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Dreamt that I was going on a train journey with Tony and Cherie Blair. We were all packed into an old-fashioned carriage, budged up onto bench seats. I sat next to Cherie and couldn't think of anything to say. Then we got off and I found myself alone on the platform with her. We were waiting for Tony. Then he turned up and recognised me. "Hello, Andrew," he said casually and went to shake my hand. We had one of those embarrassing moments where our hands didn't quite meet properly and we shoot with our thumbs hooked together. His handshake was solid and his hand was noticeably dry. (I have shaken Tony Blair's hand in real life, at the Q Awards in 1995 when he was leader of the opposition.) In the dream, I said to him, "It's been quite a few Q Awards since we last met." So you see, sometimes reality does intrude on crazy dreams.

I awoke, of course, in my brother's old bed in his old bedroom at my parents' house, for the second morning in a row. I had a hearty breakfast of egg on toast (Mum had kindly bought in some rye bread) and they dropped me at the station. The very same station that was featured in the old home movies we watched yesterday: on Mum and Dad's wedding day in 1962 they were filmed getting on the train to the South coast, with all the wedding guests milling about on the platform to wave them off. They spent their honeymoon on the Isle of Wight . Anyway, they didn't wave me off on the platform this morning, as they have automated barriers to prevent you from doing this now; also, I was just catching the 09.42 back to London , where I live, not doing anything momentous. It's been a good trip.

Lazy day back home. I feel as if my batteries have been recharged. Filled all my bird feeders. Watched the extras on Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, including a delightful one about training squirrels. Thai meal. No telly. Listened to the Kanye West album on the downstairs hi-fi for the first time. It sounds even better through speakers bigger than those in my laptop, oddly enough. I hope I don't dream about Tony Blair again.

Saturday 22 October 
No dreams last night. Good. Read an interesting piece in the Guardian Weekend magazine (not exactly a given) in which all four editors of the lads' mags, Loaded, FHM, Nuts and Zoo, were interviewed. The latter pair, aimed at younger boys (18 officially, but we all know how magazines work and that it means 14), make me despair. I can't remember which is the most popular, but one sells 260,000 copies a week, the other one about 300,000. These are huge magazines, and offer a shall-we-say simplistic view of the opposite sex. I would call it an extension of readers' wives, except the readers of these smutty mags don't have wives, or - let's face it - girlfriends. These readers are encouraged to exist in a hormonally-charged world of implanted breasts, skimpy knickers and celebrity "nip slips", with a bit of football, comedy and gore thrown in. What worries me - and I know it makes me a bit Mary Whitehouse, but I don't propose censorship - is that a whole generation of young men is growing up thinking that women are only useful if they take their clothes off and have cosmetic surgery. What a shock they are in for. (Having said that, more women are having surgery at a younger age. Why?)

The editors of the offending publications turn out to be either embarrassing ( FHM's Ross Brown is very proud that his previous girlfriend was number 64 in the magazine's 100 Sexiest Women poll; Loaded's Martin Daubney admits to moisturising but with the pathetic caveat, "Men have realised that if they adopt the ways of the gays, they get laid more often"), or embarrassed (Phil Hilton, boss of Nuts, 41, married with two children, apparently "squirms" when confronted with a spread from his vile rag called Assess The Breasts). They all defend their soft porn magazines with the "harmless fun" get-out-of-trouble-free card, and claim that their readers are smart enough to know that it's a fantasy, not reality. I wish they were right. I know, it's the market, stupid. There's a huge demand for topless women and implied lesbianism among teenage boys, and publishers IPC and EMAP meet this demand. But is nobody thinking long-term any more?

Sorry, I realise I have saddled up the high horse here. One listener accused me of being "angry" today. I prefer "concerned". As I say, I don't believe these mags should be banned or censored, just made a little more difficult to buy. Perhaps put an outer cover featuring a nude man on them; see how many spotty-chinned schoolboy-consumers would take them to the till then. (I remember when, in the mid-90s, Q put a naked Terence Trent D'Arby on the cover and sales plummeted. Red-blooded male readers revealing their innate homophobia? Or just the fact that Terence Trent D'Arby was rubbish?)

