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This month, Katie highlights the hypocrisy of the UK’s anti-American feeling

Here’s an entertaining social experiment for you: think back to the last time you saw a prime piece of American-bashing (comedy panel shows, dinner parties or newspaper columns are all ideal). Got it? Good – now replace ‘American’ with an oppressed racial group. There we go. Doesn’t it feel good to have a chuckle about our superiority to those lazy, ignorant, warmongerers who can’t even find Europe on a map of the world? Good harmless fun, eh?

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Katie considers whether youthful excess may lead to middle-aged boredom

Call me old-fashioned, but I’ve always had a soft spot for rock stars who have mastered the fine art of growing old disgracefully.

Take Keith Richards for instance. He hasn’t had a coherent thought since 1974, has a habit of falling out of trees and probably believes he really is a pirate – but that doesn’t stop young pretenders like Russell Brand channelling Richards’ trademark style.

“Russell Brand – successfully channelling Keith Richards’ trademark style”

Keef’s old mucker Marianne Faithful also has this ageing thing sussed. Through sheer chutzpah she’s strung out a career as a celebrity smackhead well into her dotage. Now she’s shacked up with a lover half her age,shrugged off hepatitis C and plans to spend her final years playing court to various bright young things begging to follow in her footsteps.

In the light of these shining examples it’s nothing short of tragic that the Britpop stars of yesteryear are having such difficulty adjusting to the ageing process. Just witness the ongoing deterioration of Alex James from Blur. Once the coolest man on God’s earth and a self-styled prince of Soho sneeze ‘n’ squeeze – these days he languishes as a celebrity cheese manufacturer with three kids called (God help them) Geronimo, Artemis and Galileo.

Maybe it’s just me (or latent lactose intolerance) but his obsession with dairy products is starting to become unnerving. You can’t open a magazine or switch on the TV without finding Alex twittering on about how cheese festivals are the new Glastonbury and rural living is the new rock ‘n’ roll.

It’s all deathly boring and slightly smug. However ironically he embraces the ‘big house in the country’ lifestyle that his band used to satirise there’s a growing feeling that he’s starting to royally lose the plot.

What’s really disconcerting is that whatever satanic pact he made during the Britpop days has now obviously been left to lapse. While Alex may describe himself as ‘the second drunkest member of Blur’ he was always by far the best looking. When Blur were young, Alex had cheekbones that could lacerate girls’ hearts at a hundred paces and a floppy fringe that always seemed to point invitingly towards his crotch.

What I’m beginning to suspect is that during Blur’s heyday there was a portrait of Alex hanging in the attic, à la Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, that soaked up all the hard living while his body remained youthful. Unfortunately thanks to middle age and excessive cheese munching it’s the increasingly haggard picture that now stalks the country roads shooting pheasants and milking cows while his gorgeous alter ego is caught in that lonely loft, dreaming of nights at the Groucho and the possibility of a snog off Justine from Elastica.

Still, perhaps Alex’s fate should be a lesson to us all. To paraphrase William Blake, if the road of excess leads to a life of middle-aged cheese farming rather than the palace of wisdom, I might just choose to swap my triple vodkas for mineral water from here on out.

Katie muses on the pros and cons of the art world’s notorious Turner Prize

There Will Be No Miracles Here (2006). Courtesy of the artist, doggerfisher and Haunch of Venison, London. © Nathan Coley. Photography: David Lambert and Rod Tidnam, Tate

A bear walks into a gallery. No, there isn’t a punch line, but there is £25,000 at stake. Is it a joke? Is it an artwork? Who can be sure? This is the Turner Prize.

The honey coloured bear, captured in two and a half hours of film as he prowls the rooms of the Berlin Art Gallery at night, is in fact artist Mark Wallinger. And this film - Sleeper – marks Wallinger’s entry into this year’s Turner Prize.

Sleeper – another name for a double agent – is intended to evoke the history of Germany and the Cold War.

dict, sent by the King of France to a village which had recently experienced a plethora of miraculous events, in which the king demands that no more take place there.

