I am about to embark on a roadtrip.

Good evening my fellow Americans.

I've been watching too much West Wing. I'm just about on the last disc of series 3 since starting at the beginning of August and that includes 2 weeks away - it's quite addictivising. Thankfully however I am about to embark the morrow on an adventure the likes I have never seen. In a Volvo 480. But more on that in a moment, I tumble ahead of myself dear reader.

First things first, and I should like to thank Emma for making me a cup of tea. At least I think it's my cup of tea, she asked me a number of minutes ago, having commandeered the kettle on her latest visit - strange, we're usually so eager with the hospitality. I left to tidy my room a little and whence I came back there was a cup of tea. I'm now drinking someone's cup of tea. There's like a three second rule, or something, surely? You snooze, you lose and all that. It might just be with seats. Or germs. I never know how long you've got after you drop something. As long as it's not covered in visible crap or you can brush it off that's fine with me. You need to develop a healthy immune system. Or maybe building up resistance is futile, I get confused by all this information. I heard thinking gives you cancer, I'm trying to cut back.

So anyway - I let the cat out of the bag back there, I was trying to build up to a rising crescendo, sustaining the tension up to the big reveal, but by know you already know that I am the proud owner of a terribly sexy Volvo 480. A dream car, a paragon of Eighties design excess. Some might say arrogance - certainly in the electronics department. It's those cutesy little headlights that have stolen my heart, though. They flip right up out of the bonnet. Sexy. But I tumble even further ahead of myself - I shall wax hard on the virtues of my dear little Swedish sports coupe when I get back at the weekend from my little trip away to Devon. The waxing depends on the blessed thing being able to get me there and back - I am not sure how confident I feel.

Fingers crossed, ALBOWIEB fans. How exciting, I shall get to use the flip-up headlights in anger.

A new car.

I bought a car off Ebay two weeks ago. It wasn't planned, it just sort of happened. If it was a baby at least you'd have nine months to smooth the way with your parents, but I didn't have anything like that kind of luxury. I would have killed for nine months.

I was just sort of looking at Volvos on there, my thought process went: "Oh, that looks nice. That's quite nice. Ooh, look at those seats. Flip-up headlights! I'd like those. I couldn't even think about one of these unless it was being sold in Coventry. This one's being sold in Coventry. I couldn't possibly afford it if it went over £400. I'll bid, but I'll definitely get outbid in the last few minutes because that's what happens and even though I've just put a stupid impetuous bid in someone will come along and pay more."

They didn't.

Twitter is dead. Long live twitter.

Where are you supposed to tell the world that twitter's broken? This seems to me to be a fundamental kink in the system. The website isn't working; where do I go? Is this a chance for some enterprising smaller social networking website to get in on the act literally whilst nobody is looking?

Perhaps millions of people are now slinking back to Facebook with their heads bowed down like their chins are stuck to their chests. Facebook is all "rofl bitches, you come crawling back when the twits and twats stop flowing". I'm ten seconds away from writing a list of trending topics from my head on my parents' wallpaper. I need to know what Stephen Fry is reading on the toilet, what the traffic is like in Neasden and what some obnoxious berk in Los Angeles just had for lunch.

It's only two minutes since my life was fine without the Neverending Story but like some new media virtual fancypants technological crack habit has taken hold, I'm shaking and sweating and in withdrawal and my picture's on the Daily Mail website and there are forty comments already slagging off that Amy Winehouse and something about Barack Obama.

We have a visitor...

We had a Romanian guy staying in the house last night – you see, my dad used to work for a children’s charity and one of the projects he set up was a childrens’ home in a place called Tirgu Mures. A good many of my childhood memories are of our family holidays in Romania where we spent four or five weeks each year there for a few years. Perhaps I'll tell you about those trips sometime, but one of the kids from the home - a man of 24 now, making his way in the world - he was wandering through Coventry yesterday afternoon and my dad happened upon him.

