Fun with ammonia

You may have heard the comedic feminist epigram: "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."

Well... fish may not need a bicycle, but they do need a cycle. The period, in the life of a new aquarium, during which the biological filter is established, growing enough nitrifying bacteria to convert the waste products from the fish (ammonia) into still-toxic nitrite, and then much safer nitrate. While this is happening, the tank is said to be cycling, a process that is complete when ammonia and nitrite levels fall to zero (or as close as makes no difference) because you have enough bacteria to eat it all, and nitrate levels gradually rise until the next partial water change.

You can cycle a tank with a small number of fish, which is how we started off the biological filter in the BiUbe, but this is stressful for those fish as they're subjected to higher levels of ammonia and nitrite than is best for them, so this time round I was hoping to do a "fishless cycle."

A fairly easy concept to grasp but more complicated in its execution, the fishless cycle basically involves introducing chemical ammonia into a tank for the bacteria to feed on (and starting the colony off with some bacteria from an existing tank if possible) and waiting until you've grown a colony large enough to handle the waste from your fish, at which point the fish can be introduced. In practice this is a bit of a juggling act because (a) you don't know how much ammonia your colony of fish is generating and (b) you have to guess that amount and then add it daily to keep the bacteria fed until the fish arrive. It's also important to do regular testing to monitor the colony's progress. Too much ammonia can kill off the bacteria and put you back to square one.

The first challenge was finding a source of pure ammonia. Or ammonium hydroxide I should more properly say. Most of the bleach available from supermarkets is contaminated with perfumes and surfactants to make it more acceptable as a cleaning agent. Any of that is not good for the inside of an aquarium. After a short search we eventually found a local shop (of the kind we usually refer to as "plastic man" because they sell a huge array of plastic tubs, buckets and bowls) with a stock of Kleen Off - pure ammonium hydroxide. Result!

It's never as easy as that though is it? The bottle had no indication of concentration, so to arrive at the required ammonia levels (4 or 5 ppm) in our 130-litre tank I had to do some experimenting. I'd found a handy guide to fishless cycling that talked about adding "a few drops at a time", testing, and repeating until the numbers came up, so armed with a jug containing 2 litres of treated water, my bottle of ammonia and my testing kit, I made a start. First with 3 drops, then 7, then another 10, 20, 50. Pretty soon I was up to 200 drops in my 2 litres and the test phial had barely shifted from the weakest colour (0.05 ppm) to the next blob (0.1ppm). Pretty soon the water was looking pretty syrupy with ammonia and I was approaching the point where I'd be adding the equivalent of half a bottle to the tank every day. That can't be right! (I thought). Slowly the reality dawned on me - the ammonia was bleaching the dye in the test kit.

I think we'll be cycling this new tank with some fish from the BiUbe!

Flooring: Day 1

The penultimate process of kitchen refurbishment began today, as the kitchen (and hall) flooring began to be laid. First order of business: lay a wide enough strip to store all the remaining materials, thus ensuring they all only need to be moved and restacked once, and then prepare as much of the plywood sheeting that carries the oak boards as possible, to enable rapid floor laying on Day 2.

Progress was hampered by our desire to install a "hatch" - replacing the original - to allow access to the subfloor void without destroying sections of floor if and when new services need to be installed. And also by the scribing, removal, and cutting of any doors that happened to be in the way.

By the end of the afternoon, things were looking... um... different

Another side-effect of starting the floor laying process is, of course, the sudden lack of a kitchen sink. Yes, from now until the worktops are fitted in approximately two weeks' time and the sink can be installed and made waterproof, we'll be filling the kettle and the coffee maker from the understairs cloakroom sink, and washing up in the bath. What was that I was saying about things getting worse before they get better?

How did this happen?

Something about our flight to Toronto yesterday triggered one of those gestalt moments for me. A chilling realisation of a modern truism. And it's this:

When I was young, the world was geared around older people. Us youngsters had to defer to our elders, treat them with respect, shut up and get on with doing as we were told, and not make a fuss.

Now I'm older, the world is geared around younger people. Us elders(*) are invisible. Virtually ignored by marketeers, shoved out of the way in queues and generally not given as much respect as people of our age commanded in "those days."

