I said, I couldn't hear a thing.

The strangest thing happened to me last week. I bellyflopped off a banana boat into the sea and lost the hearing in my right ear for six days.

It’s very strange, not being able to hear. I can’t sleep if it’s too quiet, I like a bit of urban bustle to lull me off. That said, the past few nights I have had raging torrents of blood flowing through the tinnitus region of my head. It woke me up, I thought it was raining. I could even feel it on me, so mad was I going. Then I realised I’d left the window open.

My balance was affected, strangely enough – the inner ear is a strange place, like the outer reaches of Mordor, or the Matrix. Strange shit goes on in the inner ear. I kept sitting down half on, half off chairs, bumping into door frames as I tried to go between rooms and even painfully scraping my arm on a wall.

There’s a terrible feeling of solitude when sounds become a stranger to you – not being able to follow conversations or having ambient noise that drowns out everything, it’s like a blanket. You stop working hard to try and follow what’s going on and slip into a sub-basement filled with your own thoughts and occasionally people waving at you because you’re not paying attention. Yes, my ear, remember? I’ve been saying this for five days.

But oh, the relief when the sound comes flooding back. I lapse into a wearisome resignation when I cut my finger or get a cold sore, the sort of thing that comes and goes in a few days. I can’t remember life without my disablement, but debilitating affliction. I don’t know how pregnant women cope. I was wholly resigned to a life of deafness, head cocked to one side in a vain attempt to try and hear the blaring television. I was considering learning sign language or getting a dog. A pug for the deaf, perhaps.

And yet here I am, the foolish man who built his inner ear problems on the sand. Where are my headphones again?

My field of occupation.

Every mile travelled is another thing learned about the world - that's what I like about leaving the house. For instance, foolishly putting an honest answer on your visa form on the plane is what gets you taken aside in the immigration queue to have a nice little chat with a swarthy Tunisian official who barely speaks any English and only offers you heavily accented French.

'Journalist', I wrote into the occupation field. "Brum-brum," I said to the nice man whilst doing a steering wheel movement with my hands a four-year-old would have sneered at. "Car journalist." The sinister fellow planted behind the desk scrutinised me, and carefully noted down all of the details from my green form and my passport.

"Goodbye," he said suddenly, nudging my stuff across the desk. And that was that as far as I could see - there were some suspicious-looking secret police-types standing by our coaches, but I didn't come into further contact with anyone official until leaving the country when I had to go through the whole shebang again. I am decided that I am going to have some master baker or celebrity chef business cards drawn up.

My holiday is over.

I am in the airport. The Tunisian airport. Isn't it nice that they can put on free wireless in the departure lounge despite existing in a semi-permanent state of emergency and being ruled by an unelected military leader.

Wireless. Now that's civilised.

I hate waiting in airports. A literal no-man's land of nothingness. Well, nothing except perfume and booze. And in Tunisia's case rows of tiny shops filled with camel tat.

I sit here in the full knowledge of going nowhere for the next two hours. Neither forward nor back, hemmed in by irascible men with guns in the one direction and empty tarmac in the other.

We are the only plane today, save for an unofficial forced repatriation of a plane load of refugees from Niger via Libya. Not for them an all-inclusive hotel and free airport transfer, rather angry Tunisian soldiers with terrifying weapons but rather snazzy outfits.

The airport is a pointlessly grand affair, 50 optimistic check-in desks set the tone, vast marble floors and the sort of pseudo-Arab architecture that can only be described as Viennetta chic.

Our scheduled departure is now less than an hour away - but no plane in sight. Literally - there is nothing in the airport except a military helicopter. At least there is not an (ash) cloud in the sky.

For the moment I shall drink in the weather for five hours hence, when I shall scramble through my baggage for something warm to wear.

I am on holiday in Tunisia.

I am on holiday. Forgive me if I don't stop and chat for very long, but it is beautifully sunny outside after a couple of days of rain, there's a free bar and this mental Tunisian keyboard is making my face twitch.

Hereùs q sentence if I try qnd type it using the stnqdqrd aerty keyboqrd keys: It doesnùt ,qke qny sense qt qll: Theyùve bqsicqlly just tqken q nor,ql keyboqrd qnd s,qshed it qbotu the fqce zith q ,qssive bqt:

That last sentence is like one of those codes I used to have to crack in my Usborne How To Spy books. They were pretty rubbish books on a general vocational level, but on the plus side I did hold out against the North Koreans for three months using torture survival techniques I gleaned from them. The Usborne Guide to Birds wasn't all it was cracked up to be, either.

Seriously, the comma is where the M should be and the apostrophe is where the 4 should be. You have to press shift to get a number, for goodness' sake. This ridiculous place wouldn't even be invited to a G50 meeting.

My first thoughts? This is a country of much contrast. Abject poverty and thousands of crap shacks on the half hour drive from the airport. People driving ancient Peugeot estates and obscure Renault Clio saloons they never even bothered selling in Western Europe.

