The room was dimly lit as I was led in and told to lie down on the bed. Dark shadows, figures moving in and out of the half-light, strange items of equipment the use of which I could barely guess; trying to figure out their purpose sent a shiver down my spine. I’d find out soon enough. Restraints, ready in the event of a struggle. Quiet. Just the sound of my heart beat, the blood pulsing through my body. Fear rising, threatening to take a hold of me. I swallowed and tried to control my breathing, knowing there was no way out. I’d wanted this. I’d made my choice. Now all that was left was to submit to the inevitable.

From behind me strong arms held me down, pinning me to the bed. Firm, muscular arms, pressing my shoulders, keeping me still, showing me that to struggle would be futile.

And then I saw Him. He stepped from the shadow, silhouetted by a single bright light. His features were obscured by a heavy mask but His eyes spoke for him, telling me that He would enjoy this, that I was His plaything, that His will would prevail.

A click, a whirr, from somewhere in the distance the sounds of equipment coming to life. My fear was tangible, a cold, biting terror of the unknown. A screen came to life too far away for me to see clearly and I realised that He was going to record my ordeal. No doubt He did the same with all His victims, cataloguing their pain so He could watch their suffering over and over. What twisted mind stood before me? How had I come to this?

And then He spoke. His voice as dry as a corpse, menacing, commanding, the voice of a man in total control. “This will not be...” He searched for the word, selecting just the right phrase to prove His dominance and send another wave for dread through my shaking body. “This will not be...comfortable”. A satanic glint in His eye. The confidence of someone who knew what they were about to do.

“Is this your first time?” He asked, His voice so cold yet edged with the stain of anticipated pleasure. I nodded and He leaned closer, so I caught the foul stench of His breath. His eyes flicked to a nearby tray which carried an assortment of syringes, needles and a tourniquet. “I could give you something to make it easier...” He rasped, indicating the spread of drugs. His hand moved to the largest syringe, loaded with a thick, yellow liquid, some potent sedative no doubt, used to incapacitate His victims, keep them quiet so they didn’t scream. His eyes sparkled with a mischievous gleam and He pushed the tray away. He finished His thought, “...But then you’d not remember. Let’s try it first without the drug.” I tried to pull away.

Behind me, another voice, this time from the one who was holding me down: “Don’t struggle. You’ll only make it worse for yourself...”

A gag was placed in my mouth, forcing my jaw open. Tears welled in my eyes and my vision blurred. But I kept still, trying to be strong, trying to force the fear back down to the pit of my stomach. The lights were turned down more, darkness now apart from the single point of brilliance, casting sharp white light which pierced the black, giving terrifying glimpses of the equipment He had laid out before Him -the tools of His sinister trade, items not out of place in a medieval torture chamber, the cold glint of metal in the harsh, painful light. Another wave of fear crashed over me, carrying me with it in a maelstrom of nightmarish panic. “Be still!” I tried to steady my breathing, concentrating on the rise and fall of my chest, blocking out my thoughts of the horror that awaited.

The hands still pressed my shoulders, imprisoning me as effectively as any rope or chain and yet more ominous when applied by another human being. He stood, for a moment blocking the light, His back turned to me, withdrawing something, revealing it slowly, almost worshiping it in its sleek elegance. As He turned back I saw that in His gloved hand He held His tool and my heart skipped a beat. The pounding in my ears grew louder as blood coursed through my body and He stood with His instrument of torture in His hand. It was so much longer than I had expected, thicker too, and He seemed to be stroking it, caressing its length, playing with it. “I’m going to put this inside you,” He said. “Are you ready?”

I had no choice. I had thought I wanted this. I thought it would give me answers. Now all I wanted was for this waking nightmare to be over. I was in too far, I was not ready for this!

He pressed closer now, His body touching mine, getting ready to penetrate me, to force me to submit to His fiendish will. I was drenched in sweat, the damp envelopment of pure terror as adrenalin rushed through my veins. He was so close now I could not focus and I felt strong hands grip my jaw. “You might gag,” He said, “when it touches the back of your throat. Everybody gags.” I could hear in His tone the pleasure He drew from my plight. I wished He would just get on with it, instead of teasing me, playing with me, heightening my fear and making all my senses fire with anticipation of what He was about to do to me.

