122 days until I am 40

It occurred to me this morning that there are 122 days remaining until I turn 40 years of age. That’s 122 days INCLUSIVE of today and my upcoming birthday. 

That’s an imposing milestone; one so imposing, in fact, that it has spurred me out of more than five months’ slumber to start writing ODHSNM again.

To those who have missed me, what can I say? At a certain point, the excuse I had prepared – that I had forgotten the log-in details for Blogger – actually became true.

All sorts of mad shit has happened since April when I declared (somewhat prematurely, I now realise) that I wanted to become a children’s entertainer. I’m sure that you were crying out for the interpretive wisdom of Roger of Sicily to help make sense of it all. When you needed me, I wasn’t there for you. Soz an’ all.

What does it mean to be approaching 40? When I was a boy, I remember thinking “in the year 2000 I will be 24”. It seemed impossibly distant, not least because as a subscriber to 2000AD I had very clear ideas about the degrees of technological advance and societal breakdown that would need to  be gone through before we arrived there.

Today, I have written down a series of goals that I will attempt to achieve in the next 122 days. Well, 121 days. If all the things I dislike, disavow and regret about myself could be brought under the heading of a single word, that word would be “habit”. My goals are all about breaking habits. I’m going to write about how I get on – to keep you all amused and to keep myself honest. And to make it so that not every single blog post title for 2015 starts with the word "it". 

OK Bye Now 2014

OK, so you probably thought I’d just given up writing this blog by now, right?

Yes, it’s been nearly three months since I put anything on here. But just because I haven’t been writing it doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking of you, ODHSNM.

It’s not you, it’s me. I’ve been really busy at work. I forgot the login details. Plus, the world in 2014 is so ridiculous there’s very little I can add to it here. This picture – from the quaint North Yorkshire village of Hutton-Le-Hole – sums it up for me, pretty much.

I’ll do better next year, I promise. Assuming the world doesn’t come to an end or nuffink.

So, I will bid you farewell for this year my second photo summing up the year, from a kid’s playground in Wrose. Have a splendid Christmas you magnificent bastards!

Looking Inside Myself

It’s June and this is only the 11^th blog post I have written this year.

Long-term readers will perhaps have noticed a downward trend in the frequency of updates since the prolific days of 2011, when by June 2^nd I had racked up 28 posts.

Quantity is obviously not everything, and no doubt there are those (from whose number I do not automatically exclude myself) who think that the quality has deteriorated since then too, when I declaimed loudwise about the divinity of the sun, about dinosaurs and about Eurovision.

Monologues like that – whether intended to be funny, serious or whatever – just don’t seem to come to me complete and ready for compression into 1,500 words or so any more.

Perhaps I have exhausted the store of all the experiences, ideas and connections built up over my 38 years alive that seemed worth sharing. Perhaps I am running on the fumes of what occurs to me between posts.

I dunno.

Part of it is definitely work-related. It’s all got a bit more serious in the last couple of years, and so when I have mental free time it tends not to be spent on flights of fancy but on the tiresome matter of making money for somebody else. Not on purpose, obviously – but I used to quite enjoy waking up in the dead of night with a thought I couldn’t get out of my head, whereas I don’t really now.

Part of it is just sheer ennui.

He is perfectly capable of not pulling this stupid face

Yeah, I COULD write about UKIP but what’s the fucking point?

I’m not doing this to point out what other people have written or thought, or to provoke people into arguments. I’m doing this to express my views where they are different or new. And I seem to just have fewer views than ever before.

I could write about Eurovision again – which was won by a bearded lady this year. How shocking. Oh no, wait. Didn’t a transgender person win it in 1998? Wasn’t that more shocking? Or does the beard push it over the edge? Doesn’t it stop being shocking when you know it’s all being done purely with the intention to shock?

I haven’t watched Eurovision in years. The whole thing just feels like (i) an in-joke that everyone is in on and (ii) something that takes place solely for the reason of generating opinion pieces (or “ten ways to have a Eurovision party” articles). The Buzzfeedisation of everything makes me want to blow up the internet. But I still look at it. 

I could write about Ukraine, but OH MY GOD how much work would it be to actually form opinions based on some foundations of fact rather than “goodie/baddie” or “everybody baddie” narratives we are presented with? Ukraine won Eurovision in 2004, with Ruslana’s “Wild Dances”. Just Google it yourself – I don’t need to link to it, do I?

