Okay, here’s the deal - henry and I were just lamenting the fact that we haven’t got anything good to blog about, so he suggested we give one another a topic. I foolishly agreed, and was given something stupid about horses. In return, inspired by a great anecdote I’ve been saving up about the time I locked myself out of the house, I suggested that he write about an occasion on which he’s locked himself out of the house. Having rejected his crazy horse idea, I realised that I was no longer able to tell my great anecdote about the time I locked myself out of the house, because henry was doing that now and it would look like I was copying him. Then I had the cunning idea of doing it anyway, so here it is.

I was sitting at home one Tuesday evening with a pile of CDs I’d borrowed from Ilford library, and it occurred to me that the evening could be fruitfully spent in returning them. So I left the house, locked the door, walked to the car… then realised I’d left the CDs inside. So I went back to the house, opened the door, put the keys down on the table, picked up the CDs, went outside, closed the door, and said “Oh dear I forgot my keys.”

It wasn’t a catastrophe. This was in the days when my old pal Colin lived here too, so I just had to pass the time until he got home. Obviously returning the CDs was out of the question - without my keys I couldn’t drive to Ilford - so I posted them through my letterbox to save myself from carrying them around needlessly all night. I then phoned Colin on my mobile to establish when he’d be home.

As I had feared, he was working late, so I had four or five hours to kill. We’d just established this when my phone terminated the conversation because I’d run out of air time. This was unfortunate, because whatever I did with my evening, it would be necessary to keep in contact with Colin so I knew when I could come home. But I’d worry about that later - first I had to decide what to do.

I decided to get a bus into Ilford, where I could go to the library, take a good book from the shelf, and have a pleasant time reading it. Possibly a bit of Sherlock Holmes. Having constructed this plan, I realised that I’d acted a bit rashly when I shoved the CDs through my letterbox. But it was too late to do anything about that now, so I got on a bus, went into Ilford, and approached the library.

I know what you’re all thinking. “Ilford’s in the Borough of Redbridge,” you’re thinking, “and all libraries within that borough are closed on Tuesday evening.” You are, of course, quite right, and on realising this I was doubly annoyed because a) had I realised that in the first place I wouldn’t be in this mess, and b) I was now standing in the middle of Ilford with nothing to do for the next four hours.

There’s not much to do in Ilford at the best of times, and it was starting to get late so most places were shut. About the only forms of entertainment open to me were Tesco and McDonald’s. I decided to make the best of a bad situation - I would go to Tesco, buy a book, then go and sit in McDonald’s and read it.

En route to Tesco I attempted to top up the air time on my phone. It was dark now, and raining quite heavily, and there was a howling wind, so I popped into the public toilet for some peace and quiet while I made the call. As I stood in front of the urinals minding my own business, someone came in and started shouting at me. I thought at first it was a drunk, but it turned out to be the person responsible for locking the toilets at night, and he was suggesting that I get out before he do it. This seemed like good advice, so out I trotted, and replenished my air time on the street corner as the rain lashed down and the wind tried to blow me into the road. I then tramped soggily to Tesco to see what books they had in stock.

There was only one I had any interest in reading - Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett. I hadn’t read this yet, but I did own a copy, and was somewhat reluctant to buy a second. But there wasn’t anything else any good, so I did.

And so I spent the rest of the evening on a hard plastic seat in the Ilford branch of McDonald’s, reading a brand new copy of a book I already owned, wondering all the time if anyone had noticed it had taken me three hours to drink my Coke.

That’s about the end of the story, and henry’s blog doesn’t seem to be up yet, so if I post this quick I can get in first and it will look like he copied me instead of the other way round.

This afternoon I decided to finally sort out the wigs we need for the movie. So I drove all the way to Lakeside Shopping Centre in the blazing sunshine, only to find they were out of stock. That was a waste of a journey, I thought to myself, and proceeded to drive home.

About halfway I remembered that I also wanted to purchase a sun lounger, having inexplicably mislaid my old one, so that I can lounge beneath the aforementioned sun and play with my laptop in the fresh air. Had I remembered this in the first place, of course, my journey would not have been wasted after all, but I didn’t so it was. But then I found myself passing a little retail park playing host to, among other shops, an MFI. Aha, I thought to myself, I bet they sell sun loungers. So I pulled in and had a look.

They didn’t. So it was still a wasted journey. But while I was there I decided to have a look in PC World and see if they’d got anything I fancied.

They had - home tee-shirt stencil kits! ShopDonkey has yet to take off and make us rich, and it struck me that this could be just what we needed - by doing the printing ourselves we could cut out the middle man, slash our prices, and make a fortune. I resolved to purchase the kit and experiment.

When I got home I told el10t I’d bought something that would make our fortune.

“It’s not one of those naff tee-shirt printing kits is it?” he asked prophetically.

“Er… no,” I said. “Um, as a matter of academic interest, remind me exactly what’s so naff about them.”

“They’re relatively expensive, awkward to use, and the results look about as professional as a Blue Peter Tracey Island.”

I decided to give it a go anyway, and printed a donkey onto one of the stencils. The first time I tried it my printer decided it didn’t fancy doing the red, so I told it to clean its print heads and tried again. This time it printed the red, but now it had given up on the black. I instructed it once more to clean up its act, and on the third attempt managed to print it successfully, only to realise I’d forgotten to flip the image and the stencil was back-to-front. Or rather it wasn’t, but owing to the nature of stencils, it should have been.

