Buggeration and Automation

August is going out with quite a belly flop. It's actually chilly out there. The seasons are all over the place and I expect we'll see snow by November.

I'm sort of exasperated today; I can't access one of my two gmail accounts. It claims that I'm trying to access the account from somewhere I've never accessed it from before; which is rubbish; but doesn't take you any further in the process unless you want to go through a complex set of mazes and hurdles, which, I have to be honest about, I couldn't if I wanted to because I literally cannot answer some of the questions. The account was essentially used so I could access Google Docs and do some stuff while I was at work, during my last couple of months there when I had nothing to do.

As I've been in a creative mood recently, I thought I'd go and look at the things I'd done and saved on there. I can't. I can't because I can't give them 5 email addresses I regularly send to on that account. I also can't give them examples of four tags I've used. Because I don't use it as an email account - there's no need. I have my Yahoo account and my other gmail account and that's it. I don't even have a working POP3 account now. Outlook Express is now 'so yesterday'.

So, because I can't give them this information, I can't contact them. There is a feedback form and I've filled this out and been told I can't give them enough information to allow them to give me access to it. So, it looks like I've lost some stuff to the ether (either that or someone has hacked into it, which is unlikely given the password I set).

I don't mind losing stuff. In 1998, I started writing a book. It was, probably, the best thing I'd ever written at that point in my life. It was called Succubus and I'd written well over 50,000 words. While it was probably suffering from being rough around the edges, I was really into it.

In a nutshell, it told of a man who had everything he ever wanted; nice house, good career, beautiful wife; until his wife disappears. Within a week of her disappearance people started to forget who she was; the police seemed to lose all the relevant paperwork. His wife started to disappear from photos. His friends started to talk about him like he had been on his own for years and eventually no one remembered his wife, except him and he started to go a little loopy. However, an old friend of his does remember her; very well and the two of them try and find out what happened. The friend introduces the man to someone who has suffered the same experience and the three of them go in search of his wife - who they believed to be a succubus.

I was having problems with my old PC and a friend offered to fix it for me. He claimed it was a small registry problem and easily fixable; so I dropped the PC round and stupidly I hadn't done a back up for about three months. The next day, my friend called and said I could pick the PC up. As I was carrying it back to car, he casually dropped, "I hope you did a back up?"

"No," I said. "You said it was a simple fix."

"Yeah, I just wiped your hard drive and reinstalled Windows again. You're going to have to re-install all your software."

"What? You never said you were going to format it?"

"That was the simple fix," he said sounding as bothered as a pig at a bar mitzvah.

"But, you could have told me, I would have backed everything up."

"I figured you knew what I was going to do."

"I could have fucking reformatted it. I've lost three months work. Magazine stuff, my own personal stuff. How do we get it back?"

"We don't. It's gone. Nothing I can do about it."

Suffice it to say, my friend became a 'friend' and I had virtually nothing to do with him ever again. I sat down and tried to write Succubus again, but it just didn't flow the same way as it had first time around and after about 6,000 words I shelved it. It was incredibly frustrating, but, there was literally nothing I could do. An actual friend suggested trying to see if any fragments had been left, but that came to nothing and I resigned myself to the fact that a) you have to back up all the time and b) you have to be prepared to suffer the consequences if you don't.

The problem is if you store stuff on line and forget something it might as well be your hard drive going tits up for the chances you have of recovering it. It's not even like it was a blog and I could just cut and paste stuff into a new document.

***

Coupled with the above, the net's been up and down like the Assyrian empire all day. I don't know if it was me farting about or some Virgin problem; but all in all, I've spent far too much time here. I need to do things, even if they are housework and job searches!

Gabrielle Stanton Should be Ashamed of Herself

After last week's episode, where bad editing was the only real low point, this week's Haven came along and obliterated our (well my) beliefs that this is a show that can only get better.

There have been some stinkers in this TV series and, absurdly, they are the episodes that make Haven such a cult classic. This one exceeded some of the worst story telling a television series has ever seen and left me laughing and wondering whether or not the cast are just collecting their pay cheques, because they obviously are either stupid or couldn't care less.

