2010: Blogged

Another year has gone sailing by - I don't think I'm being mental in observing that they seem to fly by that much quicker as you get older.

Reading back through some of the posts from this year and reflecting on some of the many experiences I've had it feels like mere minutes since I experienced them all. I can remember where I was when I wrote most of them, why I've picked the words and the phrases and the jokes that I have.

I don't know if 2010 was a particularly iconic year, but I live as an optimist - I plough ahead in the earnest believe that every moment will be better than the previous. I stand on the shoulders of the giant of my past - there's great responsibility there, no?

Anyway - without waffling on, here are my best bits of 2010:

January
The year started with my obviously now traditional letter to the New Year, but quickly descended into froth-mouthed irritation on the antics at Cadbury and the extreme ponciness of artists.

I was very topical in January, you know. There was also (was that only a year ago?) the joys of David Cameron poster fun.

February
In the second month of the year the Burnett residence was rocked by revelations of my dad picking crap up off the street and putting it in the kitchen cupboards, expenses was the mot du jour and the wint'ry Olympic rings were on full display.

There was the most catastrophic snow the country has ever seen, and I had a terrible relapse into the pit of self-woe I have termed the 'pre-life crisis'.

March
The third month of the year saw me beset by a terrible case of writer's block that didn't shift for at least two posts. I also professed my love for NCIS, I went away for a few days and that was all that really happened in March.

April
In the fourth month of the year we discovered the joys of the live blog. It's like we're all there together when something happens! First it started with a car journey (which was the worst journey EVA), then we progressed onto the heady heights of a general election leaders' debate, which remains the most popular post of the year in terms of people googling Nick Clegg's neck scars.

It was a funny old election, what with the 24-hour news and internet really playing a part for the first time.

May
The 24-hour-news-watching-twitterising-couch-seated-housebound-pundit phenomenon in April led me to coin a new phrase. Which didn't really catch on. But I always had my election bed sores to fall back on.

The fifth month of the year also saw me reach a new low in part-time job comedianship, I waxed lyrical about my moleskine and mused on ego and conversation. But in a shallow way, don't get excited.

June
The sixth month of the year saw me turning an outrageous age and involved an incident with a bucket. They don't hold flames well. I also wondered at what point I might actually become a writer.

Overall, though, June was a bit of a dull month.

July
The seventh month of the year (gosh, we're really munching through 2010, aren't we?) saw me getting hot under the collar about Tescos, watching a documentary about rain (quiet evening) and deciding that the safest thing was probably to never leave the house ever.

I also spent some time wondering why directors think it a virtue, sticking the crap that wasn't good enough for their film on the arse end of a DVD.

August
The eighth month of a busy year saw me getting upset at silly headlines and also enjoying a brief period of post titles that were also song names. The signs of me getting old were starting to emerge too, and I lamented the lack of funfairs in my life.

Towards the end of the month I worried about pronunciation, and managed my most hilariousest and yet underrated opening line of the entire of 2010. If I do say so myself. I also had a go at the Olympics.

September
The ninth month of the year was entirely slim pickings with a mere seven posts. Dissertation writing, freelance work getting, job hunting - these things all conspired to juice the creativity right out of me. I did still have time to write about baked potatoes and the pressure to be funny, draft an hilarious letter about the miserable summer and visit the nifty new Supreme Court.

I also decided that the only terrorists in society were us. Now whose bag is this?

October
In the tenth month of the year the nights were drawing rapidly in, the days were getting colder and I stayed in a dodgy hotel in London for a few days. I also professed much love for the Big Bang Theory and couldn't get worked up over a celebrity death. I also faced down another weatherpocalypse.

November
In the eleventh month of the year I was forced to go on a horrific rain-lashed walk through a bird sanctuary and couldn't find any virtue in the pastime at all. I lamented the state of blogging (fings ain't wot they used ta be, ya know) and got mighty irritated at a stupid woman on her phone.

I also go on the Tube and do some reading in November, which are both entirely insignificant events, but I liked writing those two posts.