And then it happened. I felt it enter me, filling my mouth, making it hard to breathe. So big! So much more than I had thought possible. I couldn’t take it, it was too much! I gagged, wanting it out of my mouth, tears rolling down my cheeks. From behind, a voice: “Try to relax. Don’t resist. Breathe.”

The man, now in absolute control of me, looked down and spoke in little more than a whisper. “You need to swallow.” His command was absolute. I had no choice as He thrust forward, pushing deeper and deeper inside me. I tried to gulp it down, taking it all, totally unable to defy his will.

I don’t know how long it lasted. Seconds seemed like minutes, time lost all meaning as I drifted beyond sense in that hell. I was aware of His movements as He pushed harder, pulled back, changing position, thrusting forward and then withdrawing slightly, a perpetual rhythm, in and out, in and out, exploring my very essence, laying bare my inner-most secrets, revealing me in the most intimate way.

And then, when He had reached full satisfaction, He withdrew completely, wiping His tool as He pulled it out. I could see in His eyes that He was spent, that the encounter was concluded.

The lights came on, blinding, disorientating, and I was released.

He removed his mask and smiled, knowing we had shared something that I would never forget. And He spoke once more, as I sat up and the truth of what had happened began to coalesce into reality. His words filled me with joy. “I could see no abnormalities in your upper digestive tract, nothing to worry about there at all. There is no sign of ulceration, it all looks fine.”

The doctor went on to say that there was still quite an amount of food in my stomach which after six hours of fasting would normally have gone, and suggested that I may just have a slow digestive system. This is probably caused by some of the medication I am taking but explains my nausea. A change of pills will probably help.

The burley nurse helped me to my feet and told me I had done extremely well, especially without sedation, and checked that I was alright. Half an hour later and we were home, having a cup of tea.

So, that was my gastroscopy – it’s fun, you should try one!

"We’re all following a strange melody
We’re all summonsed by a tune
We’re following the Piper
And we dance beneath the moon."

Let me tell you a story, you have heard it before no doubt, as a childhood fairytale, a rhyme or song. About a town in Germany, on the banks of the River Weser. A town plagued by vermin, an overwhelming infestation of rats, destroying the crops, eating the food supplies, killing livestock and bringing disease. And a townsfolk at the end of their endurance, starving, falling ill, unable to rid their town of this invasion of rats. You know how it goes: a stranger appears and offers to help, to remove the rats, to end the problem. His price is high, he wants payment in gold, but what use is gold when you have no food, when your water supply has been contaminated, when your world is being destroyed? So an agreement is reached and the mysterious man takes up his flute and as he plays the rats are mesmerised and slowly start to follow the sound, down the streets, past the fields, towards the river, where eventually they all drown. When the Piper returns to collect his dues the town’s people refuse payment, after all, their problem has been solved, the rats are gone, and they have no incentive to give up their gold. Later, when all the adults are worshiping in church, the Piper returns and plays his tune again, this time spellbinding the children, leading them away, over the hills and valleys, where they are imprisoned and left to die in a mountain cave.

So why am I blabbering on about a fairy tale? Am I notably deficient in the marble department today? Have my screws been loosened? Indeed not! You should know me better than that by now. For today is the anniversary of the day when 130 children were led out of Hamelin, never to be seen again. What’s more it’s a BIG anniversary – 725 years. I’m guessing that today is not the day to be a flautist wearing pied clothing in Germany! They say there is truth to the story, albeit allegorical, although the actual events are open to debate. One proposal is that the Pied Piper was a psychopathic paedophile who kidnapped 130 children from the Saxon village and used them in "unspeakable ways." Another relates the story of a plague that wiped out the infant population. But I like connections, links, the way experiences sometimes merge and so I choose to believe the more commonly accepted version in which some scholars suggest ‘the children of Hamelin’ means the people of the town, and that this is a story of mass migration, tempted by the lure of land and prosperity in Eastern Europe. And the connection I mention? Part of the ‘Eastern Europe’ in question was undoubtedly the land which we know today as Hungary. So maybe Gerda and the other people we met in Budapest last weekend are all distantly related to the children of Hamelin. I think I prefer that outcome to the paedophile version.