Undeterred I ironed the backwards donkey onto the tee-shirt provided. The result was a bit patchy in places, but not too awful, though a bit lumpy at the corners. With hindsight it was a mistake to re-iron these areas once I’d removed the backing - this action resulted in various bits of the donkey being transferred to the underside of the iron, and thence to other bits of the tee-shirt, resulting in a sort of hideous montage. I think el10t was right.

So it was a wasted journey after all.

Speculation regarding a picture of me posted on a very strange forum* led to the discovery that I’m the number one result if you do a google image search for mildly surprised. To my mind, this is a great honour - after all, how many other people can say that? None, that’s how many. The all-knowing power of Google has rated me the epitome of mild surprisedness, and who am I to argue? I don’t do arguing, mate, I do mild surprise.

I feel I should make the most of this opportunity, so I’ve decided to hold a seminar entitled Looking Mildly Surprised For Dummies. It will cost £50 a head, with concessions for anyone with three or more heads, which is easy money for me because I don’t intend to actually turn up. I’ll arrange beforehand for my place at the front of the class to be occupied by a stuffed barn own sellotaped to a cucumber.

If that doesn’t leave them looking mildly surprised, they can have their money back.

*No, it doesn’t make much sense to me either

What follows is really very unpleasant. I strongly advise that you don’t, in fact, read it. Especially if you’re eating.

I must also stress that it’s a complete work of fiction, and not, for instance, what happened to me today. It is absolutely and utterly not true.

So there’s this chap - a fictional character who I’ve made up for the purpose of this fictional story - let’s call him Smion. Whether he’d contracted a virus, or eaten something he shouldn’t have, is unknown to your humble chronicler; but for one reason or another, he wasn’t very well. He got out of bed, feeling a little queasy, and promptly threw up down the toilet. This presented him with a dilemma: should he go to work today or not?

Deciding that he’d thrown up all he was going to throw up, and otherwise feeling pretty healthy, he resolved, somewhat unwisely, to chance it. Having um-ed and ah-ed for so long that it was too late to walk to work, as would be his normal procedure, he got in the car, drove in, and parked. He then got out of the vehicle and began to walk from the car park to the building in which he works.

It was as he was proceeding in this manner that he had a bit of an accident. You’re probably thinking that he threw up again. You’re almost right, only this time a different orifice was involved.

At this point I must stress once again that this story is not about me.

What the hell was he going to do now? How to get out of this situation without being utterly humiliated? He limped into the nearest toilet, locked the door, and cleaned himself up as best he could. Much gagging was involved, but the job got done, leaving in its wake a toilet full of toilet paper that took an awful lot of convincing to flush away, and a smelly pair of trousers.

Clearly, spending the rest of the day at work was out of the question. For one thing, there was the smell. For another, who knew if there would be further incidents? But Smion didn’t fancy recounting the story of his accident to his bosses, and it occurred to him that a little white lie would make the whole sorry episode very much more palatable - the official version of events, he decided, was that all emissions had spewed from the oral cavity.

So he went and told his boss what had happened, with this one slight modification, got sent home, and now feels very much better. Thus ends my completely fictional story which is not true at all.

Earlier this evening I agreed to blog about Oliver Cromwell, and hied myself to the Internet to learn all about him. Unfortunately I kept being distracted by the chatroom, with the result that I only read one sentence, though on the plus side I read it about fifteen times. It seems that Oliver Cromwell was born into a family which was for a time one of the wealthiest and most influential in the area. I now know that fact very well indeed. It’s quite possibly that I’m the world’s leading authority on that particular sentence. Unfortunately I don’t know anything else about the man, though I have a suspicion he owned more than one funny hat.

Hang on, let me try and learn a bit more…

Oh dear, it’s all very political. I’m constitutionally unable to retain information relating to politics. It seems he entered parliament in the 1640s, had some wars, and then, towards the end of his life, died; but beyond that I’m afraid I didn’t take in any of what I just read. I know there were bishops involved at one point, if that’s any use.

I have the same problem with politics as I have with the weather. A weatherman will pop up on the telly, and I’ll listen intently, curious to learn what meteorological happenings tomorrow will bring, and when he stops talking I realise that although I took in every word, I have absolutely no idea what he told me. What they should do, of course, is present weather bulletins as song and dance routines. That’d hold my attention.

I appear to have strayed from the subject of Mr Cromwell. Fascinating chap, old Ollie - he was born into a family which was for a time one of the wealthiest and most influential in the area, you know. What’s that? Which area? No idea. Somewhere in England, I imagine.

That’s the end of today’s history lesson. I hope you all learnt a lot, though to be honest it seems unlikely.

It’s a bit late to blog. Can I fob you off with a limerick?

There was a young lady from Chad
(Though good grace wasn’t something she had,
And to call her a youth
’s not entirely the truth,
But one out of three isn’t bad.)

I never said it was going to be a good limerick.

I was going to begin this blog entry by establishing the fanciful notion that apostrophes are prey to big game hunters. I intended then to propose this as an explanation of why their numbers have been so depleted in recent years, their absence from their usual haunts becoming more pronounced all the time. After that I’d have suggested that they often appear where they don’t belong as a means of evading the hunters, who have forced them to adapt to new, unfamiliar territory.