December
The twelfth month of the year only began about five minutes ago, so it is strange to be choosing posts from this month as highlights of the year, but that's not to say I'm not on top form. Cough. I've been watching penguins, missing some stuff on the telly, waxing lyrical about my stationery and getting upset at the outrageous delays on the trains.

Of course - the crowning glory of my December blogging has to be the Christmas Day live blog. Never in the field of human conflict has so much been written about so little that has happened to so few.

Phew. What a 12 months, eh?

Here's to a magnificent 2011 - happy New Year!

The toilet code.

There’s an unwritten code amongst men that whoever flushes first in a public cubicle gets right of way through to the sinks.

There’s nothing worse than coming face-to-face with a neighbour after you’ve heard things. It’s a race to empty the cistern, the quickest man wins. Straight flush beats a pair, as it were.

There has been no end of times that I’ve had to wait for ages whilst some unknown cad extravagantly dries his hands.

Odd that this unwritten code exists amongst men but we never get taught it – it’s the product of shame and ignominy, having to stand next to a man at the sinks who has just farted languorously at the urinal thinking he was on his own.

Everywhere traps, pitfalls and social unconventions. And that’s all before you notice there’s no paper or soap left.

Showing some weaknesses.

Funnily enough, despite writing things day in and day out in a tremendously self-absorbed way I’m not naturally given to self-reflection – I don’t often sit and ponder things, I can’t really do sitting down and thinking about stuff. My brain is just always on.

I find it strange how in interviews I get asked what my strengths and weaknesses are – I just know what I can and can’t do, I’ll give it a go and ask for help if I need it. That could be a strength or a weakness, I don’t know. I’m kitted out with a kind of humble arrogance that makes me feel like I could do anything, with the right team of people around me.

I never really sit and think about things I’ve done, either. My memory is strange – I can’t remember much until jogged, a smell here and a sound there. If I have a conversation with an old friend it’ll come flooding back, a warm glow, but until then it all just waits until it’s needed.

People try to encourage me by saying how good it is that I get through to interview stage in a job application - but if I don't get it, what does that really say about me? Perhaps I'd rather not get through to the interview stage. What's happening is that my application is promising enough to warrant further investigation but then they meet me and decide that I'm no good.

Perhaps I should reflect more, have something prepared for those inevitable questions – but really, I’m just not sure I could manage it. Definitely a weakness.

Nothing wrong with being one of the masses occasionally.

I do love watching the telly, you know. I’m not really a high culture kind of guy, raffish despite the refined cultural air that may emanate from my general direction.

I like art, but it’s the Impressionists. The Spice Girls of late-19th century France. I like classical music, but I’m thinking Sixties Andy Williams.

I very much enjoyed this last season of the X Factor – you don’t have to subscribe to any truthfulness in what comes out of the Cowell publicity machine (you can engage with the whole event with as much or as little cynicism as you can muster), you don’t have to imagine that any of the entrants to the competition are particularly talented, just accept the whole shebang as good clean camp British fun.

Twitter has really come into its own for such occasions – I would never watch the X Factor on my own, but being on twitter at the same time as the show has made me part of a community of people watching and enjoying the same thing at the same time. That’s sociable media at work, that is.

What annoyed me during this season of the X Factor was the people who did see themselves as high culture, snobbish about the raffish, people who spent the whole of a Saturday evening on twitter telling everyone who could be bothered to listen that they weren’t watching the X Factor because it was for the proles.

I prefer to focus on what I am; I don’t define myself by what I’m not. I try not to sneer at operistas and Radio 3 listeners (apart from in blog posts, natch) because you can’t do that sitting on your low horse. People are funny though. I suppose that’s what makes it all so compelling.

Instant, but no gratification.

I’m not generally a snooty person. I mean, I know what I like, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t sneer at those who have lemon in their Earl Grey or anything like that. The schmucks. (Besides, it’s my understanding that earl grey tea was originally blended to be strong to be a breakfast tea, milk and all)

So yes – me not being snooty and all. But gah, instant coffee. It tastes like a cup of sore throat, if ever you were able to transfer that sentiment into a potable substance. It’s like drinking old wall, or slightly diluted pessimism.

