World of more

Despite my rapidly encroaching thirtyness (just a few weeks away for those planning to buy me fantastic presents) I'm the fittest I've ever been. When I walk, mountains roll swiftly beneath my toned legs, in the gym, no machine can withstand the muscle-packed onslaught of my mighty limbs. Breathing, I inflate to Arnie-like proportions as air fills my efficient lungs and oxygen energises my powerful heart. Of course you wouldn't be able to tell any of this by looking at me, my body-shape takes little notice of my cardiovascular strength. As a result I stood quaking before the wardrobe on Friday evening and prepared for the toughest of all body yardsticks - could I still fit into my dinner jacket for the Christmas party? The dinner jacket is older than me, a gift from my father when I started University. It's hewn from thick, unyielding material that causes indigestion and stomach cramps in a trice if my waistline has expanded beyond the confines of the trousers. I u...

I met her with mutual friends one night in London last week. For the longest heartbeat I nearly flipped out. Call it a reaction delayed by a year, call it an emotional dam bursting, call it slightly drunken madness, the momentary release of pouring my drink over her head and calling her a duplicitous whore in front of her friends looked like it might outweigh social constraints. The desire passed without incident. Fifteen minutes later I imagined holding her smooth and oh too close face in my hands and kissing, kissing, kissing for the rest of time. Suggestions of closure are considered slightly premature.

C is a great letter, so is X. On the other hand, B is rubbish. For no good reason I reckon the alphabet would be better if it all the letters could be phonetically spelt without resorting to recursion, it should be possible to spell a letter without using that letter itself. So G is good because it can be spelt jee, X can be spelt ecks, but D can only be spelt dee. I dunno why I think this is a good idea, perhaps because it would introduce a degree of redundancy into the alphabet. In some terrible post-apocalyptic future when the world has run out of K or I, we can replace them with cay or eye and carry on living an almost unchanged literary life.

5:00pm The 1614 to London Dan has fallen asleep, the hassles of the working week have drained the colour from his cheeks and forced his eyelids and body to succumb to gravity. Sitting opposite me with his slack face leaning against the rattling window he is enticing me to snooze too. My laptop is open in front of me, but the harsh screen glare makes my eyes slip off to hook on the brightly lit windows of houses that abut the tracks, looking for a glimpse of unconnected lives. 6:30pm Linhope Towers I have just one hour in the house I call home, that time must buy me an unpacked work bag and two packed bags full of camping gear. I am used to this routine now and shake off the dullness of a week's work as I fold clothes and hunt for equipment to the smooth bass and spacey vocals of The Orb. 8:30pm The M6 I'm watching Birmingham track smoothly past the window as Gus accelerates hard around another lorry. The M6 keeps pace with us by paying out more road, more drivers, more lam...

Linhope Street is part of a quiet residential neighbourhood. Sumptuously decorated three-storey Georgian terraced houses abut discreetly converted offices. Although our house is identical from the outside save for the prominent Sky dish and cable, inside there are substantial differences from the plush retirement home decor our neighbours prefer. Apparently the landlord offered to decorate before my flatmates moved in (I joined later), but the projected increase in rent turned the saggy sofa-bed, tired walls and Bakelite fuse box from annoyances to charming features. Fortunately the slovenly surroundings are more than compensated for by being a mere 20 minutes walk away from the West End and by the Carry On scripts that my flatmates (Baz and Davis) and I are frequently called upon to play out. I'd returned from Ipswich to spend a school night at London's finest club bedrock , my danced-out legs eventually propelling me from Heaven's doors in the early hours to return to...

After a couple of years of soap-opera histrionics my love-life has segued neatly into sitcom territory. The spectacular failure of my experiment in picking a partner from my close friends has made me realise I need to start meeting more people. Consequently, I've made myself more amenable to the relatively frequent matchmaking attempts of numerous smugly coupled-up friends. Much as I hate being match-made - all that pressure to live up to someone else's horribly oversold version of your virtues under the gleaming eyes of would-be Cupids - I nevertheless managed to get a couple of phone numbers in my blundering style: Me : You know we're being match made. Her (innocently): No. Me (full of drunken insistence): No, you KNOW we're being match made. Her : Yes, well, they have mentioned your name once or twice. Me : Well, the thing is, I'm too drunk, too drunk for talking, or dancing, or...,or..., whatever. But give me your number and I'll call you next week...

