A Little Bit Of Wisdom In Every Box...

These cupcakes bring all the boys to the yard.

2013-05-17T14:01:00.002+01:00

I do fear for the state of our society sometimes. Take, for instance, the cupcake shop that is opening up the road from my office this weekend. I can't conceive what a world must be like for someone to put together a feasible business plan for a high street-based outlet aimed solely at selling people cupcakes.

Can cupcakes really be that high on the list of must-buy comestibles such that it could sustain someone's livelihood? By all means branch out from your regular bakery work, if sticking eyes and a happy little mouth on a denuded gingerbread man or forcefeeding strawberry jam to rolls before tossing them into searing oil (it's like dough-based foie gras) isn't floating your creative boat.

I just as much fear for myself - not because I am tempted to venture into this temple to frosted trophies for the middle class, but rather because I cannot possibly go near. The signage and menu inside has been printed almost exclusively in Comic Sans, and as a hideous font snob I couldn't live with myself if I went near it. It's like my kryptonite. We've all got our thing, right?

So there we have reached an impasse - no doubt the fervent butterscotch-loving masses who will flock to Let Them Eat Cupcakes (the outside sign hasn't gone up yet, I may have to register the name) will scorn my dearth of whimsy, and I will remain perplexed by the whole enterprise. From a distance, at least. I'm going to have to start crossing the road when I walk past.

I am carless.

2013-05-09T10:49:00.000+01:00

I have scrapped another car. If it were a child I would probably be investigated by the authorities for my neglectful ways, but this time it was definitely out of my hands.

My roofless Saab shuddered to a halt up the street from my house, a mess of grinding and scraping noises escaping from under the bonnet. It was a shuddersome moment, and came at the end of a delightful day driving about with the sun on my face, the first chance I'd really had to enjoy the car in nice weather.

I feel disillusioned with the car ownership for the time being - I've been a serial monogamist for so long that I feel it's important to take some out just to consider what direction I want to take in the future. Some time to find myself, think about my priorities. Eurgh, and get the bus.

The Queen gives her annual speech.

2013-05-08T12:01:00.000+01:00

The economy, etc, etc. Matching internet protocol addresses is some sort of major problem, apparently. Though the way QE2 said it, I thought meshing was some craze that I'd missed. All this was closely followed by mention of the word 'cyberspace'. You can only imagine that there was some bet going in the government somewhere to see what words they could get away with making Her Maj say.

I thought she looked lovely though. Must be difficult to turn a page when you're wearing schmancy fancy white gloves and your digits are weighed heavily down with jewel-encrusted hunks of precious metal. Her crown glistened and twinkled under the light of the Lords. Lesser people would have wilted. I'm not sure I could even have held my head up. She can really trot up and down stairs for an 87-year-old, you know.

It's nice, for a brief 10 minutes, to see MPs of all sides playing nicely, pretending to get on with each other for the camera. Ed Miliband and the prime minister return to the Commons chamber, milling aimlessly about for a brief few seconds as their cohorts file in behind them. It's a memorably forgettable occasion, the state opening of parliament. A wonderfully distinctive part of our national culture, part of the waterfall of pomp that makes us marvellous.

But still, bit weird that it takes everyone precisely 14 times longer to get dressed than it does to listen to the government's priorities for the next year.

I briefly ditch my iPhone.

2013-05-01T15:58:00.000+01:00

I've had to send my iPhone away to be looked at because the WiFi is not working (boo, hiss, Apple) and it is surprising how much more difficult your life can be when you can't get access to WiFi. Naturally if I'm posting my phone away to meet its maker I must have something to fill the gap, something that will meet my every telephonic need.

Of course, I want doesn't always get, as my mother often used to tell me. She was a tough negotiator, my mum. Never backed down. Wandering down Croydon high street with 15 of our finest English pounds has got me something that even a churlish Amish pensioner would consider too old-fashioned and perplexingly interfaced. I understand that it makes calls - it says so on the box - so that's good.