This is what I KNOW about Ukraine

I can’t believe some of the topics I wrote about in the past, insofar as I can’t believe I gave enough of a shit to spend the time writing about them – and being satisfied enough with what I’d written to give it a public airing.

Don’t worry by the way – I am not going to treat this like a cheap sitcom Xmas special, where we reminisce over a load of links to past posts. Do you remember Viktor Bout? (Fade to late 2010...switch on laughter track...)

I have long resisted the temptation to start reviewing TV programmes or films, but...but then, what would the point of doing that be? We already have the Radio Times.

Dear readers: would you rather see more or less on here? Would ODHSNM be better as a blog with a theme rather than just as a random assemblage of ephemera? Should I perhaps experiment with the possibilities of the blog as a literary form rather than ape the columnists of the dead tree press (complete with punning headline – BUT WHY?)?

Answers below please. Come on – I NEEEEED your validation so bad. 

Now We Are Three

It is three years on Tuesday since I started writing this blog.

Looking back, I see that I used to write a lot more serious social and political stuff - “a lot more serious” by own standards, I mean. I honestly don’t have opinions on many of the sorts of news events I used to comment on. It’s not that I don’t care... well, actually it is.

I feel like “the world” one sees through the mediation of the media (that’s what it does – hence the name) as opposed to what I see through my own eyes is too nauseating to think very hard about.

Another riot? Another massacre? More corruption? Impending doom? Meh.

What good is another opinion, echoing something someone has already said? What could I add to any debate?

Knowledge isn’t power – knowing just makes you realise how powerless you are.

Where’s the point of satire when reality is already beyond parody or is just so awful that to make a joke of it would be sickening?

And so I have written more and more about my life and my own perspective, throwing in a regular bit of bathos to make it amusing. Every time.

What am I doing this for? For the same 40 or so of you – for which I am very grateful, I might add – to carry on reading it week after week?

In the words of Emo Philips (who my wife hates, but who I think is a genius):

Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps.

People who Smell

One of the worst things about summer – with the obvious exception of hayfever – is that hot weather makes people sweaty.

And a proportion of those people who are sweaty (many of whom can, in fairness, be identified on sight) really start to smell bad.

Now, many of these people will actually be smelly all year round. But in the same way that if you make a bottle of horrible wine cold enough, you can’t taste how bad it is – the usual cold weather has the merciful effect of keeping their stench down to a level where only intimate contact would uncover it.

I realise that at a time when the global economy is in a coma and many parts of the world are exploding in protest, complaining about the body odour of others probably marks me out as a rather trivial person.

Well to that all I can say is, if you want to carry on gathering in the streets and getting battered by the police, be my guest. After all, hundreds of years of experience of it having absolutely no effect whatsoever on power notwithstanding, this might just be the time that waving a placard and being hit on the head achieves something momentous.

Water canon: not always a bad thing

I have nothing to say about these global protestors at the moment unless they smell. Which some of them probably do, while others don’t.

This is not a complaint about homeless people – who have an excuse. 

Water is widely available here in the UK. Soap, deodorant and other means of preventing your carcass from giving other people migraines are inexpensive. Using them is a matter of basic human politeness, the same as not cuffing passers-by around the back of the head.

Can you not tell that you smell like a bin bag full of decomposing vegetables on a hot summer’s afternoon? Do you like it?

If ever I get onto a train with broken air conditioning, I can be assured that the hulking, wall-eyed, polyester-clad, adult virgin staggering down the aisle is going to sit next to me. And he’s going to smell like he’s been wearing the same clothes for a year and has a leaky catheter about his person. And it’s going to get hotter and hotter.

The Bhagavad-gītā tells us “we are not these bodies”.

I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do know we are responsible for these bodies. 

And now...two jokes

I have a load of maps on the wall of my office. I do like a nice map.

I just turned my head to look at one and my eyes immediately alighted on the part of Egypt shown to the left.

Sacre bleu! So Dora the Explorer is really set on the Suez Canal.

Bridge, Crocodile Lake, Abu Sultan.

Say it with me: Bridge, Crocodile Lake, Abu Sultan.

So you tell Dora... [And so on]

I'm now looking hard for the real-world locations of Wizzle Mountain and the Dancing Forest.

Moments later - out of the window this time - I saw that First Group have a bus called "Chris Moyles".

I'm pretty sure there's a joke there somewhere, but I will leave you to fill in your own details.

A Block of Ice

Most of my ideas for blogs come to me while I am riding my scooter. My commute gives me a good 25 minutes or so of chewing a thought up, swallowing it, digesting it through my many stomachs before finally regurgitating it to chew a bit more.

