Summer's here, soon to go.

Gosh, it's just so terribly hot in London this week, I'm on the point of not being able to function. Not least because I have to wear a suit in which I rock up rather fresh in the morning and then drag myself home in the evening looking like someone's dropped a stone-baked pizza on a table cloth. I've constantly got the wicked witch of the wild, wild west going 'I'm meeeeeeeelting' in my head as I mosey along in search of something to refresh my parched craw.

We're just not built for this kind of weather, the British. It's like a sustained nuclear attack, I feel like I'm going to catch skin cancer looking out of the window, or burn to a cinder if I step out of the shade for more than 4 seconds.

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You're kidding me, right?

Out Of Office Reply

I'm not here today. Isn't this clever, that I can entertain and amuse without even being present? I love blogging.

What I don't love is that I will have had, by the time that you might get around to the opportunity presenting itself to read what I have written just now but which will in fact be back then, to get up really early and get into central London to catch a coach to my two days away from civilisation. I don't resent the time away, I look forward to it, but I face my inevitable foul mood induced by fatigue with something approaching trepidation. And if I'm scared...

See you tomorrow.

The Bodensee.

I find I don't often write about my pictures, it preserves more of the mystique or whatever. Perhaps it makes me look more artistic because then people don't realise that I simply point the camera at stuff and hope for the best. But yes, the picture I posted yesterday is one of my favourite snaps from my year abroad in Germany, where I lived not far from the Bodensee, or Lake Constance as we prefer to call it in English. The Boden in German is the floor, so I deduce with the canniness and wiles of Monsieur Sherlock that is so named because it is right at the bottom of Germany.

Interesting fact: Lake Constance is not in fact a lake, but rather a bulge in the Rhine.

I used to love spending time on the shores of the Bodensee because it was the closest thing right in the centre of Europe to the sea and also because it had the most amazing character. From one minute to the next you'd never quite know what the weather was going to do - pea soup fog to blazing and glistening sunshine in a matter of five minutes, I kid you not. In summer the most beguiling place you can imagine, speckled with sailing boats and littered with dreamy villages and Sehenswuerdigkeiten along its shores, shores which ran through three different countries. I miss it.

Bodensee. Germany.

buoys will be buoys
Originally uploaded by ALBOWIEB

12A: WARNING: Contains scenes of mildly intense melodrama.

I HAVE COLD SORES, I WANT TO DIE. I tried to book a place at Dignitas but the package I wanted wouldn't show up in the basket and then they don't take Visa Debit, Boots stiffed me five quid for the teeniest tiniest piffling nanotube of cold sore cream that has ABSOLUTELY NO EFFECT AT ALL WHATSOEVER. I want to break my virtuous ways and start drinking copiously until the incessant and merciless tingling moves from my lips to my hands to my feet, I want to amputate my face, I can't ever go out in public ever again and I'm knackered. Cold sores are nature's way of telling you that you're run-down and NOT QUITE HIDEOUS ENOUGH.

You should have seen people recoil in horror when I got on the bus earlier, it was like the parting of the Red Sea, I've never got to a seat so quickly. I have swiftly learned that when I get on the train it's a window seat on the left hand side or an aisle seat on the right hand side only. Otherwise people get scared when they do that looking about the carriage thing where they're actually trying to get a side-glimpse of you and do some JUDGING between stations. Oh, caps lock feels so good.

Sob, sob - I'm deformed, beauty is so fleeting, I'll never work again.

A lunchtime trip.

I had a spot of business to attend to up Victoria Street this afternoon, so I popped into Greggs (nominally a bakery, but as much to the calling as is your local newsagents to a chocolatier) and purchased a rather forlorn-looking sausage, bean and cheese melt (delicious when they're motivated), whereupon I was handed my £8.76 change in about as many coins as you could manage without using little plastic bags and a set of scales.

I almost had to sit on my little coin box to get it closed, which it didn't like and rather malevolently vomited all over the inside of my bag. Thankfully, however, my little jaunt was redeemed by a frappuccino at Starbucks - ethics be damned when shit's that tasty.

Angst.

Gosh, it's the end of another Wednesday as I know it - where does the time go? I simply refuse to acknowledge the fact that next week June moves into its twenties and is already therefore almost over - we are resolutely moving into the second half of the year, oh foul temptress 2009 it feels like I have barely begun to know you, to caress your wonderful depths. Sod it, I think it's raining again.

This week...

...I have been mostly coming up with song-themed restaurant names:

'Wok this way'
'Fat's the way I like it'
'California breamin''
'Especially fondu'
'My tart will go on'

I post, therefore I spam.

I'm afraid that don't really have anything to say today, which I think is dangerous, like the Prime Minister turning up to do a speech without having prepared any notes, or a bus driver who doesn't think so much that the route is important, just as long as people get somewhere.

Remarkably similarly to the above examples (although I'm distinctly more bus driver than prime minister) I've just arrived at the back end of my blog (as it were) and commenced a spot of free writing. Not automatic writing, by which I would channel the spirits of famous people who would then take control of my hands and write a post for me. Now that would be a blog post.

By taking control of my hands I mean that in a spiritual other-wordly sense, of course - not living celebrities, because that would turn into some freakish modern reinterpretation of that scene with the pottery wheel in Ghost, and I can't imagine the typing would turn out that welegighoh iethwre hfeyh.

Some housekeeping.

OK, several things:

1) Have a read of this blog, I think it's brilliant. The guy is attempting to ride every single bus route in London. Quite why, I'm not sure, but it sort of sounds like fun.

2) I forgot to show you some pictures from our (me, Carolan, Andy and Maeve) trip to Legoland, but I am now going to briefly cover the story in an extremely unsatisfying and out of date manner.