So it seems, or at least yesterday it seemed, as if somehow everything had flipped 180° and I'd missed that crucial nexus - if it ever existed - when I was the "right age" for the world.


(*)OK, 54 isn't THAT old, but... you know... sometimes it FEELS as though it is.

AI & EQ

American Idol Season 10 is well under way now and I've been thinking for some time that I should comment on the changes that were rung for the 2011 version.

Indeed, regular readers may remember that I predicted, around this time last year, that 2011 would be the end of Idol following the departure of the man Cowell. Well there comes a time when all good bloggers have to eat their words and for me, this is that time. I have to say that the choice of judges to replace Cowell, along with Ellen Degeneres and Kara Italianame, has been nothing short of inspired.

Randy Jackson was always my favourite judge anyway so I was delighted he stayed. The other two empty seats were filled, as the entire televisual world must by now know, by Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler. I'm not going to pretend I had a clue who Steven Tyler was before AI started this year. I mentioned a little while ago that I've never been one for learning, or even finding out about, the names of bands I listen to, although naturally (?) I had heard of Aerosmith. Didn't matter though. His unique blend of empathy, honesty, and mad-crazy wacko otherworldliness soon had me hooked and converted to a fan. He just seems to be permanently enjoying himself, which I find totally infectious.

As for Jennifer Lopez, what's not to like? Recently voted the world's most beautiful woman, not only is she easy to look at she talks a lot of sense too, so she's easy to listen to. It's sense that comes from years in the industry, a successful career on stage, and a heart that seems genuinely to want the best for the contestants and wants them to be able to produce their best work too.

So: judges? Tick. Seacrest? Tick. Well come on he's been doing it ten years. He's part of the woodwork. Production values? If anything a slightly bigger tick than before. And when you couple all that with a set of contestants that include a handful of real originals, Idol is once again back on track as far as this household is concerned. Admittedly when compared to last year's dire choices it didn't have to go far to be on a whole other level, but it could have gone either way. Now, it looks like it might be around for a few years to come.

I just have two issues left. One, it's getting harder and harder to avoid the spoilers. I've had to "hide" two or three Facebook friends for the time being, because they insist on posting the results the day before the show even airs here.

And two, there's another show that Cowell left last year. Britain's Got Talent. It starts its fourth run here this coming weekend. So with Cowell and his cohort Piers Morgan both taking the US shilling - er, nickel - and leaving us for the West Coast, how does the UK measure up in the Judge Replacement stakes when compared to the success of American Idol? Well, we got David Hasselhoff and Michael McIntyre. FFS.

A long, hard slog

Anyone who has been around the Internet for even a short while will be familiar with spam. Even after the well-publicised fall in spam in December of last year from its historic highs of around 80 billion emails daily, it still accounts for almost 80% of all email traffic, and signs are that it's on its way back up again, as new botnets compete to fill the gap opened up by those that have been shut down.

But this is all going on in your Inbox, right? And in the hidden wars over at your ISP, with ever more sophisticated spam filters that can get rid of 99% of the crap before you ever see anything?

That's what I thought, until I received a letter recently offering me longer harder erections. Yep - POSTAL spam. Incredible.

It's the future!

I have a Slashdot widget on my iGoogle home page. Along with most of the other widgets on there, except Google Reader, I don't often pay it much attention, but today it displayed a tantalising headline: Extreme Memory Oversubscription For VMs. Having worked on VME for many years, I still retain an amused, distant interest in the activities of today's virtual machine enthusiasts. Here's a quote from the article...

"Their method is based on a combination of lightweight VM cloning (sort of like fork() for VMs) and on-demand paging. Seems like the 'other half' of resource oversubscription for VMs might finally be here."

Good grief. On-demand paging! Imagine that. Something we were doing in the mainframe world at the end of the 1960s. Next they'll be telling me they've invented a subsystem called Virtual Store Manager.

That's the trouble with the computing industry today. It's staffed with twenty-somethings fresh from college who like to think they're original thinkers and have no concept of, or interest in, history (or reinvention of the wheel). Even if they could be bothered to read up how we did it on mainframes they would probably not think it relevant (as a commenter on the article points out). Sad, really. The truth is high-end PC systems with massive amounts of memory and virtualisation technology look more and more like mainframes every day. They have the same problems, and those problems have the same solutions.

