The world has gone mad.

I occasionally think the world has gone mad. Take today, for instance, when the world has gone mad. Everything has been cut down so much that traditional state-sponsored terrorism has all been outsourced to all these small and medium enterprises, one-man bands. It might be cheaper, but it's just not as professional.

Maybe it's social media's fault - it used to be they'd put some effort into the presentation: a setpiece launch event, a nice press release and a shouty video to go with it. These days it's all about going viral, trying to capture the public's imagination. The kernel of tragedy gets completely ignored by the juicy outer shell of mass hysteria.

Our leaders' responses are no better either. All this 'we shall not be moved' nonsense feels like it's straight out of some inspirational end to a Roland Emmerich movie, where mankind crawls out of the ashes of the latest inventive natural disaster to stand boldly in the face of ruin. Until the sequel, of course.

Naturally I feel so much safer now the prime minister has done a few minutes to camera on his doorstep. Actually, I didn't feel any less safe before, I've always felt like I'm running a 50/50 gauntlet of getting stabbed every time I leave the house in London. Public reaction is always either misplaced grief or fury. Surely we can come up with a more mature response to such events?

But then the murk clears, and normal life with its mundane worries gets back in on the game. I tried to join the EDL the other week actually - they say they make it easy to switch, but it was quite complicated. I'm not sure all those questions about immigrants were really relevant to a clean green energy tariff, but there you are. They come over here, they take our cheap electricity packages... Madness, I tell you.

These cupcakes bring all the boys to the yard.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.