This latest stinker was about a group of amphibious men, an apparent suicide and two sides of Haven PD - the completely incompetent side of it and also it's ability to deduce a complicated crime with no explanation at all.

Essentially it all boiled down to this:

Audrey and Nathan have discovered the identity of the dead body washed up on one of Haven's beaches. Nathan says, "He's from this group of people who live out on a compound in a really isolated place. There are no roads out there."

[15 seconds later]

Nathan says, "My dad and I used to drive out there sometimes."

[10 seconds later, in the next scene]

Nathan and Audrey are driving to the compound...

All of this took place inside one of the 42 minutes...

Surely the actors playing the leads must have said something to the director or the show runner or even each other? Is Lucas Bryant as stupid in real life as he looks?

The other totally laughable element of the show, as I said earlier, is the complete and utter impotency of Haven PD. Two armed officers try to achieve something at the compound and are threatened off with guns; a namby-pamby threat of a warrant is made and Audrey and Nathan are driven off with intimidation. Now, this is supposed to be America; the supposed antagonists are behaving like David Koresh is their best friend. You'd think that the full force, plus state troopers would be descending on the place like flies round shit; but instead, less than a minute later, our heroes are chatting to the lead antagonist like he's the cousin of Jesus.

Later, Nathan and Audrey attempt to arrest the local reverend, believing him to be responsible for a crime. Two of the local vicar's henchmen attack the two Haven PD officers and only stop because the Rev tells them to. When the antagonist comes along to kill the Rev, he protests his innocence and every one accepts it. For all the power they wield, they might as well be the local ice cream salesmen.

Later when Nathan confronts the antagonist and tells him that he killed the person who washed up on the beach, he's told that he can't arrest him, so he doesn't. (I almost wanted to watch it again to find out just how the forensics lab came up with this deduction; it was a kind of deus ex machina explanation...)

The big problem with this episode is that while Haven is complete and utter poo; it's fun poo. This was simply badly plotted, badly scripted, badly acted and badly thought out. In other words - bad stinky poo.

The show just reached its nadir, surely?

14,964

I have a really awful confession to make. At least, I think it's awful.

I realised that I wanted to be a writer when I was about 12. Just around the time I realised that I had as much artistic talent as a mollusc with a club foot. School teachers seemed to think I had a future as an artist, because I drew all the time; but they were either stupid or being nice to me, because I knew that drawing wasn't going to get me anything. I was pretty much crap at it.

At 15, I discovered the likes of Stephen King and Peter Straub and I decided that I would be a novelist. It was a fait accompli; I had ideas and imagination, what could go wrong?

Well, not writing much between the ages of 20 and 30 for a start; mainly shopping lists and mixtape track lists. But a lot of it might have had to do with the fact that from the moment I left school I never attempted to write anything fictional in the short form. I have never started and finished a short story. The format has never appealed to me and because I've always had huge, expansive ideas, I've rarely come up with a decent idea that didn't want to turn into a trilogy.

On Wednesday, I walked the dogs in the usual place and had an idea. I could tell you how I come up with my ideas, but it's actually pretty much the way my sometimes abstract mind works. just because I see something inspirational doesn't necessarily mean it will even remotely resemble the idea I end up with.

By the time I got back to the car, I had a fully formed story in my head; a beginning, a middle and an end.

Yesterday morning I opened up a new document in Word and started writing; by the end of the day I had written a little over 7,500 words. Just before midnight on Friday, I put down the final sentence. It weighed in at just less than 15,000 words and while it's nowhere near finished (it needs editing, rewriting in places and probably 500 words taking out); it's finished! The first ever short story wot I wrote with a beginning, middle and end.

How awful is that for someone who has always fancied his chances of writing best sellers?

It's a sort of dog walking ghost cum disaster story. It tips the hat to MR James and at the moment I quite like it. It gave me chills writing it.

I'm going to do something else I've never done before next week. To go along with baking my first loaf of bread and writing my first short story, I'm going to give it to the wife to read. We've been together 28½ years and I can't recall ever giving her any prose to read.