My main theory on the glut of impressive all-inclusive hotels in the area is that they don't really want you to leave the hotel. Dare try and you are assaulted by bolshy taxi drivers, bad smells and pavements that disappear. Camels, dogs and goats tied by the side of the road. Hundreds of ropey old men riding side-saddle on ropey old mopeds.

You wander through the nearest town and you are accosted every step by locals begging you into their tat-lined vestibules. It's a country you could really explore and get to know if it wasn't for the cloud of civil war and the fact that your all-inclusive lunch buffet opens up in half an hour.

I go on a holiday.

I’m going on holiday to Tunisia today. I have done the sums and it will be the 21st country I have graced with my presence. I’m not usually one to mark such things, but visiting new countries and different places is always such a genuine thrill.

Slightly tempered in this case by being 50 miles from the Libyan border. I’ve already been told I’m not allowed to rent a car to go and visit the border, but I’m hoping that nightly NATO fireworks will be visible from the beach. If only a slightly dull glow on the distant horizon.

I’ve never visited anywhere that’s been under a state of emergency before – although those nice chaps at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office say on their website that we should be quite safe from marauding revolutionaries. It’s an all-inclusive holiday at any rate, so if any angry villagers do happen to break into the hotel I shall recommend they eat cake. It’s free.

That border thing isn’t just my mum, either – apparently there are reports of shells landing up to 40 kilometres inside the Tunisian border. Gaddafi clearly wants to mop up all of the 200,000 refugees who have managed to escape. And even then the irony isn’t lost on me that as you read this I’m flying to a country that people are so desperate to leave that the French have even contemplated closing their borders for the first time in however many decades.

Bonnes vacances, non? Never fear – I shall attempt to blog from my barricaded residence in my ongoing vainglorious hunt for my BBC News moment of fame.

Free at the point of outage.

Blogger went down the other day. It wasn’t quite an epic disaster on the scale of say, twitter going bust or stubbing your toe, but it was fairly high up there in terms of niggles that day. I was left bereft, unable to write a post that I couldn’t think of but might have wanted to publish.

Tim Footman, of his excellent blog, asked on twitter whether we can really be critical of a free service, which got me thinking. I had the time to, see, prevented as I was from trotting out a vacuous blog post at that particular moment in time.

I supposed to myself that the NHS is free, and everyone complains about that. But then it can’t be free, it’s merely free at the point of service. But then you could say the same about a McDonald’s drive thru – it’s free at the point of service, but then you get to the point of paying.

My point, though? Well, nothing is ever really free. Somebody is paying somewhere, and it’s very often us-but-somewhere-else. I can complain about the NHS because I’m a taxpayer. Likewise can anyone complain about Blogger who has ever bought anything advertised on Google.

Not only are things never free, but they are invariably intended to make money. Blogger not only exploits my presence in this little slice of cyberspace, but it profits from it. It’s my duty to complain then, surely? In a blog post at the very least.

That thing where you think you've had a lie-in.

You know when you’re in bed trying to have a lie-in, you screw your eyes closed and blockade yourself into every possible duvet contortion to fight off waking up. You lie there for what feels like hours until it is impossible to continue, sure in the knowledge that it must be at least the middle of the afternoon by now.

I did that this morning – I thought I had been lying in bed so long that my family might shortly come looking for me, but then I sprang up, checked my phone and it was 7.04. So that was irritating. It’s not even very often that I spring out of bed because I am not a naturally springy person, but today I just happened to be excited.

Shall I tell you why? I got a new job yesterday. I’m going to play it all kinds of coy and not tell you what it is – maybe I will tell you all about it in a few weeks once I have moved back to London and I start work. It’s very exciting though – I’ve had lots of fun being a freelance writer, but that has mainly involved sitting around in my pyjamas. It will be great to wear actual clothes to an actual office, you know?

I won’t even tell you how many things I have applied and been interviewed for, but it’s great to be able to get my teeth into something meaty again – I suppose I should start practicing getting up at 7am...

A literary expedition to the charity shop.

I got some great books from the charity shop the other day. I don’t mind getting books from charity shops because books don’t get armpit stains. Sometimes the more high-profile charity shops get a little big for their books, but mostly you can get some great bargains. Like a 23-owner copy of Jaws from 1985.

I love looking at the shelves in a charity shop and seeing where the same person has brought in a job lot of books. Sometimes that person has precisely the same tastes as me and I pretty much end up purchasing their entire donation. More often you can visit two or three different charity shops and see exactly the same shelf full of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, yellowing Jeffrey Archers and a smattering of Freya North.

Unfortunately I have bought altogether too many books in recent weeks but it’s OK because I’m going on holiday soon. I shall fill the part of my suitcase that isn’t filled with shoes and pants with dubious paperbacks that I bought three for a pound and I will leave them on a table somewhere when I am finished with them. Because that’s how I roll.

Time flies when you're...