West Wing, episode 13, King Corn: a Rashomon homage in which the same period of time is shown from three different, Ethanol-themed perspectives. Two Curbs.

Sunday 23 October
Dreamed some kids were throwing knives at me again. Lots of knives, although they clearly weren't circus knife-throwers, as they didn't even come at me blade first. They all missed and landed on the ground. I picked them all up and found myself more than armed. However I woke up before I could throw them back and kill my assailants.

The Arctic Monkeys went straight in at number one, as predicted. I was really excited. It's a moral victory. Genuine groundswell of public interest as opposed to industry hype. And a great song. Even better, they didn't appear on Top of The Pops, who were forced to show the two-bob video instead. (Is anyone else watching Top of The Pops? It's this chart-rundown show that's on Sunday nights on BBC2. It used to be important. Perhaps the Monkeys didn't deem it important enough to travel all the way to London for. They would be within their rights. I hope success doesn't spoil them. I don't think it will, on current evidence.)

A new four-part documentary series started on BBC2, Boys & Girls (or is it Girls & Boys?), the history of sex and pop music. I enjoyed it, but at the back of my mind was a nagging worry that documentary has lost its way. This was a history with a thesis (loosely: that sex and popular music are intertwined), but that thesis was never explored. It was just an excuse for some clips and some talking heads. It missed out facts, it skated forward and backwards in time, it used its interviewees (who were of a fairly high quality) merely to parrot the editorial line and to match up with the footage. Sandie Shaw saying Elvis was sex on legs while they showed a clip of Elvis, not on television where his gyratory style really had its impact - and where Sandie Shaw might have seen it - but at what looked liked a Louisiana Hayride gig, witnessed only by those in the US who listened to the right radio stations or were at the gig. (And the clip was slowed down for maximum hip-swivelling impact. In other words, treated. Wasn't he sex on legs enough at regular speed?) Also, they kept repeating their footage. I saw the same clip of a man looking at military jackets on a rack in Carnaby Street three times in an hour! The only time it clicked into place was when Marsha Hunt, the Hair actress and singer, spoke. For a while, the documentary had found a story that illustrated its thesis and had an eyewitness account that was allowed to breathe. I'll watch all three parts, obviously, but with a heaviness of heart.

A promising Waking The Dead, in which Spence goes centre-stage. Day off tomorrow. I need it.

Monday 24 October 
After a last hurrah of blazing sun yesterday, it went cold today. At last. I mean properly damp and chilly and grey. What you might call October Weather. A day off, although I am working nights this week, filling in for Mark Radcliffe and risking the wrath of the message boarders on Radio 2, 10.30-midnight. It's a show I've listened to and guested on (and, in my opinion, one of the jewels in Radio 2's crown), so it's something of an honour to fill Mark's shoes for four nights. I arrived for work at 8.30pm in time to reacquaint myself with the old-fashioned Radio 2 desk and get my head round the running order with producer Ian. They've allowed me to hand-pick my guests, so we kicked the week off with Mark Ellen from Word magazine (or The Word magazine, as they have insanely renamed it). Even though we talked over each other a bit in our excitement, I think it went OK. I managed to go to the news on time and only slightly muffed the Crucial 3 competition. Compared to "driving" the futuristic 6 Music desk, it's totally old-school, playing clips and trails off MiniDisc, but I absolutely love it. The hour-and-a-half flew by, and I got to play Arctic Monkeys, The Fall, Kevin Coyne, ELO and John Lennon. Carriages at midnight . Home just before 1am , buzzing. Radcliffe must be buzzing every night.

Tuesday 25 October
Went to the local newsagent yesterday and cancelled the Independent. The experiment is over. The Guardian has won. This morning, they delivered the Independent and the Guardian. Nice work.