I regard instant coffee as an accelerant, much like alcohol, only makes everything seem more wrong. You view the world through bile-tinted spectacles. Perhaps Earl Grey is the better way to go, milk lemon or just plain black. Sweeter, you see. Less bitterness.

Instant has long been bandied around as a concept that must be good no matter what the actual thing it describes is – but as we have recently discussed, technology is not our friend. I would like to think that something else somewhere in my day could be sacrificed by several minutes in order to remove this instant and get back to good old coffee. Who’s with me? Black and one sugar, thanks.

Friends reunited.

It gave me the greatest pleasure the other day to tell someone that they were flying without a licence.

Obviously this pleasure was not based on the fact that said person’s crotch was exposed to the elements but rather the sheer satisfaction of using a phrase that I haven’t wielded in absolutely ages.

Isn’t it a cracker? Clearly it makes no sense, but some wag came up with it in the mid-forties and it just caught on*. I mean seriously – would anyone really suppose that you should require a permit in order to ambulate hither and thither with your trousers fastened to the fullest possible extent? I beg not.

But such is the British reserve that even the service of pointing out someone’s failure to cover up their underwear has to be done in the most euphemistic of manners in order to preserve everyone’s blushes. It’s so great.

*(Etymology completely made up there, by the way)

CHRISTMAS DAY: a live blog

Christmas Day, as it happened:

8.26am: So, this is Christmas.

War might be over, Mr Lennon, but the day is just getting started.

Today I have told those nice chaps at the Guardian to stop live blogging every single event that happens and have a hard-earned day off. I shall be documentating Christmas, people. Mama Burnett is working today so the Burnett family Christmas does not take place until tomorrow.

Highlights of the day in the Burnett household will include much eating (dry roasted peanuts, the world’s largest jar of pretzels from the local cash and carry and a tin of Quality Street), several films and bangers’n’mash for Christmas dinner. You wouldn’t believe how much Papa Burnett has been looking forward to the bangers’n’mash.

Join me as I chronicle the thrilling events of Christmas Day on ALBOWIEB.

9.03am: I am still the only one up in the house. I am watching Mission to Mars on the DVR. It's rubbish.

Quality Street for breakfast.

9.41am: Fast-forwarding nicely through Mission to Mars. I now realise from my vantage point on the sofa that I can see all the presents I don't get to open today. Santa wouldn't stand for this, I might send him a quick email when he gets back from Fukushima.

11.06am: I have been perusing the news. It is beyond even the slowest of slow days, with reports of trains running almost normally, the weather being cold, share prices slightly up yesterday, the royals get together for Christmas (much like hundreds of millions of other people you'd imagine) and some people having flu.

The BBC has a helpful feature outlining the impact of the rise in VAT - in its illustrated example, a soft toy priced at £9.99 will rise to a head £10.20. Best buy your teddies before the 1st January.

I do however appreciate Simon Jenkins' criticism of those who attack the government over the recent cold weather. 'Are we to congratulate ministers when the sun shines?', he asks.

Especially for Cliff at This is This, following his comment on twitter this morning, I bring to you an entertaining waste of half an hour via AOL's Autoblog. Such stylish prose, I think.

11.11am: Mission to Mars fizzled to a derisory finish a little while ago and now we are onto Master and Commander. Russell Crowe is at his manly best with a portly British accent and a face-full of sea water. "I will grind whatever grist the mill requies", he says. I've simply not a clue what he means, but it sounds good. Christmassy rating: 0/10.

1.13pm: So the Queen is on later. Except we already know what she’s going to say and what she’s wearing, thanks to the news. So we probably won’t bother with that one.

Why do the press have to do that, create news out of something we're going to see in only a few hours' time but ruin it in the process? I mean that more in relation to telly programmes than the Queen. Her thing is a bit dull.

