It has to be said, the PuzzleDonkey Facebook application hasn’t taken off as well as I’d hoped. Thing that was ridiculously and unexpectedly successful in its original incarnation plus the most popular social networking site in the world seemed like quite a good combination, but so far it doesn’t really seem to have had much of an impact on the zeitgeist. What it needs is some brilliant new feature that’s so brilliant and amazing that no one can resist it.

Many years ago, in my Essex days, there was a site called atthecrossroads.com. What it was was loads of daily puzzles - the kind of thing that’s simple enough in principle that a new one can be generated every day by computer, but still jolly good fun to solve. With its assistance I whiled away many a happy lunch break, many of them possibly stretching just a teensy bit past when technically my lunch break was supposed to end. It was, in summary, a Jolly Good Website, and I thoroughly approved. As did lots of other people, because it was very successful, with a thriving community of puzzlers.

It was so successful that it was eventually bought out by Jim Davis, and suddenly not only did you have to pay a subscription - which I might not have minded - but so too was the site defaced by images of that irritating orange cat all over the place - which I definitely did. And so ended my relationship with atthecrossroads.com.

Nowadays, the monstrosity that it’s turned into can be found - should anyone want to find it, which seems unlikely - at garfieldgames.com. I think it’s free to use again now, but I couldn’t bear to put up with the hideous background music for long enough to find out for certain. What’s needed is something like it used to be in the good old days - nothing flashy that makes you want to stab your eyes out, no ‘hilarious’ cats that make you want to stab Jim Davis’s eyes out - just some nice simple puzzles that you can go along and play every day while you eat your lunch.

All of which is just a long winded way of announcing the launch of PuzzleDonkey Daily, which aims to be exactly that. It’s only got four puzzles at the minute, but there’ll be a new one of each every day, and we’ll be adding lots more in due course. If this doesn’t make PuzzleDonkey the most popular thing in the whole world ever then, well, I’ll just have to think of something else. And if it does, I won’t be selling it to Jim Davis.

Shall I see if I can squeeze out a blog? Yes, I think I will. But too many things have been going on for me to relate them in any logical sequence without several hours of planning and preparation, so I’ll just tell you whatever comes into my head and we’ll hope that the result isn’t too much of an incoherent mess. But it will be.

So the other day Jess suddenly said to me: “What’s that song on the Juno soundtrack with the puzzle about a car in it? I was talking to Sammy about it and we can’t solve it.” I had no idea what she was talking about, and we’re now fairly certain that neither the puzzle, the song, nor the conversation with Sammy, exist. I think she’s going mad. Juno does exist.

Thomas - who, you may recall, is my nephew who didn’t want a mural - has changed his mind, on the understanding that we don’t deface the section of wall wherein he stores his stories. He’s decided he wants Transformers, but not just ordinary Transformers, goodness me no - he wants Transformers made out of Lego. And the thing about Transformers is that they’ve got lots of fiddly bits to begin with, and the thing about Lego is that I haven’t played with it since I was about seven, so making up what the Transformers would look like in Lego form using only my brain would have caused it to overheat and possibly voided the warranty. And yes, I have tried googling for images of already Legoified Transformers, but he’s very specific about which Transformers he wants, and I can’t find them. So I’m now in the process of building virtual Lego models using the handy LDraw program. When I’ve done that, we can finally start painting them onto the walls, except not for a bit because we’ve got a busy few weeks.

“A busy few weeks?” you say. “Tell us about that.” Well, this week Jess is going back to Lancashire to do things with her friends and family, while I stay here working my fingers to the bone to earn us enough cash to see us through the following two weeks. For the second week we’ll be cat sitting for my mum while she gads about at EuroDisney with my sister’s lot, and in the third week, it’s me and Jess’s turn for a holiday, except we can’t afford to go anywhere forren and fancy so we’re making do with the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall, and we’ll have a super time thankyouverymuch.

This is almost starting to have some kind of structure, so let’s go off at another tangent and remark that the current state of the Lardometer isn’t a very good advert for Wii Fit. Actually, while I was doing my regular Wii Fitting, I was losing weight quite nicely, but then Jess took it to her mum’s house for a few days, my routine was broken, and I never managed to get back into it. I’m quite good at doing things regularly when I can be obsessive about them, but as soon as I allow not doing the thing to be an option, I start going for that option a lot more than I go for the doing the thing option. As those of you who’ve been reading my blog for the past five years might have noticed.