I have already sent several text messages to explain why messages from me over the coming days will be green and badly spelt. And I have already regained a loathsome but strangely nostalgic affinity with the nagging pain in your thumb joints, rheumatoid predictivitis as I gather it is known.

What surprised me when I opened the teensy box was a leaflet for a confidential helpline service for under-25s. I mean, it's slightly optimistic to imagine under-25s will be rushing out to get this particular model of phone (unless their grandmothers' birthday are looming and they have run out of ideas) - then again, I imagine they would have to be particularly depressed to have sought it out and paid for it.

I'd call it myself (under-25s rule notwithstanding), but I just can't work out how to sodding phone anyone.

Economics is confusing.

2013-04-29T11:12:00.001+01:00

I can never understand the post-results announcement recriminations that fly about the place. I read last week that John Lewis was reporting a dip in sales because of unseasonably warm weather, but then I saw that Greggs was blaming its drop in sales on wet weather, which was stopping people from coming in.

The economy's going down the pan because everyone's losing their jobs and not getting wage rises, but it's OK because lots of people are buying cars. Where are they going? You get these economists on the television saying that 0.2% growth would be a disaster for the chancellor, but 0.3% is somehow alright.

It's relative when you're dealing in squillions of pounds, but there are allowances that need to be made for an error of 0.2% either way (so I'm led to believe), so no one really knows how the economy is doing.

Our GDP is about £1.6 trillion (that is, £1,579,015,200,000, loosely based on the latest estimates in dollars), but 0.2% of our whole country's economy is a smidge over £3bn (that is, £3,158,030,400). Take that either way and somehow six billion quid could be stuck down the country's sofa.

How is anyone supposed to get their head round that?

I watched some films on the plane the other week.

2013-04-24T16:44:00.000+01:00

Looper
Mildly enjoyable Bruce Willis-eyebrow-aping time travel nonsense.
7/10

The Bourne Legacy
I hope this isn't Bourne's legacy. What swill.
4/10

Wreck-it Ralph
I really enjoyed this, and I wasn't expecting to. Maybe because I wasn't expecting to.
8/10

Lincoln
Snooze-fest historical drama. About three hours too long.
5/10

Dredd
Not good, but still better than that other one with Sly.
6/10

Jack Reacher
Sort of fun. Ultimately pointless.
6/10

The Sweeney
Fast-forwarded the entire way through.
1/10

Django Unchained
Great, until the last half hour.
7/10

Total Recall
Kind of preferred the first one.
6/10

In it for the long-haul.

2013-04-18T09:43:00.001+01:00

There's a supreme wonder about the amazing opportunities we have to circumnavigate the world in mere hours, journeys that would have taken many weeks of hardship and vomiting. If our forefathers dreamed of such swift travel, I'm sure they wouldn't have conceived doing it with their knees around their ears.

I blame capitalism, I do. It takes a lovely idea (ooh, let's fly 5,000 miles) and then has to squeeze as much money out of it as possible, mainly to appease board members and shareholders who can afford to fly in first class, where you have actual cutlery and enough room to hold a small barn dance.

Long-haul flights are the epitome of the saying that the ends justifies the means - I can't sit down for more than several minutes, never would I confine myself to a chair with a thin scratchy blanket and a bag of cheesy snacks for nine hours. Lacking much in the way of posterior insulation I lose the feeling in my legs after around 20 minutes. It's tough.

On the other hand, three films in a row and hot meals delivered to my lap is some sort of lazy Saturday dream scenario. And at the end of that lazy Saturday I don't step out into Asia, or somesuch.

If I could live in any historical period, save for being a 19th-century Parisian impressionist painter, I would love to have been a rich chap in the 1920s, steaming about the world on impossibly luxurious liners, perhaps even taking a turn across the Atlantic on one of those incredible Zeppelin contraptions. We have such busy lives these days, it's a terrible shame that we have no opportunity to enjoy the getting there.

The lady's not for burning (no wait, she is).

2013-04-17T11:54:00.000+01:00

There's been an awful lot of chatter since that Lady died. I didn't really get a chance to pay it much attention, being squirreled away on the other side of the planet as I was, but I descended out of the clouds into national hysteria.