And so I feel I must blame the recent sparsity of my posting on the dismal weather we have had for WEEKS ON END NOW.

Following the ghastly experience related in The White Caterpillar trilogy earlier this year, I have become rather more wary of taking my bike out in snow and ice. And being older now than I ever have been in the past, I am finding myself less and less willing to get cold or wet unnecessarily.

So I have been taking the train a lot more recently. And I can’t just sit and think on trains. So I read.

Reading is all very well and good, but it hasn’t furnished me with that many ideas for blogs. Not ones I can pass off as my own, at any rate.

I’m on a train home from London as I write this, and I am experiencing what I suppose proper writers would call writer’s block – insofar as, in spite of having a few basic ideas for posts, I haven’t had the opportunity to masticate them properly; to grind them up between the molars of my mind into the pulpy, glutinous paste I need in order to make the ODHSNM magic happen.

I’ve started writing a couple of things, and then deleted it after a hundred words or so.

As long-time readers will attest, considerations of quality have never stopped me writing before. And so I am writing this instead to tell you all about it.

Perhaps the weather has turned and we are finally going to get some kind of spring, which will in turn see the green shoots of things to write about begin to poke their heads out of my frozen brain-soil. Or maybe I’ve just run out of decent ideas. Or maybe I’ve lost the ability to express them. Or maybe I just don’t want to do this any more.

I need to get back on my bike and find out. 

Top Six Pictures of Things I Have Seen

And what I thought about them – at the time and later on. Let’s start 2013 with a bang!

By “a bang” I mean of course some random bits and pieces that would not warrant a blog post in their own right but which it is technically possible to argue have a unifying theme.

So here we go.

Walking my dogs in the woods, I came across this (left) carved upon a big stone.

It says “Solvitur Ambulando”, which is Latin for “solve it by walking”. Considering my largely unsuccessful attempts to solve my incipient obesity by walking last year, I was somewhat sceptical of the sentiment, but the more I have thought about it, the better it becomes.

There are not many problems that don’t benefit from a bit of a walk – although my wife (Elvira of Castille - you know by now) is not in agreement with Diogenes of Sinope that you can “solve” a dispute by “walking” away from it.

A little bit of wisdom found in the woods for you there.

A day trip saw us pass by the road to hell (above) and found the Sicilies in a very weird place called Botany Bay near Chorley, where we encountered this mysterious object to the left. What is it, you ask?

Why, a traditional garden obelisk, of course.

A what?

A TRADITIONAL GARDEN OBELISK! Obviously. 

It creates height and interest in beds and borders!

I must confess that have never come across the tradition of having an obelisk in one’s garden. Perhaps it’s an Egyptian thing.

Also at Botany Bay, I came across this, to the right. A spiked carving dish. So far, so mundane.

But what is that extra feature I see?

A GRAVY WELL!

All this time, we’ve been making our gravy from granules when I could have been hauling it up in a bucket from an underground stock aquifer in Denmark. Who knew?

Back to the real world and I show you Boston FC’s car park on Christmas Day 2012. 

As you can see, it was quite floody. The heavy rain had waterlogged the local vinegar mine as well. 

And finally, I give you the acceptable face of Lincolnshire racism. Stay classy Boston!

The Kettle Kapacity Konundrum

“Life. Oh life. Oh liiiife. Oh life. Doo-doo-doo-doo.”

So sang Des’ree in her 1998 number 8 chart hit, “Life”.

I often think about those words when I consider the fundamental contingency and futility of our existence on this earth.

Just now, a kettle has reminded me of Des'ree's words of power. 

Why oh why do all kettles measure their capacity in terms of dainty little teacups?

Does anyone under the age of 70 routinely drink out of a small teacup? No! EVERYONE drinks out of a mug!

Why, Mr Tefal, Mr Rowenta, Mr Morphy Richards, do you use an obsolete unit of measurement, forcing me to do multiplications and divisions in my head in order to work out how much water I need to boil?

It drives me to despair, as I drink my afternoon half-mug of tea. 

But then when the darkness looks insurmountable, I remind myself of the profound message of hope provided by 5ive in their 1999 chart topper, “Keep on Movin’”:

“Sometimes I think that life has no meaning, but I know things will be alright in the end.”

On Anger

HULK SUBLIMATE!

People often think I am unemotional, but in this they are mistaken. I am in fact a very emotional person, whose complex and varied inner states express themselves outwardly only in limited forms.  