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On good days my job is fabulous, I carve great chunks of satisfaction from building and delivering IT systems. I feel like a Victorian engineer constructing soaring precision marvels in a virtual world. Others may not see it, but I build, shape and precisely dam great flows of information where choked pools once sat. And even if I don't write the code or connect the cables myself then steering a team of sometime non-believers through that process lets me wring happiness from my career. Recently though, the good times have seemed less frequent and a pressure is building within me. I'm fed up. On rain-washed winter work days the duvet presses my body to the bed with the weight of a thousand past holidays and last night's ill-advised late night TV. The lure of returning some 17 hours later is all that prompts me to leave the bed's warm arms and stand dully beneath the tepid tendrils of the shower. The grey of the trip to work is oppressive, row after row of boxy wate...

The change was so sudden it ought to have been accompanied by a cheer or loud pop of champagne corks, a tiny but firm click as everything dropped into place would have sufficed, but the transformation happened silently. On Friday night Baz went round to dinner at her place, an 'introduce the boyfriend to the friends' session as far as I could work out. He told me ten minutes before he left, and the small tornado of emotions it kicked up on top of the fatigue of a week at work left me dazed and reeling for an hour. I lay on the sofa looking at but not watching the television and thinking about but not coping with the whole situation. And then it changed. All of I sudden I was over her. What was bizarre was quite how instantaneous the change was - one second my mind was whirling with "bastard, I hope he ruins her evening," the next it was serenely floating through "oh, I wonder how she is". The emotional wound I have been probing for the last four months...

Blown out by a date with an hour's notice I moped uncreatively around the house on Saturday night. After spending any number of week nights sitting in a deathly dull Holiday Inn hotel room wasting a Saturday night on TV and navel-gazing seems criminal. Weekend evenings seem immeasurably more valuable. The evening was filled by watching Amelie and dreaming of bringing random happinesses into the lives of others.

Juliette sits perfectly, her gently curving spine topping out in a relaxed and symmetric pair of shoulders. Her command of Pilates and physiology is constantly demonstrated by flawless execution - her movements are well-balanced and gracefully executed, a raised arm makes the the appropriate muscles move in a flowing and efficient melody. Next to her my habitual slouching is magnified and I am made awkardly aware of my slumping back and taut shoulders. My frame sags into its seat, lazy muscles ceding support to the hard angles of the furniture. My body positions are wrong and my mind cannot shepherd the joints into the correct angles I enviously watch flow through her movements. I'm trying to hold myself properly, hips and buttocks positioned just so, shoulder blades back and down, wrists held lightly above the keyboard, but a moment's inattention makes the wrong muscles tauten or soften and by the time I am next aware of my body my posture has failed me once more.

Logistics dictated that I walk the four miles over the fields between my parent's house and the comforting Victorian architecture of Princes Risborough station. It was a pleasant time to be out, the sun had started its slow arc to the horizon over my shoulder, a translucent veil of high cloud wallpapered the sky. The gaudy inverted tear-drops of distant hot air balloons hung on invisible pegs in the still warm air of the Vale. The footpath soon strayed off the quiet country road and cut a sharp line through straw-stubbled fields. Its passage across a village cricket pitch did not disturb the match in progress - white-clad fielders still lazed in the field, the batsmen scored good, quick runs. The path rolled past The Lions, quintessential country pub. An ancient low-eaved building, small stone steps carved into gentle curves by centuries of feet led up to a stooping front door. The spacious front garden home to rough wooden benches sprawled beneath an enormous tree. The leaves...

My flatmate claims to have noticed a drop in the quantity of self-obsessed angst in this blog. I'd just like to point out that it's almost exactly a year since the first time I was righteously done over, and over four months since I last dallied where I shouldn't, and I think I've fitted in almost enough angst in the intervening period to suffice for a good while.

The landscape of my mind is clean, bright and smooth, like rolling summer hills and meadows. I navigate smoothly and swiftly from location to location, absorbing memories en route, harvesting thoughts from the mental pastures and shaping them into coherence and action. Somewhere in the landscape sits one dark and forbidding thicket, little visited for a while, its paths clogged and tangled and all but forgotten. I unexpectedly re-entered it on Friday. I answered the knock on the door and she stood there, bags in hand, come not for me but for the transport and entertainment my flatmate was offering, proving the impossibility of a clean emotional break in a personal life complicated by shared friends and a common employer. My reaction was one of mute sullenness brought on by an utter inability to think of something I could possibly want to say in a suddenly oppressive house. I exchanged three civil if curt words before walking out to a different set of a friends and a different even...

