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Dani embraces the outside world, panics about planes, and tries to make peace with a certain 8-year-old

Driving along the south coast I can’t help but wonder why anyone would
ever want to go anywhere else? Look to your left beautiful views, and to your right much the same. Before my breakdown I had always presumed that I would travel the world at some point. In no particular order, nowhere necessarily pulls me towards it but I just thought that I would like to say I had. But now the idea of getting on a plane is quite disturbing to me.

“Every time I go to do something that really qualifies me as a regular person this imaginary child kicks me in the shins“

Considering that I still can’t get onto a bus, travelling on one that floats in the air is even less appealing. But I’m not feeling all that worried. If I was to travel anywhere I would like to drive it.

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Andrew Kay gets spiritual at L’Eglise in Hove

Back in the seventies I was lucky enough to be at the Sex Pistols’ first gig, see the Carpenters live, have lunch with David Hockney and Elizabeth Frink and for a short time study in Paris. In those days I was totally green in the culinary sense, I liked my food but I was very soon out of my depth. It was there in Paris that I had my first artichoke, fish soup and rouille and steak tartare. Of course I took to it comme un poisson à l’eau. If only I had bothered to learn to speak yer actual French eh.

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Katie finds herself actually listening to a celebrity who has something worth saying

It’s Budget day so everyone at the paper is really, really busy – except me.

Across the newsroom serious looking middle-aged men in suits are flapping about, screaming about inflation, taxation, Brown and budget countdowns. They have never looked so excited.

In my corner it’s rather less busy. I did all my work last night – I asked Annie Lennox what she made of Britney Spears?

“It’s just so awful to watch“, she says, in the corridor of the Brian Adams exhibition at the National Gallery, “To have that attention day in, day out, constantly.

“It’s changed since I was young – It was never like it is now – the paparazzi culture. They just get plastered all over the press and they don’t choose what they are – how they are shown.

“The number of people Al-Qaeda have killed is less than the number who have died of MRSA in filthy hospitals”

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Once the awkward poster-boy for avant-pop, with android complexion and a shock of white hair, 80s electro maverick Gary Numan has, in recent years, resembled more of a middle-aged goth. Recreating seminal album Replicas in its entirety (even outtakes ‘We Have A Technical’ and ‘The Crazies’), fans old and new couldn’t ask for more.

A stunning blend of the original songs filtered through Numan’s modern-day industrial rock persona; live, guitars replace electronic thrums and a crashing drum kit replaces cold machine rhythm with brutal bombast. The high points are inevitably the moody, paranoid, nevermore - theatrical ‘Down In The Park’ and crowd-pleaser ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’, but also, surprisingly, the relatively low-key ‘We Are So Fragile’ and ‘You Are In My Vision’ are given new life through their metal makeover. Unfortunately the record’s occasional weaker tracks slow tonight’s momentum, though with a sold-out Dome thoroughly seduced (particularly when non-Replicas track ‘Cars’ is thrown in), no one cares.

Brighton Dome, 12 March 2008
Nick Aldwinckle