I have also this week been thinking about humour, not least because last night David and I had tickets to see Russell Howard at the Apollo Theatre. I’m afraid the iPhone didn’t cope too well with the spotlight and all you can really see is what looks like a blob of luminous ectoplasm. Sorry. I tried. But he was very good though. I love live theatre, be it music, comedy or play. There is a connection that you just don’t get elsewhere. We really must make an effort to see more shows. Comedy is especially good for the soul. I was quite ill yesterday, in a bad mood, and of poor humour, but I’m really pleased we made the effort to go to see Russ (I feel I can call him that now), as it did make me feel better.

They say laughter is the best medicine (admittedly probably not when you have stitches) and I can see why. In fact we have a whole linguistic code built around humour which I find fascinating. We often say, “In good humour”, meaning “In a good mood” or “being jovial, funny” and in fact the etymology of the word ‘humour’ is fascinating. We borrowed it from Latin, meaning liquid – it is the same root that gives us humid. The ancient philosophers believed that four liquids entered into the makeup of our bodies, and that our temperament was determined by the proportions of these four fluids, or humours, which they listed as blood, phlegm, bile, and black bile. The humours were themselves associated with the elements – fire, air, water and earth. (Blood has the qualities of being hot and moist, so is associated with air, whilst yellow bile was linked to fire, and an imbalance caused the patient to be hot and dry, and often ill-tempered!) These humours were supposed to be in balance and an over-proportion of one would cause certain behaviour. Someone with an excess of blood, the sanguine humour, is generally light-hearted, fun loving, loves to entertain, will be amorous, irresponsible, is affected by flights of whimsy and heated passion. Whereas someone with an abundance of black bile is melancholic so can become introspective, overly pre-occupied with the tragedy and cruelty in the world, thus becoming depressed. Hence, "In a black humour" or "Black Mood". Medieval medicine was concerned with returning balance to the humours.

I’m reminded of the Blackadder episode in which Edmund falls in love with Bob, and goes to visit his doctor for advice. The recommended ‘course of leeches’ would probably have been pretty close to the actual prescription at the time, as they would suck blood and reduce the associated humour.

We watched “Supersize Me” at the start of the week with Sue Perkins (she who I mistook for a brand of cigarettes - superkings), where they talked about medieval food and started me along this line of thinking. In accordance with the humour theory, most plants, food substances, and commonly found house items were specified as either cold, hot, dry, or wet so that they could be used to modify the amounts of humours within a person. The word ‘humour’, therefore was associated with imbalance and oddness, so eventually it took on the meaning of a humorous person, or a crank. Finally we adopted the current meaning of laughter, fun and good spirits.

My humour is being tested today though. Next door (not the invading Chinese army, but Chris and Debbie who we like), have had the decorators in. I’m not speaking euphemistically – we don’t know them that well to be able to predict menstrual cycles – that would be just too weird! Uhhhh I feel dirty just at the fact you had those thoughts! And anyway, Debbie is away in the States at the moment, obviously leaving Chris in charge of renovations. It appears to me to be a couple of women who arrive each morning and I hear talking about “getting it primed” and "giving it a good rub down" when I’m outside in the garden. Jeez, maybe it is me who has applied the decorating assumption here! Maybe when they talked about stripping they didn’t mean wallpaper! Maybe “That hole needs filling” has a different connotation to the one I had thought. “Don’t drip on the shag” “I’m going for another roll” “Wash it under warm water before it dries” “Of course it will go stiff if you leave it out all night” – HELP! It’s an orgy!

I digress. That is not the reason for my disgruntlement. (Not that I was aware of having been gruntled in the first place). It is this: The decorating dungaree dykes have, for the past three days, parked their car outside the semi (again, not a euphemism). But rather than straddling the curb, half on the road and half on the path, they have driven right up the path and are parked half on our lawn! Here, look!
The cheek! And this means that I can’t cut the grass. Each day I have had that in the back of my mind as a ‘must do’ job. And I’m thwarted. The eagle-eyed amongst you will also have spotted Chinese-Woman-Over-The-Road’s knicker display too – top right of the photo. You might need to click the image for the larger version.

I can’t let today go by without mentioning Michael Jackson who died last night. It would be very easy to poke humour at him, make accusations of paedophilia (even to the point of drawing connections with the story at the start of this entry - he DID record a song entitled "Ben" about a boy who befriends a giant rat! Weird how things connect!) I won't question his mental state or his grip on reality - you will have your own views on that. I grew up when his music was big (or bad?), and I guess I never really got into him (STEADY! Minds out of the gutter!). That’s the thing though, he was like Marmite, you either loved him or hated him. Still, at least Marmite has managed to stay brown!