1.20pm: The potatoes are being peeled, the sausages primed, the beans opened. Christmas lunch is go. My role will come into action in the next 20 minutes or so, whence I shall do my delicious onion gravy. Meanwhile there is a documentary about meerkats on the telly. I am very disappointed to find out they don't talks with the Russians accents.

1.27pm: It strikes me that the entire allure of this meerkat documentary is the strobe-like series of close-up shots of baby meerkats squeaking at each other. The only information of use in the past 25 minutes has been that my coffee is ready.

1.59pm: Dinner's almost ready, the meerkats are all dead.

Just joking. The potatoes aren't even boiled yet.

Investigation also shows that a fox has visited our garden for the second time this week - no-one knows what he's after, but sentries have been doubled by the back door and the hot oil is ready. It appears he has weed next to a bicycle.

3.00pm: Just finished dinner in time for Her Madge. Wahey.

3.02pm: She's just talked about what she's been reading. Last year it was Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, this year the King James bible. Cue a shot of the Queen watching some poor and/or black children reading some bible.

3.04pm: QE2 looks a bit funny reading the autocue. I think she's doing some sort of Stevie Wonder impression.

She talks about how great sports are. I wouldn't mind if they were banned if I'm honest Your Royal Highness.

3.05pm: She just said 'orften'. I'm amazed at her resilience in still speaking like that. Go, Queen.

3.06pm: This might have been better with a powerpoint.

More bible stuff about belonging and getting loads of cool shit for Christmas.

3.09pm: Her 59th annual vodcast over, the Queen is off for a slug of sherry in time for Shrek 3. She often goes on about the armed forces, but this is fairly likely to be her first foray into the controversial world of team sports.

4.35pm: Ah, Shrek. What a fabulous Christmas romp for all the family to enjoy. They could probably trot out one of those a year until happily ever after and still make plenty of money out of it. Now there's true fairytale.

The one thing that does strike me about Christmas television is that when they call it a 'timeless classic', what they basically mean is that they can trot it out year-after-year with impunity. Like Wallace and Gromit, or that ruddy Snowman.

4.54pm: The more I think about it, the more I quiver at the terrible injustice of having to wait an entire day longer to get my presents than everyone else in the country. If I were a bank that would be forty quid plus interest.

5.00pm: Dinner has been long despatched, but I bring you a picture of the feast just as Christmas Pudding is being prepared dans la cuisine. At least there will be something traditional today. Papa Burnett likes to garnish the thing with a touch of freshly-squeezed orange and some flaming brandy.

5.10pm: Settle down now. Not the Christmas o'clock news has finished and The One Ronnie is about to start - I am fetching the roasted nuts to my side and preparing to watch a legend at work.

6.07pm: I really enjoyed the Ronnie - now there was some wholesome, fun family entertainment.

Now we're onto Doctor Who - little know fact, it's the longest-running series in the UK after the 6 o'clock news.

7.11pm: I never understand Doctor Who - I already go to church on a regular basis, so watching the Doctor's Christmas special is the only thing I do religiously this time of year but not at any other. It was entertaining but fairly inexplicable.

7.23pm: This is the funny part of Christmas Day, where events have peaked and everyone is starting to feel slightly soporific. As much dinner and rich pudding (with extra cream) as possible has been forced down your gullet to the point of queasiness and yet you still feel the need to keep shovelling in Quality Street, pretzels from the giant jar and dry roasted peanuts.

Common sense goes right out of the window, which is OK because you can make a New Year's resolution to go to the gym three times in six weeks and work it all off.

8.57pm: Phew. The digestion process is such a slow burn. We didn't even have proper Christmas dinner and I've got the cold sweats.

Actually, I'm not even sure it is the food, perhaps it's the incredibly stodgy Christmas Day soap entertainment that's so hard to swallow. Eastenders is even worse than the Queen's Speech - they've played so many adverts and trailed enough in TV Quick magazine you practically know everything that's going to happen ahead of the show anyway.