Before that happens, I will of course give the story its first edit; check for bad grammar and make sure it flows and makes sense; but I'm going to rely on her to sub it for me. Then, after I've made any corrections, I'm going to publish it on here. But first I'm going to ignore it until next Tuesday; allow myself to grow a little unfamiliar with it.

Next Wednesday, if this post has suddenly disappeared, you'll have a pretty good idea why.

Do Insomniacs Think of Sleeping Sheep?

Over the last 20 odd years, I have been prone to bouts of insomnia. It's one of those weird things that triggers all the worst things in your subconscious. Sunday night, I went to bed exhausted. It was late (actually Monday morning) and it never crossed my mind that when I got into bed I would suddenly become wide awake.

I think in many cases insomnia is psychosomatic; often triggered by a stray, almost unintentional thought. When I was younger, it was set off by a simple thing; allowing my mind to contemplate how we fall asleep. What happens in that moment as you drift away; does your mind just switch off? Can you monitor it? I'd analyse how we get to sleep and it would make me not sleep. Psychologists would probably tell you that it is manifest by some other subconscious worry or concern and I was just using the sleep mystery as an excuse. They'd probably be right, but what goes on in my subconscious is not something I can access at will.

During my late 30s, at the most stressful period of working for the magazine, I'd come home exhausted from 40 hour long shifts and find it difficult to sleep; my mum would have called it being overtired, but whatever the reason it created an odd mixture of feeling like I'd been on amphetamines (something I was never into) and coming down with the flu. My mind would still be racing even though my body would be screaming for me to just switch off and let nature work its magic.

So, on Sunday, I slipped into bed about 1.15am; I expected (probably subconsciously) to be asleep within a few minutes, but as I got comfortable, I realised that I no longer felt tired; in fact, my mind was racing. By 3.15, I was growing more and more anxious; I know my mind and as soon as I started to think I couldn't get to sleep, I knew that getting to sleep was going to become even more difficult. I shifted around, trying to find a new sleeping position and I figure I drifted off to sleep around 4am. When I got up, a little before 10 (the wife had booked the day off) I felt perfectly fine; like my body just didn't need as much sleep as I figured it did.

So, at about 10.30 last night, I opted to complete an outstanding application form for a job I don't really think I have much chance of getting, but if you don't try you don't get. It took me longer than I thought; I wanted to make a fist of it even if my expectations were nought. I finished it about midnight; decided that I needed to check and edit it, but needed to be away from it for a while. So I played patience for half an hour and then went back to the application. It needed nothing much doing to it, but what was changed was important. I opened up an email on Yahoo and started writing the covering letter. Switched to Word, where I saved the document with a new name and when I returned to Yahoo mail, it said that I had been disconnected.

After a couple of seconds of confusion, I saw that the little warning ! was showing where my Internet connection was and I decided that it must have crashed, so I rebooted the computer and tried again with no luck. I couldn't understand why I'd suddenly lost connection, so I ran a diagnostic; rebooted again, tried everything you have to to reset the modem and by 1.30, I was tired, pissed off and angry. The application needed to be in the company's hands by 9am today, which meant I had two options; get up early and see if the net was back up and/or print a copy out and drive the thing down town and hand deliver it. With these alternatives in place, I shut the computer down and went to bed.

As I lay in bed, I realised that my black ink cartridge had run out and that I'd have to print it out in dark blue, which, I believed, didn't look good. So I resolved to get up in the morning, check the net and if it was down, call Roger, give him a lift to work and take the file with me, print it out and drop it down or as an alternative, get access from his work computer and send it from there. A lot of farting about for a job I don't have a lot of hope with, but you have to go the extra yard and by 2am I was thinking that this was the kind of hurdle you faced when fate determines you're going to get something, but have to work for it. I turned over and tried to go to sleep.

At 4am, the wife got up to use the lady's room and I was still awake. I'd allowed myself to remember that I couldn't sleep the night before and subsequently my mind offered up the question, 'what if?' and the cycle began again.

