The next two days are both rather exciting. Tomorrow is the six-month-iversary of the Oxford meet where I first met my lovely Jess, which I will be unintentionally marking by meeting her stepdad for the first time. I think he’s probably going to chop me up into little bits, so I’m not sure how much I’m looking forward to that.

And the day after tomorrow, as I mentioned in the early hours of the morning, is the first anniversary of my not-having-a-proper-job-ification. Today I’ve been working jolly hard to get my revamped site finished off, and it should be ready for launch on schedule. Unless I’ve been chopped up into little bits the day before, obviously.

I’ve mentioned previously that I’m in the process of revamping… excuse me a minute, this smoothie I just poured myself, which on first sampling seemed quite nice, has revealed itself to be vile. I’ll go and get a glass of orange juice instead.

Right, where was I? Oh yes, revamping simongoodway.com. There isn’t a huge amount of work left to do on it, but finding the time to do it has always been a problem, so it’s never quite got done. I’ve had in the back of my mind the idea that it would be nice to relaunch the site on the anniversary of the day when I cast off the employment of Kloven Hooves Ltd and sallied forth into the world as a full time freelance illustrator, so I had a rummage through my blog archives tonight and found that the day in question was the 29th of July 2005, which by my calculation means the anniversary will fall on the 29th of July 2006, which is the day after tomorrow. Which means I haven’t got very long to get my site ready for relaunch.

So this evening I decided to throw myself into it and try to meet that deadline. No sooner had I begun than the biggest thunderstorm in the history of the world commenced.

BOOM! it went. BOOM! it went again. BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOMY BOOMY BOOM! it went, and although the extention cable that connects my PC to the national grid has got a surge protector thingy on it, leaving it turned on while Thor - or, if you prefer, Zeus - was using the house as target practice seemed like asking for trouble, and trouble is something I always think it’s unwise to ask for. If I’ve got to ask for something, I tend to pick cheesecake. Cheesecake, yes please; trouble, no thank you. That’s my philosophy, and apart from the effect on my waistline, it seems to work pretty well. So I temporarily abandoned my plan to have a busy evening and turned the computer off until the tumultuous weather wasn’t tumulting so much.

All of which goes some way towards explaining why I’m still sitting at the computer as it’s getting light outside. I think I’d better call it a night before it gets any lighter and I have to call it a day, so I’ll go and catch the moths that snuck in when I had my window open earlier and are now having great fun trying to find the way out of my lampshade, and then go to bed.

A couple of weeks ago I started going for long walks to be super healthy. Almost immediately, they began to have an effect.

Until that time, I could happily sit at my computer for weeks on end with no consequences except a couple of cobwebs hanging off my ears and ivy growing up my inner leg. But ever since I started going for long walks, I find that if I’m sat down for more than a few hours I get an unpleasant twinge in my right knee and I have to get up.

Now, it probably isn’t very sensible to be sitting down for the best part of a day without getting out of my chair once, but I’m a bit young to be getting a dodgy knee, aren’t I? Regular exercise has turned me into an old man! Soon all my teeth will be falling out and I’ll start watching Gardener’s World. That can’t be healthy, surely?

And how is Gardener’s World apostrophised? Is it the world of one gardener, or lots of gardeners? I suppose all the gardeners must be sharing a world, or they’d have to have one world each, and no one would be able to garden an entire world. So it must be Gardeners’ World. That’s that one sorted then.

I was going to tell you about Monkey Forest.

It’s great! There’s this forest, and you go into it, and there are MONKEYS! All over the place! Loads of them!

So that’s my extensive review of Monkey Forest. Now go and look at some pictures I took of monkeys. My girlfriend’s in there somewhere, too. See if you can spot which one she is.

What else has been going on? Well, I’ve been doing lots of work, naturally, and sticking to my super healthy diet. Sort of. It went a little awry last week when my lovely Jess was here, but for the most part I et things that were nutritious and free from artificial colours and preservatives. And now she’s gone back up north so I can get lots of work done, I’m back to eating nothing but the healthiest foodstuffs in the world. Except the four bags of Haribo sweeties I just et.

