Go and hover your mouse over the little blue man on the lardometer. Go on, do it now. You see what it says? “Current weight: 12 stone 12 pounds” is what it says! That’s the first time my weight’s started with a 12 since… well, a long time ago. Of course if you don’t check my blog on a daily basis (but, really, could anyone go that long? It seems unlikely) then it’s entirely possible that I’ve yielded to my thirst for pizza - well, hunger really, unless it’s been liquidized - by the time you’re reading this, and it says “Current weight: 18 tonnes". But at the time of writing I’m relatively underoverweight, and I intend to make the most of my slimline physique while it lasts. When I’ve finished writing this I’m going to go outside and pretend to be a lamppost.

Except that I won’t give in to pizzalust, because pizza costs money and that’s something I need to start saving. And I shall tell you why.

Last week I was informed - and, being a dutiful blogger, immediately related to you - that Jess and I will no longer have the run of the farm at weekends. A few days later it transpired that this was no longer the case, but in the interim we’d begun to consider alternative arrangements. The one we liked best was the one where I rent a place up Lancashire way for us to cohabit in, which had the additional advantages that a) we wouldn’t have to spend all this nasty time apart, and b) I wouldn’t have to spend 75% of my life on the M1. And when farm availability was reinstated, we decided that actually those advantages were sufficient in themselves to justify the proposal, and so we’re going to do it anyway.

So if all goes to plan, within a matter of weeks the Leicesecesestershire Tourist Board will have to start looking for other means by which they can entice outsiders to visit this fair city than the fact that it’s home to me. Personally I can’t think of any other reasons why anyone would want to come here, so I for one will be very interested to see what they come up with.

On Friday Jess and I went to see Joseph - him with the amazing technicolor dreamcoat - at the Manchester Opera House. I’d booked the tickets in advance through ticketmaster. I tried to book direct from the theatre - but all the numbers I could find either put me through to ticketmaster or, on my fourth attempt, to a lady at the theatre who told me to use ticketmaster. So I relented.

We turned up at the theatre in good time for the 20:00 performance to be told by the lady at the ticket desk - possibly the same lady I’d spoken to on the phone, but possibly not:

“Y     icke    re f        ive o        erfor     .”

I turned my non-deaf ear towards her and said “Sorry?”

“Your tickets are for the five o’clock performance.”

On closer inspection it turned out that she was absolutely right and I’d messed it up. I asked what could be done about it. She said not much, because I’d booked them through ticketmaster - implying, presumably, that I could have got my money back if I’d booked them from the theatre. This seemed a little unfair given that the theatre had told me to use ticketmaster, but since it was clearly my fault I thought I’d better not argue, so I just paid for some new ones. If anyone’s got a time machine and wants to see Joseph at five o’clock last Friday, I’ve got two spare tickets you can have.

We then spent the rest of the weekend mooching around at the farm, lamenting the fact that it was the last time we were going to be staying there. My phone doesn’t get a signal at the farm, so it wasn’t until we got back to Jess’s house on Sunday night that I received the text message from my mum informing me that there’s been a change of plan and the owners aren’t moving in after all. So the era that I thought was ending is in fact continuing, with the added bonus that in the belief that they were going to be moving in they’ve gone and arranged to get a phone line and broadband installed. So before too long I might be blogging LIVE from the farm, and I imagine your lives couldn’t get much more exciting than that.

I just went for a wee.

On the way - and, indeed, during the act - I was half composing a blog entry in my head. It went something like this:

My bedroom - which is also my office, and consequently where I spend most of my life - didn’t exist when this house was built. It’s an extension, added later over the garage. What this means with regard to today’s theme is that it isn’t wired into the central heating system, so I have a heater that plugs into the mains to stop me from turning into an ice cube.

I don’t think I’ve ever gone as high as setting 3. If setting 1’s too cold, setting 2 can be relied on to set a pleasant temperature. And if setting 2’s too hot, I’ll switch it to setting 1 and soon everything’s just fine and dandy. But for the last couple of weeks, neither has been quite right, and my situation has been analogous to that of the mythological Goldilocks, where setting 1 represents the porridge that’s too cold and setting 2 represents the porridge that’s too hot, except that a) it’s air rather than porridge, and b) the porridge that’s just right would be represented by setting 2 and a half, which doesn’t exist. And so I’ve alternately been too hot and too cold, and it has generally been a distressing and trying time for me.

That’s what I was going to write. But on my way back from my wee, I walked past my radiator and observed two things.