Four months of dithering have come to an end, I've found the trainers that will be my podiatric ambassadors for the immediate future. They are a little bit grey, slightly chunkier than is perhaps desirable, respectable when needed but slightly childish in general. Unconstrained by tight, straight laces, they come with a clear window that gives glimpses to the very centre of the deep, comfortable sole. I've no idea why I bought them...

My shoe wardrobe is always small and functional, only one pair of shoes for each specific need - work, walking, sailing, golf, cycling. The king of them all, the footwear that's good wear, is a single pair of trainers to support all my social activities. I have always been a wearer of trainers, not for me Patrick Cox loafers or tassled slip-ons during my leisure hours. I partly define myself by being someone who at the age of 29, refuses to conform to the CEO-at-the-weekend look favoured by many of my contemporaries. The current trainers are dying, the glue and stitching unravelling after a year of hard wear, and for four months I have searched shoe shops all over the country for the perfect replacement pair. It is not purely functional footwear I seek, although comfort, weight and ease of lacing are important, loftier factors sway my judgement. My eye catches not just on brand, my decision is based not entirely on colour, instead I crave trainers where the ensemble of form an...

The French Riviera is fabulous. The boats in St Tropez moor with sterns to the quayside, the short and enormous gulf between polished transom and stone harbour bridged by roped gangplanks. Three decks of mahogany and white leather splendour on yacht after yacht tower above gawping tourists hoping for a glimpse of celebrity or wealth. Sun-drenched sun-loungers with plumped monogrammed cushions stretch out on top decks to invite recumbent bikini-clad beauties carrying gin and tonics. White-shirted crew stand with arms crossed behind their backs awaiting the return of their charges. A hotel bar holds a balconied view of the entire harbour and the milling crowds below. Patrons drink Veuve-Clicquot and watch their friends carry designer shopping bags from the cool calm of the boutique-packed back streets to the pampered luxury of their yachts. In Monaco, every third car is a Ferarri, Bentley or convertible Aston Martin, slowing cruising the small streets and bright, grassy square. The ...

Although far from my desires to turn this website into some sort of ranting forum, I'm irritated immensely by the current campaign for T-Mobile's picture messaging and need to vent about it. T-Mobile is a mobile phone service provider who have just launched phones with a built-in digital camera and a service for sending the resulting pictures. They have accompanied the launch with a press and TV campaign featuring tennis players cum celebrity married couple Steffi Graf and Andre Agassi. The press campaign carries the slogan "Be the First". But why, dammit why? If I walked into a shop tomorrow to buy one of these phones and discovered that I was indeed "The First" due to low uptake of the service, who ON EARTH would I send my low-resolution, badly lit pictures of gurning friends to? The TV advert is worse, featuring Ms Graf being handed a picture of her husband with the words 'Find me' scrawled on the back. She photographs the picture and message...

Clouds are too big not to make some sort of noise. There's something wrong about watching enormous meteorological forces at work without a soundtrack to underline their actions. As the huge cumulonimbuses cruise like tall ships overhead they should emit a low, ominous hum. The little scudding cumuluses should pip-pip-pip their way from horizon to horizon. Lazily slow and high cirruses should tinkle like glass beads falling down a staircase, only just audible above the breath of the wind. Boiling, swirling storm clouds should fizz, slowly impinging on the consciousness. Fog's just white noise. The novel peace and quiet would be just one more reason to like clear, blue, sunny days.

When I was younger I hated the nights when the winds came. The autumn gales or spring blows, laden with rain and sound, left me lying in bed full of fear that the house would be tipped over by the prancing fingers of wind. Underneath the duvet, submerged so that my head was warmed by my own breath I listened as the air rushed and pushed through the trees outside, waiting for the smash as the windows burst, the rapid zip of tiles peeling from the roof, the crack and tear of falling tree. It seemed impossible to last the night when there was so much anger and fury directed at the house and the trees that danced outside. When the Great Storm of '87 ripped through the night (how satisfying to have survived a capitalised Event), axing beeches and transforming my woodland play areas, the next morning felt like the first day of a post apocalyptic world. The power flickered on and off, the TV news bulletins came from a makeshift studio in London and were rendered in humble tones appro...

