The Thoughts of Captain Autumn

It's that highlight of the cultural calendar - yes, FHM's 100 Sexiest Women list has been announced. Putting aside the complex psychological issues involved in even contemplating such a subject (into which I have previously attempted to delve here), I am going to run down the Top 10 and see whether the readers of FHM have a clue what they're talking about.

10. Keira Knightley
Now, Keira is a lovely looking girl. Very pretty. But sexy? If I want the sort of sexiness Keira Knightley can supply I'll dress an ironing board in lingerie.

9. Angelina Jolie
Hard to argue with this one. Although she has a strange habit of fluctuating between drop-dead sexy and just funny looking. She is the FHM equivalent of Middlesbrough FC - you never know what to expect.

8. Hilary Duff
I am 40 years old and as such I don't know who Hilary Duff is. She was in something called Lizzie McGuire apparently. She's half my age and looks like just another of the vast American phalanx of homogeneous post-teen babes.

7. Cheryl Cole
Well, yes. Only number 7? Perhaps that's down to her impenetrably broad Geordie accent, which sounds like she must be exaggerating it for a laugh.

6. Scarlett Johansson
Hmm. See Angelina Jolie above. Jury definitely out.

5. Hayden Panettiere
Even though I am 40 years old I actually know who this is. Save the cheerleader, save the world. She's probably very nice looking but she's barely more than a schoolgirl so if it's all the same I'll just look away.

4. Elisha Cuthbert
Her fan club most have mobilised to get her in at number 4, given that she's hardly the biggest star in the world. And anyway, nobody can be truly sexy with the name Cuthbert.

3. Keeley Hazell
I gather this girl appears in FHM simply as someone to look at, rather than as a result of actually doing anything more worthwhile elsewhere. This is probably just an idiosyncracy of mine, but I find it hard to find sexy a woman who exists in the public consciousness for that reason alone. It seems to bring the vacuousness of gawping at pictures of women into sharp refrain. Next, quick, before I poke myself in the eye with a stick.

2. Jessica Alba
I don't really get the whole Jessica Alba thing. Too bland, too vacant. If she were permanently in Sin City mode, maybe.

1. Megan Fox
I haven't seen Transformers, but if there's a better reason to watch a film than this

then I haven't seen it. Readers of FHM, for once, you did right.

Of course the big news on the FHM list is that Kirstie Allsopp - presenter of one of the 19,000 property based programmes on television - has been voted higher than Kate Moss. Quite why anyone is shocked that a proper, real woman with proper, real curves is deemed sexier than a drug-addled, nicotine-stinking scrawny old bag of bones I don't know, but it's certainly a step in the right direction.

Flicking around the proverbial '30 channels and nothing on' late the other night, I stumbled across the last few minutes of Richard Curtis's wretched 'Love Actually'. I first saw it a few years ago. I've seen plenty of films in my time which did little for me, but 'Love Actually' is one of very few to make me so angry I wanted to kick the television in. I really, really loathed 'Love Actually', to the extent that even now when I see it in a listings magazine I feel like getting a biro and scribbling over it until the paper gets all mangled and torn. It wasn't just that it was trite, facile, witless, sentimental pap; it was that it was insulting to the viewer to suggest that they were so shallow that they could be emotionally manipulated by stories that were so vacuous and devoid of heart. Seemingly dozens of characters, not one of them fleshed out to the extent that you might genuinely care about them, trotting through a succession of paper-thin romantic plotlines designed to tug at the heartstrings in a manner which even the most compliant Mills and Boon reader would find mechanical.

Having now seen the end of the film again, I have discovered it is possible to hate 'Love Actually' even more than I thought I did.

Goodness knows how I missed it last time - I can only presume that I was by this stage so thoroughly nauseated by the dialogue that my nervous system had opted for temporary deafness - but over the closing montage of all of his characters getting together one final time Curtis chose to play The Beach Boys' 'God Only Knows'. 'God Only Knows' is one of my favourite songs, albeit one to which I listen very rarely because it always - and I mean always - makes me cry. I have no idea why, because it has no specific emotional attachment for me. I think it is simply that it is a song so beautiful in every way that I go through a small breakdown whenever I hear it. And here it was, shamelessly grafted onto the end of one of the most shallow, meaningless excuses for a film ever perpetrated in the name of entertainment. And yes, it did make me cry, and I thanked the stars that nobody was there to wander in and misapprehend the situation by inferring that it was Curtis's abomination that brought me to that state.

I am not a homophobe. Which has nothing whatsoever to do with my feelings towards homosexuals. Let me explain.