Even with The One Ronnie I'd seen the best sketch on YouTube during the week.

9.56pm: Christmas Day goes on forever, doesn't it? Currently watching Bridget Jones. Weight: 10.5 stone. Cigarettes smoked: 0.

11.16pm: Bridget Jones has finished, and with her another Christmas. The massive pants will be cracked out again in a year, but in the Burnett household Christmas will only be reset for tomorrow morning. It's like Groundhog Day.

Presents opened: 0. Quality Street eaten: dozens.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Watching you watching me.

SO, I got on the bus at the train station, which was late. The bus, not the station. The train station has been fairly stolidly there since the 1960s, to the extent that it has been listed. They would give a poopy scoop bin a Grade 2 listing if it sat there long enough, all red and smelling of scooped poop.

But the bus. On which I got on. Aside from looking like the bins from McDonald's had vomited down the central aisle I noticed a peculiar LCD screen mounted up above the disabled parking bay between the folding seats for lazy people who can't be bothered to walk to the proper seats and the luggage rack which is too small and too high to fit any actual luggage in.

Why on earth would I want to watch a screen with multiple views of a single-decker bus journey in which I am sat right in the middle, I thought to myself. Specifying the middle isn't even particularly necessary on one of this non-bendy provincial single-floored passenger-carrying vehicules - you get quite a reasonable view from all seats, rising as they do in an Albert Hall-style crescendo to the balcony at the rear where the mental people sit.

I'm right here, I think. I don't need no stinking angled shots of the back of my head or the smelly old woman up the front who looks round periodically trying to fix her gaze on someone she can draw in with her tractor beam of dull and inconsequential yet totally meaningful to her conversation.

The whole concept of the LCD screen struck me if not immediately then immediately+1 as a peculiarly crass attempt at passive aggressive threats - what the bus company were saying to me was that we're watching you because you're watching you so we must be watching you. We're watching.

I know they're watching. Everyone's watching. This is probably the most-watched any watched people have been since the beginning of watching. Our society loves watching, as if watching would prevent doing and hurting. I know they're watching, so why can't the LCD screen be an oasis, our little secret, a moment of repose? Get the driver to bring in a DVD. Or they could just resort to the newszak and stick News 24 on it.

Kidnapped by the transport system.

I was held against my will by Virgin Trains the other evening.

The apparent culprit was an abandoned train at Milton Keynes, or so the unrepentant train manager told us after about an hour or so sat staring at dimly-lit tracks in the snow. After an even longer while we were informed that a driver had been found - but where the hell did he go in the first place? Did the call go out somewhere nearby, 'is there a driver onboard?'

Perhaps the local supermarket resounded with the tannoy echoes of 'could the owner of a silver Bombardier please return to your vehicle as it is blocking in the entire south east.' Those are never questions, even though they sound like them.

We were stuck immobile for nearly two hours outside Milton Keynes. You could tell that the great British public was starting to feel almost outright mutinous because each update over the PA was met with a low grumbling. Near me was one of those men in character ties who describes the entire carriage on the phone - 'I don't know why I didn't go on the quiet carriage, no loud children there. I know, I know, why can't they keep them quiet? Now I've got this guy with glasses making notes in front of me.' I don't even know if they're actually talking to anyone. Commute catharsis.

On it goes, longer and longer. You get to the stage where you can't remember life outside the train - you are only able to project your entire life forward from this everlasting moment and it ends up with you dying in a small riot in the buffet car, stabbed in the face with nail scissors over the last curled tuna sandwich at £8.65. The tannoy announcements have this world of hatred projected onto them, that train manager responsible for famine, pestilence and all abandoned trains in a three thousand mile radius.

The corporate language doesn't help - everything starts with 'apologies'. Apologies is what you say when you have to say you're sorry but you're not sorry and don't want to say that you're sorry. 'Apologies for running your yapping dog over.' The very worst thing is 'Virgin Trains would like to apologise...' - that's not even an apology, merely expressing a predilection.