(If you're *really* interested, you can read the original Slashdot story here.)

Water, water, everywhere...

Here we go again. A drier spring than usual has led to reservoir levels being 15% down on the average for this time of year, and we're already getting water companies warning of hosepipe bans and giving us advice on how to save water.

Apparently leaving the tap running while you're cleaning your teeth wastes 7 litres. Imagine that! And then imagine the fact that United Utilities (previously Northwest Water) wastes considerably more each day through leaks. And when I say considerably more, I mean orders of magnitude more. I mean 460 million litres. Per day. "Chief Reporter" Dave Guest pointed this out to the water authority stooge on the telly last week and got the same old reply. We have an ongoing programme of leak control in place. Yeah, and you've been saying that for the last ten years to my certain knowledge. After ten years of "ongoing" leak control, you're still losing 460 million litres a day. How bad was it when you started, ferchrissake?

It's a total disgrace that water companies up and down the country are STILL allowed to sit on miles of old, dodgy, perforated piping and yet declare "profits" every year. Profits that come from ordinary households paying over the odds for their water supplies, only to be told to cut their usage in times of drought. Not even drought, actually. It's been raining on and off for weeks. There is no drought. If this is a drought God help us if it ever gets as "bad" as the oft-quoted summer of 1976 when we went 10 weeks without any rain at all.

Let's do the maths together. If you wanted, through the simple expedient of not running your tap while you were cleaning your teeth, to save the water wasted by our local water company in a single day, it would take over 65 million people changing their behaviour to do it. The entire population of the UK. And then what could we all do to save the wastage by Southern Water? And Severn Trent Water? And Thames Water? And Yorkshire Water? There are 20 water companies serving the UK. 20 companies pissing our expensive, treated, potable water out of their pipes and back into the lakes, rivers and streams, and all the while shelling out the money we've paid them to supply our water, to their shareholders, as "profit."

You couldn't make it up.

Comic timing

We've been trying to sort out the pressing of physical CDs for Weird & Wonderful for months. The cover art for the front was, as regular readers will know, put to bed months ago, the photo for the inside front cover was in the bag in March, so what's really been holding us up was the back cover or, more precisely, the permission to use one of the two photos I'd found on t'Internet.

Permission for the first of the two was granted almost as soon as I asked, but the owners of the second were, shall we say, slightly more "legal" about the whole process, requiring a signed contract for limited use to be exchanged (by fax) and taking several months to even decide that approach was acceptable. Still, to give them their due, they did eventually come through and I was able to place an order for 100 CDs a couple of weeks back.

We had wanted them to be available for sale at the hotpot, but it seemed unlikely that hope would materialise, as the original delivery estimate was for June 10 and that didn't take account of international shipping. Sure enough hotpot came and went, with no sign of the discs.

They arrived in this morning's post.

Making do with instant

Major and ongoing disturbance to sleep patterns has its advantages. For a long time now, one or other of us has been waking up between 5 and 5.30 - occasionally even earlier - and not being able to get back to sleep. Not having to leave until 7.30 to take Nikki to work, such an early rise time translates into a 2-hour morning stint at the puter and - the real bonus - enough time to enjoy a pot of real coffee.

The downside is flaking out in front of the TV by 8.30, the consequent early bedtime, and an inevitable early wake-up again. It's a vicious circle, I tell you!

But guess what? Something even more vicious? The one day in - what? 20? 30? - that we do manage to stay asleep until the alarm kicks in at 6.30, means there's only time for one cup of (instant) coffee. And when you've been used to savouring two mugs of delicious Java fresh from the cafetière, that really bites.

Storm warning

Recently we found out about the opportunity of a lifetime... which, ironically, we may be JUST too late for.

Storm the Charts is a campaign designed to repeat the success of last Christmas's campaign to get Rage in the Machine to the number 1 chart spot in preference to Simon Cowell's "traditional" X Factor winner, who in recent years has been a shoo-in for the Christmas #1 on account of the cynical and exploitative timing of the show.