At the last count, I’d lost exactly no weight at all. I’ll have to get a whole new wardrobe soon.

And that’s really all that’s been happening really. You can go back to whatever you were doing before you started reading this now.

Hello! No doubt you’ve guessed from my non-bloggage that I’ve had my lovely Jess with me all week, and my goodness what a lot of exciting things we’ve done. But I’ll stick to the highlights - on Thursday we saw lots of scarecrows, and tomorrow we’re going to see lots of monkeys! Guess where we’re going? Go on, guess. I’ll give you a clue - it’s a forest, and it’s full of monkeys.

Yes! We’re going to Monkey Forest^TM!

Meanwhile I’ve been doing lots and lots of work, hindered only by laziness and my PC periodically going DEE DOO DEE DOO DEE DOO DEE DOO DEE DOO DEE DOO DEE DOO DEE DOO which is its way of telling me it’s about to melt. You see, my room is the hottest in the house, and you’ve probably noticed that it’s been about five million degrees centigrade recently, which has meant my bedroom was hotter than the inside of the sun. My PC didn’t seem to like that very much, so I had to keep turning it off. Unfortunately I was then advised to cool it down by the simple expedient of removing the sides, since which point it hasn’t gone DEE DOO DEE DOO DEE DOO DEE DOO DEE DOO DEE DOO DEE DOO DEE DOO again, denying me my only legitimate excuse not to work. So now I’m having to rely on laziness alone, which is far less satisfactory.

And then yesterday I popped to the postbox, and while I was out I thought I’d pay a visit to John and Hilary (the people who own the farm we sometimes stay at. Do keep up.) to see if it’s available this weekend, and guess who I saw when I got there? Go on, guess. I’ll give you a clue - it was their son Jon, my old school chum who I haven’t seen for about - ooh, what is it now? At least seven years I should think. So that was jolly exciting. He said he reads my thing, by which I presume he meant the very thing you’re reading now, so hello Jon! You must pop round some time and we’ll either feed you cheesecake or experiment on you, depending on the mood we’re in at the time. But not tomorrow, we’ll be at Monkey Forest^TM.

And that’s about it really. Call again soon for an exciting report on monkeys.

There’s a fly in my room. He keeps landing on my head. It’s getting very annoying.

Anyway, my dad informed me that a couple of the tyres on my car are bald, and that I’d better get them replaced so I’m not illegal.

So today I went to the tyre place and waited patiently while they replaced my tyres, paid, got back in the car, and drove away.

As I was reversing out, I hit a post that hadn’t been there two seconds earlier, and smashed the light casing.

I estimate that I was driving legally for fifteen seconds. It was a nice feeling while it lasted.

As is woefully often the case these days I’m far too busy to blog properly, but while I wait for the ache in my wrist to subside before pressing on with the next drawing on the agenda I thought I’d take a break to record for posterity another update on my all new super healthy lifestyle. Because obviously you’re all fascinated by the precise details of what I’m ramming down my throat.

henry suggested in yesterday’s comments that possibly Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut Clusters isn’t the healthiest cereal in the world, so today I switched to Whole Earth Organic Corn Flakes. I have to idea what the “Whole Earth” part means, but it sounds healthy. I also et two nectarines, some strawberries and a “surprisingly low fat” vegetarian cottage pie with a side salad of tomatoes, onion and lettuce, drank three glasses of water and one glass of orange juice, and went for my usual five mile walk. I can’t weigh myself now on account of my parents being in bed and the scales being in their bedroom, but I imagine I must be down to about 8 stone after all that lot.

Now I should go back to work but my wrist still aches so I’ll go and mess around on the interweb for a bit.

