The Thoughts of Captain Autumn

"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.