As a work of art, Coley’s piece could mean whatever you want it to, but one interesting explanation is that it is intendedto be taken as a confrontation to the expectations that people have of both modern art and – more specifically – The Turner Prize itself.

Coley tells us, mockingly, that we expect too much of art. And perhaps he is right.

Sleeper (2004-5), Mark Wallinger © Mark Wallinger

Because despite perceptions of the Turner Prize that range from stupid to outrageous, pointless to sublime, perhaps the most significant thing is that we should look to it to be any of these things at all.

Is Wallinger’s Bear art? I’m not convinced that even Wallinger could answer that question, but what is important is that he provoked me into asking it at all.

The Turner Prize 2007 Exhibition is open now and runs until 13 January 2008.

Katie’s ‘dry spell’ reveals rather more about British booze culture than she’d imagined

This week I have not been drinking – booze that is. It’s been six days, four hours and 20 minutes since I last consumed alcohol – but hey, who’s counting?

Actually, jokes aside, I have surprised myself with how much of a nonissue my non-drinking has been. Contrary to my suspicions that I was turning into an alcoholic, this week has assured me I can get on just fine without a glass in my hand. Much to my relief I’ve discovered that I’m equally as inclined to sing at inappropriate times, giggle to myself, shed my clothes on the dance floor and fall into bed with the nearest blonde teenager whether I’m drinking or not.

But in the same week that I confirmed I wasn’t an alcoholic, I unintentionally discovered something else - everyone else is. Because while I’ve been clubbing, bed hopping and binge shopping with all my usual zeal, the one thing that has consistently threatened to flatten my bubbly free week is the constant chorus I’ve heard wherever I’ve gone: ‘why aren’t you drinking?’

‘Why aren’t you drinking’ has droned through my week like a bad smell. And it’s not going away. Some say it with shock, others with awe. Some people have whispered it (as if the answer will reveal a guilty secret), while others have snarled it, forcing a glass of unwanted wine on me. But everyone, EVERYONE, has said it.

“The first rule of ‘Grown-up Drinking Club’ is you MUST keep drinking”

My not drinking, it seems, is more of a problem for everyone else than it is for me. Because over six days of non-drinking I have fielded close to 40 enquiries as to the reason why. ‘When did we turn into an alcohol obsessed culture?’ I found myself wondering (very Carrie Bradshaw) as I brushed off the umpteenth barman with another excuse.

Ironically it was never like this when I was a teenager. Back then it was easy – you were either draining a bottle of White Lightning at the top of the skateboard ramps, or you were sitting home with your parents. There was ‘not drinking’ and there was ‘getting wasted off your face’. But apparently, from your 20s onwards, everything changes. Binge drinking becomes casual drinking. Going out becomes a quiet night in. And three bottles of Babycham becomes a pint
after work.

It’s a grown-up world of moderated drinking where one will never be enough and four will always be too many. And it’s a world to which I never knew the rules, until I realised I’d broken them. Because the first rule of ‘Grown-up Drinking Club’ is that you MUST keep drinking.

grown-up drinking clubs no one likes a non-drinker because if you are not drinking you are drawing attention to the fact that everyone else feels the need to. The teetotaler is a show-off, parading their selfconfidence and ability to relax naturally in the face of everybody else.

People hear “I’m just not drinking” as an insult, a direct snub to their inability to say no. The only viable reasons for being teetotal, in the adult world of the moderate drinker, are to be a recovering alcoholic or a first pregnancy, because then at least you’re not doing it out of choice. Nope. If I learnt one thing this week it’s that no one likes a non-drinker. So, as the week comes to a close and I’m about to jump off the wagon, frankly, it comes as something of a relief. I’m not looking forward to my first G’n’T half as much as I’m looking forward to not having to discuss my drinking with anyone else.

But if my dry patch has taught me anything, it’s that giving up booze isn’t just a matter of kicking the bottle. The hardest part of all is convincing anyone around you to accept it.