But it has to be done. And in many ways I welcome it, for many reasons. For one I haven't shaved in ages and it's starting to irritate me. It's starting to feel like I have a wadge  of velcro wrapped round my face. In fact I'm so rough looking that if you saw me on the street you would either give me a wide berth or throw loose change at me - it all depends whether you are a liberal weenie or a right wing nasty. Another reason I'll sort of be skipping back to work is because I need to sleep. My sleep has been whacked all out of line since I got home from New York, it's all I can do to stay awake during afternoon soap operas but yet when I go to bed I toss and turn, and not in a good way, to five in the morning. My brain is frazzled. If I'm not far in the land of nod by 3 tonight I'm gonna make a Scottish cocktail of cough mixture and supermarket whiskey, that'll do it. Well it'll do something. But I'm hoping the routine of work will knock me back into a regular snooze pattern.

New York was, as I've already said, amazing. I must have spent the first 24 hours grinning like a wanking man such was my delight to be there. It came on me from the moment we touched down at JFK. America! Whoop whoop! I just couldn't believe it, I, Manuel T Waiter, was in America. America - home of Coca Cola and burgers and Larry David and Californians and Converse shoes and Levi Jeans and where some wonderful person thought up the iPod and well all that stuff. And I was there too. Fucking aces!

Little Miss Manuel didn't join me in the inane grinning and in fact spent an age pretending not to know me after her attempts to persuade me to stop Whoop Whooping out loud had failed. The Little Miss is a much more seasoned and experienced traveller than I having lived and studied in both the US and Spain. But then again I am also convinced that younger people just don't get excited about stuff and things anymore. Sure they get all melodramatic about this and that and TopShop but not when it comes to things like going to America. Mainly because it's easier to get there now than it was when I was a lad. Not that it was that difficult even then but you get the point.But then again I am a very excitable person.

Take last weekend for example. I had been out and about and had happened to run into an old chum. He's a decent chap and when his bike got stolen last year I happily lent him mine until he got himself sorted with a new one. Now, he's a musician so obviously he's skint. After a week or two I began to realise that it might take a bit longer to get my bike back than I had initially thought. Days turned into weeks and weeks into months and months in to half a year. I'm never getting that bike back unless the good people at Sony music decide they need a grumpy whiskey fuelled guitar player on their roster. Goodbye sweet Kona, goodbye.

Anyhoo, like I say I happened to run into him, and the bike, the other day. It was like meeting an old lover with her new beau. She looked different, her handlebars had been changed, but still looked good. I wanted to touch her, to squeeze her brake grips but as the ex-lover I don't have that right anymore despite it technically still being my bike. And that's when I thought, fuck it, I'm getting a new bike. So I did. And it arrives tomorrow. Whoop fucking whoop. I am as excited as if I had just arrived in America with a wallet full of cash and dreamy dreams swirling around my head. Now tell me, what kid gets excited about getting a new bike?

I'm not gonna sleep tonight either am I? I'm going to dream of having hair and having that hair waft behind me as I cycle carefree down long tree lined streets. Wonderful...

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