27th January

My car - the cursed lump of silvery metal which more or less gets me from A to B - has been struggling to start for the past month and a half. It went to my local garage and they couldn't find anything wrong with it. It was only when it wouldn't start when I picked it up that they thought maybe there was something wrong but they didn't know what. That'll be sixty pounds please. Bring it back next week and we'll run a diagnostic. A week later it goes back and they conclude that something in the starting thing was sticking. They lubed it up and said from now on it will be as easy to get going as a Daily Mail reader confronted by a gay asylum seeker who wants directions to the nearest benefits office. That'll be another sixty pounds please. For the first four mornings this week - cold mornings to be fair - it had been touch and go whether it would start or not. Give it three or four goes and eventually it spluttered into life. Not Friday. No - on Friday it gave a whimper and then went back to sleep. The RAC sent a man in a van and - like Doctor House - he differentially diagnosed the problem. The battery was as old as the car and needed replacing. One new battery later and she starts instantly. Far better than she's ever started for me. So the question is why a hundred and twenty pounds-worth of garage mechanic didn't think to check whether the battery was in working order? I know nothing of cars but even I know that the battery is an important part of the whole "getting started" genre. I'll be sure to mention it to m'mechanic if I see him riding past on his horse.

Every bit as bad as my garage was the sit com "After You've Gone" which I watched last night for the first and last time. It was wretchedly awful. It came from the same stable as the occasionally decent "My Family" and was every bit as bad as that show ought to be. It was as if the creator of the series sat down and typed "Nicholas Lyndhurst plays a divorcee who lives with his mother-in-law..." and Microsoft Word's paper clip popped up to say "It looks as if you are writing a situation comedy. Would you like to use one of our templates?" The writer clicked Yes and the rest is history. I only watched it because Amanda Abbington is in it

She's also in "Man Stroke Woman" - the new series of which has just started on BBC3. It's a cut above most modern sketch shows. Perhaps the best since Big Train. It's on BBC3 a lot so you can catch it if you want to. Anyway, she was good, Celia Imrie was good (as she always is) and the son was good (a staple of the creator's work - Fred Baron not God) but the script was dire, the rest of the cast were pitiful and half way through I thought I saw where the wacky and hilarious plot was going. I groaned inwardly at the awfulness of it. But they didn't go that way - they went nowhere instead - and it was worse. So "After You've Gone" is officially worse than I could possibly imagine. My version would at least have been bad farce. This was just bad nothingness. And say what you will about "Only Fools and Horses", Nicholas Lyndhurst is no, has never been and never will be an actor who can be the lead in anything. He's a sidekick. He's someone's brother. He's one of a group. But he is not a leading man. The BBC feel obliged to make him a leading man because he's paid a fortune but he is best when he is reacting to someone else and he doesn't get to do that as much when he's the centre of attention (ie the star).

So that was sad in one sense, sad in another sense is the demise of Music Zone. Partly because it means one less store on the high street (what do we have left? Woolies, WHS, HMV, the occasional Virgin and maybe the odd Fopp) but mainly because I remember their first shop opening in Stockport. I remember them taking over the upper floors of what will always be "the Toy and Hobby building" and going through phases of being extremely good and extremely rubbish. I remember getting all six tapes of series 1 of "Survivors" for 99p each and later selling them online for £17 each. I remember them suddenly expanding like the birth of the universe and turning up on every high street that mattered. I remember them opening their 50th store in what used to be a big, old, dark, scary building patrolled by savage dogs and almost certainly ghosts. I hate it when shops close - something so full of light and life suddenly becomes a dark and empty void. Like Professor Chonotis's study would've been had they not added a tacky special effect to the reconstruction of Shada. There's a reference for the kids.

20th January

It's been a strange old week. Thursday was the day of chaos where the windy weather we've been having for the last month finally took its toll. Roads were closed (which made getting to work an adventure), a tree blew down in the grounds and hit the side of the building (smashing windows on three floors and giving everyone something to take pictures of on their camera phones) and I was stuck at m'desk until 7pm before I dared venture out. Which was the second night this week I'd been there well into the evening. Tuesday had an out-of-hours release so m'self and m'colleague stayed behind to make sure all was well. Though it nearly didn't happen as an email I sent two weeks ago suggesting a potential problem was suddenly noticed on the morning of "go live" day and panic meetings were convened. The wrong people are being blamed (not me fortunately) and, like the background colour of some on-screen notes a few months ago, a minor detail is being blown out of all proportion and valuable time and energy is being wasted.

Also on Thursday, shortly after the tree hit the building and everyone except me reacted by running over to take a look (I was trying to read the new Peter Cook biography and didn't appreciate the overreactions of people who had obviously never seen a flying tree before) I couldn't help but notice a film crew in IT. Apparently it was some corporate video being shot for HP and the star of the show was... ITguy. Cue lots of different angles of him sitting at a desk (not his own) and typing away while wearing a suit and looking awkward. It was that phoney "computer use" which never involves starring at a screen and wiggling a mouse like proper computing. He would've earned a million bonus points if he'd spotted us starring at him and given us the classic Partridge "I'm such a big head".