Then, no doubt, I would have speculated on how this enforced flexibility might affect their evolution, foreseeing future apostrophes more adaptable than any other punctuation mark, and probably concluding that, in the event of a nuclear blast, they will be one of the few creatures to survive, and there’ll be an evolutionary battle between them and the cockroaches to determine which becomes the dominant species.

And I’d probably have tried to work in some word play about the hunters putting them in apostrophy cabinets at some point.

But now I come to write it, I realise it’s not remotely amusing, so I don’t think I’ll bother.

I once remarked on the striking similarity between myself and Sherlock Holmes. I also bear an uncanny resemblance to Leonardo da Vinci.

Leo had a tendency to get terribly excited about each new idea, right up until the next one came along, at which point the previous project would be abandoned and never completed. He always meant to go back and finish them off - in his later years he could often be found wandering through the streets of Florence muttering “I really must give her some eyebrows” - but it never happened.

I’m not quite as bad as he was - my undertakings are generally completed in the end, but they’re frequently put on the backburner for such long periods that when I remove them there’s a dark patch where the sunlight couldn’t fade the wallpaper. Let us take, as an example, the phenomenon that is PuzzleDonkey. At the launch of PD3, my spare time had been occupied almost entirely by donkeys for the last six months, and I felt I was due a break. It’s nice to have something so successful, but one can’t devote one’s entire life to a single idea. Rod Hull seemed to manage it, but look what happened to him. Variety is key to happiness and prosperity, and it was around that time I had the idea of making a movie, so I switched my brain from puzzle writing mode to film writing mode. For the next couple of months, the number of puzzles that got written was approximately zero.

Of late this was beginning to concern me, for the peasants were clamouring for PD4 and at this rate it wouldn’t be ready until 2058. To speed the process up, el10t suggested we draw Bean into our inner circle, he having made many excellent contributions in the past. This seemed like a grand scheme and I gave it the thumbs up.

I then went away for a cruise on the QM2, and when I got home Bean had written about eighteen zillion puzzles. It would seem that PD4 might not be too much delayed after all.

Now all I need to do is draw the donkeys…

I need to go to Tesco.

I exhausted supplies of liquid sustenance just prior to my jaunt on the QM2, and I’ve been so exhausted since I got back that I haven’t topped them up yet. Tonight I was thirsty and wanted a drink before going to bed, so searched the house for something that might fulfil the role.

I found half a bottle of Coca Cola, but this had been sitting out overnight and was completely flat. I reasoned that were I to pop it in the freezer for a bit, the icy coldness of the beverage might cloak its flatness, so into the freezer it went. While there I extracted a tub of ice cream - I figured I could fill a glass with the stuff, pop it in the microwave for a minute, and have myself a lovely vanilla milkshake.

My verdict was that liquid ice cream is too sickly for words, and does very little to quench thirst. So once it had got nice and chilly I tried the Coke instead. It was certainly cold, but this did very little to hide the fact that it was certainly flat, and I couldn’t down more than a couple of mouthfuls.

So I’m still thirsty. I could resort to tap water I suppose, but my failed attempts at improvisation have left me feeling a bit queasy and I doubt I’d keep it down. I’ll just have to be thirsty.

I’ve had a rubbish day. I’ll spare you the rant: in summary, getting off the boat first thing in the morning didn’t occur until 4pm, and the list of people I’d like to stab with a rusty knife just got considerably longer.

But I’m home now, and have ingested a celebratory pizza, followed by a much needed bath*. I then realised that my dressing gown, which I normally slip into after such ablutions, was nowhere to be found on the upper storey. So I popped downstairs and peered around the door into the living room. There it was in the middle of the floor. This was tricky - how to reach it in my state of undress without subjecting my webcam viewing public to certificate 18 footage?

Leaning around the doorway I carefully turned the webcam to the wall and then made my way happily across the room to my dressing gown.

You know the noise a webcam makes when the cable it’s attached to decides to uncoil, twisting the whole thing round by a hundred and eighty degrees? I heard that noise. I doubt the sound of machine gun fire could have prompted me to dive for cover more rapidly. I think I got away with it, but if anyone out there captured a blurred shot of my buttocks flying through the air at 200MPH, you’d be well advised to hold onto it until I’m a famous movie star and flogging it to the tabloids for millions.

*On rereading I realise that looks like I ingested my bath. I can’t be bothered to rephrase it to remove the ambiguity.

Day three aboard the QM2, and there’s bad news: my boss has been at sea for too long and gone mad.

Actually he was fairly mad to begin with. Ever since we got on board this godforsaken ship of the damned, he’s had us working EVERY SINGLE WAKING MINUTE. How he thinks I’m supposed to find the time to get off with a rich old lady I’ve no idea. But today his madness manifested itself in the most striking manner yet.

This morning we docked at Rotterdam. What’s surprised me on this trip is the amount of interest from the public - true, this is the biggest boat in the world still making its first stop in each of these countries, so I suppose some media coverage was to be expected, but it all seems like overkill to me. All week we’ve been tripping over TV crews exploring the bridge, and today there were hundreds, if not thousands, of onlookers lining the street, looking on in that way that onlookers are so good at. In a nearby office block a gaggle of young laydeez had procured a pair of binoculars and were studying our every move at close range.

One member of the bridge crew - we’ll call him Jerry for the usual reason - took up a pair of binoculars and watched them back. He waved. They waved. He put up a sign in the window that said “Fancy going for lunch?” They put a sign in their window with a phone number on. He rang it. They told him to bring friends. He asked if my boss and I cared to accompany him. My boss said we were too busy.

