I miss a television show.

Do you know what I miss? 10 O’Clock Live. I was mildly perturbed when it finished - I came to really enjoy David Mitchell’s pug-faced indignance, Jimmy Carr’s biting asides and quizzical meerkat features and Charlie Brooker’s rasping infectious cynicism. Lauren Laverne was a bit of a bum note in the beginning, but she really began to grow on me to the point I found her utterly beguiling and delightful come series end.

And during the Hackgate scandal? Oh, how it would have perfectly captured the British appetite for biting humour, slapstick and cutting down those tall poppies. It would have been wonderfully hilarious and unrepentantly focused on bringing down those who have been trying to hide their wrongdoing. It would have been a great chance for that show to transcend from entertainment to vital part of the UK news landscape.

People have been going on for years about needing our own version of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show in Britain, but I think with 10 O’Clock Live we ended up with something better – American stand-ups are rubbish, and our fair green isles reign supreme in the art of being quite funny. Let’s hope a new series comes along soon...

Manly stock.

I occasionally worry about the fact that I carry a chap stick not being awfully manly, but then I pause for thought and realise that it has the word chap in it, so it must be manly. I also carry my chap’s stick around in my man bag, which also has a definitively manly word in its name.

It’s a tremulous thing, a guy’s manliness. In my head it seems to go up and down like the stock market – nice shirt, up 10 points, pink laces on my women’s-shoes-which-I-bought-without-realising-they-were-women’s-shoes...down 20 points. If that was a real manliness stock market I would slick on a bit of brylcreem of a morning, undo a button on my shirt and short sell.

Those women’s shoes are a funny thing – one of the perils of shopping at TK Maxx. I think women hide shoes in the men’s section so they can come back later and grab them without another lady noticing them in the meantime. Only the danger is that I could come along and take a shine to them. Minus 50 man points.

The perils of tomato sauce.

Barbeque season comes on you quite quickly each year, doesn’t it? It seems the first hot Saturday that comes along heralds the official start of barbeque season – I really think there ought to be a government agency somewhere that sanctions the start of the sausage and beefburger time of year though.

And do you know what? Squeezy tomato sauce bottles are a nightmare. Without fail I manage to get the stuff all over me – like a dicey sports car with a nervous throttle, you just can’t get the right amount of squeeze for the sauce you need. I knew a scientist in Bangor back when I lived in North Wales who explained to me the nerdy bits about the point of viscosity and suchlike, but it has never helped me not drown my food in sauce when I squeeze.

Is it really beyond science to create a bottle that can deposit manageable amounts of tomato ketchup on your dinner? It is many ways astounding, though, how many things in our homes are at the very forefront of scientific innovation and yet we take it all for granted. Except sauce bottles, that is. Science still has some way to go there.

Outdone by the kids.

We had a kid doing work experience in the office the other week. He was 15, taller than me and much better dressed, it made me sick. Literally, I was vomiting for hours.

I wasn’t really vomiting for hours. But it did make me literally metaphorically sick. And I’m actually feeling a bit sick right now writing about being sick. Is it like yawning, that your gag reflex is triggered by reading about people sick? It’s definitely either that, or the dodgy batch of grapes I had this morning as an ill-advised snack. I don’t know what it is about grapes, they just make you HUNGRIER.

But this kid. So self-assured, well-dressed and polite. No drugs, alcohol, massive spots or obvious ankle tags. Even worse, there was another kid I met last week, the youngest ever works-supported rally driver. Sixteen years old, and he makes a teensy 1.0-litre rally car handle like it’s an Audi Quattro bashing the tits off the Safari rally in Kenya. Probably.

But he was confident about it, a swaggering, assured 16-year-old rally driver. Seriously – it’s enough to make you sick. What is it about kids these days? They are supposed to be degenerate and useless, lazy and inappropriately fecund. Obviously I was a dream child at that age, too – I was articulate and desperately polite. All credit to my parents, I’m sure I was an exception.

Now, I’m not throwing accusations around here, but all I’m saying is I’m not a rally driver. They could have managed that, surely? Being pleasant just isn’t going to cut it these days, clearly.

Quite stylish.

I got a Guardian Style Guide for my birthday, like an ACTUAL book. Of course, I do use the website an awful lot to check things out, but there's nothing like actually having a reference work in front of you.

Perhaps it's down to me being a linguist by trade. I am used to sitting at a table with a pen in one hand and a massive dictionary in the other. It makes me feel like a terrific writer, having something so scholarly to hand on my desk at work. Right next to my lunchbox and a bag of Haribo I use to hold off the desperate consumption of the former.

In just shortly more than an instant (it's a terrible shame that leafing through pages has become such a prosaic waste of time) I can find out not only that I am supposed to spell Nichpa that way, but I am immediately compelled to look up the National Health Control and Infection Protection Agency, the UK body designed to do that stuff that it does.

With my Guardian Style Guide I am become a more knowledgeable and better-spellinged person all round. Good times, eh?

Magic moments.

It's like July and everything. Where does all the time go? Come to think of it, where does all the time go? We obviously don't recycle it, so what happens to all of the thousands of moments that are just used for a brief second and then thrown away?

Perhaps memories are a way of saving them up, those particular instances caught on film, whether photograph or video, our method of freezing a moment in time. It's the dull ones I feel sorry for. The eight hours a night I just sleep through and completely miss. I doubt there is anything more valuable I could be doing with that time rather than sleeping, but there are so many other moments I could put to better use. Blogging instead of sitting and staring at the wall, perhaps.

The past few weeks haven't been all about staring at the wall though - I have been very busy with my new job, getting used to everything and driving thousands of miles in fancy cars. I have also reached season three of the West Wing, which is mildly embarrassing given the two-and-a-half weeks since I started watching it again. Maybe we all need a temporal audit, for the official representatives of time to come along and tell us whether we are getting best use out of our precious moments.

It's certainly something to think about, but not for too long, obviously.