I finally drifted off about 5am, I think I just gave out, but at 6am the alarm went off. I had by this time, feeling shit and with a stinking headache decided the application form can go to hell; but had forgotten that I'd left an note by the alarm to reset it for 8am. I managed to get to sleep again quickly, but almost as soon as I slept, it seemed the alarm went off again. I was awake again, I might as well sort out this poxy job application, then perhaps I could have a bath and a kip on the sofa. but if I have a kip on the sofa, I'll not be able to sleep tonight, even with a few pints inside me (it's quiz night). So, I'm sitting here on a cold miserable August day, the rain is falling and it's blowing a gale through my office window and I feel like several lumps of shit, forced together with burning matchsticks stuck in it to brighten the mood...

***

I did something yesterday that I haven't done for 49½ years. I baked some bread! it was a success. It's a real loaf that tastes like bread and is nice. There's a long story behind it's arrival, but even I'm not going to subject you to it, it's pretty much the most dull bread story ever...

***

Sport is now reserved for Sportsdiscuss over on Live Journal, which I write with Roger, but I can't help but mention it briefly because of something I read in the paper yesterday.

Celtic had lost to St Johnstone at home on Sunday and it was something of a shock. The write up in the paper the next day had a quote from Celtic manager Neil Lennon which, I think, goes a long way to explaining the defeat. He said, "The front six just didn't click today".

The front six? What was he playing, a revolutionary new 4-0-6 formation? Someone needs to take him to one side and mention the word 'midfield' to him as it's obviously been lost from his mind.

***

I can't be arsed to write a full blown review of it, but can I thoroughly recommend the Norwegian film Troll Hunter to anyone who fancies 100 minutes of utterly bonkers comedy played absolutely straight. It's brilliant. And it could only be done in a Scandinavian country; it just wouldn't work in the USA, although you could possibly get away with setting it in the North of Scotland or some of the wilderness around Connemara in west Ireland.

It is also possibly the best 'lost footage' movie I have seen since Cannibal Holocaust and puts films like Paranormal Activity, Rec, Catfish or Cloverfield to shame. It is quite an extraordinary film from a region that is quickly growing into one of best film making places in the world.

***

Nothing much to report re: Haven. This weeks episode had a Groundhog Day theme and would have worked quite well had the acting been any good and the weather conditions on the repeated day been the same, but one moment it was foggy and the next it was blazing sunshine. Does anyone actually edit this thing?

I have all but given up on True Blood. it's just plain boring. Every week I just feel like it's becoming what I call it a Carry On film. You would think that for such a successful show they'd spend some money on special effects! Or maybe on a plot that's good. I really can't see this lasting much more than one more season unless it jumps the shark and does something interesting.

I can't recommend Monty Hall's Great Irish Escape enough. It's cracking natural history TV, with a man you can't fail to like, with an enthusiasm that is totally infectious. I'm playing catch up with it and have been enthralled by the utter beauty of the west of Ireland and the impression that it could be one of the most idyllic places to live on the planet, even if it is probably quite cold and a bit isolated.

***

Any errors are attributed to me feeling like crap.

Guilty Pleasures

I know a really well adjusted human that thinks Aqua's Barbie Girl is a great pop song. I have a friend who cannot resist singing along to I Will Survive whenever it is on, wherever she is. We all have ephemeral guilty pleasures, but the real ones are the kind that we can revisit time and again and really feel a way we miss.

Asking people what their favourite songs or films are is one of those things where rarely can you think of one thing; a favourite something tends to change with whatever mood we're in. Ask someone to list their five favourite somethings and two of them will invariably change over time.

I love films; I've seen shitloads. It's pretty much my specialist subject in quizzes (unless there's a James Bond question, then it tends to be an educated guess - as I said to an old friend recently, most James Bond films could be called Fred Smith 007 for the relevance they have to Fleming's books). Throughout my life there have been loads of movies that I've loved and a good percentage of those have slightly lost their impact with time; they're still great, but, you know, maybe not in my top 5, 10, 50 or whatever, any longer.