Too busy?! Now just a second here! We spent all of last week working late into the night to get this software ready. This week we’ve been working even later into the night - all the way through it on one occasion - to make sure it’s all installed and happy. We’re now pretty much there, with only minor niceties left to fill our time, and quite frankly at this point a break would not only make a refreshing change, but is probably an essential requirement if we’re to preserve anything approximating sanity. And yet here you are, given a choice between working even more and hot Dutch totty, and you choose the former? Are you completely and utterly bonkers, or do you have some bizarre fetish for bridge equipment?

Happily, our work is now over. We’ve left Rotterdam, to much waving from the assembled throng, and will arrive in Southampton at approximately 7am. I then get off, go home, and order a pizza. I think I’ve earnt it.

I suppose you want an update on the dire situation reported yesterday.

I was compelled, as I had feared, to spend the night with my boss. The whole night. I was absolutely knackered by the end of it. He was, quite frankly, insatiable. Not until seven o’clock this morning did he finally decide he’d had enough. Then, and only then, did he let me stop working and go to bed.

It turned out the single bed in our cabin was actually two beds pushed together, which someone had come and rearranged during the course of the day so they were now on opposite sides of the room. I collapsed into mine, fully clothed, and slept well into the afternoon.

When I woke up my boss had already vanished, presumably to continue working on the bridge. Before joining him I decided to have a look around in the hope of acquiring pants and/or pyjamas. It turns out there aren’t as many shops on this boat as you might imagine - one selling perfume, a gift shop, and a shop selling horrendously expensive looking clothes, mostly for women. In none of them could I find pants or pyjamas of any description. If anyone fancies opening a pants and pyjamas shop aboard the QM2, I feel there’s a niche to be filled.

I finally made my way to the bridge, worked for the rest of the day, then came to a little Internet suite on deck 2 to write this. It’s costing me fifty cents a minute, so you’d better be enjoying it. You might want to read it two or three times so you get my money’s worth.

So we get on board the QM2 this morning and they show us to our cabin. That’s ‘cabin’, singular. I’m sharing a cabin with my boss.

But that’s not all.

There’s only one bed in it.

But that’s not all either.

I like to travel light. When I packed, I decided to do without frivolities like pyjamas or underwear. I will sleep, I resolved, as mother nature intended.

I’m not sure if mother nature intended me to sleep with my boss, but if she did she’s got a cruel sense of humour.

On the bridge of the ship is a poem called ‘Ode to the Queen Mary II’. It’s rubbish. I reckon I could do a much better job.

A ship called the Queen Mary II
Was built with one cabin too few.
Because of this loss
I’ve to sleep with my boss,
And that isn’t a nice thing to do.

Here I am once again in my favourite Internet cafe, which I’m pleased to report still exists. It’s got jolly comfy chairs, which almost make up for the keys being in the wrong place on the keyboards. The lifesize* model of Lara Croft helps too.

But I expect you’re all wanting to hear about all the amusing incidents that coloured my journey. Shame there weren’t any then. The flight went smoothly, and they gave me a piece of apple pie, which was nice. I mean the fact that they gave it to me was nice, not that the apple pie itself was nice, though come to think of it that was nice too.

I don’t know why it is, but whenever I get on a plane I feel compelled to flick through the in-flight magazine, and today was no exception. I had an excellent book upon my person which I could have been reading instead, and I knew from past experience that the most interesting thing in the magazine would be the staples, but I flicked through it anyway. I don’t think I’ll be subscribing.

Then when we took off I looked out the window. I don’t usually do that on planes, preferring to cultivate the demeaner of a frequent flyer for whom such sights are old hat, so this was the first time I’ve really studied clouds close up. They’re less fluffy and more sort of stringy and fractal than I imagined. And there were surprisingly few old hats in them.

Then we landed in Hamburg, where I managed to shake off my boss and make my way to the Internet cafe, and thus my tale comes full circle. Tomorrow I get on the QM2 and divide my time between working jolly hard and trying to improvise some form of apparel that fulfils the dress code so they’ll let me mix with the posh people. I’m told the passengers are mostly rich old ladies, and I’m hoping to find one who wants a toyboy and hasn’t written her will yet.

*Well, some bits are lifesize

Today I’ve been mostly visiting Bletchley Park. Being an educated lot I’m sure you all know that this is where we cracked enemy codes during the war, and it makes for a whizzo day out. I learnt all sorts of interesting things - if I understood correctly, it seems the main reason we won is that the Germans were distracted from the war effort playing Tomb Raider on the Enigma machine.

In one room stood a mannequin kitted out as a soldier. In order to make him look more hip and trendy, I impulsively turned his hat back to front. I feel a bit guilty about that now - how many innocent schoolchildren will see him and be misled as to the uniform of WWII soldiers? Oh well, I’m just glad they don’t have CCTV.

Later, while roaming the grounds in the delightful company of Sam aka Wronskian and his girlfriend aka Alison, the discussion turned to something which prompted me to say: “I wonder if there’s a puzzle in that.” I’ve been rather lax on the puzzle writing front of late, so now I’m desperately replaying our conversation in a futile attempt to remember what it was. The only thing I’m fairly certain of is that it in no way relates to code breaking, which unfortunately doesn’t help much.