And it’s a bit of a worry, because I really really do need to get fit. I used to be perfectly content to be an unhealthy, overweight slob, careering rapidly towards the destiny foretold by my genetic predisposition to diabetes, and focusing more on the pizza I’m going to have for my dinner than the state of my body in fifty years’ time. Of course then what happened was I went and fell in love with someone eleven years my junior, and now I do find myself looking fifty years ahead and thinking that I want to be the one looking after her as she crumbles apart in her old age rather than the other way around, which isn’t going to happen if in that fifty year period the amount of exercise I do fails to exceed the duration of the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s production of Postman Pat’s Windy Day. The moral of which being that I really ought to start doing my Wii Fit again, but she’s taking it to her mum’s again this week, so that will have to wait. (What do you mean, there are other forms of exercise?)

And speaking of Jess going to her mum’s (that was another segue - this is more structured than I expected (and speaking of segways, we’ll get to ride around on them on our holiday when we visit Goonhilly)), she’s going to want to go soon, so I’d better go and put some clothes on.

There once was a full bodied lass
Who inflated with helium gas
Both her breasts for a dare -
Now they’re lighter than air,
Which you’d never have guessed from their mass.

Yeah, okay, it’s not one of my best. But more importantly, hello! I’ve been meaning to do this for aaages, but it’s so hard to find the time these days. There’s always so very much to do, doncherknow.

Now that I have found a gap in my schedule - inasmuch as it is one, given that I really ought to be sleeping - let’s press on with the agenda, and first things second, we’d better get the overdue Golden Girls Update out of the way. Way back in a bygone age I promised to keep you posted should any of them shuffle off this mortal coil, and it’s taken three years, but one of them finally has. Of course I’ve been so rubbish at blogging that you all read it on the BBC website weeks ago, and by now even her closest relatives will be well over the period of mourning and wondering what to buy with their share of the inheritance, but I made you a promise so I’d better inform anyone who’s managed to miss the news that Estelle Getty is no longer with us, finally putting paid to those rumours of a sequel to Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.

And so onto the less pressing matter of updating you on my life. Since last we spoke, Jess has returned from her work experience at the newspaper factory - in fact she’s returned from it twice, having popped back for the weekend midway, which involved me making an unscheduled trip to Leeds owing to an inconsiderate chap throwing himself off a railway bridge and causing her train to be diverted, which would have made for a thrilling blog if I’d got round to reporting it at the time, but it’s far too late now - since which time we’ve been to the seaside and Alton Towers and she’s started learning to drive, and life has otherwise continued in its usual merry way.

Oh and we’ve been devising murals. What happened was, you see, my sister decided to get murals painted on my nephews’ bedroom walls, and what with me being a professional illustrator and all, she asked me if I fancied doing them. My initial response was negative, because anything that involves using actual paints instead of sitting in front of my computer playing with the graphics tablet is well outside my comfort zone, but then I remembered that Jess is infinitely more talented than me and more than capable of transforming a wall into a scene from a popular children’s television cartoon franchise, so we’re going into it as a joint venture. Daniel’s having Fireman Sam, Ben’s having an eclectic mix of Marvel superheroes, Action Man and a couple of Transformers, and Thomas… well, Thomas has decided he doesn’t want one. It took my sister a while to elicit an explanation for this decision, but it eventually turned out that he makes up stories in bed and keeps them inside the boxes on his wallpaper, so if the wallpaper goes he won’t be able to get at his stories. He’s a strange boy.

Speaking of my nephews, way back in my last entry I mentioned in passing Ben’s Spiderman themed birthday party. My sister showed him my blog and he apparently got very excited that he was ‘in the news’. If he’s that easily pleased, I figured I may as well give him another thrill and do a news report style entry about whatever he’s been up to lately. Clearly I then forgot all about it, but now that I’ve remembered I might, so if an article appears on this website in the next few weeks about some aspect of my nephew’s life which is of no obvious interest to anyone but him, it’s for his benefit, and not me scraping the bottom of the barrel in my efforts to make it look like I still know how to blog. No, honestly.

Now I really will go to bed. Goodnight.