It's fine when someone pretty and young like Diana dies, everyone knows that it's a tragedy and that the whole country should be upset. Bit more difficult when someone that made people occasionally quite angry 25 years ago shuffles quietly off this mortal coil.

I don't necessarily agree that you shouldn't speak ill of the dead - in fact, when better to speak ill of someone? It's not like they're in any particular position to retaliate. Also, they don't care - they're dead. I would have rather a high opinion of myself to imagine that anyone could be so massively enraged by my words that they would feel compelled to reach out from beyond the grave to bitchslap me.

On the other hand, it's not a sign of a healthy soul that anyone should still be quite so angry as many are at a woman who was driven weeping out of the spotlight a couple of decades ago. Seriously, move on - she certainly has.

I have left Twitter.

2013-04-16T14:30:00.003+01:00

I just had a lovely couple of weeks on the other side of the world, doing this and that and feeling really rather useful. I did however have this sinking feeling at the back of one of my cortexes, that rejoining civilisation would see me burn up and streak across the sky like so much space junk. Re-entry into the atmosphere is tough if you get it wrong.

I've been on Twitter since 2008 - back when it was full of meedja types, all air kisses and exciting new ideas. I genuinely think the place jumped the shark the very day that Phillip Schofield joined, bringing hordes of fawning middle-aged women in his wake and throwing open the doors to celebrity colonisation of social media.

Things have changed in those five years. Twitter has become a leech on goodness, tolerance, self-control - all the things people might like to think they are, but invariably aren't when it comes to the internet. News of Baroness Thatcher's clogs-popping filtered slowly through to our state of incommunicado and I could only imagine the frenzied froth of cynicism and bile that would be billowing back and forth across the place.

Heaven knows I've been right in the middle of that before now, but I never felt especially good about it.

Perhaps I'd like to think that I'm more than a 140-character sort of guy, that I could place a premium on being in the room with people. That I occasionally like to look up from my phone and marvel at the world around me rather than tearing it to shreds. I'm essentially an optimistic person, full of excitement at what I experience. But even a spaniel with its head out of a car window can look mean when it's running with a pack of dogs.

That sounds mean - I'm not blaming others for anything here, just revelling in the fact that I have the freedom to choose one way or the other.

I walk through a market sometimes.

2013-03-28T09:30:00.000Z

'Pounderlark.'

'Pounderlark.'

I do not know what a pounderlark is, but the market stall man is most insistent that I should desire one.

Sometimes, when I must make my way to work through more public means of transport, I have to fight my way through a market street to get to the office.

It rather reminds me of that game on Gladiators where the contenders had to fight their way up a half tube full of steroidal maniacs with soft-touch weapons.

Only instead of retired Mr Universe contestants and professional summer fete ribbon-cutters, this market has little old ladies who throw their shopping trolleys under your legs as you approach, or men with magnificently high-stacked trolleys full of ripened fruits.

I don't like this aggressive form of shopping. Can you imagine someone standing in the biscuit aisle at Sainsbury's, yelling out the latest special offers? I don't want to haggle over my sliced bread, I just want to look at the prices for a few minutes, compare products and slip off into the glare.

Some people might say that they enjoy the haggling, as if they're getting a better deal rather than the market trader has added 30% to the price that they can magnanimously hack off. At least in the supermarket I can pretend that some higher authority has calculated a heady blend of profit and value, that I have a choice.

And at least in the supermarket the pounderlarks all have labels, so I can try and figure out what the hell they are.

On aiming for a higher plane of existence.

2013-03-27T12:52:00.002Z

The smooth French pilot smooches into the intercom. No doubt his gravelly lullabies go down a treat with les femmes, but not so much tonight with me. 'Delay due to the late arrival of the plane', he says. This is the sort of balls that gets right on my nerves.

Being late is one thing when you're on the move, but a special kind of intensely frustrating when you're sat in the uncomfortable, overpriced, aggressively air-conditioned no-man's land of departures.

Not that airlines care particularly - a law for themselves. Not for them, the shackles of common decency, the oppression of good will or the evil of being nice. It's a sheen, exacerbated here by the virtue of the airline being French.