At the leading edge of the short sloping bonnet, just inches from where my feet flick from pedal to pedal, the road is being consumed. The tarmac is funnelled between the rounded shoulderblades of the wheelarches, each dip and bump digested by the engine that sparks and revs behind my head, before being smoothly discarded into the rear view mirror. Built up with layer upon layer of paint-daub clouds on pale-blue, sun-smeared canvas, the yawning sky above revolves, skips and leaps in time with the dimples of the road and the smooth turns of the steering wheel. The speakers behind my ears have built a cocoon of music to soundtrack the movement, but I can only hear it when the need for concentration eases and I have the spare mental cycles to listen. Behind the music, the engine pitch changes in precise and exact concert with the pressure of my right foot and the movements of my left hand. At a bend, I perform a smooth body dance, pitching forward into the strong arm of the seat belt, s...

My phone rang with her name flashing on the LCD panel. My brain moved rapidly up through the gears as I tried to work out why she would be calling me - some terrible family accident, an overwhelming happiness, his appalling behaviour. Instead no external melodrama had made my phone light up, just the unpredictable actions of her pocket. Two errant presses on her phone keypad were all it took to close the mental distance I thought I'd placed between us over the last two months. Our short, slow conversation recapitulated in the first person what I already knew in the third and was notable more for what could not be said than what was forced out through emotionally muzzled mouths. She's fine apparently.

"Have you seen her recently?" I ask him. I pose the question lightly, but as soon as the words are spilled I know the answer is heavy and important. "Yep, I had lunch with her on Thursday" Inside a voice is starting to rant and rave - it should be me having lunch with her, not him, me , it's what I deserve, what's right, I'm best, I should win - but I stay calm and try to keep an even tone. "How is she?" I've no idea how I want him to answer, I think there's no answer that'll satisfy me. I shouldn't have asked, far better for her to stay in limbo in my head, better for her to have moved to another country, to have entered a state of cryogenic suspension, simply been wiped off the face of the planet by an auditing error than for me to have to go through knowing that she still thinks and breathes and lives a normal, pedestrian life like mine somewhere in the same city. I don't want him to know how important the answer is...

<--- just look at all this space ---> It's like stepping into your favourite comfortable trainers after a long day in slightly too tight work shoes. For no other reason than because I could (and maybe because I was very bored at work) I bought a domain name, signed up with a new ISP and now here I am - worldofmore.com. It was spectacularly easy, and spectacularly cheap - 0 for the domain name (with worldofmore.info thrown in for free), per month for the hosting , with lots more features than Demon used to give me. So change your bookmarks/favourites, because this is the new permanent home of more. All I need to do now is think of some content...

Reading www.dervala.net (a blog I've been reading on and off for a couple of months) one day I was struck by a compulsion to mail the author and tell her that I (enviously) enjoyed reading her entries and way with words. Delightfully, she wrote back and a brief but entertaining e-mail conversation followed. When she mentioned she would be passing through London for a few days at the start of a long bout of travelling (can you have a bout of travelling, I believe I may be making it sound like malaria) I decided I'd like to meet her, to see if the lines of a blog accurately sketch the real person. Surprisingly (I couldn't help but imagine myself being imagined as some pale, wan geek, wedded to a broadband connection and a crate of Pot Noodles) she agreed and we arranged to meet up on Sunday night. I wasn't going to be nervous - I'm a competent, capable, adult, I have many friends, sometimes I even feel like a winner - I was really looking forward to an excellent r...

Supping milky tea and eating biscuits around a typical town hall table, slowly coming to terms with having left a very important pint of my blood in a small plastic bag just minutes beforehand, the woman opposite me performed a perfect demonstration of a classic, cliched faint: Look pale Place hand on chest just below neck Roll eyes to ceiling Fall off chair The only areas she disappointed were She didn't place her hand on her brow at any point She didn't close her eyes She scored low in the dignity stakes by fitting and starting very briefly She seemed untroubled by her unconsciousness and recovered composure very well. I thanked her for her effortless confirmation that things only become cliches when they're rooted in fact.

