Come fly with me

Birmingham airport. It is teeming with rain. Absolutely hooning it down. Rainfall of biblical proportions.

In fact, I'm just ready to hear Gabriel's trumpet. It's as close to Armageddon as I think it's possible to get.

And there is nothing - and I mean nothing - funnier than the sight that greets us as the taxi driver drops us off. All the people streaming out of Arrivals, all clearly returning from sunnier climes.

And all of them are wearing the classic Brits-abroad combo of shorts and vest tops.

The collective look on their faces as they negotiate the car park, amidst a torrential downpour, the wind whipping at the puddles and sending up spumes of spray, is priceless.

The fact is, I find this sort of thing funny. Does that make me a bad person?

Reasons to be busy (part two of three)

Because only having one blog to keep updated is so 2007, isn't it?

Because there's nothing better than driving from one end of the country to the other - twice - over a long weekend.

Because being in the company of sweaty cyclists is a reasonable way to spend one's time.

Next Tuesday I revert to normality after my Irish weekend. A couple of days to get the stout out of my system. Then I'm going to Land's End on Thursday evening. I'll turn 180 degrees in the early hours of Friday morning, hit the accelerator and, all things going to plan, end up at the other end of Britain about three days later.

And then I'll drive back home. Just as well, really. One hell of a commute, otherwise.

I'm driving a support vehicle for colleagues who are cycling the 900-odd miles from Land's End to John O'Groats to raise £10,000 for a cancer support charity. I've also been appointed as the team's diarist - so for more details, head on over to the Queasy Riders blog.

We could use a little interaction.

Reasons to be busy (part one of three)

I'm looking at my diary. I'm checking to see what September has to hold.

Bloody hell. I think I'll need to break this down into chunks.

OK. This weekend I'm off to Ireland to catch up with a side of my family I've never met before. Yes, I have Irish ancestry. My mother's parents came over to England in the 1920s. There are some delightful photos of them wearing clothing I was about to call 'period costume', but what at the time probably qualified as just 'costume'.

Most people who claim Irish heritage normally do it in the days running up to St Patrick's Day. I'm sorry, but having a liking for Guinness or owning a Pogues CD doesn't quite cut it. But it's a source of shame to me that, other than a brief stop-over at Dun Laoghaire a few years ago, I'd never visited what the tourist board probably still calls the Emerald Isle.

I didn't even realise I was pronouncing 'Dun Laoghaire' all wrong until relatively recently. Shocking.

It's doubtful whether I'll be kissing the tarmac at Cork Airport on Saturday afternoon. For one thing, I'm escorting my mother, who doesn't stand for things like that.

And when I come back I've got several other Pretty Big Things to do this month. More detail to follow.

Pushing tin

It's been quite a month for milestones. They come in groups, apparently. A little like buses, but perhaps without the social stigma.

Tomorrow is our tenth wedding anniversary. And they said it wouldn't last. Actually, they didn't. In fact, I'm not sure who "they" would have been in any case. Quite frankly, Katie and I have clearly done the rest of the adult population a big favour over the last decade by keeping each other suitably occupied and off the market.

In some countries we'd get a medal for this. That's all I'm saying.

Anyway, the tenth anniversary is officially classed as 'tin' or 'aluminium'. Given that my spelling of the latter is going to disenfranchise my friends across the Atlantic, we'll go with tin. Now I don't want to sound like an ingrate, but it just seems a little low-rent. At least we've moved on from those silly low-number ones, like the paper anniversary at year one.

Let me tell you, buying your other half an A4 pad is no celebration.

So tomorrow we've booked the day off work. We're going to a very nice hotel in Stratford which is half-timbered in a non-ironic way. I fully expect a portion of the afternoon to be spent at the Dirty Duck. Then we're nipping next door to see A Midsummer Night's Dream at the RSC.

For reasons I will expand upon shortly, this might well be the last bit of tranquility I get to experience for the next few weeks. Oh, the mystery.

Look ma, no mac...

I must be a crushing disappointment to you all.

By the way, it's not the first time I've said that in public.

Contra to everyone's advice, the replacement to the PC-that-is-no-more turned out to be yet another PC. I'm just not sufficiently wedged-up to pull together the eight hundred quid necessary for a basic iMac. There's a credit crunch on, don't you know. Anyway, I got a decently fast PC, all the software I need, and a fancy-pants wireless printer for £250 less than that.

I know. I'm a failure. As one of the continued Mac-less majority I cannot play hacky-sack, go snowboarding or grow interesting facial hair. And it means I'm having to negotiate the dickwaddery (qv) that is Microsoft Vista. My past years of home computing have clearly been incomplete without the right-hand edge of my screen showing an additional clock, a random slide show and an RSS news feed delivering, for some reason, local news for an American audience.

I guess I can't play with the cool kids just yet. But if anyone wants to know about industrial disputes in Ohio.....

PC, or not PC?

Oh buggeration.

The big computer - the one upstairs that gets used for non-bloggy things - is officially on the fritz. Well, I assume it is, at least. The fact that it won't load up, preferring instead to emit a regular ticking noise from the direction of the hard-drive, confirms my suspicion. This is not good.

It's not good because my iTunes library is on it. It's not good because a lot of my photos are on there, too. But mainly it's not good because it might involve buying a new computer.

The expense is one thing. Given the choice between having the money in my account or in someone else's, it's a no-brainer. However, needs must when the Devil vomits in your kettle. In any case, the actual pain stems from the buying process itself.

I can't be the first person to have noticed that PC World is Pac-Man made real, can I? When you're just browsing the aisles, you can't avoid the ghosts, sorry, sales attendants, no matter which corner you turn. They're stalking you. Yes, you can indeed help me, callow youth. By naffing off until I need you. But when you actually want to buy something, it's like you've eaten a power pellet. They scatter to the four corners of the maze shop. Distress flares wouldn't attract their attention.

Let's say you manage to ensnare one of them, and get to the point where you've decided on a model. There must be some parallel universe where you simply pay up, take your box and leave. But not here. Oh no. For we must first talk about support packages. And extended warranties. What really gets my goat is the look they give you when you say no. It's as if it's the first time they've ever heard the word. The look says:

"I've been in this shop, man and boy, for five-and-twenty years. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark, near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time. Like tears in rain. Time to die."

To which the response is, "Hang on, are you channelling Rutger Hauer's character from Blade Runner?"

I digress. Maybe I should buy a Mac instead.

Bring on the trumpets

Occasionally, just occasionally, a TV advert will leave me open-mouthed.

Indeed, agape.



There are no other words.