Air France is probably the perfect storm of all that's bad about flying. Of the four flights I took with them last week, all four were late. 'Bof', says airline representative as you board. We spent several hours lying almost comatose with boredom in Paris Charles de Gaulle's airport, animated only by the €137 bill for snacks for eight.

This new PCdG terminal we were in - 2E, the collapsible terminal - was beautiful, a velvet prison for international prisoners of war. It's like the French think you should be happy just by looking at something handsome. I am not. Unhappiness due to the unhappiness of the person.

Happy birthday to my mum.

2013-02-27T17:18:00.002Z

It's my dear mother's birthday today. Happy birthday, Mum.

I think it would be imprudent to tell you SHE'S 50, WTF how old she is, because a lady's age is her own counsel, or something like that. Actually she's terribly young, which is nice for her because now she's manage to divest herself of children and other hangers-on she has a bit of freedom to do some of the things she never has.

This is the scenario that sees my parents on holiday to Egypt this week, presumably to get away from it all and relax a bit. Luckily they weren't anywhere near the location of the horrific balloon crash in Luxor the other day.

No, they're tucked safely up in the north-east, just where rockets have been fired at Israel for the first time since last December. I presume the all-inclusive hotel includes a bomb shelter with constantly refreshed fruit buffet and soft drinks.

Actually, the whole thing might be part of the activity programme: 'Sporting activities include mountain biking, wakeboarding and firing missiles at the kafir shitfaces over the border. Ask please at the front desk for details.'

None of which is to take away from the fact that my mum spent her birthday sunning herself on a beach in the (near the) Mediterranean while I hunkered down at my desk and typed stuff in fingerless gloves. Here's to a great year, ma.

Aide memoire.

2013-02-21T15:14:00.003Z

I drove past a charming little sex shop the other evening - you know the drill, the sort of thing that looks like a greengrocer that went bankrupt 17 years ago, windows covered with paint and metal shutters to make sure that curious eight-year-olds can't ram-raid their way in even by accident.

I say charming on account of the sign outside advertising magazines, specialist underwear and 'marital aids', an endearingly old-fashioned take on the whole business.

This was in Croydon, mind, just up the road from the Ducati motorbike showroom that posted security camera videos last year of three blokes on scooters trying to steal their stock right out the front door. They would have got away with it too, if someone who worked there hadn't stood in the doorway. It was all very odd. Clearly these chaps could have done with some robbery aids.

An easy unmistake to make.

2013-02-19T15:34:00.000Z

I've been a bit lazy recently and not made myself packed lunches to take into work. I really should, because instead of spending £3 on a meal deal I could be spending less than a pound on a smorgasbord of retro treats, such as the Club biscuits ('if you like a lot of chocolate...') I was nibbling on the other week.

Now that I think about it, I've had approximately three triple chickens from Sainsbury's in the last week. That's depressing. I'm not even particularly sure that I like the triple chicken, but it's the only triple that Sainsbury's does and it's important to me that I get value for money out of my meal deal. It's getting increasingly difficult to buy a good triple sandwich – Marks and Spencer used to be the place to go for that kind of action, but I've not been there for a sandwich in quite some time.

I got some crisps with my meal deal today. Well, I get crisps with my meal deal every time I get one, it's not like today was out of the ordinary. 'Unmistakably cheese and onion' it said on the front. I'm not sure what was particularly mistakable. How many people mistake crisps anyway? It's the sort of marketing truism designed to make you gag, which isn't particularly good, especially when you're about to start eating some crisps.

The only time that I think it would have been good to write such a thing would have been during the Great Crisp Bag War of the 1980s. I mean, I grew up with blue salt and vinegar and green cheese and onion, that was the way we rolled back then. I'm not sure whether crisp bag colours are monitored by the European Union, but that's exactly the sort of thing that centrally mandated regulation should cover. Unmistakably cheese and onion? Depends whether you were a Walkers or a Golden Wonder man...