1) The four settings are not 1, 2, 3 and 4, but 0, 1, 2 and 3. My brain had lied to me, rendering the second paragraph a load of rubbish.

2) Underneath the settings is a ‘thermostat’ dial. I’ve set it to 1 and turned it down a bit. It’s quite nice in here now.

Hello! Hello hello hello! Hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello! Hello!

How are you? Are you well? I do hope you are! I’ve been neglecting you, my pretties, I know I have. I do hope you’ll forgive me for being such a very naughty boy. I’d say that it will never happen again, but we both know it will, so let’s just put that behind us and move on, shall we?

Last week was spent enJessed, which was very pleasant but meant I didn’t do any work, so now it’s time to catch up. Unfortunately the comments on my last entry persuaded me to make the game described therein, despite the issue of how I was going to fit it into my schedule, so I’ve spent most of the week doing that instead.

So far today I haven’t done any work at all. It doesn’t really seem worth bothering now.

But of course what you’re thinking is: “Why is the fool rambling on about this nonsense when we’re fast approaching the end of an era that he should rightfully be telling us about?” To which I have no real answer, other than to assure you that I’m going to tell you about it right now.

The era which we’re fast approaching the end of began just under a year ago. Jess lived in Lancashire, I in Leicesecesesesecestershire, and if I set foot inside her house her stepdad would have turned me into an attractive scimitar display unit. Clearly what we needed was a vacant property within a quarter of a mile radius of her home, preferably belonging to old family friends I’ve known since boyhood who would let us have the run of the place whenever we wished.

So I paid a visit to John and Hilary, parents of a boy I’d watched being thrown up on at the age of seven, told them where Jess lived, and walked out with the keys to their farm located just across the street.

We’ve spent a lot of time at that farm since then, and it’s saved me a hell of a lot of driving. But what’s happened now is that, due to family developments that it isn’t really any of my business to go into on the Internet, John and Hilary are going up to the farm next week for a stay of several months. They’ve told me that we can still stay in the spare room, and insist that we wouldn’t be in the way, but I suspect that part isn’t entirely true. Thus it’s looking likely that after this weekend our farming days will be naught but a happy memory.

This is where we fade to a montage of some of the more interesting episodes to have taken place there - me getting my car stuck in the snow, me breaking my car, me falling down the stairs after being injected with growth hormones, me getting my car stuck again, me ruining the hot chocolate, me using my head to smash a light shade, that sort of thing - while George Formby’s I Wish I Was Back on the Farm plays quietly in the background.

Seven or eight years ago, when I lived in Essex, introduced bugs to marine navigation software for a living, and shared a house with my friend Colin, he and I had a game of Trivial Pursuit one day. This was a moderately entertaining way to pass the time, but we both had a bit of trouble getting our Sport and Leisure pie, for neither of us was terribly well educated in that field (because obviously we knew everything there was to know about geography, history, art and literature, science and nature and entertainment). Afterwards, reflecting on this difficulty which had blighted an otherwise enjoyable game, Colin remarked:

“It’s a pity you can’t play it without the Sport and Leisure category.”

That gave me an idea, and I expounded it to him. It struck me that one could theoretically write a computerised version of the game that could be played with whatever categories of question the player demanded, by simply drawing on the might of the Internet for material. Colin agreed that this was a whizzo scheme, and between us, over the following weeks, we implemented it.

It worked something like this: you told it what categories you wanted, and it then set about quietly googling for those terms, visiting the pages turned up by the results, and harvesting likely looking sentences. These would be presented in lieu of questions, with a key word asterisked out, and the object was to fill in the blank.

It kind of sort of worked. The snag was that half the sentences it picked were irrelevant, inaccurate, or made no sense out of context, and no form of knowledge or intelligence would be of the slightest assistance in working out what the missing word was. We’d already gone to all the trouble of programming the thing, but this problem proved fairly insurmountable so the project got more or less abandoned. And that was how things stood until just a few weeks ago.

What happened a few weeks ago is that I was thinking about Hextreme - which is what we called the game, in reference to the board redesign we’d undertaken to maintain the topology of Trivial Pursuit without the wasteful holes between the spokes - and realised that something had happened since I’d last applied my brain to it that might mean our dream could be brought to life at last. The something that had happened was Wikipedia was launched. And it occurred to me that by restricting our data mining to this source, the relevance and quality of the information being harvested might be heightened to the point that it was actually a good game. And I decided that what I ought to do is take this new approach and create an online version of Hextreme that all the boys and girls around the world can play. It is, after all, high time there was something new and exciting on simong.org, and there was a time when I had great hopes for Hextreme, which might now, at last, be met. The more I thought about the idea the more I thought it was indeed an honourable and whizzo scheme, and I couldn’t wait to get started.