That is to say, no matter what is happening to me and how I feel, I express myself more or less uniformly somewhere on the spectrum between boredom and rage.

In the same way that a power station turns coal into heat, which turns water into steam, which turns the rotation of a turbine into electricity (or something like that), so my constitution reliably metastasises every stimulus into one or another form of annoyance.

This is an exaggeration of course (you IDIOT) but it contains an element of truth. To have a furious side is quite restrictive, given that it is socially unacceptable EVER to be angry.

Generally, I get around this by the trusty old British standby of irony. You may have noticed this strategy in play on this very blog – I rant and rave, sneer scathingly, belittle and threaten others, but I don’t mean it.

Or do I?

I used to love irony. It felt so clever saying one thing and meaning another. Now I just want to say what I mean – but it’s practically impossible. People would think I was mad. Not because the things I want to say are mad (well, not all of them) but because there are things you just don’t say directly.

Like – oh, I don’t know...for example – that one thinks that another is an idiot, upon whom one has spent quite enough time already trying to explain simple things.

Having always to say this indirectly and in a way that doesn’t upset the other actually makes me even angrier.
 

Do you ever just want to get a sledgehammer and smash everything around you like the Hulk?

I do. Quite often.

And the fact that I can’t do that – because (i) everything around me belongs to me and I’d have to replace it, (ii) I’d get fired from my job, (iii) other people would be upset and/or (iv) the law – is quite irritating.

Can you perhaps see my problem?

What are people in our civilised society supposed to do with all the pent-up rage and aggression that our civilised society causes in them?

Play squash, get ulcers and have strokes?

Calm down dear

Everything around us is arranged to maximise annoyance value and minimise opportunities for legitimately releasing the pressure.

 Just phone up your gas supplier – it’s not the person on the end of the phone’s fault. You can’t get angry with them.

THIS IS NOT A COINCIDENCE!

The insincere pre-recorded apology for your train being late?

THIS IS NOT A COINCIDENCE!

By the way, none of the above is true. I’m being ironic.

LOL. 

It’s the Final Countdown

Have you seen this god?

T-55: Not long to go now, eh apocalypse watchers?

Less than eight weeks to go until the end of the world/the dawning of a new age of spiritual enlightenment/the Strictly Come Dancing final, depending on your point of view.

For my own part, I have to say that the portents have been a little disappointing to say the least. Jimmy Savile obviously came as a surprise, but apart from that the last few months have been pretty slim on Book of Revelation-type stuff. 

I am starting to wonder if this is all not a big joke. Has anyone else seen anything suggesting the impending end of days? Let's try to keep it light-hearted though. 

Isle of Sodor Railways loses franchise

"Eccentric" Hatt

PRESS RELEASE

Department for Transport, 12/10/12

Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin will announce this morning that the Isle of Sodor Railway Company’s franchise for operating passenger and freight services will be not be renewed and will come to an end next April.

Mr McLoughlin cited Isle of Sodor Railways’ appalling record on punctuality and safety – derailments on the network total 255 for the last year alone – as the decisive reasons for rejecting the bid put in by eccentric chairman, Sir Topham Hatt, better known to the public as “The Fat Controller”.

Many critics have laid the blame for the company’s performance on Sir Topham’s “Very Useful Engine” artificial intelligence system, which allows locomotives to make their own route planning and other decisions – frequently in competition with one another.

The Secretary of State also pointed to extensive financial irregularities within Isle of Sodor Railways, which is incorporated in the neighbouring tax haven, the Isle of Man.

Concerns have frequently been raised about the amount of rolling stock and track maintained by Isle of Sodor, which is vastly out of proportion to the needs of an island no more than five miles in length.

Mr McLoughlin will later today hand the franchise to the US-based Consortium For Putting in an Offer for Running Sodor’s Railways – SodOff.

Chuggington: Safety concerns

One of the lead backers of SodOff is the Arizona city of Chuggington. Commentators have noted that Chuggington’s record on accidents is just as bad as Isle of Sodor’s.

Confronted with these concerns, the Secretary of State said in a statement: “They offered shit loads more money.”

Asked for a comment, senior partner at transport engineering consultancy Pig, Rabbit and Cat, Ian “Daddy” Pig said: “Oh. I didn’t expect that to happen”, before jumping up and down in a muddy puddle.