Writing this blog post: the live blog

2013-02-11T18:02:00.000Z

6.01pm: I start writing this blog post.

6.02pm: I am finished.

Those stupid signs (again).

2013-02-08T14:46:00.002Z

Everywhere I go around the office I see those stupid signs. One has since appeared on the microwave asking if we could ‘please USE a cover or clean up after use’. It’s a palindrome of passive-aggressive inanity. It’s not even typed out and laminated, rather a bit of biro and lashings of tape. I’m thinking of making my own and sticking them everywhere. ‘Please SWITCH the light on when required.’

I still can’t get my head round the ‘Leave these toilets as you’d wish to find them’ sign, with its fuschia caps and cod-philosophical, condescending tone.

That’s not to say it espouses the philosophy of the cod, all ‘don’t live in the North Sea’, and ‘beware the Spanish fisherman’. It’s the wishing and the finding that gets me. If I would wish to find the toilets in any particular state, it would be with a heat source, plush carpeting, access to hot water that doesn’t involve running all the taps for five minutes and then a key to the door that only I can use. I rather imagine, however, that I would get told off if I tried to leave the toilets as I wished to find them.

Perhaps the sign-writer means that I should leave the toilets where I wish to find them. I think where they are is fine, so that’s good.

Getting into the stride.

2013-01-31T19:11:00.003Z

I can't believe that January is basically over. We're almost 10% of the way through the year already, and nothing has really happened except it snowed and a load of shops went bust. That's January for you, the sneaky miserable shit. I don't like January.

I don't much like February either, but it's the gateway to better things. Spring is on the way, the days start getting appreciably longer and the sun gets over its winter funk and decides to hang out with you a bit more. January wasn't so bad in a way - my bloggingest month for almost two years, in fact. That felt good. I like to write, and I like to write in this sort of exercisy way that stretches me and builds my tone. I'm not really into all that cardiovascular 10,000 words a day nonsense, but I do want to be fit.

An assortment of polite notices.

2013-01-26T11:00:00.000Z

I work in a hideously over-air-conditioned open plan office in Croydon, where our humble brigade of workers mixes with those similarly oppressed office-wallahs from other organisations. It's the worst blend of awkward workplace and battery chicken student houseshare.

We have a communal kitchen on our floor that is the subject of much passive aggression, with open warfare that has recently spread to the toilets.

It all started quite nicely in the kitchen.

This is our recycling notice. We have no recycling bin. When the cleaner comes round the office to empty the recycling bin next to my desk, he tips it into the same bag he just used for the rubbish bin. Still, it's nice to know what might have been.

Ooh, a jaunty reminder about not leaving festering mould-rimmed yoghurts in the fridge. This has a lovely rhythm to it, and as a result I am only too happy to throw away my food when it is six months past its sell-by date. NB Anything marked 'polite notice' is not.

This was our second rhyming addition to the kitchen. Note that it is laminated, clearly a well-resourced office, this one, and keen to make a lasting point. This clever ditty has been written from the point of view of the dishwasher and fixed to its front. Nice.

This 'et of ervice' sign really leaves you guessing. Mainly because of the toilet brush paperweight holding it down. Given that this poorly ventilated room does not have any access to an outside source of air, I rather think the brush is overkill. Also, no rhyming.

This is where the notes really kicked off lately. The font is too small, I don't appreciate the massive paragraph breaks and there are occasional lapses in grammar that shouldn't be creeping in if you're after the moral high ground.

I do like how this one is dated (because it's important to know precisely when it was put up), but not signed. Kind regards, eh? Cowards.

'Please leave this cubicle as you would wish to find it' - this is a Christ-like sentiment of community living. If only we could all aspire to leave the cubicles of the world as we would wish to find them, I think planet earth would be a much better place to live, don't you?

'Excessive use of toilet paper can cause blockages' is a masterfully understated mess of tautology. Now, moderate use of toilet paper can cause blockages? That would be something to print in colour, laminate and write home about.