I’ll be in Hamburg tomorrow night, and on the QM2 for the rest of the week. I expect I’ll manage to blog every day, but such matters are always uncertain when one is on one’s travels, so if I don’t, don’t panic, I’m not necessarily dead. Most probably it means I’ve sunk the ship, washed up on an unpopulated desert island, and am doing my best to construct a broadband connection from two coconuts and a bamboo shoot.

Tired… so very very tired…

I’m barely awake, but will gamely attempt to bash something out that could loosely be described as bloggage. After a long week, working far more than I’m used to (i.e. at all), a weekend with my feet up doing very little is just what the doctor ordered. Shame I’m not going to have one then.

Tomorrow will be spent in attendence at a chum’s birthday spree to Bletchley Park, and on Sunday I’ll be getting on a big metal birdy which will transport me all the way to Hamburg. On Monday I board the QM2 and spend the day working frantically before it leaves port, before finally getting a day of rest on Tuesday when it’s at sea. That’s unless my evil boss manages to come up with something workish we can do while we’re barred from the bridge, and frankly I wouldn’t put it past him. Then on Wednesday it docks in Rotterdam, so no doubt he’ll insist we take the opportunity to do the W word again, and Thursday will be spent messing about with trains and taxis getting home from Southampton. Then I’ve got to work on Friday morning before finally getting some time off.

That whole schedule is obviously open to modification in the event that my tiredness results in an act of gross incompetence that sinks the ship, which frankly is quite likely. If you have shares in Cunard, this might be a good time to sell them.

Good lord this is turning into a long week. I worked for twelve hours* today. It takes its toll.

Have you ever woken up from a dream in which you were, ahem, intimate with someone you would never ever want to be ahem intimate with in real life - chiefly owing to non-gayness - and felt slightly disturbed by it for the rest of the day?** Have you ever stumbled zombielike around the office with such dull senses that you make two near-catastrophic mistakes within the space of a few hours?*** Have you ever sat in the bath at night, trying to keep yourself awake so as not to drown by turning your head little by little such that the droplets dripping from your chin realise a perfect reproduction of Munch’s The Scream in the thin layer of bubbles in the bathwater? Have you ever wondered why Selfridges don’t sell fridges? Have you ever had the suspicion that the blog entry you’ve just written includes at least one admission you’ll regret in the morning, but you’re too tired to work out what it was?

Me too. Night night.

*What I mean, of course, is that I was at work for twelve hours, but let’s not argue over semantics.

***But I also prevented my boss from making a catastrophic mistake, so that compensates for one of them.

Ooh apparently this is entry 500. How simply exciting.

It now looks like I will be spending next week on board the QM2. This afternoon my boss made some calls to see if he could arrange accomodation, and was told “We can probably find you a corner somewhere,” with the qualification that they can’t guarantee anything until we’ve flown to Hamburg and got on board. I think that roughly translates to “We haven’t got any free cabins, but we’ve got lots of occupied cabins, so there’s a good chance someone will die.” Knowing my luck the person who dies will be the scullery maid who sleeps in the bilge, so if anyone reading this happens to be a rich old lady with a heart condition, ensconced for the foreseeable future in a Grand Duplex apartment aboard the Queen Mary II, I’d just like to say BOO!!

I never look forward to trips on boats, but I think this one might actually be quite pleasant. They don’t want us getting under their feet while we’re at sea, so we can only work while in dock - the rest of the time, as far as I can make out, is our own. So really it’s just a free cruise on the most luxurious ocean liner in the world. I think I can live with that.

They’ve just said on the telly that children used to be glued to the television when The Magic Roundabout was on. I know it’s a pretty boring programme, but the notion that parents would amuse themselves by gluing their children to the television seems very wrong to me.

Elsewhere in the news, my boss tried to make me work to an insane time again this evening. I managed to wriggle out of it, but in doing so I think I may have promised to do an unseemly amount of work for the rest of the week, and I’m fairly sure I sold my soul to the devil, which with hindsight may have been a mistake.

Finally, various persons (you know who you are) have expressed scepticism as to the cleanliness of my house. To shut them up, I’ve created - thanks to el10t’s Great Big Adventure Game - a virtual tour of my house! This is probably the most exciting thing on the Internet. Get it while it’s hot.

Today I was at work from 9 o’clock to 10 o’clock. Unfortunately that’s 9am and 10pm, so I’m a bit knackered now. Don’t expect anything I write to make sense. Count yourselves spungly if I use real words.

After my long weekend cleaning the house I was struggling to stay awake in the morning, and everything after about two o’clock is a complete blur. I remember testing some software, but I also remember a large stoat-like creature emerging from the ceiling fan and turning into Shirley Bassey; which, if either, of those things actually occurred, I really couldn’t say.

What, you may ask - though I don’t suppose you do - is all this work in aid of? Well now, it’s all in preparation for next week, which I’ll be spending on the QM2. Except it sounds now like I might not, because they’ve run out of cabins. So unless they chuck someone off, we’ll just be flying to Hamburg, fitting new software, and then flying home again. Either that or we’ll run along behind, it hasn’t been decided yet.

If someone took all the work in the world and replaced it with happy kittens, that could only be a good thing. And yet they don’t. Which is a pity.

Right, I’m gonna make this quick coz I’m knackered.