My heart breaks, if ever I thought that were possible - he spent two days hitch-hiking over to the UK in search of a job (5 million unemployed in Romania apparently) and had somewhere to stay for the last three nights but last night he was going to be homeless. For all we tell the world how much #welovetheNHS and tout ourselves as a welfare state, we’ve got sod all up our sleeves when someone genuinely needs aid. The poor guy has been turned away from how many different places and there doesn’t seem to be much promise of a job for him at the moment. Someone has apparently asked him why he should be given a job when there are two million people in the country without jobs. And it’s not like he has anything to go back to in Romania.

It seems to me that this is the American dream at work – he’s had the balls to make his way across one and a half thousand miles in search of a better existence and found it to be wanting. He actually went to the cathedral yesterday afternoon to pray that someone would come and help him – that he found my dad can be seen as proof in favour or against the existence of God I think...

Back soon.

I'm off to Yorkshire for a week, but when I'm back remind me to tell you how I bought a car off Ebay on a whim this week. She's a beauty.

Hair today, gone tomorrow.

SO either my life is really boring or my haircuts are really interesting. I’m tempted to go with the former. Incidentally, why do magazines and newspapers do that thing where they capitalise the first word of a story? I suppose I shall find out when I start my masters course next month. I had to think of some way to contrive fitting that in to the flow of a normal post without looking like I was trying to blow my own hose or anything. So yes, I’ve been accepted onto the MA at Coventry in Automotive Journalism (it’s reputable, honest) that I’ve been wanting to do for years.

Anyway, I was talking about my hair.

I went to get a haircut the other day at the same place in Coventry I went to before – I’m still not sure why, but sometimes there’s a part of you that has to touch the fire twice to see if it’s hot. It was a singularly unsatisfying experience – I’m not sexist, honest, but I just don’t think that a woman is quite capable of cutting a man’s hair in the most perfect way possible. The fairer sex just don’t understand that you don’t care about your fringe but you do want attention lavished on your hairline, a neatly-trimmed neck and no detritus down the back of your collar. They don’t understand how attention to the right details can be cherished, how dull the small talk is and how terrifying yet satisfying a cut-throat blade can be when wielded in the correct manner. I’ve never seen a woman use a cut-throat razor in a barber’s. Not that I’ve seen anyone use one anywhere else I hasten to add.

To compound the insult and injury the woman who cut my hair this time was more interested in getting back to her book than ensuring my continued happiness – my eloquent answers to her vapid questions were met with patronising ‘oh yeeeah?s’, I left the place with clumps of wet offcuts clinging to the back of my ears. And I know that the backs of my ears weren’t hairy when I went in...

Can it be so hard to find a decent barber?

My computer

There’s this little circle thing that comes up next to the arrow on my computer (apologies for the computer jargon there) when it’s busy, it just glows round and round in a circle. It’s completely pointless, like some travel-sized hadron super collider. And what is a hadron, anyway? Is it the name of some German scientist who came up with the pointless idea of blowing shit up on a sub-atomic level? It’s Top Gear science dressed as some messianic mission to discover the very meaning of life. I suppose science-types need something to blow tens of billions on now that space ain’t sexy anymore.

Where was I? Oh yes, moaning about my computer. So there’s this annoying little circle thing that comes up when my computer is busy – not as murder-inducingly enraging as that irritating little bugger Mr Paperclip, but worse than say, pop-up adverts. It’s there to signal a wait, a period of time when I am without computer power, despite it being in my very hands. I know that it doesn’t give me long enough to go and do something useful in the actual world, like make a cup of tea or assassinate the presenters of Fifth Gear; it just leaves me sat there gawping and inanimate save for a grumbling in my soul which I will later channel into a blog post.

If I’m honest, I think it’s hypnotising me.

Just kidding.

Are we friends?

Breaking news

Coincidentally, it seems that I’m going camping next week with the family. You can’t write this stuff.

No really, you can’t write this stuff – it’s my blog, sod off.

On camping.

It must also be said that I'm not really a fan of camping. In fact, I think I'm allergic. When I camp my face always end up swollen in the mornings; I can't sleep, it's cold and damp and soul-destroying. It's something I barely tolerate for large-scale religious gatherings or have to accept for budgetary purposes when organising myself a holiday. The continentals have got it mostly right when it comes to the experience of holidaying in contraptions and contrivances you wouldn't put your rubbish out in - nice little plots with fir trees and toilet blocks you'd rather sleep in than the fly-spattered monstrosity you picked up for twenty quid from Argos that has the liquid-repelling capability of George Best at his peak. (While I'm on the subject, why is it that we would insist on buying most things from specialist shops that know what they're talking about except when it comes to camping and jewellery? That must be where Argos makes their money, because I can't for the life of me figure out how they're a successful company.)