May? It’s May already? How can it be May? I mean, I understand that months do occur in a fairly consistent sequential format that is foreseeable well in advance...and yet May has still crept up on me.

It’s not like I’ve been looking the other way, or so busy I got distracted. Or in a coma. I do sometimes wonder what it would be like to be in a coma and then wake up to find that the world has not stopped. That’s the cruelty of life.

Not that you need to be in a coma for everything to pass you by. It has happened to me this year. Seriously – May? I can’t even remember spring. It went from Baltic cold to Riviera hot in the space of about a week. I think I was in a coma that week, but I can’t remember. One day I was wearing my gloves and coat and then suddenly I was sweating and trying to find my t-shirts.

I should really get a start on my Christmas shopping about now. Because let’s face it, as soon as they start clearing the Creme Eggs off the shelves ‘tis the season and all that.

In which I could breach a superinjunction.

I’m no lawyer, but I regularly chew Orbit sugarfree gum.

What on earth are judges thinking about with some of these superinjunctions? I don’t particularly care if a footballer can’t keep it in his pants or a television actor has to pay for sex, but it’s rather the existence of this legal gagging device that makes me queasy.

Who really gets to decide that something is or isn’t in the public interest? Based on what legal or accepted definition?

I think Prince Charles could have got a superinjunction to ban talk of his affair with Camilla, which would have thrown Diana’s Panorama interview out of the water. Hitler could have got a superinjunction out on the Sudetenland, or the Jews. That would have made history a lot different.

In fact if I can scrape together the cash I might get a superinjunction out on my taxes and stop the Inland Revenue from writing me letters, or get one out to stop people talking about my [REDACTED].

It makes me uneasy when the courts start to tell us we can’t talk about things they won’t tell us. It seems inevitable that a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters will inadvertently break a superinjunction within about five minutes of plonking away at the keys.

It reminds me of Martin Niemöller’s famous poem – “first they came for the monkeys, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a monkey.”

The lilies hang their heads and die. Hopefully.

My sister bought some lilies in honour of my mum the other day. Which is fine, aside from the fact that she is still alive.

And fine, aside from the fact that the entire house smells like an old woman has snuck in during the middle of the night and liberally pissed over the upholstery. I am not a fan of lilies.

My throat is upset at the cloying stench. It feels anxious, unsure of itself. Lilies are handsome flowers, but they are massively irritating.

I don’t understand why they need to smell so strongly – are they insecure? Are they worried that we won’t pay attention to them?

They are extravagant in nearly every way, with their splay of petals and massive waving green leaves. That monstrous pollen that turns up in the most unlikely of places.

I might have to replace these frou frou divas with some long grass just to tone the place down in the opposite direction, or maybe some freshly-sharpened pencils. Or a bag of chips. Or a cat.

I slow up by a Swiss lake.

I appear to be stuck in a permanent limbo of the beginning of my last day in Geneva - we had better get through it. We left me bobbing up and down on Lake Geneva, reading Time Magazine and trying not to fall off as large boats went past, and now we find me in the car, Geneva a distant memory in the rear-view mirror and the German-speaking part of the country approaching. I feel like I’m going home.

The one problem with German-speaking anywhere is the propensity to invent English phrases and words that simply don’t exist – a ‘handy’ is a mobile phone, ‘wellness’ is the ubiquitous expression for anything healthy. You can go to wellness centres, do wellness exercises or eat wellness flakes. Things have got so bad the word has started to creep over into actual English.

We were making our way to ‘Slow Up’, an irritatingly and rather incomprehensibly-named but thoroughly enjoyable day where cars are banned from the roads surrounding a lake somewhere (plenty to choose from) and cyclists, joggers, walkers and skaters have free rein.

We arrived in Murten, delightful walled medieval town complete with lake, immediately surrounded by literally tens of thousands of bikes, with literally tens of thousands of odd Swiss men in vegetable-hugging lycra shorts. It was horror on a grand scale, a sartorial Somme. What was nice, though, was to be able to order a bratwurst and apfelschorle in my semi-native tongue. Imma let you finish, French-speaking Switzerland, but German-speaking Switzerland has used some really great languages this year.

I’ve sadly never seen the point of gratuitous walking but did enjoy slowing up, punctuated as it was by food, boat rides and more food. There was no great room for walking, what with all the tens of thousands of cyclists. And yet good on those Swisses for doing something so simple and yet so compelling. What was no doubt intended as a jaunt by a lake had become a festival of doing fun stuff outside. Relaxing was busy-ness and vice versa.

This summed up the contrasts of my Switzerland experience, I thought to myself as I smeared my face with caramel ice cream. This was a country at once so dismissive of and yet so resplendent with all its greatest stereotypes. A land both iconic and unsure of its own identity. The Swiss probably wouldn’t be able to place themselves on a map, but this strange culture has made them so amenable to becoming the world’s debating chamber. A geopolitical haven at once so progressive and so conservative. And also, but perhaps just this weekend, really hot.