Today began with a trip to Tesco to replenish my stock of cleaning products. The neighbour, who alerted me to the drainage problem, was in the garden at the time. I was hoping to sneak past without him saying anything, because it would inevitably be something along the lines of “Have you told the landlord about the drainage problem yet?” to which I’d have to reply “No, I’ve got to frantically scrub the place clean before I can call him out so he doesn’t find out what depths of squalor and fetid putrescence I’ve reduced the place to.”

To avoid this line of conversation I slipped out stealthily and made a dash for the car. The neighbour accosted me en route.

“Have you told the landlord about the drainage problem yet?” he said.

“Yes, of course,” I said.

So I made my way to Tesco where I bought one of more or less everything in the cleaning products aisle, including one revolutionary item which promised to remove even the most stubborn stains with ease. It turned out to be a small piece of sponge.

The rest of the day was spent scrubbing and dusting and hoovering and tidying, though I did have a break in the afternoon. For about five hours. But I got the job done, and was left exhausted.

After all that hard work I needed a nice relaxing bath. So I ran one, only to realise that my only decent towel had got drenched when I enlisted it to assist me in cleaning the bathroom, and I therefore had nothing to dry myself on, which rather stymied my plan to bathe.

And now I need food, and my microwave just beeped to tell me that food is waiting so I’m off. Night night.

More house cleaning. Oh what fun.

I set myself the target of completing the ground floor today and tackling the rest tomorrow. Anything which presented difficulties I therefore simply transported upstairs, rendering it a problem to be dealt with in the morning.

The bottom half of the building is now gleaming. I even went so far as to vacuum up the pine needles which have carpetted my living room since I took my Christmas tree down in February. Unfortunately my vacuum cleaner is rubbish, and only the hose attachment seems to work at all, which made the whole operation very similar - and in another, much more real sense, not at all similar - to painting the Forth Bridge with an eyeliner pencil.

After all that hard work I felt that I’d earned a pizza. Not that I usually feel obligated to earn my pizzas, of course. Now, usually when my pizzas arrived, I’m so ashamed of my grime that I sort of poke my head around a narrow gap in the door like a little old lady who lives on her own in a cottage in the woods and can see a hairy visitor with a wet nose through the letterbox. But today I opened the door wide and proudly, standing back for the delivery chap to admire my tidy, vacuumed hallway. I fully expected him to say “My, what a delightfully well kept home you have! It must be wonderful to wake up in such a clean environment!” but instead he said “Here’s your pizza", which come to think of it I prefer.

Tomorrow I complete the job, putting me in a position to call the landlord and get him to come round and fix the plumbing. Which is all very useful and it will be nice to have it done, but it makes for a pretty rubbish weekend.

Cor that was a busy day.

Thanks to the wonder of flexitime I only work in the morning on Fridays, and had all sorts of things lined up for the afternoon. I had to write a guest blog for henry, and one for Omally, I wanted to fix a bug in the chatroom, clean the house and change my email address, since I’ve just started getting spam on my current one, and I wanted to get all that done in time for the dressing up game at eight.

It didn’t work out like that.

The first delay was my boss persuading me to work late, which cut my afternoon in half for starters. Then, when I got home, my neighbour was playing with manhole covers and asked me to flush my toilet. I obliged willingly, and he stood peering down a hole as I did so. It seems there’s a blockage. This is a Bad Thing, and means I’ll have to call the landlord in to sort it out. This in turn means I’d absolutely positively better get on with cleaning the place, because if he saw the squalor I’ve been living in he’d throw me out on my ear.

So I busied myself cleaning the house and writing my guest blogs. I was making good progress on all of this when I received a text message from Omally, asking me to call Stu and get him to phone henry. This was a bit tricky because I hadn’t got Stu’s number. I asked in the chatroom, and no one there had it either, but between us we recalled whereabouts on the net it could be found. I hastened thither forthwith, only to discover that it was his mobile number - all well and good, if it weren’t for the fact that for the last few days Stu’s phone charger has been in location A while he’s been in location B. For this reason I didn’t expect it to work, but I rang it anyway. It didn’t work.

Then I had a brainwave - way back in March, my invitation to Stu and Sarah’s party came in the form of an email linking to an image which I remembered had their phone number on. Had I still got the email? Was the image still there? Was it their home number? As it transpired, yes, yes and yes. Sorted.

What with all these distractions and more, the other jobs on my list didn’t get a look in. I’m glad it’s the weekend.

First, a word to those of you who are my mum: you might not want to read this. The following demonstrates a level of incompetence on the part of your son which is frankly scary. We at SimonG.org take no responsibility for stress brought on by concern for the author’s mental health.

Yesterday there were still flies on the ceiling. The night before I’d counted seventeen: by now it looked more like thirty, swarming about the light fittings, and I decided enough was enough. I’d tried to be a good host, but by this point they were abusing the privilege. They had to go.

That was all very well in theory, but they didn’t want to leave, and I didn’t have the heart to kill the little chaps. No worries, I thought - one by one I’ll trap them under a glass and release them into the wild.

If you happened to look at my webcam between midnight and half past one this morning, you’d have seen me scrambling over furniture in my dressing gown in pursuit of my prey like a big game hunter, only with smaller elephants. Most of them were pretty easy to catch - they just sort of sat there as I lowered the glass over their heads - but a few were much smarter and did everything in their power to evade me. Nevertheless, I outsmarted the lot of them in the end, and was able to go to bed in a no fly zone. My original estimate of thirty turned out to be rather low - there were 82 of the wee beasties. That’s quite a lot.