Then I realised that there’s no way I’ll ever have time to do it, so I abandoned the idea again. But it was nice while it lasted.

Yesterday - today being, for the purposes of this blog, Tuesday, even though it’s gone midnight so technically Wednesday now… but was it yesterday? Come to think of it, it must have been Sunday - but none of that’s remotely important, so let’s just say ’some time recently’ to keep things simple, though I fear it may be too late for that - Jess and I went to the cinema to see Music and Lyrics, the latest romantic comedy starring that talented if somewhat one-dimensional actor Hugh Grant. I’m generally quite a fan of Hugh Grant romantic comedies, but I was a bit wary of this one after learning that it was written by the same person as an earlier Hugh Grant romantic comedy called Two Weeks Notice, which I’ve always avoided due to the outrageous punctuational error in the title - partly as a matter of principle, and partly because it seemed improbable that someone who doesn’t know how to handle an apostrophe could produce a decent screenplay.

Well it turned out that Music and Lyrics was Quite Good, so now I’m faced with the terrible dilemma of whether I should abandon my principles and watch the other one. I’ll wrestle with my conscience for another six months or so before reaching a decision. I wouldn’t want to do anything hasty.

Today - still pretending it’s Tuesday - we paid a visit to CenterParcs, where my sister, brother-in-law, nephews and parents are spending the week. We went in the pool and they turned on the wave machine and I wanted to go and swim in the waves so Jess, knowing that I’m not the world’s strongest swimmer - apart from a previous excursion to CenterParcs and the time I fell in a river, I haven’t done it in a decade - suggested that I stick near the edge. But that would have been boring, so I swam across to the far side of the pool and back again. Except that approximately the final third couldn’t be described as ’swimming’ so much as ‘fighting for my life’. I very nearly drowned. I really should listen to her.

While my parents are away, our job is to look after the cats. This is always a major undertaking, for Charlie’s on five hundred different types of medication, a countless number of which are there to ward off constipation. Unfortunately they aren’t doing their job at present, so part of our task is to follow him around and report in detail on anything that comes out of his bum. This hasn’t been difficult, because in the past two days his many attempts to poo have been in vain, as a result of which there’s been a slight change of plan and my mum’s come home to look after him and see if she can squeeze anything out by popping him in a vice. What the foreshortening of her holiday meant to me - which is, after all, the only aspect of the affair that anyone’s interested in - is that the assumption that we could let the house gradually slide into a state of grimy, mouldy, entropic chaos turned out to be unsound, and I had to run around like a mad thing transforming it into something that wouldn’t cause my mum to faint when she walked through the door. I think I got away with it, though we didn’t have time to empty the dishwasher.

You know, of course, about the horse who hates me - well now I seem to have invoked the loathing of a little kid as well. I really must read How To Win Friends and Influence People some day, because I’m clearly doing something wrong.

My path crossed that of the little kid last night in Frankie and Benny’s. Jess and I were sitting here - you have to imagine a table where I’m pointing (of course you also have to imagine that you can see me pointing) - and the little kid was sitting over here - I’m pointing to a different place this time - with a group of people which I presume, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, was his family. The little kid - let’s call him Charlie - was approximately five years of age, and had a balloon. It was a big balloon, about twice the size of Charlie’s head, and it was filled with helium - the balloon, not Charlie’s head - information I was able to deduce from the fact that it was suspended mid-air on a length of ribbon, the other end of which was firmly grasped in Charlie’s sticky hand.

It isn’t of the slightest consequence, but in the interest of painting a fuller picture, I think the balloon was red.

The action started when Charlie slackened his grip and his balloon got away. As it floated upwards, the motion of the ceiling fans propelled it sideways, away from Charlie’s table and towards ours. There it settled, equidistant between the two, the top of the balloon bopping against the rafters and the length of ribbon hanging down below.

On realising his mistake, Charlie wasted no time in leaping to action. He got down from the table, positioned himself under the balloon, and raised his arms to retrieve it. But his arms were short, and the ribbon remained tantalisingly out of reach. The thoughts going through his head were transparent on his face.

