The clocks go back. Where? Nobody knows.

I have a little widget on my thing that tells me the weather (saves me looking out of the window in the morning) and the news (saves me looking at the news) - it's one of those useless "isn't modern life great, eh?" things that we wouldn't miss if it were gone except we'd have to look out of the window or read the news.

Yesterday evening one of the headlines was 'Clocks turn back as British Summer Time ends'.

Er, wait. Is this really news? I had a little scroll down to see if there was something else, such as 'It's Sunday, as midnight Saturday passes without hitch', or 'Sun set to come up again say scientists'. Not least the grammatical problems I might have had with said headline - it sort of implied that these anthropomorphised clocks would be turning themselves back, or even turning themselves in... 'Timepieces call truce in war over minutes'.

I mean, I'm all for lazy journalism - as a lazy journalist myself, I think it's great that we can get away these days with cutting corners, copying press releases or simply making things up like our great hero Johann Hari. But seriously now, this clock thing happens every year - twice a year, even. It's one thing warning people, because they do get silly when it comes to following the time, but letting them know it has happened? That's just plain silly.

Must try harder.

If ALBOWIEB was a schoolchild, its school report would read "We've not seen any work off this child in weeks, must try harder," it would bring its report trembling back to me (its daddy) and I would tell it off and send it to its room with no supper. Maybe I'll smack it with my slipper, just to complete the 1940s postcard image. Little blighter. I say 'its', because it's quite hard work deciding whether your blog is a boy or a girl. You can't just look up its skirt, because people frown on that sort of thing these days.

Anyway - must try harder. People say that time flies when you're enjoying yourself, but I actually find that it flies when I'm not too. Time just flies. Tempus fugit, and all that. It's Latin. I think the saying should be more about encouraging people to enjoy themselves and not pay any attention to time, obviously unless it's getting late and you have to be up early tomorrow and you're driving so you'd better not have too much to drink, but what the hell you only live once, sorry officer?

I quite often trot out the same dull platitudes every now and then on here - I don't hang on to regular, attentive readers for long enough for anyone to notice the repetition, but I feel this aphorism holds particularly true when it comes to blogging: whenever you're doing interesting things, you just don't have time to write about them, and then when you're not doing interesting things, you have all the time in the world to write about them.

So, dear reader, when it comes to these long pauses between posts, and you're sitting at home in front of your computer wondering what on earth could have happened to dear Sam Burnett (I'd check twitter first if I were you) - you can rest easy, because I am no doubt having all kinds of fun somewhere, and I just don't have the time to write about it.

A national disaster happens.

The other day I was looking in my Guardian Style Guide and found out that cement and concrete are distinctly different things. Perhaps everyone knew that cement is an ingredient of concrete and that a cement mixer should be called a concrete mixer, but I, for one, did not know that. I feel much smarter already despite being only a short-term owner of the G-Style Guide.

I have also been thinking recently about words that really shouldn’t exist – someone was talking to me the other day about the vapid pointlessness of ‘embarcation’, and the equally-useless-but-only-validated-by-the-presence-of-its-opposite ‘disembarcation’. Why can we not just get in and out of shit, you know?

But what got me admiring my Guardian Style Guide today particularly was that it was such a delight to have some paper on which I could build a foundation of existence. The internet broke at work – it was a national disaster, I might add, caused by a fire in Birmingham which sent BT into a terminal tailspin and left us cast off from the entire world for literally a couple of hours.

I just didn’t know what to do with myself – it was surprising even to me how much I rely on the internet to scratch the itches of thought that pop in and out of my head. If I don’t know something it is momentarily upsetting to me until I can google it and 30 seconds later rest in a post-coital-esque glow of knowing satisfaction.

The internet giveth and the internet taketh away. I might just have to buy an emergency encyclopaedia for those moments when it’s not working though…