It’s the 21st Century. We throw ourselves around the world in great iron birds. We can communicate with someone on the other side of the globe in an instant by bouncing our voices off the myriad satellites that orbit our planet. We’re beginning to unravel the secrets of DNA. Our understanding of the quantum world is beginning to hasten in a new era of human enlightenment.And yet we’re totally unable to rid ourselves of the most stupid of suspicions. All week I have watched people grimace and ... Read Full Story

2 years, eight months.303 pages.231,558 words (though this is apt to change).My novel is finally finished. I typed the last words last night and then let my fingers hover over the keyboard for a few moments, savouring the slightly shocking sound of silence. I can’t quite believe it. I’ve lived with this story and the characters for such a long time it now feels weird to be without them. But there is nowhere left for them to go. Nothing more for them to say. Their day is done.And it feels good... Read Full Story

Yes it’s true.See these fingerless gloves hovering in front of you? Well, could spare some change for a cup ‘o tea, please? I promise not to spend it all on meth. Honest, guv. Cough cough.Well OK. So I’m not quite begging on the street just yet, nor selling my body for the price of a burger but I do have a confession to make that may see me part of the way there in the eyes of some of you.Ahem. I’ve been wearing the same trousers to work for the last... ooh, 4 weeks at least. I’m sure people ... Read Full Story

After spending much of the summer in hospital my grandfather was sent back home again about three weeks ago with a “home care package” put into place to look after him. Two healthcare visitors four times a day to get him up, clean him, feed him, put him back to bed, etc. Not ideal but as he has adamantly refused all suggestions of going into a nursing home (which I don’t blame him for) this was the only option. The family had reservations over the proven effectiveness of this package but had ... Read Full Story

It isn’t often I go shopping for basic functional man items but whenever I do I’m always amazed at how difficult they are to find.Take yesterday for example. Over the weekend my eyes and intellect finally registered the fact that the comb with which I daily impose order upon my glossy barnet (admirably fulsome given my age) had seen better days. The teeth barely had 2 millimetres clearance from the years of grey scum, scurf, and abandoned follicles that had built up around the base. I swear t... Read Full Story

The end of last week saw me both ill and gadgetted up with a brand new PC. Unfortunately the former delayed my getting to grips with the latter by a day or two. ‘Cos, let’s face it, you have to be completely healthy when faced with a brand spanking new PC complete with brand spanking new operating system – the much vaunted Windows 7. New PC’s are stress-fests of the highest order. Will it like your peripherals? Will it run your software? Or will it spit the dummy at the first whiff of your mo... Read Full Story

My last post (or more specifically, its title) got me thinking about Red Dwarf. And in particular the episode where Rimmer and Lister perform a mind swap. For those of you who don’t know the show, Rimmer is a hologram (cos he’d dead) and gets to borrow Lister’s body for a week on the condition that he puts it through a rigorous training regime to get it back into shape. Rimmer, of course, reneges on the deal and goes on an extravagant orgy of eating and drinking. Lister is less than happy abo... Read Full Story

A: To Silicon Heaven.My computer died over the weekend.The secondary hard drive experienced some kind of coronary during a bout of game playing (that’ll teach me!) and went into catastrophic mechanical failure. In the process it managed to blow the network card, take out my museum-piece floppy disc drive and mangle parts of Windows and Internet Explorer.Quite how all these components were ever interconnected is beyond me but my computer’s internal biology is now completely irrelevant.My deskt... Read Full Story

So I’ve been going merrily about my business, ignoring the distant thunder of swine flu rattling the headlines and, though not feeling myself immune, at least feeling myself relatively out of reach. Nobody I know has had it. And my place of work brought in an excellent “stay at home if you or someone in your family has it” policy way back when the flu thing first kicked off in the media. I felt secure. I felt buffered. I knew The Flu was still out there but I had a moat around me and the draw... Read Full Story

This particularly informative piece of graffiti appeared on the road outside my house late last week. Applied with white aerosol paint the letters are about a foot high and each word has been rendered with a wobbly capital. I have, I admit, been tempted to take a photo of it to publish it here for your delectation but, much as I love you all, being run over by a passing BMW or a souped-up moped doesn’t strike me as a suitable pay-off for my photographic skills so you’ll just have to use your ... Read Full Story