I think it's something that goes with the whole notion of a protestant work ethic; my personal theory is that camping is one of the last vestiges of Victorian austerity that we've not managed to move beyond as yet. The idea that the best way to rest and get away from it all, to holiday, is that you should make yourself as cold, as wet and as dirty as possible. These are the people who made porridge with water and salt; they made women dress in boiler suits to go swimming in Clacton. There's a curtain around the viewing gallery in the House of Lords because Queen Vicky didn't want anyone to see ladies' ankles. As good a reason as any to save up for a motorhome that comes with a garage.

Now that's my kind of camping.

The comeback.

Also, I've gone right off Michael Schumacher. I was excited, and now I'm not. I don't care if his head was going to fall off.

A holiday.

You don't ever think of yourself being in a position where you're so relieved to be able to use a toilet that isn't in danger of giving you mortal gastro-intestinal troubles. Some may describe it as shitting yourself with delight, others might just call it going for a poo with a smile on your face. Either way, I survived the week suffering from nothing worse than greasy hair and a Maplin beard. I call it a Maplin beard because all I can grow is that sort of half-arsed attempt at alopecia that's stuck some way between a beard and puberty, the sort of thing sported by your average Maplin worker. That's not to be horrible, that's just their demographic. It's like a scoop'n'save with electronic bits instead of strawberry milkshake and pear drops.

There are moments and experiences in everyone's life that allow you to reset and really remember how much you appreciate things - and for that read 'I liked it the way it was before'. Thankfully with camping it can mostly be undone and it is a seldom done thing - once a year if you're a Christian, perhaps more often if you live in an Eastern European state or anything ending in -istan. It was a Christian camp I was at, helping my dad with a cafe he'd somehow contrived to be running, despite being somewhat lacking in cafe-running experience. The camp was all standard fare, apart from the looming threat of swine flu, which appears to loom at the moment in the same way that musical success always did for Posh Spice. Close, but no cigar.

I don't know whether everyone was looking in the wrong direction, but the norovirus outbreak really pepped things up towards the end of the week. I've always had a stand-offish relationship with sanitary equipment, but this stuff was really out to get me. It sounded pretty ghastly too: more than one time I ventured into the garishly-painted blocks to be greeted by the arse-wrenching sound of someone vomiting out of both ends. I feel like I've conquered something, though - it may have merely involved simple hygiene precautions, but I survived. In a curiously British way that really makes your holiday...

Suis pas la.

I am on holiday for a week - if I had been inspired and witty and organised and amazing I would have a) prepared posts to fill this horrid gap and b) invited guest writers in to share a little bit of wisdom from their box.

As it were.

Unfortunately it's dead air for a week. I'm taking my notepad though, and I expect to come back refreshed and revitalised. See you soon and have a great week, whether you're on holiday or not.

Don't look back in Bangor.

I'd forgotten how tasty the air was in Bangor - so much nicer than the suffocating nonsense they peddle in London. The air in North Wales is the sort of air you could breathe all day.

I met up with my friend Kelly and we went round the shops. It mainly involved walking up and down the High Street once, which is all you ever need and involves much less actually going into shops that you'd have guessed beforehand. The problem with going up and down the High Street is that it then it leaves you with ever-decreasing options for the rest of your time in the city. We went to the pier, for one of their legendary scones - these scones are so famous they've even been mentioned in the Virgin trains onboard magazine. Or some I'm led to believe.

But it was closed. KFC is a slightly less legendary and less scone-like than I'd been looking forward to, I must admit.

The main reason for my visit to Bangor was to attend a staff ball that had been organised to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the place - as good a reason as any to pop back and say hello to lots of people I've missed.I only mention it because they had the best rat pack-style tribute act I've ever seen, which admittedly isn't a long list, but they managed the holy grail of both looking and sounding like the people they were impersonating. Fun times in Bangor.