The movement is spreading. No, not that kind of movement, that's disgusting. Not only were the most recent notes prolifically splattered across every single cubicle door (although this last one wasn't laminated, which strikes as both stingy and unhygienic), they are echoing each other's sentiments. Do unto these toilets as you would wish to be done unto you. Eurgh, not that again. Seriously, what's wrong with you?

I'm not even going to explain what's been happening to warrant the excessive show of force from the passive aggressive notes police, because it's much more fun if I don't. But this final one? It's a masterpiece. A bold, fresh font with just a hint of serif about it, restrained use of red as a highlight, and CAPS ALL ROUND FOR EXTRA SHOUTY GOODNESS.

Reader, I know that you will be on tenterhooks for any further updates. I shall keep you informed.

Living in south London

2013-01-25T10:30:00.000Z

There are two trains an hour to Victoria on a Saturday. Seriously, it’s like living in the countryside. I had to wait almost 25 minutes for a bus the other day, I was outraged. I nearly rang the bus company to find out what had happened to my ride.

Of course, back when I lived in north Wales you never got the bus anywhere at all because there were probably only three of them a week and they didn’t come back in the same direction.

Maybe we just expect too much from our constantly connected worlds. I can complain instantly that the bus hasn’t turned up on time, but I still have to stand around for 20 minutes to see if one will turn up.

I also think that there’s a bit of a north/south divide going on. We in the south of London feel terribly hard done by because we don’t have fancy tube stations every 100 metres. Every time I put a journey into the TfL journey planner it involves at least 14 changes and three miles of walking, it doesn’t matter where I’m going.

We’ve got the Tramlink that goes from Wimbledon to Croydon, I suppose, but it just sort of goes from one part of south London that nobody wants to be in to another part of south London that nobody wants to be in.

It’s a hard life.

Makes you feel a bit sic.

2013-01-24T10:00:00.000Z

I was just clicking through some links and saw this story about a woman who was on a night out and died because she wasn't wearing a coat.

Walking home drunk in the snow is one thing, but I couldn't help feel that whichever grizzled hack wrote the piece was somehow trying to amuse themselves. Someone clearly has a bit of a sic sense of humour:

'Your (sic) one of the Angels now, your (sic) a star shinning (sic) bright in the sky, your (sic) the spirit guide that watches over us and looks after us.'

Clearly if you're writing a quote from a site like Facebook no one expects it to be written in Shakespearean blank verse and the (sic) isn't necessary. Anyway, check it out for yourself. I'm just not convinced the journalist isn't a bit of a twat.

More blogging, less Twitter.

2013-01-23T10:30:00.000Z

It’s terribly louche to talk about blogging on your blog, but I think a new sense of openness would do us some good. I’m pleased to be able to tell you, for instance, that no horse was sacrificed in the making of this post.

I went on a Twitter fast over the Christmas holiday. A reaction to the stress of constant connection to the world was the primary reason I got rid of my smartphone a couple of years ago, but I recently became iPhoned and I’m keen not to get into that state of permatension again.

Also, it’s too easy to waste a good thought on Twitter, something that could be fleshed out and more posterititious (of, or pertaining to posterity, obvs) on my blog. You see, 140 characters is good, sometimes 140 words is better. There we are.

These kids don’t know they’re born.

2013-01-16T11:40:00.000Z

I have got to that age where I start reminiscing about everything once I among my own kind. I’m not sure whether the present is so dull that it’s not worth remarking on, or whether it’s a way of rooting out interlopers and bonding with like-minded people.

If someone doesn’t remember the theme tune to Funhouse (‘there’s a whole lot of fun, prizes to be won…’), sitting down and watching Noel’s House Party on a Saturday night (‘blobby blobby blobby!’) then they are not to be trusted. Although I’ve got a few friends who I keep forgetting are foreign. And I keep asking them stupid questions. It’s doubly disconcerting when the Irish speak English so well.

But anyway – I’ve been remembering recently how much the internet has changed in its short existence. I remember back in 1998, when we first had an internet connection, and my dad set us up with email addresses in the house (we’d been given them at school as early as 1995, but they were basically useless). The internet was mainly used for sending and receiving emails once or twice a day, usually waiting until you had a substantial number of them built up. You’d never listen to music online (online! What a fanciful notion. We were surfing the information superhighway), the soundtrack coming out of your computer was more likely to be a little something like this.

