The New Age

The Brentwood OC (Osteopathic Centre) just across from me, is no more! The other day I saw a woman scraping letters off the window. Where the sign used to stand outside, there now remains only the three blue poles that formerly supported it. The building has suddenly become an enigma, like a Rachel Whiteread artwork, presiding over the mysterious migrations of red recycling boxes.

Appropriately enough a shop has opened just below and to the right of me, called The Five Elements. Letters in the window advertise 'buddhas' and 'angels'. Are they selling these, or are they perhaps the staff? I wouldn't know, since I haven't been in, and neither – from what I can tell from the odd casual glance – has anyone else. I'm sure that the owners will take this philosophically. They need only await the bursting of the TOWIE bubble, when everyone will be looking for Answers.

In fact, on the programme the other week, Gemma was trying to 'find herself'. This didn't take long; she isn't hard to find. I almost bumped into her myself the other day, rounding a corner in Roper's Yard. She was standing about with a film crew, outside a shop ('Sui Generis') that was being made over, Brentwood being little more than a set nowadays. Moving on, I encountered a teenage girl who also looked familiar. What docu-soap was she from? Ah yes, the ongoing one that is my life. It was my step-niece, Saskia. She'd just got her first tattoo, from that place near the curry house. She moved on, with her friend Laura, quite possibly to become embroiled in the world of TOWIE herself, leaving me to contemplate the increasingly fragile border between reality and 'reality'.

Once upon a time you had to do something in order to become a celebrity. Now celebrity is more like a waking dream. But isn't that its ultimate tendency? Sure, Liberace could play the piano, but it's all the glitter that you remember. Yes I've seen Steven Soderbergh's Behind The Candelabra. It's witty and well-acted, but a bit like a superior TV biopic – which, since it was made by HBO, I suppose it is. We see some brief bits of grisly plastic surgery and we get Matt Damon (playing Liberace's lover Scott) throwing up in the backroom of a sex shop, but overall I felt that it was all a bit too toned-down and tasteful. Which is hardly appropriate to the subject.

At the end, Scott re-imagines Liberace's funeral as a show, complete with diamond-encrusted hearse and dancing girls, with the resurrected Liberace flying up to rejoin his piano on an upper level of the stage. Meanwhile I was busy re-imagining the whole film along those lines: a kind of Gothic fantasia, with Liberace (Michael Douglas) flying around his mansion like a big sparkling bat. If there's one film that Ken Russell should have risen from the dead to direct, it's this. But I suppose it's all a matter of taste. Here in Brentwood, Liberace would probably seem quite restrained.

a sequel

So another Sadler has been born into the world. I have had Mat's story of the birth trauma. How he had to try and sleep on pushed-together chairs of uneven height in the waiting room. And don't even get him started on the coffee! Amanda was fine I think. A couple of weeks early but just as well as she could hardly have got any more pregnant.

The result was, not unexpectedly, a baby. I saw it. It is a her. Mat's anxious mind has already flitted forward to the terrifying prospect of the Father-Of-The-Bride speech. He needn't worry – he's creative. Even if Emilia Sunshine Sadler is one of the few recent projects of his that have come to fruition (and that, even if he's reluctant to admit it, was a collaboration). He had announced his intention of filming the birth - more than that, it would have been a live concert, with Mat occasionally taking a break from supervising the special effects (to make it look more realistic) to bash out a plangent chord or two on his synthesizer. The doctors would have had to work round him. However, this potential YouTube hit sadly seems to have gone the way of Mat's 19-hour version of Dracula.

Not that any of my creative efforts have really borne fruit either, and I don't even have children to justify my sorry existence. Thank God. I can't even cope with other people's children, let alone my own. Taking my niece Heidi down the road to a Sadler barbecue was a stretch, but, as I joked – I think it was a joke anyway – she got me there. And once that had been achieved, it turned out that she had her own friends. Phew.

the old man and the charts

It is quite a long time since I have known what's number one, but Daft Punk's single Get Lucky seems to have changed all that. I have never particularly liked Daft Punk, but the first time I heard this single it struck me immediately not only that I liked it but that I could hardly imagine anybody anywhere not liking it. This was before I learned that out of the three people in my office two of them found it irritating. They unaccountably like that horrible Caro Emerald song Liquid Lunch, which really does seem to be about the perils of drinking at lunchtime (in spite of the oddly suggestive line 'The girls got going and we had a munch') and which makes me feel slightly nauseous. Although I have to admit that this is thematically appropriate.

As for Daft Punk, their song speaks to me in spite of its theme. It's a long time since I've been 'up all night to get lucky' (or for any other reason). I'm up at night quite a lot, but that isn't 'for good fun'. It's for a piss.

Nevertheless my interest in this song has not only been considerable enough to make me buy the album, but has also drawn me into watching The Official Chart Countdown on Viva. Well, some of it. The first thing to appear is a woman called Demi Lovato singing about how she fears that she may at some point in time and under certain conditions, have a heart attack. This is a metaphorical heart attack, I understand, but still, should her career continue to thrive I can't see her singing this in her sixties – bit too close to the bone.

She probably needn't worry – I'm sure it won't come to that.

Demi is in the minority in the charts at the moment (and by 'at the moment' I mean two weeks ago) by virtue of being a woman and, moreover, only one woman. Most of the acts seem to consist of people 'with' or 'featuring' other people. Can nobody take responsibility for anything anymore? As for women, there's not much change there: their fate in the world of pop video is mostly still to be part of the decor. One woman is praised for her ability to 'Walk Like Rihanna', while being in all other respects incompetent. A decidely backhanded compliment - I mean, how difficult can it be, walking like Rihanna? Surely even I could do it with the proper training. Then they could write a crap song about me.

Oh, here comes a 'rap anthem' (what next, a rap hymn?) by three people. It isn't at all clear how the workload is distributed, but subsequently I have discovered that the (white) rapper is called Macklemore. According to the critic in the Mail On Sunday, he is very good, but this first experience only brings to mind the dread words 'Vanilla Ice', though Macklemore is possibly more intelligent: for example, he can spell the word 'independent', and proceeds to do so. Someone called 'Ray Dalton' is also involved, but I don't know what he does. He sounds like a plumber, and perhaps he is – it's always useful to have something to fall back on, if it doesn't work out.

The thrust of their 'anthem' naturally lies in the chorus, which encourages a notional roomful of people to 'put our hands up like the ceiling can't hold us.' I'm struggling to visualise this, to be honest. Is this an especially low-ceilinged room? You wouldn't expect your hands to be intercepted by the ceiling in your average nightclub, surely. The video, which features a camel, is no help with this at all. Perhaps the fans of Macklemore are especially tall, or long-armed. More likely, they are jumping into the air – but then they should really be worrying about whether the floor, not the ceiling, can hold them. But such ignorance of health and safety issues is typical of the young people, I find.

Finally, I reached the top of the chart to discover that Daft Punk are there no longer. They have been replaced by a song about putting your fingers in your ears and going la la la, 'like a child'. Good advice, when this particular song is playing.