A quick roundup of events today before I start my main thesis. We’re quite happy today as we have tickets to see Russell Howard at the Apollo tonight. You know who I mean, don’t you? No, not the “Titter ye not” guy from Up Pompeii – that was Frankie Howard. Certainly not Henry VIII’s wife, Catherine Howard (or is that Sree from Big Brother at the moment?). Howard Jones, 80’s singer/songwriter: no! Russell Howard, off the telly, does stand-up, always on Mock The Week. Floppy blond hair. Well, him. So that should be fun. Whilst on the subject of comedy quiz show whores, happy birthday to Phill Jupitus too. Never sent him a card, but there again he missed my birthday this year, and didn’t send for my bonkday yesterday either.

It is also George Michael’s birthday. He’s gone to pot recently, bless him. I heard he’d invited all his mates to join him in a mass debate in a cottage in Devon, but hardly anyone came and most of them couldn’t give a toss. Still you gotta have faith.

It is also the anniversary of Juan Peron being elected President of Argentina in 1972. Damn – if we’d still been in Budapest we could have done a re-enactment. I’d look good on a balcony.

And a mention of note too for George Orwell, he of Animal Farm, and 1984 fame. He’d be 106 today and probably feeling double-plus-un-good at the prospect of no longer being able to keep his aspidistra flying! Mind you, in this temperature pretty much anything is likely to go droopy!

And what the heck is going on? I’m not happy. I feel a strongly-worded letter of complaint coming on, but I’m not quite sure who to send it to. Something is seriously amiss, and I demand a full enquiry. Do these people not understand that we have rules in England? We have certain expectation of what is right and what is wrong. Ways of doing things. How things work, or rather don’t work.

Let me explain. This is the first week of Wimbledon. And what does that mean? Torrential rain. All week. And what do we get? Glorious sunshine! Yesterday it was hot enough outside to melt aluminium! NOT wet enough to start investing in ark manufacturers! Come on, this is just not done. It’s not British! Every year, without fail, the first week of Wimbledon is a complete wash-out.; so much so that this year they have built a fancy new retractable roof over the centre court. That’s the bit that really rattles my cage though. We have a tradition to maintain here. You see, what is supposed to happen is this:

We plough unfathomable amounts of money into a large engineering project (ideally something that the vast majority don’t want but we have committed to anyway). We then take forever to plan and start construction, run almost instantly into financial difficulties causing further delays, have to bring in outside help and finally deliver a project over budget and late. The final few points of perfection require that the end result is either useless, dangerous or at least just doesn’t work. That is the glory of being British and applies to pretty much any building project much bigger than a loft extension, small conservatory or garden pond (although all of these present their own opportunities).

Our land is riddled with examples – you’re probably already thinking of the Minnellium Dome (sic) and the facilities for the 2012 London Olympics which look set to cost at least £6 billion, rather than the £2.4 billion first quoted. Brilliant! It’s not just the English though – recall for a moment the wonderfully troubled Scottish Parliament building, which cost ten times its estimate and was delivered three years late. The new tram lines supposed to be completed in Edinburgh for 2010 are already months behind schedule and projections suggest they will be millions of pounds over budget.

The privately-financed Channel Tunnel opened a year behind schedule in 1994, at a cost of £10bn - more than double the original budget. All right and proper. That is what we expect to happen. Even looking around my own region I see the Manchester skyline now jagged with the half-built carcasses of new blocks of flats, which were committed prior to the credit crunch and now do not have the funding for completion.

Of course sometimes we get it wrong by getting it right. The shining example of this being the Millennium Wheel – which was only intended to see out 2000 and never meant as a permanent installation. By rights it should have fallen down by now, so someone screwed up big time! That said, in its defence, it WAS late in opening and missed the Millennium celebrations by three months and was regarded as a political embarrassment. Now the re-named London Eye is the capital’s biggest paying tourist attraction – something of a blot on our landscape of failure, but nevertheless costing a king’s ransom in maintenance (£12.5 Billion has just been set aside to replace the ‘pods’), so I’ll let it off on a technicality.

The new British Library opened in 1997 at a cost of £511m. It was three times over-budget - and construction work had overrun by five years.