Only this time, instead of just the number one, the campaign is trying to take over the entire top 40.

And this time, instead of the profits STILL making their way to Sony BMG (who ironically own the rights to the Rage in the Machine single and therefore still made money on the back of the Christmas campaign), they're choosing unsigned indie bands who have never charted.

Bands, in fact, like Beresford & Wallace.

How cool would that have been? Mere weeks after releasing the album, to have Spin Doctor charting, and downloaded by thousands of people who only a short time ago had never heard of us?

Unfortunately, there is an application deadline for bands wishing to take part of March 23. And in order to apply, our music would have to be already available from iTunes. Even though iTunes is the quickest online retailer at processing new music, they still quote 1-3 weeks as the lead time to load up new stuff, so even if we could get it to them today we'd still only have a slim chance of meeting the deadline, and that's without taking account of the delays introduced by our chosen digital distribution partner.

No, sadly, we're gonna have to take a back seat this time round and miss out on the fun. BUT - if the campaign is successful and captures the UK music-buying public's imagination in the way the organisers hope it will, then there'll almost certainly be another go later. You can bet we'll *definitely* be there next time round.

Vinyl: Bad Company

Artist: Bad Company
Owned on digital media: No
Want to replace: No

Bad Company were one of the favourite bands of a mate I shared a house (and a room) with as a student, and also a regular feature of the "Heavy Rock" discos we used to host on Thursday evenings during our time at UMIST.

I was never that into them, even then, and to be honest I don't remember buying this album, so I suspect it's one of those I "acquired" by virtue of being the Student Union Socials Secretary during my second year. This in itself mired me in controversy, as some of my "friends" held the opinion that albums sent to me as Socials Secretary belonged to the Union, whereas I treated them as a perk of the job (there weren't many!), especially since most of the ones I received were duplicates that had already been sent to the Union addressed simply to "the Socials Committee" or similar, and in any case I was only ever interested in a handful of the stuff that turned up.

In view of the bad feeling this caused towards the end of my student years, it's ironic that I now have absolutely no interest in replacing this album in my digital collection (although I would like to hear it again just once to make sure!).

Ideas 'R' Us

I had an idea for another novel last night. It came to me in one of the most vivid dreams I've ever had and for once, I remembered it for almost an hour after waking - long enough to write it down in sufficient detail for me to build the story on it.

Trouble is... I really don't need any more ideas. From a position a few years ago of saying to myself "I know I could write a really good novel, if only I had an original story concept" to now, when I've been writing down every good idea I've had since that first thought, I've got more ideas that I know what to do with. Certainly more than I could ever write in however much life is left to me. People in the know - specifically this guy - told me (well, not ME personally, you know - he wrote it on his blog. His very-well-read blog) this would happen and guess what? He was right.

Damn' good idea though. Really dark and menacing. And as always, FAR more attractive than the story I'm trying to write at the moment. Which makes it just one more distraction I don't need!

ZoomZoom

A few years back I joined ZoomPanel. You may have heard of them - they run online surveys on behalf of marketing companies to gauge opinion before adverts, products, etc come onto the market, and also keep tabs on the public's views on issues of the day. With a self-selecting audience I'm not sure how meaningful the results of the latter are, but let's not get sidetracked with that.

In exchange for completing their questionnaires, members rack up points which can then be exchanged for "gifts." When I first received an invite to sign up it sounded like a bit of a laugh. Register my opinion (always an attractive proposition) and win some prizes while I was at it.

Two things weren't immediately apparent:

• the rate at which points would be accrued
• the value of the "gifts" on offer

The reward for any survey is usually around 50 points, but with survey requests only arriving sporadically, often with several weeks between, the maximum rate at which points can be won is limited. The reality is worse than that. Surveys are often oversubscribed, or aimed at a different demographic, so I'd often answer a few questions only to be told that the survey had closed, or they were looking for someone with a different profile.

Far be it from me to cast aspersions, but it did seem after a while that some quite useful marketing information was being gathered before the survey suddenly announced it was full, or decided I didn't fit the bill. Not only that, but every survey always asked for information - gender, location, age etc - that was already available in my profile. Tedious, to say the least.

