't even find a link for the third shooting.

Monday morning

Thursday Afternoon

This comes two months after a 17 year West Indian boy was shot in the chest at point blank range and died at the end of our road and one month after a car had it's tyres shot out again at the end of our road.

There's a gang war going on all around us and no one's talking about it. Sorry, everybody round here's talking about it, but nobody important. Why? They're closing down schools because of this shit.

I must have some booze. I demand to have some booze

Withnail and I is 20 years old next year. IMO still the finest British comedy of all time and without a shadow of a doubt Richard E Grant's finest performance. Playing an alcoholoic smoker when you're allergic to alcohol is a pretty tough call, but Grant did it with aplomb. As a celebration they're bringing out an anniversary DVD. Get it.

I'm very sorry, I appear to be under-dressed

I've just got back from lunch in the square mile, with a couple of friends. I'd forgotten people actually still wear suits and even more weird ties. I wear a suit maybe a couple of times a month for new business meetings but the last tie I bought is about 6 years old. My client meetings tend to be smart casual, by which I mean I wear a lot of black. Well I'm in advertising that's what we do darling. Actually I'm not in advertising, but it's what I do darling. The rest of the time I wear t-shirts and jeans

My office is 2 minutes from Tate Modern and normally people in ties round these parts get poked with sticks and pointed at. Unless of course it's some sort of eccentric cravatt, in which case they get asked their opinion about Mark Rothko.

However, cross the Millennium Bridge and you wade into a sea of suits and ties. It's quite extraordinary and strangely bizarre. I used to have a few finance clients, but it's been years since I've worked in the sector and I'd forgotten how it was. I basically now have gaming and software clients and on the whole those guys work in offices where you're lucky if the personnel have washed their clothes, let alone wear a tie.

One thing did strike me though, having been out of the suit and tie game for a wee while. I've fallen behind on what people are wearing these days. It would appear that the main fashion sweeping the city is shirts and ties that should never ever be in the same room together, let alone worn by the same high flying, pond-hopping finance exec. I'm sorry, but wearing a white and blue striped shirt with a gold and black striped tie, looks shit. Please don't try and persuade me that it's fashionable, because I know that at the weekend you climb into a wardrobe that was all bought at Boden and the Salcombe Clothing Company by your long suffering wife and you rebuy brown leather boat shoes every 4 or 5 years, because your previous pair has a hole in them.

OK - enough is enough

I'm a huge advocate of the BBC. I think £140 for the quality of programming we get in the UK is absolute superb value and if it means no adverts, then even better. I'll defend it to the hilt. I understand the arguments against, but as it stands the alternative still appears the worse option.

However, watching the BBC 10'o'clock news last night, Nic and I spent most of the time open mouthed. I'm not sure I've ever watched a more emotive bulletin in my life.

First up organ donation in China - it has emerged that Chinese transplant centres are harvesting organs from executed prisoners and charging foreigners £50,000 a pop for a life saving transplant. It's a story that chills my spine. I'm vehmently anti-death penalty and I very much doubt whether willing consent has been provided by the executed prisoners. However, despite some pretty solid evidence, the level of specualtion contained within the report was astonishing. We had an interview with Mr Yu the father of one of the executed prisoners and all sorts of conjecture about what may and may not have happened to his son's organs, we don't know whether his liver was harvested as far as I could see, but never mind that, here was human tragedy. Then there's the poor unsuspecting foreigners. The abuse was termed horrifying.

Huw Edwards then went on to interview the correspondent saying. ''What many of the viewers will be horrified at tonight, is the amount of executions that are occurring in china'' WTF. Yes I am horrified Huw, but please don't make the assumption on my part, I'm sure there are some veiwers who think it's great and you know what they now hate you for assuming they're horrified.

This was Auntie Beeb at it's worst, telling the viewing public what they should feel. It was agenda setting propoganda, not public service. 'You sit there and we'll tell you what's what'. It left both of us wondering what the agenda was, for the first time ever. You expect this from Fox or CNN, but not the beeb.

Next up we had the report on the leaked War on Terror documents in the US and the UK. All fine for the first few minutes, purely factual. The Democrats are seizing upon it. MI5 are denying that these are widespread beliefs. The Republicans are defending the non-release of details. All fine.

Then cut to the war on the ground in Iraq, FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF AN 8 YEAR OLD GIRL. See the evil Americans. See the uncertainty of the girls life. What a tragedy she is trapped in a war zone. Again yes, this is what I believe is happening. Yes we've fucked it up. Yes the civilian population of Iraq are suffering. But, don't take my side. Stay neutral, report the facts. I'm smart enough to work things out for myself, I don't need to be told by you what to think and this report just means some arsehole's (probably Iain Dale) going to chip away at the whole BBC institution. How am I meant to defend this. I can't, it's undeniably biased.