Recently reading White Teeth by Zadie Smith (very well-written but with an unsatisfying ending) one particular passage struck me as descriptive of me and her. One of the characters is thinking about how the word involved is the best way to describe a complex and torturous web of relationships: Involved happened over a long period of time, pulling you in like quicksand. Involved is neither good nor bad. It is a consequence of living, a consequence of occupation and immigration, of empires and expansion, of living in each other's pockets...one becomes involved and it is a long trek back to being uninvolved.... They are not wanting this, they are not willing it - they are just involved, see? They walk IN and they get trapped between the revolving doors of those two V's. Involved. The years pass, and the mess accumulates and here we are. Your brother's sleeping with my ex-wife's niece's second cousin. Involved. Just a tired, inevitable fact....An enormous we...

It was to be the culmination of our Welsh walking careers. After six months of (ahem) preparation we headed for Snowdonia at the weekend. Once minor distractions like England whupping Denmark 3-0 and buying enough food to feed 400 people for a year and a half had been overcome we found ourselves in Pen-y-Pass car park at the foot of Snowdon at 10pm on Saturday night. The plan was to walk to Snowdon's summit and bivvy for the night, arise at 4am and walk the Welsh 3000s - standing on all 14 (or 15 - much rampant controversy here apparently) summits over 3000 feet in Wales in one day. One glorious sun-drenched day that was to etch itself into my memory with views to Ireland and the English East Coast and the biggest dangers being sunburn, dehydration and achieving so much joy all of life seems flat afterwards. A total distance of around 30 miles with about 3000m of climbing, no mean feat. So we walked up Snowdon in the gathering darkness. It was very cool, walking up a big lone...

My childhood involved a lot of telly, a lot of videos and a lot of books. I can only consciously remember the educational ones - Horizon documentaries about bombers, David Attenborough, the Hardy Boys - although there was probably a lot of dross in there too. But they all gave me a false belief that my life was telling a story that was bigger than me. Whatever they look at - histories of entire countries, scientific discoveries, mid-life crises - books and television attempt to tell a story, create coherent narratives, plot character arcs and reach denouements. Things rarely just happen, there's always an underlying motive, a foreshadowing of events to come, an echoing of events that have passed. It's endemic - witness football as the World Cup unravels; journalists tell stories of footballers' persecution and later renaissance, myriad stats tell the tale of previous encounters in an attempt to shadow the narrative of a forthcoming match. Look at Big Brother's attem...

I've used up the last of my unlucky shaving foam - let the good times roll.

It's been three months now since the last major corkscrewing change in my relationship with her and it's been a good three months. I've taken back control of my life by (amongst many other things) buying a big telly because I wanted to, going to the gym a lot, laughing on Sunday mornings with people who understand the value of lazy days, and rediscovering the loveliness of many of my friends. I've maintained some degree of contact with her, so I've been talking to her about once a week and I've seen her a couple of times. I thought I was over her (or getting that way). So I'm annoyed that I'm upset that he's moving in with her. I've known for a while he was returning from overseas this year, and of course I've known that they were only going to get closer. So why does this hurt? I think it's the finality of it all. I can't phone her anymore (I don't want to speak to him at all, so I can't call in case he answers), I can...

I follow rigorously in the shadow of mighty intellectual giants and trail breakers for the scientific method such as Galileo, Newton, Maxwell and Rutherford. If the observations fit the theory then the theory is good, and theories stand until they are disproved. There is no need to invoke any higher powers to understand inexplicable events, they will eventually crumble beneath the steamroller of logic and truth. Why then, do I own a lucky pair of pants - whenever I wear them I'm guaranteed some bedroom frolics (although there's no empirical evidence to back this up). And how is it that I shave with shaving gel that brings me bad luck - since its purchase in a Sydney chemist, nothing but emotional trauma has befallen me? Why do I always check my horoscope in whichever paper I'm reading (fortunately New Scientist's remit does not extend to astrology), even though I'll always do it with a weary and resigned sense of how damnably stupid I'm being. It's becau...

Happiness is frequently considered to be something transitory and only easily recognised in hindsight. With the many immediate pressures and confusions of day to day living - from what to eat next to who's going to win the Premiership - people apparently find it difficult to ask themselves the question "Am I happy?" and answer with a "yes". These people should get themselves a Lotus Elise. I got back in my car after a six week hiatus and did over 200 miles of driving along dry and lightly populated country roads. And it was all great. I've had the car nearly two years and twelve thousand miles and driving it fast still brings a smile to my face. The single best moment this weekend came whilst accelerating through a series of open, empty bends when I was hit with a massive adrenaline rush culminating in the incredibly exciting thought that "I'm driving a Lotus Elise". A more current expression of happiness would be difficult to realise.