Classics scholars (of which I am not one) will be aware that the word homophobe has its origin in two Greek words, homos meaning 'one and the same' and phobos meaning 'fear'. As a word, homophobe appears to be a lazy 1970s offshoot from homosexual, some etymological anarchist simply adding the phobia suffix without bothering to think about the derivation of the original word. As such he or she created a word which means not fear of homosexuals, but fear of things which are the same.

This is where I come in. I have a great deal of time for things which are the same. I am a big fan of symmetry. It borders on obsession. The lengths of shoelaces, that sort of thing. You know, when you're tying your shoelaces and the amount you have in one hand differs from that in the other? That's intolerable, is it not? There are other, myriad examples I could present. Most of them are extremely trivial, although there's a part of me that thinks it is not coincidence that I have an even number of children. Anyway, my point is that anomalies are anathema to me, which by my understanding makes me about as far from a homophobe as it is possible to be. In fact I'd go so far as to say that I am a homophile, and am toying with describing myself as such in the future. I'm tired of getting nonplussed looks from people who are not sure how to react when I tell them that I am mainly interested in the apparently incomprehensible combination of jazz and football, so from now on I think I will declare myself openly as a keen homophile and see how far that gets me.

"PIMP MY PROFILE" screams a banner across the top of my weblog, inviting me to visit a website called webfetti which has facilities to enhance my site with generators (whatever they are), 3D graphics (a neat trick on a flat screen) and "bling".

I suppose I'm getting old, and I suppose the last dregs of liberalism have yet to be crushed by this country's seemingly endless lurch to the right, and I suppose I think about words too much... but am I alone in being uncomfortable with the appropriation of the word "pimp" into widespread use? Pimps are not people to be admired, even in a postmodern, ironic sense. Pimps trade on the fears and desperation of vulnerable women for their own gain. They are not, as seems to be the notion in much popular culture, simply kitsch, Huggy Bear types with a flamboyant dress sense and gaudy jewellery.

It's the thin end of a wedge which has also seen "bitches" come perilously close to being accepted as a synonym for "women", a truly deleterious state of affairs to my ears. Although these linguistic trends have come about as the result of British kids being in awe of the culture and street slang of the American gangsta rap movement, their affectations are not enough on their own to have created this shift towards the mainstream. For that it has also needed a complicity by the record labels, TV channels, magazines and websites which allow such repugnant terms to be used out of context and thereby broaden their original meaning. Who knows what is behind such an idle abrogation of responsibility, but I wouldn't bet against a pusillanimous unwillingness by white middle class executives to take a stand against the spreading influence of an artform which has its origins amongst the oppressed black.

I seem to have travelled in one paragraph from feminist to Daily Mail reader. What is happening to me?

I was bemused to receive an e-mail notification that a comment had been added to one of my weblog entries, bearing in mind that I haven't posted anything on my weblog for about six weeks. Stranger still it turned out to be in response to an entry from February 2006, in which I lambasted the Coca Cola company for refusing to accept that there can be such a person in the world as a grown man who does not own a mobile phone.

It turned out that the 'comment' was actually just a spam link to a mobile phone selling website. Slightly ironic that such a link was put at the end of an entry which expressed my loathing for mobile phones, but then I suppose the automated systems set up to inflict this blight upon us haven't yet developed the sophistication to work out whether the targets of their invasiveness are sympathetic. Not unlike mobile phone users themselves, in fact.

The sales manager of the mobile phone website in question, needless to say, denies all knowledge. So I can only conclude that it must have been one of those people who go around visiting weblogs and placing links to arbitrary websites just for the hell of it. Come on, which of us can't say they've done it? It's the only rational explanation.

The irony of all this is that it's come merely days after I have been obliged, as part of my work, to take delivery of my first mobile phone. No matter that the phone will be switched on only one week in four, and even then only in order that I can be contacted in an emergency - it was still a moment of profound disappointment and disillusionment to me. This may seem an extreme reaction to a minor event, but it comes hot on the heels of me acquiring a passport and flying off to meetings in Germany and France, in relation to new aspects of my work which also seem (no pun intended) foreign to me. Pure financial necessity has obliged me to be pushed out of my comfort zone (no bad thing in itself) into areas which feel strange and discomfiting to me (a bad thing in itself). It's one of the reasons I have posted so little here lately - the fabric of my working life has altered so much that I find myself almost devoid of moments of respite in which to be bemused or artificially incensed by some aspect of modern life. I'm spending most of my time just trying to remember who I am.