“My balloon! I need my balloon! Maybe I could reach it if I jumped… can I jump that high? No, I can’t jump that high! I’ve only got little legs and it’s all the way up there! What am I going to do? How am I going to get my balloon back? I NEED MY BALLOON!”

Being the kind, caring, compassionate, devilishly handsome chap that I am, my natural instinct was to assist Charlie in his hour of need. This would be no great personal sacrifice, for my arms were amply long enough to reach the balloon and hand it to Charlie without even leaving my seat. Putting this plan into action, I extended said limb and had almost grasped the ribbon when Charlie’s dad looked around and saw what was going on. Giving a brief nod in my direction to thank me for the help I was about to provide, he took charge of the situation and handed the balloon back to Charlie himself.

That was what actually happened. In Charlie’s mind, though, things were a little different - his perception of events was that I was one of those evil strangers his mummy had warned him about, and if his daddy hadn’t intervened and saved the day I would have stolen his balloon and floated away on it to my evil child catching lair at the bottom of the sea. I know this from the look of raw, untamed hatred he administered me with. I knew from past experience that children can’t really shoot lasers from their eyes, but it went against every natural instinct not to shield myself with the dessert menu.

I tried to avoid making eye contact with him after that, but I did glance in his direction once more as his family were leaving, and he was giving me That Look again. I don’t think Charlie will be inviting me to his birthday party this year.

I bet there was going to be jelly, too.

Just before Christmas, having completely failed to provide anyone with any useful suggestions as to what presents they could buy me, I found myself in Waterstone’s looking for inspiration. There I saw a thick tome by Arthur C Clarke entitled The Collected Stories, which on further inspection turned out to contain the collected stories of Arthur C Clarke.

I decided that this was a volume I’d be delighted to find in my stocking on Christmas morning, and left the shop satisfied that my endeavour had been successful. Then I decided that actually I wanted it NOW, so I went back into the shop and bought it.

This meant that I was unable to assist the thousands of people begging me to tell them what gifts they could bestow upon me, but on the plus side I got to start reading some jolly good stories a few days earlier.

It has been my habit to read said stories in, amongst other places, the bath. The procedure for reading in the bath, of course, is to support the book in one hand so you don’t have to worry about keeping both of them out of the water, which is all very well with thin volumes, but when your book’s got 966 pages can present a problem. Everything was fine until I got to about page 874, but by that point the weight distribution was so heavily biased that most of my hand was supporting the left side to stop it falling into the water, with the result that my little finger had the sole responsibility of keeping the thing open.

Clearly that was no way to carry on, so I made the drastic decision to reserve Mr C Clarke for reading in bed, and move onto the slimmer volumes of stories by Philip K Dick that I did get for Christmas for my bathtime enjoyment.

So this afternoon I sank back into the water and amused myself with my Dick, but the story I’d picked was a long one and if I read the whole thing in one sitting I’d have come out so wrinkly people would have mistaken me for the Mandelbrot set. The consequence being that I now have a partially read story by Mr Dick awaiting my attention, so naturally when I go to bed I must give it precedence over an unstarted tale by Mr Clarke. I haven’t investigated whether the rest of Phil’s stories are similarly lengthy - this would, after all, involve the incredible effort of looking at the contents page - but if they are, it appears inevitable that this state of affairs will repeat itself and Mr Clarke isn’t going to get a look in for quite some time.

I have no idea why I thought you might want to know that.

I was just trying to think of ways to procrastinate and remembered that I haven’t blogged yet, so here I am. Hello!

Every day - well, most days - well, most weekdays - I go for a walk, for I am a fit and healthy person. My walk is always the same - I go down Ingarsby Lane, across the fields on the right, turn left on the road at the other end, and all the way back down Ingarsby Lane to the village. Going on the same walk every day is fairly dull, but it has the advantages that I don’t have to think about it and I can’t cheat by not going as far.

As you are no doubt aware, there’s a field beside Ingarsby Lane with a horse in it. Now it used to be that every time I walked past, the horse would be standing at the gate watching the world - and more specifically, me - go by. “Hello, Mr Horse!” I would shout. He never replied, but I felt he appreciated the attention.

One day I took my mum on my walk with me. For her, shouting “Hello, Mr Horse!” wasn’t enough - she insisted that we go over and stroke his nose.

This we did, and she made me promise to repeat this procedure on subsequent occasions. The next day, being a good son who does what his mummy tells him, I went and stroked his nose. I did it again the day after that.

That was a couple of weeks ago. Since that time, whenever I walk past, he is no longer at the gate. Now he’s always standing in the middle of the field. I think he hates me.