Then on the way home I was listening to the BBC news at 7 o'clock for a storm update and heard that the worst weather to hit the country in two decades was only the third most important thing going on that day. Ten or more people had been killed, millions of pounds worth of damage had been done and the nation's infrastructure was in chaos. But none of that was as important as the BBC's licence fee not being as high as they had hoped or the pathetic controversy over "Celebrity" Big Brother. There was a time when the Beeb would've been above that sort of thing but apparently those days have long gone.

I've not seen any of Big Brother and have read only the most basic details of the alleged racial bullying / abuse but it seems to have been blown out of all proportion. From my outsider perspective it seems that Channel 4 - looking for a fresh gimmick - decided to invite a token Indian into the house to see what would happen. They then presented edited "highlights" in which some not very bright girls bitched about her. Then the tabloid press - normally so anti-foreigner - writes a load of stories giving edited "highlights" of the edited "highlights" and next thing we know it is being debated in Parliament and senior government figures are wasting their time and our money answering questions about it.

It is being portrayed as an international incident, Channel 4 are enjoying a massive ratings spike, the tabloids are having a field day, everyone involved is hurriedly hiring a publicist and the whole episode - far from raising valuable issues - is trivialising the word "racism". If you set the benchmark so low, people will come to see "racism" as nothing more than a little light bitchiness. Shilpa Shetty has commendably dismissed the whole thing and the rest of the media should too because otherwise it turns "racism" from a set of beliefs into a set of words. We'll never get an integrated society if all the "anti-racist" movement does is censor words and occasionally crucify someone for a public transgression.

By turning Shilpa Shetty into a victim for the sake of ratings, Channel 4 has thrown away an opportunity to send out a positive message. One of the housemates is supposed to have referred to her as "the Indian". But that's all she is now - just the Indian victim of racial bullying. Not a person in her own right - she's being defined by her ethnicity and skin colour by the very people supposedly defending her.

But three paragraphs is far too much to waste on this whole squalid affair.

A much more important question has been posed by TheArtist. He wants to know whether it is possible for a person to eat a house. He reckons that you could grind a brick down to dust and add it to normal food without really noticing it. If anyone knows anything about eating bricks and/or houses please let us know if his plan is feasible.

15th January

Our new team mate debuted today. I've known KFD for some time now but we bonded at the coffee machine when he read "This machine goes bean to cup".

"You never go bean to cup" I mumbled.

He got it as a Clerks 2 reference. This boy will go far.

Having not been without a PC for more than a day or two it is curious to have one again after two months. I keep remembering things I can now do again. Like consulting my DVD database or putting new stuff on my iPod or having stupid sound clips play whenever I get email or updating a footling website which will remain nameless. The one thing I still need is a DVD player. I used to have PowerDVD5 but that came preloaded and is only available when doing a full system restore. Which I don't want to do. So I'll have to get one from eBay (a legit copy of 5 or 6 which should be cheap as 7 is the latest version). Unless anyone knows a freeware one which lets me take screen shots.

Today's update was mainly put together so the "timely" pieces by Si and Paul would get a belated airing. All four were written shortly after their respective broadcasts and have been hibernating in my inbox ever since. I also wanted to put the fourth annual Brenty Four in its rightful place, even though most of those who would be interested have probably already read the first few chapters and concluded it is washed up offal from a dried and past-it well.

I do want to mention what happened when I went to the doctor's on Friday. Not what happened when I finally got to see a professional trained in the tying of bandages, but rather what happened shortly before it. The first thing was that everyone else in the waiting room seemed to know each other. The second was that the boy in front apparently had a "bad back" but that didn't stop him turning sharply round and staring every time someone came in through the door. The third was the school girl who declared herself to the receptionist as being seventeen but had the hardened and plastered face of an insecure thirty-five year old who has lead a hard and smoky life. Then came the main event. A short haired woman in a baseball cap burst into the surgery and asked which doctor was on duty. She then announced, loudly and proudly, that she was suffering from "female problems". She asked how many were in front of her.

"Six" said the receptionist. The woman then swished her hand in our direction and boomed "All of them?"

She sat down in front of me and opened the Co-op carrier bad she'd brought with her. She took out one large bag of bacon crispies, one large bag of salt and vinegar chipsticks and one large bag of cheesy poofs. She put the bacon crispies and the salt and vinegar chipsticks back in the carrier bag and proceeded to chain-chomp her way through a hundred grams of cheesy poofs.

The ten minutes with the stand-in doctor weren't great. Brent Kremen was locked up for three weeks in a secure hospital for less than the answer I gave to her question about whether I'd had any suicidal thoughts recently.

I was reminded today of one of those foot-in-mouth moments that happened a few weeks ago. We're working with this guy on a project. Last year's disaster recovery exercise was mentioned and he asked where we went. "Oh - I live right next to there" he said. "I could walk there from my house. It'd be much better than driving all the way here every day."

"So if this building explodes we'll know who to point the finger at" I said.

"Yes" he agreed. "Of course, most people would do that anyway because I'm Palestinian."

Excellent.