Not wishing to be racist, I can’t miss out the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff – only ¾ complete when the first game was played there – ‘wet paint’ notices in the dressing rooms I should think. “Please don’t use the showers, the tiles aren’t set”. Amusingly, during its construction Welsh football and rugby games were hosted at Wembley; a favour that Cardiff was able to return when the new Wembley Stadium plummeted behind schedule. I used to work for an organisation who supplied IT facilities for Multiplex, the construction company behind Wembley, so their lack of progress was a matter of some interest to us. In the end, the contractual wrangling in respect of late payment charges and additional funding were a tangle of loose ends, crossed wires and general mayhem akin to the worst knotted mess you might find behind any British home TV/DVD system! But that is what happens in the UK. Hell, these things have implications beyond sport or entertainment or even the comfort of our politicians – we have a whole workforce of lawyers to keep in employment too. What would happen to them if things just started to go to plan? Specialists in conveyancing, procurement law, arbitration and conciliation all out of work. Can this country cope with a deluge of pin-striped tramps called Tarquin, in des-res cardboard box houses (constructed to the highest degree of health and safety legislation I’m sure)?

We know where we are when things go wrong. It is built into a very being. It’s who we ARE. We are known the world over for our stiff upper lip, it’s iconic. We built an empire on it. People go for collagen injections just to maintain it! But you don’t need a ‘stiff upper lip’ when all is running according to plan. We’d loose our national identity. Civilization as we know it would fall into the entropic void.

Back to Wimbledon via the minor digression of a Tweet from Sue Perkins last night that made me smile: ”When will the incessant she-grunting of Wimbledon be over? I play a spot of swingball, and I don't mind saying I've never come close to a full throated hog-yodel, even on a tricky backhand.” Perfect attitude. In any given year Wimbledon serves but a few genuine purposes:

1. To provide a source of endless humour, often involving Cliff Richard, Lesbian tennis players or excessive grunting – maybe all three. (By the way, could Transvestites enter the mixed doubles by themselves?)
2. For those who go to complain about the price of the strawberries, and those who don’t go to complain about those who do go and then complain about the price of the strawberries.
3. To provide another opportunity to demonstrate how the Brits have a singular talent for inventing a game, sharing it with the world and being shit at it. (Still, at least OUR world championships are open to people from abroad – which is more than can be said for the Americans!)
4. As an unfailing guarantee of rain

And it is point 4 where the problem arises. No rain. So no goddamned opportunity for the roof to fail. I know they tested it, but things always go fine in tests – dress rehearsals are all well and good but no use if the actors all get swine flu for opening night! What they need is a real, live, critical application of the roof, so it can show its full lack of potential. Not some drizzle but a storm of biblical proportions, so heavy that the centre court fills up like a huge bucket before the 3000-ton roof can be coaxed into place, drowning thousands amid the flotsam and jetsam of flailing ball-boys, Robinsons Barley drink bottles, empty Pimms glasses and John McEnroe’s collection of sweaty wrist bands. Or, failing that, just as soon as the roof is fully deployed, the sun comes out and we discover that the translucent ceiling acts as a massive magnifying glass and burns Princess Michael of Kent to a crisp. (Do you think she’s known to her close friends and family just as Mike?) .

We finished the roof on time, so we’ve got to redress the balance somehow. It just isn’t meant to go so smoothly. It’s not meant to work. It is meant to be an unmitigated disaster. Poor show Wimbledon: It’s just not cricket!

I read my horoscope this morning, don’t know why. I don’t really hold much truck with them anyway and have a few theories of my own. I think they are usually cleverly written to be so generic that you can find significance in them even though there is no direct correlation to the prediction and your life. It is usually things like, “Take care when meeting new people today – things may not be quite as they seem” or “Your energy will build today but try to not do too much or you’ll end up tired”. Meaningless or just stating the bloody obvious. That isn’t to say I don’t think there could be some practitioners out there who are able to tap into deeper forces, but I doubt the newspaper predictions are anything more than random phrases generated by a computer! Take by way of example my reading for today: “You could easily slip into an old relationship pattern as the Moon in your 7th House of Partners conjoins the karmic South Node of the Moon” – Well I’m bloody glad I knew about THAT before I tucked into my boiled eggs!