I’ve never been hated by a horse before. It wounds me deeply.

Feeling rather unwell yesterday I had an early night, but not before switching off my PC’s speakers so it wouldn’t wake me up this morning at the ungodly hour of nine o’clock as it usually does. After a good night’s sleep I was feeling much better, but I thought it wise to have a nice long lie in just to make sure I was fully recovered. When I finally got bored of staring at the ceiling I rolled out of bed and looked at the time. It was half past eight. I think I must be iller than I thought.

Except I feel fine now, so I’ve got no excuse not to have a busy day of doing lots of work. Which I’ll do as soon as I’ve completed a busy morning of procrastinating.

And how better to procrastinate than to tell you all about the weekend? Apart from the lightshade incident it was relatively uneventful, but Sunday was our anniversary so we headed to Haworth, where we’d lunched in a pub on that historic day one year ago, having previously found a geocache nearby. We located the pub alright, but some rather thoughtless individuals were sitting at OUR TABLE so we had to sit at the next one along. Do these people have no sense of occasion?

While in Haworth we popped into a sweetie shop that sold little trains full of sweeties. Now, my nephews love trains. Possibly the only thing they like more than trains is sweeties. Couple this with the fact that we’ll be seeing them next week, for they and their parents are holidaying at CenterParcs and they get two free day passes for the use of friends, which Jess and I will be taking advantage of for we are poor and not above accepting acts of charity from rich relatives, and you will see that purchasing three of these trains as gifts for the corresponding number of nephews was a natural thing to do, and so I did it. The only problem is that one of the nephews is too little to eat sweeties yet, so I fear it may be necessary for me to eat them for him. It’s my duty as an uncle.

Except that the little blue man on the lardometer seems to have ground to a bit of a halt, so I suppose it’s time I redoubled my effort on the diet front. It’s a pity I’ve recovered from yesterday’s unwellness, really. If I was really lucky it would have been something hideously unpleasant and I’d have been ill for weeks. I’d have been thin in no time.

I came up to Lancashire a day early this week, and so it was that this morning Jess and I were in the bathroom at the farm getting ready for a shower. Having learnt from experience that this is best done with few or no clothes on, I proceeded to remove my shirt, an action which requires me to lift my arms high above my head - no doubt those of you with limbs will be familiar with the process.

Unfortunately I was doing this immediately under the light, with its pleasing smoked glass shade. This I managed to dislodge, and though the consequential motion occurred too rapidly for me to be entirely certain of what happened, I can only conclude that it landed on my head and smashed, for the next thing we knew there were four thousand eight hundred and seventy-six fragments raining down around us. It was a bit like getting married, but semi-nude and with more dangerous confetti.

Fortunately I don’t seem to have suffered any serious brain damage. I’d better go now, there are invisible pixies sellotaping tiny monkeys to my feet.

How the hell did I blog virtually every single day for the best part of two years? I can never think of a topic these days.

I sometimes think that it would be interesting to go back and read my entire blog archive right from the beginning (though of course I never have time to actually do it), my life having taken so many twists and turns since it commenced; which has been something of a surprise, because in the preceding five years absolutely nothing had happened at all, a fact which does lead me to wonder just how many of those twists and turns would never have twisted or turned were it not for the influence of this little website - I suspect the answer is “most of them” - and to speculate whether, if not for its existence, I would still be Jessless (definitely), doing the same tedious job (probably), and living in the same house (probably not - I don’t think SimonG.org can be held in any way responsible for the propitious series of events that resulting in me fleeing from it). In any case, it’s certainly been the most interesting nearly-four years of my life, and I’m rather glad to have this record of it - who’d have thought, back on the thirteenth of March 2003, that… but this is beginning to sound like the sort of entry one should write on one’s blog’s anniversary, which it isn’t, so I’ll shut up.

Though what it will be the anniversary of at the weekend is me and Jess - unless you take the view that it was last weekend, for there are two schools of thought as to when our relationship technically began - but I can’t tell you very much about that, partly because we haven’t really made any plans yet, and partly because even if we had made any plans it probably wouldn’t be possible to discuss them without making you vomit. Still, it’s quite exciting for us.

Maybe I’ll write something suitably vomit inducing on Monday to mark its passing. You have been warned.

But what I was saying before I got all reflective there was that I can never thing of a topic these days. Today is no exception, and I have absolutely nothing to tell you, so I won’t. Good night.