As he drew level with me, we stared at each other for a second. It was "Dave", the new saviour of the Conservatives, the man who is going to persuade 21st-century Britain that his party is not stuck in the late 19th. I had no idea that "Dave" was my neighbour. Virginia, on the other hand, executes people with a gusto exceeded only by Texas. He was getting on a bike in the midst of a camera flash firestorm.
Not many of them though, because I suddenly realised that I was not the object of their attention. Coming out of a house a couple of doors down from me, was a thick-haired Sloane who looked a little like Peter Mandelson with the quiff reversed. So what though; I've never preached abstinence, I'm not some role model, so why should I be intimidated by this low-life rat pack? I hit back: "Yes, I take cocaine, lots of it, in big Scarface piles off naked women with loads of other celebrities We're all at it - and proud of it. They call me the Dyson..." I was shouting in the middle of the street now and a couple of the snappers looked at me in some surprise. How did they know? Maybe Kate Moss had broken down in rehab and confessed all about our snowblind nights. I picked up my junk mail, staggered out of my London front door, heading for the nearest Starbucks, when I heard the voices screaming questions at me: "Have you been taking cocaine in there?" "Have you ever been to Medellin?" I looked up to see a swarm of paparazzi, cameras flashing, evil eyes honing in on another kill. I was really hungover, so I didn't really notice what was going on at first.
The same was true of "A Coral Room", with its tenderness and yearning for Bush's dead mother and the capturing of some sub-aquatic quality of fading memory. And the heavy-kohl brigade will be suitably spine-tingled by, "How to be Invisible". As for the second CD, inspired and interspersed by birdsong, tracking the changing light and weather of a single day, following a painter's eye, taking you from dawn to dusk, to the sea's shore and beneath the stars, it answered my feverish heart's prayer.All we ask of Kate Bush, in the words of Duckie (Kate Bush fan club and "South London's premiere post-gay pop & performance kinst-disco"), is that she's "eccentric, elusive and very English" The qualities are all mercifully here in Aerial All together now: Lovely, lovely, lovely Kate Lovely, lovely, lovely Kate.. "Lovely, lovely, lovely Bertie", she trills over and over, before going on, "Here comes the sunshine/Here comes that son of mine" Frankly, I thought my heart might not take the strain.