I’ve had to evict enother eight today. One good thing to come out of this invasion is that it’s made me comprehend the depths to which my housekeeping has sunk. So tonight I went round putting all my rubbish in bin bags and took it outside to be collected in the morning. This involved traipsing the length of the garden several times, which in the dark and the rain meant treading on a lot of snails. So much for not wanting to kill things. By this point I was beyond caring.

After all that I decided to relax with a bath by candlelight, and very pleasant it was too. Afterwards, I climbed from the bath and blew out the three small candles, in little metal trays, that were sitting on the toilet cistern. Or, more accurately, blew them onto the floor, where they continued to burn.

So now the candles are lying on the lino, at various angles, merrily burning away, right behind the toilet where I can’t get at them. I found myself crouched naked, my head pressed hard against the porcelein of the bowl, huffing and puffing with all my might in the hope of extinguishing the flames before the house went up. All to no avail - in the end I grabbed a toothbrush, which happened to be lying nearby, and repeatedly whacked the one remaining candle in the hope of snuffing it thusly. The only effect was to catapult the burning embers out of the metal tray and onto the floor.

I put the fire out eventually. My relaxing candlelit bath had caused me so much stress that I needed a drink to calm my nerves. So I went into the kitchen, took an unopened bottle of orange juice from the fridge, filled a glass, looked away for a moment as I returned the bottle to its home, and then - on turning my gaze back to my drink - let out an audible “Mwaaaah!". There was a fly swimming in it.

It’s been one of those days really.

I went to the chip shop this evening.

Whenever I go to the chip shop, the procedure runs thusly: I say “A bag of chips and a can of Coke please"; the nice lady shovels three scoopfuls of chips onto a bit of paper, followed by one last scoop with about two chips on it*; I season the chips with salt and vinegar while she retrieves a can of Coke from the fridge; she wraps the chips; I pay; I leave; I come home; I eat them; life goes on.

Now, they have two bottles of vinegar - one with vinegar wot you can see through, and one with vinegar wot you can also see through, but not so well, on account of it being brown. Whatever difference there may be between these varieties eludes me, so it was always my practice to make my selection more or less at random.

One time, however, I evidently picked the wrong one, for the nice lady told me off. “That’s mumble mumble vinegar,” she said. “That’s for mumble mumble, not chips. You want to use the other one.”

“Do I? Oh, ah,” I said, and used the other one. Having done so, I immediately forgot which was which, and fear that I may very well continue to make the same mistake every time I go there. So now - to avoid further telling offs - I have to time the vinegar distribution to coincide exactly with the Coke retrieval, so she never sees which bottle of vinegar I use.

Of course now someone will tell me in the comments which is which, thus denying me the fleeting excitement of stealth chip seasoning. Which is probably for the best really.

*All chip shops everywhere in the universe do this. I don’t know why.

For the last couple of hours there have been approximately seventeen flies on my living room ceiling.

I don’t know where they’ve all come from. They certainly weren’t here yesterday. I can only presume that it’s some sort of day trip, and no doubt they’ll be gone in the morning. I suppose the other possibility is that one of their species had laid seventeen eggs somewhere in the house, and they’ve all just hatched, but they don’t look like babies to me. Come to think of it I have no idea what baby flies look like, but I imagine them to be cute furry things with big puppy dog eyes, which these certainly aren’t.

My ignorance with regard to the fly lifecycle doesn’t stop at not knowing the appearance of their young - I also have no idea how many you get in a litter. For all I know there could be another six hundred eggs behind the telly, waiting to hatch while I sleep. By the time I wake up tomorrow it’s possible - nay, probable - that I won’t be able to reach the front door owing to the thick wall of these filthy creatures blocking my way.

I just counted again and I think there are twenty-one now. I’m going to bed before I can’t move.

Today I’m going to teach you all to play the bottle top game. You have to be very very bored to play this game. It’s probably only worth bothering if you’re a) at work or b) a prisoner of war. If you work in a prisoner of war camp then that’s perfect.

All you need is a 500ml bottle of Dr Pepper. I’ve been told that other carbonated beverages work too, but I can’t confirm that first hand. I can’t make it clear enough that I take NO responsibility for injuries sustained or lives lost through participation in the bottle top game. You play entirely at your own risk.

Having acquired the necessary materials - to wit, the aforementioned Dr Pepper bottle - you must next remove the cap. As the name of the game suggests, this is the bit you need. What you do with the rest is up to you - I recommend consuming the Dr Pepper, but I realise I’m in a minority in actually liking the stuff, so you can please yourself. Quite frankly I don’t care. Just keep the bottle top, that’s all that matters.

Lining the inside of the cap you will find a circle of clear plastic, slightly concave. You must remove this - long fingernails may be required here. If you don’t have long fingernails, you may wish to let them grow before embarking upon the game, but your sense of excitement is likely to be so high that you chew your nails off altogether, in which case a knife may work in their place.

Having successfully removed the plastic circle, you must now face your greatest challenge yet. Concentrate - here comes the science part! What you have to do now is turn it over, and put it back inside the bottle top where you got it from. But now, you see, it’s not concave at all. Now - and this is the clever bit - it’s convex. Beneath it, if all went well, is a trapped pocket of air.

But what, I hear you cry - except obviously I can’t and obviously you don’t - is the good of trapping a pocket of air under my clear circle of plastic? The good of it is this: you can now poke the plastic circle with your finger, and it feels nice.