Unfortunately Andy couldn't make it inside the park as his car disintegrated on the way and we had to call the RAC to RAC to it. The kindly chap in the orange truck kindly said that he would take us from the middle of the motorway (booo) to the front of Legoland (yaay) because he didn't want our day to be any more rubbish.

Obviously poor Andy wasn't too happy, but seriously - sacrifices sometimes have to be made.















I wouldn't be lying if I said that riding in that truck was one of the most exciting things I'd ever done.



















Also, there were Lego Top Gear presenters in the model part of the park, which also made my day.















3) Bleurgh, I'm really tired.

4) I don't know what on earth Blogger have done to mess with their technical bajoozery, but I'm never going to get this post formatted to anything half-decent, I apologise on their behalf.

A new element.

I read this on the BBC News website earlier and it made me angry - I was never particularly good at chemistry, but now my faith in science has been rocked and shaken and what was already a crumbling foundation in the dark arts of how this place runs has been shown to be a sham.

An extra element? How many more of the little wastrels are hiding about the place? The enlightenment was ages ago, you would imagine we'd be quite smart having been in a state of enlightenment all that time. You can't just whistle up a new element out of nowhere - who are these people, can we really trust them?

The world is now literally a different place from when I woke up this morning. I felt safe, knowing that the periodic table contained the basic blocks of building your own earth, that the complexities and minutiae could be tracked down to a limited albeit Tolstoy-rivalling array of characters. And now there's one extra. Is Iron going to marry Samarium but cop off with Rubidium at the wedding reception? Will Boron kill Bismuth because he doesn't like being next to him all the time, or Einsteinium fake her own death in order to escape from the limelight? Who knows. But at least they were there and we were familiar with them.

And of course the even bigger problem out of the whole thing is who's going to pay for all the new school posters? It's one way out of the recession...

Nope, still here.

Posts coming soon.

Alright...

I confess, I contrived that entirely useless last post just so that I could use the line.

I will write later, though. Hasta la vista, baby.

No blog but what we make for ourselves.

I've just been to see Terminator 4 (although they probably don't like people calling it that) at the cinema, what a film. I'm off to bed now, so I'll have to write about it later.

I'll be back.

It's Saturday.

I've not done a great deal today - do you ever look a moment and wonder what would happen if your life when on in a straight-line tangent from that exact moment? In my case people would find my bloated, rotting, starven corpse in a few months surrounded by DVDs and empty packets of mini cheddars.

Not my greatest day by any means, but you need days like today inbetween the great ones to provide some balance, some rest and relaxation. Fun times.

All the news, 24 hours a day.

This has turned into a really newsy week - every minute there's news, and it's new news, not old news. I've been tripped up and hyperactive all week, still unsure whether these crises are of the media's making or whether there's actually stuff going on. It must be serious for the Prime Minister, because the Guardian have been liveblogging his demise, which is what I'm sure it will turn out that we've been watching.

And Susan Boyle quits the cabinet because of swine flu. How are we supposed to keep all of these things in our minds? What am I actually supposed to be worried about? Man, this is tough. We've got the downfall of a government being measured on a minute-by-minute basis, and when that gets quiet we've got an international pandemic of a deadly disease to fall back on, an air disaster in the Atlantic or the US President's attempts to bring peace on earth and goodwill to all men.

I went out to a dinner last night and the Work and Pensions Secretary resigned - I was on the phone in the office when Hazel Blears went. I'm almost too scared to go and brush my teeth just now or make a cup of tea - who knows what will happen? At least the news will catch me up.

A quote.

I've finally got round to reading a book that my brother kindly purchased for me a wee while ago, could've been Christmas (I'm sure he'll correct me if I'm wrong, I've no doubt he lurks occasionally) - 'Who Runs This Place?' by Anthony Sampson. I was struck on the train yesterday by the following quote (though not literally, that could drawn blood):

"The people are the masters. We are the servants of the people. We will never forget it, and if we ever do, the people will very soon show that what the electorate gives, the electorate can take away."

Tony Blair, 1997.

On ageing.

So, it's the morning after the day following the one before. I sort of feel older and I sort of don't. Because it is of course ridiculous that you should actually feel any different on what is simply the anniversary of having been born - living, growing, it's such an organic process - it's the very definition of an organic process, in fact.

Mentally, though, you do start to think of yourself as being a year older. Closer to thirty than twenty, firmly ensconced in the mid-twenties, ageing, wearing out, tramping inexorably closer to that fateful day when wispy organs will just give out and people will queue up to eulogise whilst wondering what you might have left them.

I'm much more optimistic than those two paragraphs, I swear - I am full of joie de vivre, in fact I am almost overcome by the joie of viving. It's a constant joie to be a party to all that happens on this fair planet, a miraculous globule in the interstellar picnic. We truly are the life and soul of the party.

Happy birthday to me,

Happy birthday to me,

Happy birthday to me because it's my birthday,

Happy birthday to me.

Feeling hot, hot, hot.

It's the hottest day of the year! Of course, its full name is 'HRH Princess Ladybumps of The Hottest Day Of The Year So Far In A Year That Has Been Intolerably Wet And Miserable'. The queen of my heart, at any rate. Why do we want to trumpet the fact that it's the hottest day of the year on the first day of summer? Call me back in August, bitches. It's like BBC News 24 leading the 7am bulletin with "Breaking news: Lightest hour of the day!"

So it's June. I didn't quite manage to write something every day in May, but I'm a busy chap - 29 would be admirable, had I not cheated somewhat by posting perhaps two or three times on my more profligate days. Oh well - must dash, anyway - I need a glass of water, it's sweltering.