There have been three films that have been constants in my favourite films list ever since I first saw them. Others still poke around and drop in and out of the other two places, but these three have remained constant. The first (but not necessarily FIRST) is Close Encounters of the Third Kind (original version, which I own on VHS tape). I think the Special Edition is great, but the first version still has me completely enthralled and I've now seen it so many times I can virtually speak everyone's lines - even bits of the Spanish at the beginning. CE3K isn't a masterpiece; it has flaws and over 30 years since it came out some of the ideas are a wee bit... silly. But I think Richard Dreyfuss is brilliant; I think for its time it is pretty much Spielberg's best film and it makes me blub at the end, every time, without fail.

The second film in the trio is Harvey starring Jimmy Stewart and an invisible 6 foot tall rabbit. As screwball comedies go, there's very little to compare. It is just surreal enough to make you wonder just what is really going on and it's just a very subversive film for its age. this has more sentimental value for me than I can fully explain.

The final film in that trio is one that has matured with age and has taken on a different resonance in this century. It is a film about which I have little understanding; it makes no sense at all, but like the other two films it is a fantasy - possibly the purest fantasy of them all. It wreaks of Americanism; it has a wooden actor in the lead; a turn by a legend that is spellbinding and a supporting actor who just spends the entire film looking like he's having the most fun he's ever had. It also makes me cry and not just at the simply brilliant ending, but throughout the entire film. There are moments when I speak the next lines of certain characters and I just well up!

It is a film that is both very sad and capable of making me feel elated, reinvigorated, capable of facing the challenges of life and not because they will be solved by a fantastically bizarre idea, because we all have the ability to beat the things that hold us back. It's allegory dressed up as the American Dream and it is probably my biggest guilty pleasure. It's not a film that movie buffs will recognise as a piece of film making history or even a worthy entry into lists of favourite films, but I know heaps of people who just love it all the same.

I watched it again tonight, for probably the sixth or seventh time. I think it might be the first time I've watched it since my dad died; that episode in my life has added a totally new dimension to this film. I got upset, but in a good way and I don't care what people think, at this moment in time, this 1989 film is probably my favourite film of all time.

Can you guess what it is yet?

Worst Fears and All That

I might not have proper arthritis, but Jesus Harry Christ, do my bones tell me when it's damp and rainy, or what? Those of you who are always eager to read about my ails and woes will be disappointed to hear that since about April my general aches and pains have abated to the point where I even think of myself as being almost as fit as a man fast approaching 50 can be. I suppose the dry year has had a lot to do with it and that thing we talked about a couple of months ago - the special medicine.

However, I appear to have developed 'Tennis Elbow', despite not playing tennis. I know what it is, it's the same thing as is affecting all of my joints; the gradual degeneration because of wear and tear. it seems like a pathetic diagnosis really; but if you ask me, or my mate Wendy who also suffers from this debilitating problem, we'd tell you that GPs are as useful as using a jellyfish to clean your windows. What we really want is a miracle drug to stop the pain, or at least one that doesn't fuck us up in a not very nice way. No wonder people prefer illegal drugs to prescription ones - the fun ratio is disparate.

My elbow shows absolutely no visible signs that it feels as though I have bones grinding together like two Russians in a porn movie, but bone problems will always be viewed by people with massive scars or missing limbs as 'out of sight and not that bad'.

Ironically, I think the problem I'm having with my right elbow is directly linked to my problems with my left shoulder. Sounds unlikely I know, but if you consider the fact that I was using my right arm twice as much as normal during an 18 month period, then this not so sudden problem becomes easier to understand. Damp days like today only exacerbate it.

***

Walking the dogs down my usual haunt - Bradlaugh Fields - I normally, when I'm on my own, go round the perimeter of the south side of this sprawling wilderness. this involves skirting with the Morrisons' garage and walking along the security fence of the local allotments. For the last few days there has been a really horrid smell emanating from a copse of wild plum trees, surrounded by brambles and knowing that at least two of my dogs have a real thing about rolling on rotting carcasses, I've been walking passed this part of the fields at double pace, especially as the smell has been getting worse.