Third up was Brazilian cleaner Roselane Driza, found guilty of blackmailing a high court judge over a sex tape he'd made with his high court judge lover. If 'Heat' had a TV channel they couldn't do a better job than this sensationalist nonsense.

The whole thing from beginning to end has rather rocked my faith in the neutrality and quality of the BBC. One half an hour programme has done an awful lot of damage.

Compoman

Tomorrow I'll be making my first ever compensation claim.

I thought I'd include the image because it made me laugh. I google imaged 'compensation man' and this is what I got. It is contained on the website of 'access2compensation'

Anyway, I'm not physically injured, although I'm quite surprised I'm not. I was cycling along the A3 as normal this morning. I'd stopped, behind a bus at some lights and on turning green, I headed off behind the bus and up the cycle lane, I kept pace with the bus for about 50m and then all of a sudden I hit the mother of all potholes. The bus had gone straight over the top of it and as I wasn't able to see it, I just rode straight through it.

In so doing, both my front and back lights popped out of their housings and both smashed on the cycle lane. Actually, I tell a lie. The back one popped out completely, the front one stayed firm but the front of it literally ripped off and just left the bit of black plastic that constitutes the back of the light. Amazingly I didn't pop a tyre and my wheels remained unbuckled. I'm not sure how, as this thing was about 75 cm across and about 20 cm deep. It baffles me, how something like this can suddenly appear out of nowhere and not be spotted because as far as I remember I don't recall seeing it yesterday or the day before.

After some ringing round, I eventually got through to TFL who are responsible for the maintenance of the 220km of bus lanes in London and lodged the report of the pothole and then asked whether I could claim for my damaged lights. The customer services representative said certainly and put me through to a firm of what I assume are solicitors, that deal with compensation claims of this type. The guy I spoke to said he would send me out some claim forms, do some further investigation and then come back with a response to my request, but he said it sounded fairly straightforward and on that basis, he didn't think it would take very long.

Am I right to complain? To be honest if I hadn't bought the lights just 2 weeks ago I'm not sure I would have bothered, but the set cost me £35 and although it's not a huge amount of money, I think it's worth claiming for, if it's possible. After all there was nothing I could have done to avoid it (cue, lots of people saying, I should have been watching where I was going). Incidentally, I was recounting the tale to a work colleague who cycles the same route as me and he said 'Oh yeah, I saw that this morning and did think someone ought to ring the council and tell them about it' so I feel slightly vindicated and not completely mad.

So whaddya reckon. Am I just fuelling compensation culture, or am I fully justified in making my claim? Answers on a postcard please (or an online comment if you must).

It takes a lot of balls

I'm not sure I could perform under this sort of pressure, if I'd lost my wife a month earlier. Congratulations Darren, we're all rooting for you mate.

I want to watch Dumbo

Having managed to avoid TV altogether, we finally caved in with Ebs about 5 months ago (when Louis was born).

He still only watches videos (yeah remember them) and DVDs and even then only about 15 or 20 minutes a day. OK so it was about 2 and half hours at the weekend when we were hungover.

But in the main we've kept it very low key and until the last couple of weeks we haven't had any telly tantrums.

We recently had some neighbours move out with their 15 and 17 year old kids and became the inheritors of the kids' videos. Then when our new next door neighbours arrived we inherited their 13 and 15 year olds' videos. Flicking through we actually got some crackers.

Anyway we started off with a revisitation of Jungle Book, which in my opinion is possibly the finest Disney movie ever made, it's definitely got the best score and Eben loved it, but last weekend we thought we'd take a look at Dumbo.

Neither of us had seen Dumbo as kids, so we were watching it for the first time ourselves. What a crock of disjointed crap. It's bloody awful. Both Nic and I hated it. Problem is Eben loves it and this morning I had a proper huff when I wouldn't let him watch it. Yes I would rather he was doing a jigsaw, but more selfishly, I didn't want to sit through the interminable mess of a movie.

Get well soon Hamster

Vanity has broken out all over the blogosphere

Iain Dale , Ros Taylor and Guido Fawkes have started fighting. I'm not sure I believe a lot of what the political commentators are writing at the moment. Dale is a big head of the smuggest kind, Taylor is a luddite and Guido's basically just a troll.

It's all so much vanity in one place. Lol, I know it's all vanity, but the worst thing that can happen to some bloggers is they start getting hits. Dale's become almost unbearable since his 'success' on the Prescott scandal.

This bloging lark's getting out of hand.

What is it about that pot?

I'm not a golfer. I have no intention of being a golfer (I'll be playing in 6 months you wait). I don't like watching golf. I find conversations about golf deadly dull.

But...

...I always watch the Ryder Cup, or at least the singles on the final day. There's something about the drama of the Ryder Cup that is utterly compelling. Bring it on.