Three hours into a one hour journey and I want to kill someone. I haven't been able to feel my arse since the first 15 minutes of the journey and I ate all my chocolate during the 25-minute wait at Clapham Junction because someone died on the train in front.

I finally reach Coventry after an entire universe of waiting, a journey that could be measured in proportions of a century. I gulp in the fresh, sharp air - that sweet taste of freedom. I wait for a bus. It's late.

The lows of technology.

Do you know, I still can’t for the life of me fathom how we can transport many hundreds of people across the country at high speeds in a modicum of comfort but we can’t make the onboard toilets smell nice.

There are such dichotomies across our culture – we can be flown across the whole world in jumbo-sized jets but they’ll only give you a soggy ready meal and plastic cutlery to enjoy it with. We reach a point in the auspicious history of humanity where we can seriously contemplate a manned mission to Mars but can’t get the buses to run in the snow.

We are a tortured breed – capable of astounding genius and breathtaking incompetence. Perhaps that is what being human is all about.

Pen's for your thoughts.

I got to the train station the other morning and realised that I had left all of my usual pens (Staedtler Triplus ballpoints) in the living room at home and had nothing to write with should the urge strike me. Disaster. I was absolutely bereft, so a visit to WH Smith was called for as soon as it opened.

It takes me about as long to buy a pen as it does any normal person to buy a pair of shoes, or adopt a child. A pen to me feels like an important investment, the benchmark for the next period of my life, until it runs out or I lose it.

Whole epochs can be defined by having a trusty pen by your side. I can think of all the fun times I’ve had with a soft-grip Papermate, Berol handwriting pen or my exquisite set of coloured Stabilo fineliners. I can’t use a fountain pen or anything with gel ink because my left-handed grip is something akin to a monkey clenching a banana in its fist.

I am therefore quite particular – I need something quick and smooth, because my hand gets cramped. I need a quick-drying ink, because my hand drags across the page ‘like a demented spider that has fallen in ink’, as my primary school teacher Miss Vials put it so aptly. My personal preference is for something of medium thickness and black ink, but I’m not a snob.

Once I have the right pen (I went through a bad patch with Paperchase earlier in the year) we are BFFs, until one of us gets bored or dies. Right now I am in the honeymoon period with the surprise addition of a Parker rollerball to my portfolio, even if the heavy ink does seep through the page more than is to my taste. I have written this post out in delightful, flowing, crisp and unsmudged black lines. Typing it up just isn’t as fun.

Them's the rules.

Ah, the rules. The last bastion of the British specimen. ‘Yes, you might be in the middle of a fatal heart attack, but these are double yellow lines. I’m afraid I’m going to have to give you a ticket, those are the rules.’

‘I’m afraid’? Quite the opposite. We love it.

A rules contravention in British society is like bad mannas from heaven. If someone infringes the Highway Code it gives us an almost feudal right to swear and gesticulate and simply be the better person. The better person.

Rules are the new class warfare. This is how we work out our place in society – there are those who break the rules and then those who enforce them.

Enforcers talk about ‘the public’ like they’re some other species and start every sentence with a ‘sir’, or a ‘madam’.

They often have fluorescent jackets and little radios, which are an instant sign of authority and credibility to members of the public, of course – even on a 12-year-old boy waving his arms in the middle of a car boot sale car park.

I hate the enforcers. Possibly because I’m not one of them.

The problem with busy-ness.

You might not believe it, but I have a good seven or eight blog posts lined up on my notepad that I have jotted down over the past few weeks - I simply haven't had the time to write them all up. This is the great paradox of blogging which I have remarked upon over the years - the more you have to do, the less time you have to write about it.

A regular blog must then by definition be quite dull, which heartens me in this time of fallow posting. At this rate, I shall be the most fascinating and erudite collection of musings in the world. I jest, of course, because obviously I already am.

I've been doing some freelancing work down in London, which has been fun. The work has fun, but not the commute. Up at half five to catch an early train two or three times a week is no life for an energetic young go-getter like myself. I am pooped, dear reader. The positive side is that I have time in-between my fevered dozing on the train to write down my thoughts on things as diverse as...I can't actually remember. But I remember them being excellent.