For the first few times, I just took it for granted that it was some dead animal, but yesterday I must have been in a wildly imaginative mood, because I suddenly thought that this part of Bradlaugh Fields was perfect for hiding a dead body. Parts of it are virtually impenetrable, unless you have heavy duty overalls and padded gloves. What if someone had dumped a body there? What would I do? How would I react? Do you know how you can sometimes convince yourself that your worst fears are going to be realised? Well, the closer I got to the pungent odour, the more I thought I was going to find a dead body. The smell of rotting flesh was unlike any I'd ever smelled before - it had a sweet tinge to it and this just heightened my fears.

I also don't know if my fear of this or my urgency to avoid the place on previous trips had some effect on the dogs, but they seemed to be uninterested in the smell and avoided this patch almost visibly; this further enhanced my belief that I was going to uncover a murder. The truth turns out to be almost a bizarre...

I decided that it was almost a civic duty to investigate; so I stopped at the point where the smell was worst and tried to peer through the brambles. I didn't see anything. the dogs were not interested in what I was doing, so I moved along a bit and used the dog lead I was carrying to help pull back the wild growth. Did I see something? I think I did and my stomach turned over. I looked again and saw something pink.

Deciding that I was right; I moved along and found a spot that allows you to move into the copse of plum trees without encountering the brambles; only Murray was interested in what I was doing and he was stuck to my heel like a wad of chewing gum. Was he as nervous as me? Then I saw it and at first it was the mutilated body of a small child. I almost screamed out. Then I looked more closely and my brain started to play tricks on me; it must have been. Lying about ten feet in front of me was the carcass of a pig. A pig? I shook my head. How the fuck does a pig get there? It was barely fully grown from my guess, possibly six months old and it had obviously been had by either foxes or badgers (my mind was not entertaining any thing else at that time); but how the hell did it get to Bradlaugh Fields?

All I could think of was that the allotments have some livestock; someone must have been keeping pigs and this one must have been captured and killed and then somehow dragged back to a safe place to chow down on. But the allotments are like Colditz; they have touch fences and razor wire running along the top. the only way for this pig to have got where it was was by being dragged through a tunnel. But it fucking freaked me out for a second!

***

It's cold and wet and while days like this spoil summers; I'm the first to realise that a) the gardens need it and b) it propagates the return of mushrooms. From the weekend on, keep your eyes open, you'll start to see an abundance of potentially gourmet offerings popping up in the unlikeliest of places.

I've already found my first wild mushroom of the year; it was in my garden, growing amongst the old lilac tree that has turned into a weed. it was a parasol and it had been eaten to buggery by insects. They grew there last year and were just another of the many things I ate for free. So, I've been keeping an eye on this patch of the garden and giving it some extra water, despite not really needing it now as the strawberries have all died back.

Then the day before yesterday I saw a little nub poking out of the ground. It looked like the start of another parasol and it also gave me the opportunity to see if a theory of mine is correct - that parasol mushrooms stop growing once they've been seen (because my experience suggests exactly that). Yesterday, I checked on it again and true enough it hadn't changed. I moved the leaves to one side and touched the cap; then had an awful case of stupid realisation. It was a stone. It wasn't going to get any bigger and it certainly wouldn't be an added bonus to a culinary dish. I chuckled at myself over that one!

***

I've been pleasantly surprised by two albums over the last couple of weeks. The first is The Horrors new CD, Skying, which is just remarkable. It sounds like an album from the 1980s with 21st century production. I can now understand why the press were so amazed by this album, because the little bit of The Horrors I'd heard before this made me want to put drills in my ears!

The other album is the new one from Bon Iver, which is pretty much indescribable - it's a mixture of prog, folk, chill and dream like melodies that are not like the boring stuff the band did in the past that have made them firmly no where near my music radar. There are a few moments in it that make you think you're listening to some MOR US Rock band from the 1980s, but I'm forgetting that bands now a days are all influenced by everything, even the shit we used to avoid when we were their age.

***

I have irons in the fire again. Keep your fingers crossed that something positive comes from this round of applications!

stubble bum

Learnt much I have, over the last few days. Not all of it was understood.

Humility, avarice, desperation and despondency have all featured. Roger calls my current mental condition the 'Slough of Despond' and to be honest if I don't get something (a job) soon enough I might as well do a Reggie Perrin, become a beachcomber in Newquay and live in a yurt. At least I'll have a sun tan and be surrounded by unobtainable but pretty young things...