As part of my new healthier lifestyle (today’s stats: a 5 mile walk and a diet of Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut clusters, strawberries, grapes, water, orange juice, an apple, and a potato topped with something called soured cream which is apparently healthy) I’ve taken to eating Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut Clusters for breakfast instead of the more traditional (and yummier) hot cross buns. For some reason I tend to eat cereal in the kitchen, whereas I always took my former choice of foodstuff up to my bedroom, and this resulted this morning in me opening the newspaper.

I don’t usually do newspapers. I was quickly reminded of why.

I opted to peruse the Culture section of the Sunday Times, which happened to be lying nearby. The contents page proclaimed a review of Carrots of the Pirabbean II, so I thought I’d start my journey through newspaperland by reading what they had to say about it. Let’s all turn to page 12, shall we, and find out?

The review is by someone who claims to be called Cosmo Landesman, which seems unlikely, but we’ll overlook that for the moment. His opening sentence reads:

I simply don’t understand the phenomenal success of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.

He then rambles on about his mystification for a bit, concluding, in the second paragraph:

all I can say is, I don’t get it.

The rest of the review (abridged) goes something like this:

The screenplay […] is convoluted, repetitive and at times difficult to follow […] Depp gives one of the most awful performances I’ve ever seen […] The rest of the characters are too drab to hold our interest […] the fun element runs out very quickly. And not even Depp can save the film from drowning.

So, to recap, after admitted at some length that HE DOESN’T UNDERSTAND THE FILM, Mr Landesman, or Smellypants Stupidhead as he’s known to his friends, considers himself qualified to make all sorts of assertions about why all the people who like the film for reasons he doesn’t understand are wrong, including an unfavourable declaration about the inability of the characters to hold our interest. This surprised me, because I was under the impression that I’d thought the film was jolly good indeed, but then I understood it so I suppose I’m not as well positioned to judge these things as Mr Stupidhead is.

Annoyed by that, I flicked back a couple of pages to an article that had caught my eye entitled “The next step in brain evolution". This was clearly some kind of science story, so would presumably have been written by someone with brain cells.

Unfortunately it was a load of rubbish, claiming that the “digital universe” may be “the next step in evolution".

The thesis appears to be that growing up with computer technology has meant that young people’s brains are wired a bit differently than those of their elders. No doubt that’s true, but what it’s got to do with evolution isn’t made clear. Possibly evolutionary pressures will favour those better able to work with technology, but a) given that computers evolve orders of magnitude more quickly than we do, it seems clear that the disparity between how they work and how we want them to work will be resolved in our favour, and b) it’s pretty apparent from the article that that isn’t what’s meant at all - they seem to be hinting at some hazy concept of evolution that’s got nothing to do with DNA, and if you asked Richard Woods, the perpetrator of this pile of poo, exactly what he was trying to say, I suspect that he wouldn’t really know himself.

So Cosmo Landesman and Richard Woods both smell of wee and poo. Thankfully these two articles were enough to remind me why I never read newspapers, so I stopped.

Besides which, I’d finished my Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut Clusters.

A couple of days ago I happened to step on some scales. A couple of minutes later, when the dial had settled down, I was somewhat alarmed by the reading. Way back in January of the year 2005, you’ll no doubt recall, I weighed in at a mere 11 stone 11 pounds and nevertheless decided I looked far too much like a teletubby and would do well to cut out the fatty foods. I got down to about 11 stone 3 and celebrated my success by stuffing myself with pizza for the rest of the year.

So maybe I shouldn’t have been that alarmed that I was now a whopping 13 stone 3. But I was, and decided that drastic action was called for, and that I’d better promptly stop eating anything with calories in. Shortly after reaching this decision I was force fed a chocolate chip and marshmallow cookie, but apart from that, I vowed, there would be no more dietary badness.

That was on Saturday night. On Sunday I went to my nephew’s birthday party.

Well, naturally I had to eat some of the food on the barbecue and a slice of cake. It would have been rude not to. But as of the end of the party, there really was to be no more naughtyness in my tummy.