Here’s a thought to run up your flagpole and see if it flies proud and erect or hangs limp and flaccid: I wonder if we’ve not made an error in one of the basic assumptions of astrology. We read our stars and make predictions based on the date and time of our birth. But it seems to me that the more relevant date (but harder to prove) is that of our conception. Stay with me – I’m trying to take a more scientific approach here. I was born in February, although I was premature and really should have made my grand entrance into the world in March, had I gone full term. I was probably conceived in June. The date I popped out was random, could have been influenced by many factors, Mother eating a particularly spicy radish, driving over a vicious pothole in the road, a funny episode of “The Liver Birds” or heaven forbid, Ena Sharples, Minnie Caldwell, Martha Longhurst and Hilda Ogden caught up in an edge-of-the-seat drama centring around a pint of milk stout and a pressing need to riddle clinkers and scythe pots! Anything could have set her off. But the date that I was conceived is absolute. Mr Sperm met Miss Egg at a fixed point in time (I’m assuming he brought champagne, flowers and at very least a box of Milk Tray, but knowing my father it was probably a couple of Dahlia heads he’d plucked in passing from mother’s garden – mother always kept her garden very tidy!! And maybe a half-eaten spam sandwich).

So, and here we come to the clever bit, I was conceived in June, in the Summer. Now that was way back in the days when we had proper summers, with knotted hankies, cricket on the green, sun loungers that would remove your leg as soon as look at you, knitted bathing costumes and a complete ineptitude for getting skin cancer no matter how hard we damned well tried. Hose pipe ban? Bahhh – it wasn’t summer unless the lawn had turned into a grassless, cracked expanse of compacted dirt more arid that depths of the Gobi Desert. So there’s this poor little embryo stuck inside my mother, suffering from the gestatory equivalent of boil-in-the-bag, being force fed the muffled tones of Dusty Springfield, Cliff Richard, The Mamas and The Papas and bloody Ken Diddy Men Dodd and a diet of cheese fondue, Prawn Cocktail and Babysham. Then, to add insult to injury, just as I’m starting to grow into a perfectly-formed mini-me and cognitive processes are starting to develop, BANG, it’s Winter, the temperature plummets and I go from par-boil to freeze-dried in less time than it takes to harvest a decent batch of stem cells! My point in all this is that the prevailing conditions, temperatures, pressure systems, socio-economic climate and so forth must all have had an impact on the embryonic me, and will have played some small part in governing the design of the resulting sproglet. Yes, we inherit much from our parents through genetics and behavioural models but surely the conditions of our gestation are influential too? And if that is the case, then our birth date is of less significance than our date of conception. A baby conceived in a torrid summer holiday romance and consequently being born in the winter will have undergone a different sequence of external conditions to a baby conceived at the office Christmas party. And yes, there ARE population peaks nine months after Christmas and the Summer Holidays (or similar vacations in other countries) - give people a few days off work, a couple of bottles of Tesco’s vin de plonk and hey presto, the human race has another statistic to ponder.

Maybe we should be paying more attention to the astrological significance of our conception dates and not our ‘wombic evacuation’ anniversary. In which case, by my reckoning, I was conceived round about 43 years ago to this very day. Why are you not singing “Happy Bonk Day To You”? Where’s my Bonkday cake? I expect a card!

Although, if I extrapolate just a step further, I guess that would make my star sign ironic in its predictive abilities and painfully appropriate. June 22 to July 22: Cancer!

Back in Blighty, buggered, bewitched and bewildered after Budapest, and now being Bill Bryson! Hungary was not at all what we expected (although we didn’t know what to expect really – just not what we found). We had a good time though, and Budapest was fascinating.

Flight out delayed by an hour – points failure at Brent Cross or some such excuse. Maybe the wrong type of leaves on the runway or inappropriate catering conditions. But no matter, as we had to put clocks forward an hour anyway so had absolutely no idea what time we were supposed to land at Ferihegy. I really don't cope well with temporal displacement! Great views of the Danube as we flew in – decidedly NOT blue though. I guess “On the banks of the Muddy-Brown Danube” doesn’t sound quite as romantic. Transfer to hotel uneventful but I was nagged with a strange feeling that I had seen the architecture somewhere before.