Even so, with the eagerness of youth (this was about three years ago) I pressed on, keen to make my first 1,000 points and gain access to the cornucopia of delights available to me. Gifts are arranged in "portfolios" which require a certain number of points before they can be opened. 1,000 points for the first, 2,000 for the second and so on. When eventually I began to approach the thousand-point mark, I took a look inside the first portfolio.

Hmm. Nothing much there to get excited about. I decided to press on towards the 2,000-point barrier. It's taken more than three years, but I did eventually reach it. Sadly, the prizes in the second portfolio proved almost as uninspiring as the first, so I cut my losses, ordered two things from the first portfolio, and cancelled my account. What had appeared to be "a bit of a laugh" actually proved a complete waste of time. The surveys took around 20 minutes on average and to reach 2,000 points I must have completed something like 40 of them. Over thirteen hours effort in exchange for two objects worth no more than a couple of quid.

So why am I telling you all this?

Well, the first of my two shiny new toys arrived yesterday morning. A small tripod "ideal for use with all types of camera."

Unfortunately, mere seconds after removing it from its blister packaging, I made the mistake of trying to deploy the legs. One of them snapped off in my hand.

When I stopped laughing I did wonder whether it was worth breaking the other one off and using the pathetic thing as a monopod. One more look at its cheap plastic construction was enough to dispel that idea. It's now in the bin, along with my ZoomPanel account.

Special offer

If you've been reading regularly you may have picked up on the fact that we've paid a few visits recently to our not-so-local garden centre, principally to buy an incinerator and a bird feeder.

Whoever is in charge of marketing at this place - or at least, whoever came up with the "membership" scheme - is a genius. For a tenner a year gardeners can become "friends of the garden centre" which guarantees them 10% off all purchases, year round, two free coffees in the restaurant per month (you get one of those Café-Ritazza-esque stamp cards for this) and "privileged" access to a few events throughout the year, such as the summer special, where the discount is raised to 15%, and the Christmas event where, presumably on account of there being not much doing gardenwise, the discount reaches an eye-watering 20%.

Now even for a tightwad like me, the prospect of a couple of free coffees isn't going to provide sufficient incentive to make the 20-minute car journey to the other side of town, but it does sit there on your shoulder, whispering in your ear like the cartoon devil from Tom & Jerry. "If we're going to the garden centre we may as well stop for coffee," can easily turn, as it did on our last visit to "we could have breakfast there."

Which is where the marketing genius comes in. Because when "two free coffees" turns into "breakfast for three" the restaurant finds themselves almost twenty quid better off, and I'm left thinking something's not quite right. As I mentioned in the incinerator post, £5.25 for a bacon bap is taking the piss somewhat. Free coffee my arse.

So after that experience, why were we fooled into trekking over there tonight for their "Summer Special" event? 15% discount and the offer of a free drink and some nibbles aside, there was in fact nothing we needed for the garden. So why go to a garden centre? But we did. Exhibiting astonishingly lemming-like behaviour we drove over there after dinner, arriving 30 minutes after the posted start time of 6 o'clock. There, by the door, a low table was adorned with half-a-dozen plastic wine glasses, stacked near the front with their few remaining drops of wine clinging to their immaculately smooth surfaces, and a plate containing a few crumbs along with three pieces of french bread spread with sweet chilli hummus (or something).

They really pushed the boat out, huh? Oh... yeah... the counter held a few pots of olives too, along with a cocktail stick dispenser.

We wandered around the indoor part for a few minutes, marvelling at how similar it all looked to the last time we were there, picked up a couple of pieces of french bread spread with paté (the first plate had been replaced, but the wine hadn't) and... umm... left.

For the first of the July Wednesdays (*) we agreed it had been a total waste of time. But from a garden centre profit perspective? Genius.

(*) In a rare explosion of sociability, all my Wednesdays are occupied for the rest of July. Next week I've been invited to the Alfred Bradley Bursary Award ceremony at the BBC, the week after drinks and a curry in celebration of an ex-colleague's forthcoming wedding, followed by a week where our normal recording session has been brought forward a day on account of a diary clash, and the last Wednesday of the month is, as always, book club. Never mind "nearly famous" - I'm almost popular!

