Well, it’s that time of year where my weekends welcome the return of the football season and at noon on Sunday, I was back at Seat 1010, Row 16, Block 32 of the Lower Tier of the Emirates Stadium as Arsenal welcomed Fulham. And bloody great it was too, though 2-1 doesn’t quite illustrate how we snatched victory from the jaws of terrible first-day of the season defeat. As one of my pals said, it was the perfect game for him - 80 minutes of bitter complaining and then 10 minutes of rabid excitement. Though it was 15 minutes after Fulham’s appalling time wasting. Terrible business.

I don’t often feel at my best at 12pm on a Sunday - the kick-off was a consequence of the new Setanta deal with the Premiership - but felt distinctly lively when the time came for a post-match libation. That said, Islington being Islington, the conversation soon turned to the cultural runnings area - at least once we’d fully covered the smoking ban. My friend has given up, he explained - being 41, he worked out that stopping smoking could make the difference between him being half-way through his life and being two-thirds of the way through. Anyway, we talked about Don DeLillo’s ‘Underworld‘ which he is definitely half-way through. I like DeLillo’s early books more than some of the later novels, but ‘Underworld’ certainly aims for ‘classic’ status pretty successfully in my view.

I’m always up for a discussion about the Great American Novel, aren’t you? The purist will go for ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’. The attention-seeker, ‘Lolita’. I’ve heard Norman Mailer’s ‘The Naked and the Dead’ get some votes. Saul Bellow’s somewhat provocatively named ‘The Adventures of Augie March’ would be my sleeper choice, but Bellow was of course Canadian. But nah, it’s ‘the Great Gatsby’.

Talking of the American novel, I’ve been casually reading Henry James’ ‘What Maisie Knew’. I’m never really sure about Henry James - I can’t quite work out why I don’t find his work as satisfying as one is supposed to. That said, I really like ‘the Aspen Papers’ and scary ‘the Turn of the Screw’, novellas both. Oh, and my kind co-worker Jamie White has lent me a copy of a book called ‘A Perfect Mess - the hidden benefits of disorder’. I’ve long maintained that while my desk may look somewhat erm… dishevelled, I know where everything is. This book, I’m convinced, will prove this. Once I find it of course, it’s somewhere around here…

If you work in a creative industry for any length of time, sooner or later you have to make a big decision. It’s not about artistic license versus license-to-print money. It’s not about creative freedom versus commercial reality. It’s about something simpler than that - suit or slob.

Every agency in the world used to delineate its crop of talent with these two points of reference. At one end of the office, a thrusting executive clad in the softest mohair, distinctive Parisian silks and the crispest Italian cottons, tapped a John Lobb heel whilst waiting for his counterpart to provide the latest crop of ideas. At the other end, a generation Y manchild, replete in rare Japanese dunks, loose selvage denim and an ‘ironic’ hoody shook his head. And sulked. In medieval times, rival liveries depicting vibrant beasts and singularly terrifying weaponry would have sufficed. Now, the communications agency typifies its rival factions of creative and commercial by a simpler means - threads.

Or is it? Nowadays, you’re just as likely to meet a creative flouncing around in Savile Row finery (Evisu-tailored, of course) as you are a new business manager wearing a pair of pink flip flops. Dress down Fridays and relaxed organisational policies on business attire at places like Orange, Virgin and even Morgan Stanley have had a long term effect on us all. It’s a confusing world (nay wardrobe) we face nowadays. The point is, clothes do not maketh the man. But they did at least let you know which department he worked in.

Facebook. On the one hand, it’s an innovative and immersive communcation tool that hands the powers of global discourse to the masses. On the other, it’s a gallery of shameful and often drunken moments captured on celluloid interlaced with largely pointless groups of lonesome fools discussing issues as banal as the relative dietary merits of Findus Crispy Pancakes. The world of work beware - hordes of loyal followers now spend their days updating their profile (Jamie is…at work), downloading the Zombie Application (Jamie is…Infected!) or uploading pictures of their pet fish (Jamie is…aquatic) rather than tackling their workload. A leading law firm recently banned it altogether from the workplace, only to retract the decision after mass hysteria and, i’d venture, a few precursive chats about ‘rights’. One of our competitors (Jamie is…discreet) recently built their own group, only to fall foul of the fact that, if one member joins another (in this case, wholly innappropriate) group, it appears on your home page. However potentially damaging or ultimately enriching Facebook happens to be in the context of employment, I’ll say one thing for it. Frints. It’s a group of Facebook with a growing following of laconic wordsmiths and it might just be the funniest thing you read this year. (Jamie is…off now).

This weekend I joined 100,000 music lovers (mainly fellow northerners) at Lancashire Cricket Ground, with the very rare pleasure of ‘freak’ Manchester summer weather – yes, dry and sunny.

The gig provided a full 8 hour set of seamless music entertainment. Headlining were the talented Sheffield fourseome, The Arctic Monkeys. Known for their energetic indie-rock/post punk music with flavoursome lyrics, they played a jaw dropping, uninterrupted 90 minutes from their early album ‘whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not” (fastest-selling debut album in UK chart history) and more recently ‘favourite worst nightmare’. The best track by far on the day was ‘i bet you look good on the dancefloor’. See ‘Videos’ on their site.

Equally as enjoyable were supporting acts Amy Winehouse (amazing Rehab and Back to Black), The Coral (Dreaming of you and In the Morning), plus new material from SuperGrass (Pumping on your stereo).

Well done boys, a great set. Enjoy the dates in Australia.

Equally as impressive is the story of the Monkeys rise to success on the web. Not down to a shrewd marketing campaign by a record company. Legend says it was thanks to the power of the internet that an army of fans latched onto free downloads of demo recordings on the web. The Monkeys are quick to point out that they did not put the songs online themselves. They started gigging at small venues in 2003 and handed out demo CDs to the crowd, who in turn put them on the internet for others to hear.

For those intrigued by the album title ‘whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not’, read this for true Northern grit:

‘Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not’ is a line from the book (by Alan Sillitoe) and later film (by Karel Reisz and starring Albert Finney) Saturday Night And Sunday Morning. One of the key texts in the British ‘angry young man’ tradition, it tells the story of the charismatic but amoral Arthur Seaton, who works in a factory by day and wreaks havoc shagging his colleague’s wife by night. After being busted and beaten to near-death by squaddies, he delivers a bitter soliloquy: “If any knowing bastard says that’s me I’ll tell them I’m a dynamite dealer waiting to blow the factory to kingdom come. I’m me and nobody else. Whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not. They don’t know a bloody thing about me.”

Alex (bassist) saw the movie: “I thought to myself, ‘That’s a right line, I’m gonna put that in summat.’

For those interested (or confused :-)) by any Sheffield dialect and slang, there’s even a book available Amazon: Sheffieldish (A beginners phrase book).