As I write, it's pouring with rain and for some reason all of the garden birds have decided to line up on the same tree in a kind of display: blackbird, thrush, blue tie, coal tit, great tit, chaffinch, greenfinch. How charming. Just listening back to last night's Radcliffe show on Listen Again  to analyse my own form. I just played the beginning of Diamond Dogs twice and muttered over it. Ah well, spirit of John Peel. That's my defence.

Spent a large part of my day in a cheese shop. Rippon Cheese in Pimlico, a tremendous old-fashioned emporium run by Mr and Mrs Rippon, who wear bowler hats and striped aprons. They stock 500 different cheeses from around the world. It smelt halfway between wonderful and disgusting, as you'd expect. I was in there for two hours, getting used to the smell. As someone who's dairy-intolerant, it was a bit cheese-cheese-everywhere-and-not-a-slice-to-eat. But I had other things on my mind but cheese. I was being filmed for a BBC3 documentary called When Comedy Changed Forever, made by those splendid people at Murfia, who lit me from below for Generation Jedi on BBC3 but are otherwise to be trusted, I think. They should really make a documentary about the Rippon Cheese shop - we had customers coming in and out throughout filming, Pimlico residents who seem to exist out of time, each with their own story, linked only by rennet. We were particularly taken by a huge old gent and his companion who were in for a piece of ripe stilton and some Bath Olivers to go with a bottle of '85 port they'd just opened. We asked his companion if he was a connoisseur and he said, "I've lost a lot of money over the years trying to find out." Then the fat one, who spoke like a character in a 1940s British war movie, became fascinated by the Belfast accent of Paul the producer and asked him which school he went to. At this point we were keen for them to take their cheese and leave as I was in the middle of a profound observation to-camera about the impact of Vic Reeves.

I was blown out by my next two London appointments (old mate Dave Keech, whom I was meeting for an early-evening meal, bowed out with a bad stomach; Will Saunders, whom I was meeting at the BBC to discuss the Christmas special of The Day The Music Died, was keen to get home to his family and I encouraged him to do so). So, after a brief drop-in at my agent's, I killed the next two and half hours at 6 Music. I wished I'd had my Eric Sykes book with me, and I could have reviewed it.

Enjoyable second night in Radcliffe's seat (actually, it's Terry Wogan's studio, as of course Mark broadcasts from Manchester ), chatting to Phil Manzanera about Roxy and his solo work. I actually ejected a CD while it was playing tonight - something, in mitigation, you can't do on the modern CD players at 6 Music - but I think I recovered.

Wednesday 26 October
Two copies of the Guardian arrived this morning. That's progress I suppose. I note from one of them that Zoo magazine has been criticised by the Advertising Standards Agency for a competition it noisily ran offering a "boob job" for your girlfriend (again, the irony is that most of its readers, a girlfriend is as much of a fantasy as a boob). "Win your lady a brand new set of expertly crafted tits," is what it actually promised. I refer you to the Guardian report:

The double page spread also featured before and after photographs of the model Jordan, who has had her breasts surgically enhanced several times. Under the headline Choose Your Chest were photos of eight pairs of breasts, with the caption: "What type of tits do you want for your girlfriend?" In its submission to the watchdog, Zoo said the competition was written in a "tongue in cheek style" and was "intended to be a parody of the view that men objectified women and of society's obsession with cosmetic appearance".

I'm just checking and . . . no, I've never heard such tosh in all my born days.

Another nice lazy day at home, something you can justify when you're working nights. (Apologies to anyone who does actually work nights, as opposed to talk on the radio for an hour and a half.) Watched part three of Elusive Peace, which looked at the so-called road map to peace and all the coagulating Israeli and Palestinian blood that must make it pretty difficult to unfold. Also, Waking The Dead, a fitting end to this series, in which Spence ended up in blood-soaked jeopardy in an industrial estate, with nods, I felt, to Reservoir Dogs.