Flawed floor

We dodged the showers yesterday to take a quick peek at that mysterious garage floor. It's built more like a floor you'd find in a house rather than a garage. Every garage I've ever seen has a huge slab of concrete for a floor, not floorboards.

Most of it, I should say, is made of boards. In one small area - which looks in the right position to have been beneath the old MGC's sump for most of the time - the boards have been reinforced with additional timbers laid perpendicular to the run and screwed into place. Presumably the wood beneath had softened under the influence of countless oil drips. It certainly feels spongy to the tread.

Closer to where the door was, the boards give way to more substantial planking - pieces of timber stretching the whole width of the building but more than an inch thick and a good six inches wide or more. If these are in good condition when I lift them, they can supplant the rather too large and heavy planks which I originally bought for decorating. Even closer to the door the whole mess dissolves into small offcuts, bits of pine and whatnot which would make good kindling should we ever again have a fire in the dining room.

About three-quarters of the way across the floor, one of the boards is loose and gives a hint of What Lies Beneath: eight or so 2x4 joists supporting the boards and which themselves are resting on what looks like a mishmash of brick, concrete, and old tarmac. I don't think I can be entirely certain what it is until I start digging it up. At the moment it's covered in a film of white dust. I'll be ignoring discomfort and my long-time hatred of the damn things, and wearing a mask when I tackle this. There is a chance this dust is years of slough from the cement asbestos walls and I don't fancy keeling over with mesothelioma in twenty years.

This is turning into yet another example of how one job leads to another. The demolition was just the start!

I've made $10!!

It's pretty quiet in my corner of the world. I have a few regular readers (that I'm very grateful for - thanks guys!) and a few others happen by from various parts of the world, but I'm not one of those blogs that is read avidly by millions. In fact I'm so not into that whole thing that I couldn't even quote you the name of one of "those" blogs. So it was very much with tongue in cheek that I installed Google AdSense almost two years ago, more out of curiosity than anything.

Imagine my surprise then when I received an automated email from them today saying that now my account had reached the dizzying heights of $10, I needed to verify a few details in case they ever need to actually pay me. I thought it was a phishing scam at first, especially when I logged into my AdSense account and saw the balance was, as always, $0. That was until I realised it was showing the earnings for the day. As soon as I clicked on "all time earnings" the balance shot wayyyyyyy up. To $10.27.

So yes, I've verified my phone number, and nominated a bank account, and I'm in the process of verifying my address. Nice to know, with all this verifying going on, that my ten bucks will be secure from fraudsters.

Unfortunately, since Google don't pay out until the balance reaches $100, I won't actually be seeing anything for a while. I signed up in April 2007. Call it two years ago. So on current form it'll be around 2027 when I collect my earnings. I can put it towards my retirement party! Still, I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, so thanks to all my visitors for all your clicking!

What a drip

Our friendly neighbourhood plumber came round first thing this morning. Good timing, as it turned out. The drip, which had started off really slowly, had worsened to the point where it was filling the bowl twice a day - right to the brim.

It took his more experienced eye less than a minute to discover the leak was not, in fact, at the joint in the pipe. This was merely the lowest point of dribble. The source was higher up. Much higher up. At the neck of the tap. If we'd looked more closely we would have seen it for ourselves quite easily. The water was clearly visible, running over the chrome.

Doh.

Silver lining? Ten seconds tightening with a professional-looking wrench and no charge. If only all drips were so easily sorted.

No snow!

And there it was: gone! After listening to the 10 o'clock forecast warning that another two or three inches were expected (that'll be a disappointment for someone) and that some areas could have up to a foot (way too much of a good thing - someone else would be choking on it), what did we have?

A huge melt. There's nothing left.

Which, if repeated across the whole of the UK in these credit-crunchy times would be A Good Thing. At least, if yesterday's news is anything to go by. 6 million people failing to get to work, £1.2 billion lost to the crumbling economy, roads closed or impassable, trains, planes and buses cancelled, people full of the great British spirit battling their way to their local train station only to find that's as far as they're going to get. We wouldn't have won the war if we'd had this namby-pamby attitude back then, I tell you! Cough! Splutter!