NOTES FOR EDITORS

• Sir Topham Hatt is the brother of rogue investment banker Sir Stetson “Cowboy” Hatt, the former chief executive of RBS, who has not been missing since 2009. Sir Stetson was last seen leaving Claridges and getting on board Bertie the Bus with 15 teenage Lithuanian prostitutes.
• Sir Topham first developed the “Very Useful Engine” system in the late 1930s. He spent much of the previous decade in Italy observing how Mussolini made trains run on time. That period is widely believed to be the source of the ardent anti-communism which inspired his desire to run a railway without workers. His feelings about the labour movement led Sir Topham to become a dedicated supporter of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, and he was interned for much of the Second World War on Zingzilla Island.

Missing banker Thomas Goldstein

• Although Isle of Sodor Railways maintains that “Very Useful Engine” is a closely-guarded software secret, allegations that trains are animated with the souls of dead business partners of Hatt, revived by unspeakable necromantic rites, have continually depressed share prices. Longstanding acquaintances of the Hatt family have claimed to see uncanny similarities between certain company assets and the renowned German financiers, Thomas and Percy Goldstein, who vanished in 1936.
• Spokesman for SodOff, Tinkie Winkie the Teletubbie commented on the DfT’s decision: “Tinkie Winkie bag!”. The FTSE100 and Dow Jones both immediately rose by 100 points. 

Contact DfT press office for further information.

Mayan Apocalypse Liveblog - Half-Time Analysis

T-175: Whooo-ooo, we’re halfway there! 175 days have elapsed since I started liveblogging the run up to the end of the world, and 175 days remain.

Let’s review the main portents so far:

 - Wettest June on record – check

 - Imminent collapse of global economic and social fabric – check

 - Nadal out of Wimbledon – check

If there’s anything left in this world you want to do or see, you’d really better get on with it. Look how quickly the first half of all the time that remains to us flew by! And with 25 Sundays between now and then, that's a mere 150 shopping days. 

100 posts...and for what?

So, this is the hundredth post I have written here on Oh Dear. How Sad. Never Mind.

Let’s take a look back over the highlights.

...

Errr

...

In March last year, I posted a picture of Peppa Pig, which was a HUGE HIT.

That’s it.

Did you enjoy it?

Top ten unfinished blog ideas

It is well-known that even the crappiest article with “top ten” in the headline will be ridiculously over-rated by Google, and therefore attract way more visitors than the content legitimately deserves.

To that end, here is my very own contribution to the entirely unnecessary top ten genre. Like a ruminant, I’m bringing these half-digested ideas back up from one of my many stomachs for a last chew. Too rambling for a Facebook status update, too under-developed for an entire post –here we go, my Xmas gift to you:

1. All the thrill of the escalator

Does anyone else still get a frisson of big city excitement when they go on a “down” escalator? None of the towns I lived in up until the age of 18 had any shops with a down – it was lifts or stairs only for us yokels.

Every time I ride the down escalator, part of me wants to sing “New York, New York”.

2. Now or then?

Is this London St Pancras 2011 or Berlin Templehof 1936? Fascist art is alive and well...

3, Everyone’s a critic

Has anyone here read “The Communist Manifesto”? I did recently, and I was surprised by how clear and modern Marx’s critique of capitalism is. His descriptions of the finance-driven economy are shockingly prescient of the situation we find ourselves in now.

The second half of The Communist Manifesto is also pretty funny, where Marx kick starts the favourite pastime of every leftwinger ever since and slags off every other kind of socialist who has any point of disagreement with him. Because it’s SCIENCE after all.

And does anyone here like Nietzsche? As far as I can see, his demolition of the foundations of Judaeo-Christian ethics in “Beyond Good and Evil” and “The Antichrist” is irrefutable.

The trouble is, both Marx and Nietzsche go on from their brilliantly-argued critique to erect some batshit alternative scheme on top of it – in Marx’s case, communism; in Nietzsche’s case...errr...well, I’m still not entirely sure. Something to do with “act like a Homeric Greek and don’t give a toss about what anyone else does”.

And the funny thing is, both of those two explicitly denigrate “mere critics”. Why is it so easy to knock things down and so hard to produce alternatives?

4. Don’t put your daughter on the internet Mrs Worthington

If you put a picture of your kids as your Facebook profile picture, no one is going to know if you are who they think you are.  

5. Literary heroics (a)

Thanks to Anonymous (for god’s sake people – just put in any old name when you leave a comment...) for pointing me in the direction of Xenophon. I read the whole of “Anabasis” while on jury duty.

