This evening, I realised the difference between a middle-class culture vulture and a pseud.

The former goes to random cultural events because they feel they ought to, while the latter talks endlessly about going to specific cultural events, but never actually goes, or if they go, they spend the entire time moaning about it. However, despite this, they remain under the impression that they are not only better informed about the event, but they also somehow have ownership of it too - which means that no-one else is really allowed to have an opinion.

Why do such pseuds moan so much about the very things they go out of their way to experience? There seems to me to be an obvious solution to this…don’t go! Mind you, they generally don’t. It’s far easier to sit at home, see, and be informed about these obscure things, without going to the effort of actually doing them.

There were many of both types (but mostly the former) at tonight’s Daksha Sheth dance company performance on the South Bank (part of the National Theatre’s Watch This Space programme of free events throughout the summer).

It was pleasant to walk along the South Bank in the cooling of the evening, after such a hot, long day - a day which also included a lengthy trip down to Denmark Street to pick out a new bass for P (he will be able to tell you muso-type details if you’re interested; I can’t. My knowledge of bass guitars runs out just after “they have four strings” and before anything very revealing or interesting - but I can confirm that today’s acquired instrument is indeed a thing of tremendous beauty - and noise) and a new 60GB hard drive for me on TCR, all of which entailed much sticky walking in the sweaty city, and a few too many shops without air conditioning. Mind you, at least that meant we were happy to escape out into the couple-of-degrees-cooler St Martin’s Lane - and it’s not often you’ll hear someone say that.

Summer in the city. An acquired, sticky sort of taste. At least my windows open this year - last year, as you may remember, the landlord had helpfully painted them shut, so we sweltered in stuffy rooms throughout the heatwave, relying on one rather tired fan to circulate the warm air back around the room. Not very conducive to sleep at all.

In contrast, this year, with windows wide open, we get the full benefit of not just living on a relatively quiet street (to be fair, last year, even if we had been able to open the windows, we’d only have ended up shutting them at night because we lived on the busiest road in the north of the city, pretty much) but also listening in on all the neighbourly ambient noises from the houses which back on to ours, and those adjacent.

Modems dialling up, fridges buzzing, arguments, barbeques, parties, people making love (the girl downstairs is a real screamer) and the mad old bat who lives in what must be an institution of some kind, in the basement of the house that backs onto ours, who spends many long hours over lunchtimes sitting in the back garden with a cup of tea, having incredibly loud shouted conversations with some unseen person indoors. We can peer down through the leaves, three storeys below, and see the top of her head, but are unable, alas, to aim projectiles into her tea (perhaps a biscuit with the word “shush!” written on it in permanent marker?), because of the bush in the way. Ah well. Perhaps when winter comes?

All sounds very cosmopolitan, doesn’t it? Very New-York-hot-in-the-city slowly-turning-fans people-dripping-with-sweat framed-in-dark-windows and lone-saxophonist-on-the-rooftop, eh? (Actually, on reflection, that sounds more like a lemonade commercial or the start of a bad eighties porn flick. Sorry)

The truth is that as I type some twat is letting off fireworks in the very narrow space between the back of the terrace on our street, and the one behind, and I’m so paranoid that one’s going to come in through the window (not by accident; on purpose. Teenagers around here would do that kind of thing, just like the teenagers in Liverpool who once through a mountain of snowballs through a window I’d left open when I went to a lecture. I came back two hours later to find my bed covered in melting slush. My bedroom, let the record show, was on the fourth floor, and the window was open six inches. Those kids could go far in cricket, I tell you….) that I’m going to have to go and shut all the windows at the back of the house.

We’ll swelter in a stuffy room tonight - it’ll be just like old times…