Sorry. Got a bit carried away there. Still, it is faintly ridiculous isn't it? It's not like snow in February is exactly unexpected. It was even forecast. I heard Ken Livingstone on the news (mind you, he'll say anything to beat the drum won't he? Still smarting from having to hand over to Boris I expect) blaming the worst of the travel problems on councils who didn't want to send the gritters out on Sunday and pay overtime. What a load of bollocks. I was out and about on Sunday night and followed several gritters all over the North-west.

I tried to work out, in my usual geeky way, what proportion of the UK workforce 6 million came to. There's about 65 million of us altogether. If you assume a linear distribution of ages from 0 to 80 (I know that's not right, but for the sake of argument...) that makes 34 million of working age (over 18 and under 60), of which there's about 2 million unemployed (32) and an unknown number who don't work, or try to, at all. But even if you leave the figure at 32 million that's one-fifth of the entire workforce couldn't get to work! Crikey.

Rather madly I'd decided to stick to my usual routine and go in to the office yesterday. I could have worked at home, but as it turned out (and not surprisingly) a much larger than normal number of my colleagues had elected to do that, and overloaded the corporate VPN shortly before 9am, so I wouldn't have been able to get much done anyway. I really needed some light relief while negotiating the roads into the office, and it was duly provided by Radio 4, where they read out an email from a listener pointing out that we were now suffering the 21st-century equivalent of traffic chaos as well as the more traditional sort.

Yes, not only were the roads blocked and the public transport cancelled all over the place, but the traffic and travel WEBSITES were all crashing too, under the load of people trying to find out whether they should set out or not. What irony! What symmetry! The British do farce SO well.

POEBIS day

Traditionally Friday is POETS day. I guess it's just possible there's someone out there who doesn't know what the heck I'm going on about, so just for you: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow's Saturday.

Today I have an alternative slant on the tradition. Piss Off Early Because I'm Sick. Yes, with infinitely perfect timing, right before I take two weeks leave and with only 5 days left until Christmas, I've picked up a chest infection. Or an URTI to be more accurate. If I didn't have extra evidence I'd have to guess that I met the little blighter at one of the two Christmas dos I was at last Friday and Saturday, but since about three-quarters of Nikki's office are down with it too, I think we'll have to conclude it was this one.

So I've struggled manfully on (which by some strange coincidence I've just noticed is an anagram of man-flu-ly. Don't say a word) to finish the piece of work that absolutely had to be done today, and attend the voice conferences I absolutely had to attend, and now I've collapsed, panting, in a soggy, hacking, headachy heap here in front of my PC. The irony isn't lost on me. I wouldn't mind if the do had been especially brilliant, but had I known I'd contract lurgius expectorensis I'd have been more than happy to give it a miss.

Happy bloody Christmas. (Don't worry, I'll be better by then) (he bluffed)

Birthday Boy

Happy Birthday to me. A time for reflection, and as luck would have it, I DO have time for reflection. So I'm reflecting. On another year gone by, family, friendships old and new, hearth and home, the world, the news. It would be easy to feel depressed, but I remain (a) philosophical and (b) upbeat. I'm relentlessly upbeat, me. Even in the face of having to spend my birthday in the office, and not receiving any birthday cards from my closest family. Again.

Nikki excepted, of course. Her card is perfect. It is undoubtedly the best birthday card I've ever had. Concisely expressing the most moving and touching of sentiments without being cloying, trite or juvenile. A grown-up card from one grown-up to another (we like to pretend). So thank you for that, my darling; it made my day.

Maybe I'm being needlessly old-fashioned. Maybe the tradition of sending cards is being gradually eroded, from both ends of the generational spectrum. From the aged P who can no longer get out to the shops, to the younger generation who have never been used to sending, or taught by example to send, cards. Instead they are supplanted with phone calls, email messages and scribbled notes on Facebook. But although that may be just dandy for geographically dispersed friends and acquaintances, somehow it just isn't the same when it comes to family. You can't beat the excitement of the plop on the mat, the attempt to guess who it's from by analysing the handwriting, slicing open the brightly coloured envelope and slipping out the contents to read the heartfelt message within.

Still, a happy smiley email is better than nothing I suppose. Anything is better than nothing.