World of more

Compared to our previous (two? three?) separations, this one was remarkably free of histrionics. Neither tears nor angry words clouded the final severing of ties, just a fug of inevitable and knowing sadness that surrounded us as we sat in the quiet Monday night pub and she said the words that despatched me to singledom. Her face normally carries a pale sheen of anxiety when she's about to break bad news; a patina of stress and bottled-up emotion laid over a foundation of worried sleep. Her skin looked healthy this time and there was a previously absent calm certainty in her voice that invested her words with weight and credibility. After a mostly fun year of weekends and nights together, I'd suspected that the next step in our relationship would be make or break. By December, I predicted to myself, we would either be choosing curtains together in Peter Jones or individually working out whether to send each other Christmas cards. We'd not really talked much about the f...

Based on a sample size of one gig and two albums, I am confident in my assessment that the Drive By Truckers are peerless rock gods. Barry introduced me to The Dirty South, their latest album, praising it and playing it on one of our innumerable trips to the hills. It didn't stand out that much alongside all the other folk/rock he subjects me to on those long car journeys but when he offered me a spare ticket to a rare London gig I thought it would make an interesting departure from a normal week night out. At the small and sweaty Camden Lock, in a not-quite-full venue peopled by middle-aged rockers, slightly misplaced London fashionistas and a baffled me, the five Truckers sauntered out unassumingly on stage and then took control of the evening. Every rock and roll cliche came true in the small gap between where I listened slack-jawed and where created their tender and ferocious sound. They played with such obvious enjoyment and drunken exuberance I was converted from dispassio...

Hi there, you don't really know me. I'm your best friend from when you were five, our mums kind of kept in touch and so you had to invite me to your wedding. Or maybe I'm a close school friend's new boyfriend. Perhaps I just wondered off the street, you didn't seem to mind. Anyway, I wanted to thank you for the great time I had at your wedding. I enjoyed the ceremony. I could only just pick you out of a police line-up if pressed, so it was hardly an emotionally charged experience for me, but you chose some good readings and it was all clearly heartfelt and blessedly short. The bride looked beautiful, but perhaps she's always gorgeous, I've got no history to compare it to. Your great aunt's an interesting character isn't she? As I didn't know anybody else and she looked lonely I wound up talking with her for over an hour whilst the photos were being taken. Once you get past her hearing problems she's got plenty of tales to tell; life i...

For convincing proof that atheists must be correct, look no further than the panda. A glamorous icon for the WWF and cuddly toy of countless pre-pubescent girls it may be, but it's also clearly the worst designed animal ever. Consider: the average male panda weighs 100kg, that's bigger than me and nearly half the size of my flatmate. Its padded paws (the panda, not my flatmate) hide fearsome claws and vicious incisors line its mouth. It is, in short, plenty capable of killing and eating tasty mammals and reptiles (the panda, not my flatmate, although he probably could do). Yet, a few million years back, pandas decided to give up eating meat and focus instead on bamboo. Whatever prompted their decision to become vegetarians - a dodgy madras, a flyer from Greenpeace - dietary efficiency was not a consideration; they can only extract about 20% of the nutritional value of the green shoots they cram into their mouth. They shit nearly pure bamboo. They have to spend almost th...

And another thing while I'm on the subject of the Chinese language : it's impossible to speak. Well, obviously it's not impossible, 1.3 billion people are currently proving me hopelessly wrong, but you can't just flick through the language section of a guide book and just pick up some useful phrases like you can with European languages*. You don't know that to start with though, so it's easy to convince yourself that Chinese is like all the other languages you've attempted on holiday. Flicking through the the pinyin gives you nothing to contradict your initial belief; spicy chicken is simply gong bao ji din . That looks pretty straightforward, how difficult can it be to order? You spent a week in Sardinia without any Italian language and got by just saying prego and molto bene , Mandarin looks a cinch. Foxed copy of the Lonely Planet in hand then, you march into a restaurant, hold up four fingers in case the waitress has difficulty counting the number o...

On a freezing cold minibus, driving over icy freeways from Xi'an to the wondrous Hua Shan , the Chinese Vincent d'Onofrio lookalike sitting next to me is whiling away the hours like any Western teenager - ferociously texting on two phones simultaneously. As I watch over his shoulder, fascinated, he is filling screen after screen with Chinese characters using just a standard numeric keypad. I have no idea how he's doing it. The spare and elegant efficiency of the Roman alphabet, with its tiny set of written symbols capable of supporting every word known to man and plenty more besides, can be fully appreciated when compared with the beautiful mess that Mandarin seems to be. If I were running a project to design the written representation of a spoken language and my technical architect came back with written Chinese I'd be livid. Each morpheme has its own symbol or logogram , and by some counts there are 60,000 such logograms. According to the Lonely Planet, even the...

"Squeeze your buttocks. Good. Now relax to 50%. Good. 75%. Good. 25%. Excellent." In an attempt to correct knee pain picked up during an arduous summer of half-marathons, 100km walks and Alpine mountaineering, I have engaged a physio to prod and embarrass me on a weekly basis. Alison is making me work on my core muscles to provide better support for my knock-kneed pipe-cleaner legs with their tendency to let my feet over-pronate, my knees roll inwards and me generally run like a girl. "OK, now just tense your left buttock. No, not both, just the one." I can't, it's either all buttocks or none, not some mix of the two. How can this be? I'm a master at graceful movement through the virtual domains of my work and leisure hours, as at ease piloting the Master Chief around the battlefields of Halo 2 as I am at vaulting along the main highways and quieter backwaters of the internet. I can make my PC sing and could tell within a moment if it had sp...