“Anabasis” is the ancient Greek “Bravo Two Zero”. Secret mission in Iraq goes wrong, escape from behind enemy lines, fighting all the way – sound familiar? ANCIENT GREECE IS NOT BORING!

6. Literary Heroics (b)

Whoooooooooooooooooooooooooo lives in a pineapple under the sea? FRIDTJOF NANSEN!

If Xenophon is Andy McNab, Fridtjof Nansen is Bear Grylls – but without the overnight hotels. I just read “Farthest North”, relating his polar expedition of 1893 to 1896. That’s right – three years in a wooden ship on the Arctic Ocean.  

In fairness, there are times when the repetitive prose manages to not only describe the ball-aching boredom he suffered being frozen into pack ice with 13 Norwegians waiting to drift to Greenland but also to elicit it. I could only care so much about what they had for dinner EVERY DAY FOR THREE YEARS. "Took the latitude. We have drifted 12 feet north in the last week. Took a sounding. The sea is very deep. It's been night for six months. Thought I saw a polar bear, but I didn't. I am so bored."

But the unbelievable fortitude of the man – a man of action, and of science and (later) a humanitarian statesman - is just inspiring. Sure, there are plenty of British polar explorers I could have idolised. But their books were not free! Nor did any of them have quite such an impressive moustache and stare. 

7. Vests are not outerwear

It is not acceptable to wear just a vest in public in the UK if you are a man. Even if it’s hot.  Especially when it’s cold.

Also, is it wrong that when I hear the line “don we now our gay apparel” in “Deck the halls with boughs of holly” I can’t help but think of assless chaps?

8. The most revolting cocktail ever

I give you the “Scotti”.  

9. The day I quit the gym

I cancelled my gym membership – and had to work out a three month notice period @£72 a month! Outrageous. If anyone has any ideas on how I can avoid turning into Jabba the Hutt, I’d be most grateful for your input.

10. And then the abyss stared back into me

The trouble with writing a blog is that when I meet people in the real world, I don’t have anything left to say to them. In telling every interesting anecdote I have on here, and polishing and grinding down the sharp edges on the facts until it becomes a routine or a bit of schtick, I lose the will to ever mention it again. 

Safety first!

Here's a picture I recently took out of a car window on the M25.

It is a Honda Accord - maybe a Civic, I don't know - in the back of a Luton van coming up to the Dartford crossing (southbound).

As you can see, it is securely fastened in place by a piece of rope holding the tailgate up.

No doubt the thoughtful driver also put the handbrake on to make doubly sure that nothing could possibly go wrong with this little arrangement.

Feel free to rip this picture off and stick "Epic Fail" across it if you so wish.

Unrelatedly, I feel it is only right and proper that I provide you with material evidence to back up all this "moustache big talk" I've been engaging in recently. Well here it is:

I can't handle the truth

So, Blogger has a new interface which includes something resembling a child's version of Google Analytics.

Oh, I know I said I was never going to talk about SEO on here, but this is too interesting – by which I mean disheartening – to ignore.

Turns out round about one third of the traffic that has EVER come here has come in from people looking for pictures of Peppa Pig.

Back in March, I wrote a post about said pig, which was well-received and even got randomly linked to from a site promoting "real breast feeding" or something.

Ever since, I have been thinking that if I really want to give up work and write this nonsense for a living, I was going to have to sit and analyse a lot more episodes of Peppa Pig and think of something amusing to say about them. I've got quite a long way with this project so far and – even in the light of this setback - may well return to it in future.

Anyway, the goddam new interface has shown me (from a list of top URLs for incoming traffic) that it's not my ingenious interpretation of the Mummy Rabbit/Miss Rabbit dichotomy that has drawn in the readers. No, it's the fact that Google Images indexed the bloody picture.

So...LOOK! IT'S GEORGE! DINE-SAW!!!!!! LOOK AT MEEEEEEE!!!!!!

One year of ODHSNM

ODHSNM is one today. That means it's started to crawl around and it has increasingly strong opinions on what it will or won't do (and especially, eat).

However, it still lacks effective bladder or bowel control, and has to be prevented at all costs from getting to the stairs.

Yes, my blog is no longer a baby. It is now a toddler (much like my actual toddler, Tancred, who is also one year old). No longer can I put it down somewhere and expect it to still be there when I get back.

I find it quite remarkable that I've kept writing this up for this long. Here's to the speedy passage of the next 17 years, and to ODHSNM finally leaving home!