I've got those coming up, that most excellent series of 'pictures off my phone', some Formspring questions that are like theses propositions and in January I should have replies to some letters which I have been casting out into the realworldosphere. Next week, I shall be live-blogging Christmas. Someone has to, if those poor chaps at the Guardian are going to have some time off.

A sad day.

I went to a funeral yesterday - it was quite sad. I mean, funerals as they go are generally quite sad, undertakers are not in the business of making people laugh. There's something bittersweet ironic about the fact that funeral i an anagram of 'real fun'. I worked that out in the car on the way there. Interestingly, anagram is an anagram of 'a rag man'. A rag'n'bone man came down the street the other week, screaming any old iron into his squealing PA. Which is neither here nor there.

It was very sad because I genuinely quite liked the man, and it was all relatively sudden. He was an accomplished man, living a life of which I hadn't heard the half. Mourning is as much about celebrating someone as it is sending them off and saying goodbye, no? There was a fantastic picture of him at the house afterwards carrying Princess Anne's dog off a plane because it didn't want to go anywhere. She's just stood at the bottom of the stairs, still holding onto the lead.

I mean, that's what I'm talking about - that's the mark that we leave on the world. I mean obviously there's family and friends and all that, the bricks and mortar that your sweat and toil have built around you, but to have done things, to have stories and tales and anecdotes. To be able to regale folks with tales of derring-do and near-misses and that time I did that thing.

To have that repertoire is to be someone who has lived life and enjoyed it. Not just enjoyed it, grasped it. It felt a little prurient to be peering into someone's existence like that, but all the great stories of yore were passed down from generation to generation and I feel the richer for knowing more things about the world than I did before.

It's the true mark of a human being, I think, to have stamped your indelible mark on the planet. And I don't mean having your own Wikipedia entry. He touched lives with a sort of laid-back sardonic humility - and the sad thing is that whether you live free or not, life has no respect for any of it...and it could be any of us next.

I miss some telly stuff.

Is it a DVR or PVR? I hate this new part of technology, where we can’t call it the old thing (the video. I’ve taped something) but no-one has yet decided what the new thing even is. For many months it has been the PVR for me but I have realised that although it is programmable I actually don’t do any programming, and what really is a video? DVR is mildly better, the digital video recorder, but it still doesn’t blow my skirt up.
Either way, it was broken.

So last month I had the most outrageously tense few weeks of my young(ish) life as the PC under the telly broke. I was literally devoid of television, it was like losing a lung or a leg or a...pair of shoes, I don’t know.

I quickly realised that much like mobile phones causing you to know precisely none of your important phone numbers, including your own, that the automated process of recording an entire series had rendered me an impotent part of the telly-watching process. I didn’t know when any of my programmes were on.

Weirdly, I didn’t even know what programmes I watched each week, for they just appeared on a regular basis. I switch to the DVR and there they all are, a mass of favourites just waiting for me to find the time to sit down and watch them.

So quickly, a new way of living inveigles its way into your life and becomes apparently indispensible. It amazes me how quickly we adapt to such things – it wasn’t that long ago that I was at university with my VCR, watching cassettes I’d picked up from the local charity shop and visiting friends with a telly when I wanted to watch something live.

And now, well the world is my oyster. Until that world comes crashing down and I don’t even know where it is. Or what oysters are.

Odd, that.

P-p-p-p.

Did Tim Berners-Lee (or Uncle Tim, as he is in my head - you can't invent my internet and not be a kindly uncle figure) imagine loads of porn when he invented the internet? He probably had a vast vision of a global utopia of interconnectivity and millions striving with one voice to achieve world peace. Instead nothing gets done because we spend hours writing blog posts and that. Or looking at penguins.

But I love the penguins. The penguins are killers.