For the second summer in three, I have found myself with more time on my hands than I know what to do with. the first time I was stymied by my shoulder op; this time it's a financial impediment that is preventing me from spending this summer doing something exciting, different or even energetic. With our big party looming closer still, I'm having to make sure that I spend as little as possible; after all, none of the money I might be spending was earned. Last week, I went an entire 7 days with 11p in the my pocket. I spent no money (apart from £6.30 of Roger's money on two pints of Bishop's Farewell). Our shopping bill this week came to less than £30 - that's the smallest amount paid by us since the 1980s!

But, to be fair, I have runner beans, French beans, apples, plums, rhubarb, raspberries (still), beetroot, hazelnuts, potatoes, peppers and herbs in abundance - if I were to invent new dishes like apple curry, runner bean stew or French bean, rhubarb and coriander souffle, then I could probably eat for almost nothing until the end of September, when I will either have a job or will be planning a bank heist. (Apparently Blogger's spell checker doesn't know what 'heist' is!)

In true penny-pinching, making ends meet culinary assertiveness; Fishwife's son gave us a bunch of freshly pulled carrots from their modest veg patch and gave them to us for the rabbit. I looked at this bunch of baby 'orange sticks of joy' (© 1992-2007 Gifford Hall) and thought, 'bollocks to the bunny, there's a dozen edible roots there". So we had them sautéed in a little butter and sugared water with our Sunday lunch.

Talking to my delightfully eccentric and slightly insane brother Ronnie last week, it was his 58th birthday, he said that he was having problems with his courgettes. I asked him what the problem was.

"I've got hundreds of the bloody things!" He says.

"How many plants have you grown?"

"About a dozen."

Last year, the wife grew one courgette plant (that's zucchini to our American friends) and we had more baby marrows than you could shake the proverbial stick at. We were giving them away; composting them and I even tried to kill the plant off towards the middle of September, but we still managed some weirdly deformed ones before the frosts came. Having a dozen courgette plants is a little like deciding to go into the courgette business. He could sell his fruits to Tesco's for the next month and still have enough to solve the famine in East Africa, invent zucchini ice cream and enter the gnarliest specimens into a 'Look my courgette looks like Ron Jeremy's penis' competition!

I believe there is a kind of strange brotherhood that springs up; the Squash Heads. A group of people that basically exchange different types of Curcurbita pepo with each other like people re-wrap unwanted Christmas presents and dump them on someone they feel obligated to buy something for, but don't really want to.

I was never a huge fan of The Young Ones, I think my aversion to that Mayall twat soured it for me; but sometimes when I'm standing in my garden, I think of Neil the hippy and his 'you sow the seed...' mantra and share his wonder at how we can actually grow all kinds of stuff that we have to pay good sheckles for in a supermarket. How much better it tastes and how a scar or a touch of blight on an apple doesn't make us bat an eyelid. Everybody should be made to grow something; even if they only have a window box. Perhaps that would make supermarkets understand that uniform might suit them, but it doesn't suit everybody.

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I've been slightly overwhelmed by the 20 odd copies of my Kindle book that I've sold. I think I said before that I would have been happy selling just one, but in recent days it's sold twice what it did in its first week; I'm getting requests for different formats and I even got offered a proper publishing deal from some bunch of cowboys who offered me a whopping 22% of net profit. That's 'net' profit - a little under a ¼ of anything it makes above break even. I thought that was a bit of a rip off, regardless of the risk the publisher was taking. it might be standard practice; but part of me thinks that if a publisher will approach someone, without going through an agent first (which I haven't got and don't think I deserve), is a trifle dodgy.

Technology seems to be moving so fast now, I feel as though I'm being left behind. I seem to have an inherent stubbornness for understanding current technology trends. I still struggle with RSS feeds and they've been around for donkeys. Subsequently, I'll try to find out something new and I'm faced with pages of explanations, FAQs and mindless waffle from technoheads and I yearn for Windows 3.1 and a 286 PC...

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And then something weird happened...