After three months of inaction I finally went house-hunting on Saturday. Pathetic. For the price of 20 million penny chews (and that's retail, not cost price) I can get a tiny little two bedroom flat in Kilburn - hardly a salubrious area of London. They had some nerve calling it two bedroom, it was more that there were two rooms that beds could have fitted, in much the same way as a 18 tonne lorry fits in a terraced-house front room following a brake failure. Or, or (and I'm spitting feathers in actual indignant and arrogant rage about how little 00,000 gets you, I'm especially angry because it's my 00,000 and therefore should be able to secure a penthouse with water feature in Belgravia because, godammit that's what I deserve), or I could get a slightly larger two bedroom flat in Brondesbury with a commanding (like a signal box) view of the Jubilee, Metropolitan and railway lines and one of those horrible kitchens that's actually in the lounge. Grrrr. Looks ...

Washing clothes confuses me massively. Sure, I understand the basics; don't wash your whites with your darks, don't wash it at too high a temperature, hang things out straight (a concept my flatmate has a lot of trouble assimilating, choosing instead to leave weighty bundles of crumpled, damp washing atop the clothes horse for days or weeks and somehow, impossibly, avoiding it smelling like piss), and I change my pants and socks everyday too. But for things that aren't constantly pressed up against smelly areas I just don't get how often. I mean, obviously I've twigged that if it's dirty and smelly and in danger of becoming sentient, it deserves a visit to Mr Zanussi. But if it doesn't smell, or it's only slightly crumpled, only guilt makes me put T-shirts with two days use in the washing machine. And suits utterly baffle me. I own black and dark grey suits that don't show the dirt much and don't seem to smell much either, so how do I know w...

My father had a celebratory OBE lunch the other day. He invited 23 friends and family members to the local pub for a slap-up Sunday lunch. It was quite pleasant, not least because I'm happy that my father has actually got some friends. For as long as I can remember he has appeared to operate entirely in a social vaccuum filled by my mother's rambling stream-of-consciousness conversational style and occasional visits from more family-minded cousins. I am concerned that the OBE has swollen his head quite substantially. Post-lunch coffee was hosted at my parents' house where the dining room had been turned into a shrine to my father's greatness. The OBE medal was there, surrounded by photos of the ceremony and an entire scrap book full of press clippings and letters of congratulation clearly made using Word's mail merge function. The reverently laid out dining room table was pushed back against the wall to provide floor space for prostrate worshippers. Further, h...

She phoned me the other night. We hadn't spoken for three weeks, because I've been waiting for the transition from thinking about not phoning her to not thinking about phoning her. It seems it may be a long way off yet. She asked "are you happy?", which was an unusual question given the conversational context (Crufts or walking or something). Despite immediately answering yes it was a question that made me wonder for a good few days after the call. If she's anything like me then she wanted two contradictory answers - I want to know that: she's happy, because I want everyone to be happy she's having the hardest time of her life, spending evenings crying floods of tears into a sodden pool in front of the TV and spending nights thrashing in a comfortless bed, staring with unseeing eyes at the darkness of the ceiling and falling endlessly into the darkness of her soul. So I phoned her back and told her that was my interpretation of her question and that my ...

Snowboarding in France last week. I'm rad and gnarly and I listen to Linkin Park. Skiing holidays are wierd, they're a proper and complete break from the norm - I hardly thought about work all week - but they're more regimented than a normal working week. Up at 8, breakfast in the chalet served by London recruitment consultant/boarding dude chalet boy Barney or funny, dreadlocked Geordie/boarding dudette chalet girl Jen. Trudge through slush and ice to the kit shop, boards on, meet stereotypically stereotypical French boarding instructor "ze most important movement is wiz ze 'ips.. you must be like a sex masheen.". Board "you must remove ze brain". Pay 5 for a coke and pizza for lunch. Board "why you fall over so much, are you gay?". Sleep. Eat three course meal cooked by comedy Jen. Drink. Sleep. Repeat until twisted knee or severe stomach cramps force you to miss out on one aspect or another. It's not even like you're e...