So far today I’ve gone on a five mile walk in the countryside, and consumed: a bowl of cereal, two apples, a banananana, four glasses of water, a vegetable moussaka, and a cheese salad roll. I weighed myself again this evening and it said I’m down to 13 stone - losing three pounds in one day seems like a pretty good start to me; I’ll be super fit in no time at this rate. I’m a bit peckish now, but I shall resist further pre-bedtime noshing, and I shall continue in this super healthy manner until I’m the fittest person in the whole wide world ever. So there.

Where were we? Ah yes, waiting to pick up my lovely Jess so we could go and see She Stoops To Conquer. Well, I did, and we did, and it was rather good, and then we came down to Leicesecesestershire and slept. And then it was Saturday.

We spent much of Saturday sleeping too. Jess always gets very tired when she visits the Goodway family pile, for she has to take allergy tablets so she doesn’t drop dead from contact with cat fur, and the side-effect of drowsiness is not lost on her. So we popped to Asda to get her a different type of allergy tablet instead. Would these ones also make her drowsy? Or would they have other, more terrible side-effects?

Meanwhile the house was covered in notes from my mum instructing anyone who read them to eat lots of strawberries, she having gone mad at a pick your own strawberries place, so on Sunday morning we decided to follow orders and consume said fruit. Dad was sitting at the table, I was standing over the sink sieving strawberries, and Jess was standing beside me. Then she said:

“I’m going to go and sit down, I feel weird.”

“Okay baby,” I said, and she rested her head against my shoulder in a loving manner - or so I thought. And it was quite a shame that I thought that, because if I realised that what had actually happened was that she’d fainted and slumped against me, I might have tried to catch her before she slid away from me and collapsed backwards onto the hard ceramic tiles covering the floor, narrowly missing the table and even more narrowly not smashing her head open, which was fortunately leaning forward a bit as she landed and then just sort of lolled back gently as she came to rest.

It was good that she hadn’t smashed her head open, of course, but it was still quite bad that she’d fainted, and I don’t mind telling you that I was jolly scared. I crouched over her and scrutinised her face. She was pale, breathing quickly, and her eyes were closed but twitching rapidly like REM sleep in fast forward. I spoke, but at first got no response. Eventually, after maybe twenty seconds, I said: “Can you hear me baby?” and finally got a mumbled reply of: “Yes.”

She quickly regained full consciousness. I helped her to her feet, took her through to the living room, sat her on the sofa, and left her with my dad while I went back into the kitchen to get her some strawberries and orange juice. Meanwhile my dad called the NHS helpline, which said we’d better take her in so they could have a look at her, but it was probably either low blood pressure or low blood sugar, and in case of the latter she should ingest lots of sugar. So she had a Coke and some cookies, and then we took a trip to hospital.

We waited a while, and when it was our turn we went in to see the doctor. We told him what had happened and that she’d just changed the type of allergy tablets she was taking, though he didn’t think it was anything to do with that. He took her blood pressure. It was normal.

His verdict was that there were lots of things that could have caused it - possibly a combination of the heat and the fact that she hadn’t eaten anything for a while, but really he hadn’t got a clue. As long as it didn’t happen again, we shouldn’t worry about it too much.

Then on Monday we went up to York for an open day at the university, which has got lots of ducks and a big river and generally seems quite nice. Then we looked around York and went to the Jorvik Viking Centre and Jess made me dress up as a Viking and we bought badges with pirate monkeys on them and a book of short stories by Philip K Dick and didn’t go on a ghost walk. And on the motorway on the way up I found myself behind a Mr Kipling lorry with a ‘How’s my driving?’ sticker on the back, and I resisted the urge to phone the number and say it was exceedingly good, but it wasn’t easy.

So far Jess hasn’t fainted again. She has fallen off a bed and walked into a window, but I think those were both due to stupidity rather than a medical condition we need to worry about. I’ll keep you posted.