I recommend that you don’t poke it more than twice. That’s the point at which the novelty wears off. But for those few seconds, it’s almost (but not quite) fun. And in these moments of sheer boredom, what more could one ask for than that?

Today I went insane in a fancy dress shop.

I was looking for a few bits and pieces we need for the film, but I got carried away and bought more than I meant to. My purchases were: two wigs, red hairspray, clip on earrings, false eyelashes, a garter, fishnet stockings, and a rubber chicken. I realised after I’d left that nothing in the film script calls for a rubber chicken. I’m not sure why I bought that really. It just seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

I then came home and played with my new toys. The plot requires three wigs - a sensible one, a clown one, and one that’s exactly halfway between the two. To get the intermediate wig just right a spot of trimming and dying was necessary, so I sat down with a pair of sharp scissors and gave my new wig a haircut. Despite what some people prophesied this went just fine, and I soon had a wig structurally equidistant from the sensible one and the clown one. Now all I had to do was get the colour right.

I’d had the foresight to pop into Boots for some dye, so I sat with the wig in my lap and massaged it in vigorously. Unfortunately it seemed that hair dye doesn’t work too well on wigs. Not to worry, I thought to myself - I have this hairspray I purchased in the fancy dress shop. I’ll use that instead.

First I had to wash off the dye which had refused to take, after which the wig looked like a drowned cat. Obviously I couldn’t spray it while it was wet, and so, eager to complete the job quickly, I decided to dry the wig by the cunning expedient of putting it in the oven.

Of course, the reason the dye didn’t work is that wigs are made from plastic. So perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised when it melted.

All in all I think it went quite well.

In her quest to better understand England’s green and pleasant land, our Canadian correspondent Qov has requested that I blog about the Norman Conquest. I agreed willingly, undeterred by the fact that I know nothing about it. Google is my friend.

It all started, it seems, in 1016, when the King of Denmark, Cnut, seized the English throne by killing King Ethelred the Unready, demonstrating neatly that they both lived up to their name. The murdered king’s widow Emma hastily married Cnut - whether this is because she had a monarch fetish or because she didn’t want her head chopped off, the history books don’t say.

Ethelred’s son, Edward the Not Quite So Unready But Frankly a Bit of a Wuss, fled to France, where he lived on a diet of onions and frog’s legs until 1042. By this time Cnut and his sons were dead, so Edward decided it was probably safe to come home. He returned to Blighty and they let him play at being king for a bit. But they also made him marry some bird named Edith, who looked like the back end of a constipated rottweiler, so it’s no surprise that he never had any heirs.

When Edward snuffed it in 1066, no one was quite sure whose turn it was to be king next. At that point things get a bit chaotic. Harold eventually gets the gig, but William seems to think it’s rightfully his, and decides to illustrate his view by means of several thousand men waving pointy things.

The battle doesn’t come off as smoothly as it might. Harold has an unfortunate incident with an arrow, while William’s attempt to orchestrate a carefully rehearsed attack formation ends in utter confusion on account of everyone in his army being called Norman.

To cut a long story short, William won. He was crowned on Christmas day, just in time to slip into a frock and do the Queen’s Speech on the telly.

I just realised something.

The day that just finished was el10t’s birthday. That means it’s a year since we auditioned for Eggheads.

When we went for that audition they gave us each a sticker with our name on so we didn’t forget who we were. That night, when I came home, I trudged upstairs, peeled off the sticker, and slapped it against the wall for safekeeping. I’ll deal with it later, I thought to myself.

It’s still there.

I really need a cleaner.

Boring administrative thing number one: Tomorrow night at 8 is the dressing up game. Join us in the chat. It’s fun. Honest.

Boring administrative thing number two: If you’ve got a MovableType blog and are fed up of getting comment spam, I’ve come up with a solution you may be interested in. You can find it here.

Speaking of the chatroom (What? Yes I was. In boring administrative thing number one, that’s where.) I was in there today (well, obviously) and the conversation turned to my general slobbishness. The general view seems to be that I should Do Something About It.

It was proposed that I get a cleaner, and I can’t say I’m not tempted. It would be nice for all my junk to magically put itself away while I’m at work, and it would be nice if my living room floor were topographically closer to Denmark than to the Andes. But on the other hand, I wouldn’t feel comfortable paying someone to clean my house for the same reason I don’t like the bag packers at Tesco, plus how could I be sure she* wouldn’t chuck away stuff of vital importance? What might look like a screwed up piece of paper with scribbles on to the uninitiated could well be the workings of a fiendishly clever puzzle, or a movie prop, or part of an elaborate experiment designed to study the behaviour of my cleaner.

And in typing that, I’ve had a rather fiendish idea. I’d like to think I have a fairly scientific mind, and a keen interest in the world around me, and if I ever own a pet I will surely conduct experiments to further my understanding of its mind. Of course the chance of me getting a pet is next to zero - I can’t look after myself, never mind some poor, innocent animal - but I might get a cleaner, who I could treat in much the same way B.F.Skinner treated pigeons. It would be marvellous fun, devising little experiments I could set up each week to expand mankind’s understanding of my cleaner’s brain.

For that reason alone, I think I’ll do it. My slobbery, then, will soon be a thing of the past. It’s a massive sacrifice, but I must be strong. I do it in the name of science.

*Yes, yes, or he. But I bet it’s a woman.