I went to Buckingham Palace the other week for my father's OBE investiture. He had decided to do everything in a full, glorious, middle-England, Hyacinth Bouquet, "did I tell you I've got an OBE" kind of way. Which he's well within his rights to do. For once the tables were turned, I was all beaming, proud parent and he was chuffed child, I drew short of dabbing at the corners of his mouth with a damp hanky, leaving that to my mother who is genetically predisposed to such things. He stayed at the RAF Club - effectively a swanky members only hotel facing over Green Park on Piccadilly - and hired a limo to take us all to the Palace. I stared at him when he mentioned the limo, my mind filled with visions of long, white American cars with too many doors, leopardskin seats and a drinks bar, smelling of adolescent vomit and Essex girl perfume. Fortunately my father is a man of some taste (proving that appearances can be easily deceptive - the waistcoat predilection ...

At the risk of sounding like an uber-geek, I was thinking about how to describe emotions properly. There should be some sort of absolute reporting mechanism so we can accurately convey how something feels, it should be possible to say to someone "and then the pipe burst and my favourite T-shirt was ruined and I felt like X " and for them to be able to think, "well I felt like X too when I was eating a slice of toast and my teeth fell out in front of the padre, so I know exactly what that feels like" without resorting to a whole world of wild gesticulation, adjectives like dreamy, whirling and wild, and the all too common response of "I know" when they clearly don't. In the world of design and techy things and what not, colours are specified using a set of numbers called RGB values. Any given colour can be described with three numbers detailing the amount of Red, Green and Blue in the colour. So (0,0,0) is black, (255, 255, 255) is white, and there ...

I need a challenge in my life. I'm fed up of the emotional lurches and swoops of the last few months and need to devote my life to something else instead. I've been inspired by reading Round Ireland with a Fridge , Playing the Moldovans at Tennis and Are You Dave Gorman? (all excellent BTW) and I need something to do along those lines. It's got to be unique stupid achievable with a bit of chutzpah achievable within a year not bank-breakingly expensive and I've got to be able to write an award-winning book about it all at the end of the year so that I can retire. Notably, all the books listed above start with a drunken bet - when I got drunk on Saturday night the only bet I made is that I could get a 6-pack in 6 months. The best suggestion so far has been to try and do some silly sayings or proverbs like selling sand to the Arabs. Any suggestions gratefully received at the usual e-mail address .

I started this blogging malarkey for two reasons so that I could keep distant friends updated so that I could practise my creative writing and ultimately become as rich and famous as Jeffrey Archer for my riveting reads If I'm honest, there was a third minor goal in the back of my mind, so that slowly, using the power of the internet, my readership would grow and grow, until daily, millions would thrill to the trials of my life (and I could IPO and retire) And I'm some way to achieving that third goal today. A new reader has been brought to my attention... (ahem, embarrassed silence) ..it's "him", "the other man" from the tales below... (shuffle, cough) ...I bear him no ill will, but knowing your "opposition" is rifling through your metaphorical underwear drawer is an odd feeling.

Like an overexcited child, I got back on the rollercoaster and was sick again. I'm embarrassed to admit to all this after the continual beating I receive from everyone when they've read this site and tell me how stupid I'm being, but I suppose I should stand up and take it like a man. I went back to her. More accurately she came back to me. She spent two or three weeks crafting a long love letter to me, splitting up with him (over the phone) and trying to persuade me that I was the love of her life, I was the one that made her happy, I was the one she wanted to be with. She did a very good job too. She even went to the effort of giving me all the photos she had of them together and all the letters he had sent her (although I didn't want anything to do with them) so that I would truly believe that she had written him out of the book of her life. So, predictably, I succumbed, and we were 'officially', if tentatively, going out with each other again. Then, equal...

My father got an OBE in the New Year's Honours list. I thought I was above this archaic, class-perpetuating nonsense, but it turns out I'm really rather proud.

With a superficially innocuous decision the whole carefully constructed edifice of denial I have built up over the last few months has come crashing down. Despite all my best intentions to move on after her massive betrayal in August, it's been consistently clear to me that I've actually just been living in hope that she'll see the error of her ways, end her pointless dalliance with the stunted diplomat and pick me. Whilst busy opining that it's over to anyone in earshot I've been fervently wishing for the opposite. Well, now the wishing has to stop because she's chosen him. Christmas was crunch time, I had invited her to Sardinia over New Year, my opposition had invited her to Scotland. She told me that although she had decided that she didn't want to go out with me, she was going to spend the holiday with her family, and I could phone her from Sardinia just to prove that she wasn't in Scotland. I wanted to believe her and so that I could continue to...