Of productivity, that is. Although an army of flesh-eating penguins would make for an amusingly apocalyptic sight. We had a discussion the (my temporary) office the other day about the Edinburgh Zoo penguins - between squeals of delight at one of them doing something (this lasted a good hour) we were wondering what they do a night.

The consensus was that they really don't sleep very much, but they do lounge around and congratulate each other for coming up with such wonderful puns.

I fully believe that penguins can write jokes - if we can stick a million monkeys in a room with Olivettis who's to say that McVities hasn't done the same with our little bird friends and it turns out they have the comedic touch? In fact, I was just saying this the other day to an Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman who walked into the bar.

I think about de-teching.

Isn't it funny how when someone calls your phone to help you find it, that you still get a little frisson of delight inside when you see a missed call come up on your screen, and then the crushing descent as you remember mere milliflopsits later why it is there. It always happens, it's something that taps straight into the very centre of what it means to be human, or something.

I am suffering much mobile phone-related angst at the moment - I am considering my options as my contract is up in January (I like to get my thinking in early) and I am seriously considering a massive deteching.

I don't like the angst of always being connected to the world, that feeling of being on edge.

But the more I think about it, I don’t know if I’m actually capable of cutting off the world like that. I have to know things - I need to be able to google something I come across that I don't know. Not knowing whether Dakar is in Senegal or not will ruin my enjoyment of a Spooks episode, so I search for it quickly on Google Maps. Finding out news that everyone else has known for hours or - shock - even days is a most unsatisfactory option for me.

I was getting dressed the other morning when I was auditioning my cheap phone for the process and I felt anxious because I couldn't check the main screen and see what the current temperature was and what the highs were going to be for that day. This is an incredibly minor utility, but it does inform what my day is going to be like. It's information in the purest and perhaps most literal sense of the word.

So my problem is this dear reader - do I get another smartphone and carry on more or less business as usual, which leaves me with a strange dissatisfaction; do I get a cheap phone and enjoy cheaper monthly rates but a less modernistic experience; or do I get a cheap phone and a tablet/netbook?

I’m quite taken with the idea of a flip phone, but that’s only so that I can look like Jack Bauer or Agent Gibbs – I’m not saying any of this thought process is particularly rational. I’m also quite taken with the idea of the John’s Phone, although that might be an extreme, if cool, way to de-tech. I’m also quite taken with the idea of being able to take or leave the world, in the form of a tablet that runs Android. I wouldn’t lose anything I currently enjoy; I would just get to manage it better.

It’s a thoroughly modern conundrum.

In the bleak midwinter...

Another day, another week, another month. And █████ the ████ off my ███████ when it's ████ing, is it cold. I'm not a fan of the cold. I lived through the winter of 2005, I've been there man.

Genuine, like - that was the winter I lived near the Alps. The frigidaire of central Europe. A metre and a half of permasnow for three months. That was a winter. The teachers in one of the schools I worked at used to go cross-country skiing during their lunch breaks, whereas I did a pot of coffee and dried my socks on the radiator.

But that's all in the past now, much like my left toes. Only joking, I still have them all.

It's mad though, how mad the British go when it gets cold and there's snow. All known life comes to a pathetic halt. It's not even a spectacular grinding halt, an implosion or anything particularly catastrophic. You just wake up one morning and the day won't start. In Germany if there's snow the trains just drive through it, everyone gets their chains out and just goes to work. Kids still cycle to school and if you catch a plane on Christmas Eve you'll see a man with a jet washer standing on the wing getting rid of pesky anti-aerodynamic ice so that you don't fall out of the sky. The plane still won't be late though.

I think the British are just glad of the extra day off in these long periods between bank holidays. Me, I've never been busier than these past few weeks - I have been getting trains in all sorts of directions, and I've been writing all of my thoughts down but I simply haven't had the chance to get them translated into pixels. Never fear - they are coming.

Neither have I forgotten your Formspring questions, which you can still ask. And even more neither have I forgotten the series of 'Photos Off My Phone' posts I had planned. Including this one:

All that and more still to come after the break, don't go away.