Left for work at 7.15. Tonight's was the best show of the run so far, I feel. The most relaxed. No major technical errors. Some fine music and chat from Jim Bob , and a wad of emails and texts from not just lorry drivers. Great off-mic moment: when he arrived to soundcheck at about 9.30 he came into the studio and caught me with an old 1990 copy of the NME , reading an article I'd written about the Cocteau Twins (I was genuinely researching my opening monologue). Jim rolled his eyes and said, "You've really got to move on ."

I'm glad I'm not a music journalist any more, but it's amazing how many essentially work-related bonds I forged during those years that have evolved into genial working relationships in radio. It's always enjoyable to have Jim Bob on, and to know how appreciated he is by certain among the listeners (so many emailers tonight had happy memories of seeing Carter in the 90s, and now they're Radio 2 listeners - of course!); we've got Alex James in all week at 6 Music doing Tom's show and he had Jim Reid in tonight doing a session, with the charming Phil King, formerly of Lush and one-time picture editor of the NME , on bass. I bumped into them outside the lifts and shook them both warmly by the hand. We're all looking middle age in the eye, but we're still in the music caper in one form or another and much healthier. (And happier? I'd like to think.) I cut out some more characters.

Thursday 27 October 
The hottest October day on record at 21 degrees. Thank heavens there is no global warming and that climate change is just cyclical, or else you might start getting worried. But everything's going to be OK, and the readers of Zoo magazine understand that it's intended to be a parody of the view that men objectify women and of society's obsession with cosmetic appearance.

Part of me is glad that my weekend on the late shift is over. As I suspected, it has played havoc with my work rate during the day. I've been getting up late, pottering rather than knuckling down, starting to look at the clock at about 5pm, and generally being unproductive. I have been writing my review of the Sykes biography all week and I'm not even halfway through it. (It has to be delivered on Monday.) This is why I could never have done the show from Manchester . Anyway, I've described my day. Watched Lost from last night (last night's TV during the day: another burglar of my time). Left the house at 4pm , for a screening of The Brothers Grimm, Terry Gilliam's new film, about which I am talking to him at the London Film Festival next week. I love what he does and I'm glad he does it, against all odds, although this was not up there with Brazil or Twelve Monkeys. I think it was the dubbed voices that put me off initially (and Lena Headey is no leading lady), but I was won round by the sheer bravado of Matt Damon and Heath Ledger in the titular roles. They're terrific. They drive the film. I understand it has been re-cut at the behest of Miramax. I wonder if I'll be able to get to the bottom of it with the great man next week? Stay tuned to find out.

The final Radcliffe was fun. I had Danny Wallace in and he was charming and funny and the listeners were mad about him. One, Jenny from Bristol , asked, "Are you still with your girlfriend?" (he is). As threatened I play Kiss by Age of Chance. Not quite all of the eight-minute mix, but enough to make the job worthwhile. Small victories. Home by 1am, worn out. If asked, I'd do it again, but I must remember what it did to my days. 
 
Received a copy of Graham Kibble-White's new book The Ultimate Book Of British Comics (out next week) and tucked into it when I should have been going to sleep. Written with pure love, it takes the form of a selective A-Z and concentrates on the likes of Buster and Bunty and 2000AD with particular interest in the golden era of the 70s. How pleased I am to have grown up in that decade, when Kid Kong was king. This book - disappointingly low on illustration, but hey - takes me right back. Graham must be a proud parent this week. I think the word is unabashed.

The bad news: George Best is dying and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be wiped off the map. I see trouble, up ahead, as Ocean Colour Scene once sang.

Thanks to Simon in Dorking, who suggested I weave a competition into my blog, which I have indeed done this week. Hidden in the text is a line from one of my childhood diaries. It's one stand-alone sentence lifted from an entry for the equivalent day in the 70s or 80s (this week: 1975). The first to correctly identify it gets a very small prize. Just post your entries in the comments box below. At the very least, I expect Simon from Dorking to enter!

The views expressed are Andrew Collins' and not necessarily those of the BBC.