Shopping online is such a recent thing, and yet it has taken over our lives. A decade ago I got my first smartphone, which was basically the size of a small trailer tent, and it had email and a rudimentary browser. Most importantly, I could blog with it. The internet was still finding itself, like a middle class gap year student. Social media built up through forums and chats and ICQ and MSN, life was a big conversation and the whole world was a world of discovery.

Nowadays opinion is like being vomited on by a tramp, checking your emails like walking down an Amsterdam back alley at 2am, being assaulted from all angles with offers and pleas and barely literate scams. We take solace in the real world, where once the internet was a pleasant escape. I suppose it’s better that way. Stuff happens on the internet and you tell your friends about it. It used to be the other way round for a while, but it seems we’re coming back.

That’ll give us something to be nostalgic about.

An exploded F1 car.

2013-01-15T10:30:00.000Z

I went to Mercedes-Benz World at Brooklands in south-west London not too long ago, and it was a really interesting place. Ostensibly a massively expensive branding exercise, it offers plenty of fun and attractions for everyone in the family.

I quite enjoyed looking round the old racing cars, and staring at this exploded F1 car for a while. They've just taken it to bits and then hung it from the ceiling, which is novel. I think we should try something similar next Christmas, a sort of deconstructed tree.

I've added this and a couple of other pictures to Flickr, which has suddenly come alive since Instagram jumped off the ledge. So that's nice.

I have moved house.

2013-01-14T09:30:00.000Z

It was a mildly stressful process – I did it all by myself, although it wasn’t for lack of kind offers. I just didn’t feel like I could prevail upon people to carry boxes of the crap I’ve accumulated in recent years, stuff that just sits in the corner of whatever I’m renting gathering dust and being forgotten about until it’s regarded guiltily by me as I move into the back of whatever car I own just now.

There was something quite fun about moving house in my convertible (for that is what I am running at the moment, a ratty old Saab 900 convertible). I even did a trip to Ikea where I seriously underestimated both the size of the eventual purchase and the amount of space I had in the boot to put it. Slightly spitting, 11 degrees, roof down, job done.

It took me several weeks over Christmas to get moved, another week to get everything unpacked and vaguely in a pattern that I might be able to live with. I don’t really know where anything is, but it all looks lovely. It struck me as I was moving that I’ve spent about 18 months gathering more and more rubbish to fill spaces I had in one room, only to be left with much surplus because the same things have no dedicated home in the other room.

Still, as long as no one examines everything too closely, I’ve got some nice little photo frames and I’ve filled up the fireplace with candles. I’m aiming for a sort of tatty chic, my television resting on some books and the radio on the floor. My bedside table a small chair filled with my many coats and shoes tumbling out from the end of underneath the bed. This is the honeymoon period, that novel phase of fun and discovery. I’d say that it’ll soon be time for the winter to kick in, but we’re right there already. Phew. I wouldn’t mind a bit of spring – I could get that roof back down again, at the very least.

You were the future once.

2013-01-13T10:30:00.000Z

I feel seriously aggrieved. I genuinely thought that by the time we got well into the 2,000s that would be poncing about in flying cars and zapping things with really cool guns. I thought I would have a personal robot like in the Jetsons, or one of those cool pizza things like on Back to the Future.

Basically I don’t think any film that has been set in the future for the last 100 years has got it right. Which is odd, because in the 70s and 80s the future looked a lot like the 70s and 80s, but slightly more futuristic. I love that in the original Alien film they had those super-futuristic monitors with green text, but when you look at the prequel, Prometheus, set well before Alien, suddenly they’re dashing about with hologram things and fancy touchscreens.

It makes you wonder what happens between those films that makes the universe so regressive. Perhaps that nice Ridley Scott is going to explain to us how that happens with some more prequels. ‘Oh no, everything got destroyed, and all they could find to rebuild the sum of human technical knowledge was this old Open University storeroom from 1983.’ Perhaps not.