Some consternation at hotel reception. Two men wanting a double room? Flap, panic, gibber away in Hungarian assuming that we had no idea what they were saying. But, “Are you sure? A DOUBLE? But they are both men! They must mean Twin. No, it says here, Double. They must be homosexualists. Yikes!” has pretty much the same body language anywhere in the world regardless of native tongue! Much frantic phoning around to “Check that your room is ready” and eventually we got a key card. It was quite funny, especially in light of the fact that Hungary has passed legislation which means that starting from July 1, 2009 same-sex couples can enter into registered partnership, as per the UK. The law gives the same rights to registered partners as to spouses – just don’t ask for a double room in a five-star hotel! It was a stunning building though - marble everywhere, very plush.

We had nibbles and corporate small-talk that evening, it being a work gathering with David's fellow 'achievers' - the vast majority of whom were sales people from other sectors of the business. I was happy; plenty of olives, nuts and bread sticks. Strange pointy ‘biscuit-cum-pastry’ things for dipping into the guacamole – we worked out later that they were triangles of deep-fried pancake! The meet-and-greet was on a terraced balcony onto which our bedroom’s French Doors opened – which was handy and meant we could liberate a couple of bottles of water without having to pay the £9 for the one they left in our room!

Breakfast on Saturday was fabulous – pretty much anything you could want was there from full English to Continental, fruit, cereals, breads, omelettes cooked on demand and even champagne for Bucks Fizz (still making my mind up about Bucks Fizz!). Can’t fault the catering in the hotel at all.

We were then taken on an organised coach tour around the city, hosted by a local guide called Gerda (pronounced the same as in iron Bru), who was very amusing if only in the fact that she didn’t have a good word to say about her home country! We were deluged with lots of stats (everything of significance is 96m tall, has 96 steps or lived to be 96 years old), saw lots of statues (mostly of people with beards, and that’s just the women) and did lots of touristy gawping. Gerda shepherded her flock with a folded umbrella raised high – the significance (or rather error) of this will be explained later.

The main historical lesson seems to be that whenever there has been a war, skirmish or general disagreement, Hungary has picked the wrong side. I guess I had an image of the country under Communist rule, as would most people of my age, but Gerda was keen to point out that this is only a very small period in their history and they have been invaded by plenty of other people besides the Ruskies!

Remember I said I had a feeling that I recognised Budapest? Well the forint finally fell (see what I did there?) and I drew the connection: Evita! They filmed many of the crowd scenes and the funeral procession in Budapest. They shot a lot around Hero’s square - I guess it made a change for the shooting to be film and not guns! I’d like to claim that we have followed the same route as Madonna, but I doubt she was actually IN the coffin as it processed up the main boulevard – probably busy catalogue shopping for a new baby/husband/leotard/mansion.

Our guide was full of anecdotes, mostly self-deprecating, but quite fun. For example, when the Opera house was built they hadn’t really thought things through and come the first performance it turned out that a third of the audience couldn’t see the stage. Another third couldn’t hear. But the Mayor was not to be thwarted and decreed that those seats could be sold at a discount to deaf and blind people! Now that’s lateral problem solving for you. The coach took us past the zoo where they boast a pair of hippos who have, against the odds, bred in captivity – leading to much frivolity concerning happy hefty horny Hungarian hippos. Maybe if Gerda hadn’t pronounced it “hee-pohs” we might not have been so infantile!
We also learnt that Hungarian people put their surname before their given name and that Curtis Tony’s family was from there. Not sure how the naming convention works for people with a middle name – I suppose it’d be Pooh The Winnie! Struggling to list many famous Hungarians – Zsa Zsa Gabor was born in Budapest and Johnny Weissmuller (for me the quintessential Tarzan in the same way as Tom Baker was the best Doctor Who). Musically there is Béla Bartók and Franz Liszt, but beyond that I’m struggling to name many names. Not surprising I guess in a nation of people that seems to have always been pretty constantly revolting!

The city is split into two areas – Pest, the flat, commercial/residential area and Buda, the old, hilly, castle district. We coached over the Danube to Buda where the main party went on a walking tour to the royal palace. We opted out – I’d already done a fair amount of walking and couldn’t cope with too much more. We had a little meander around and took a few photos – the funicular railway and a panorama of the riverside – a series of photos that I then stitched together to make this one:

We had to meet the main party to head off for lunch together. By this time it had started to rain. Gerta appeared with her attendant ducklings in tow and headed off at breakneck pace for the restaurant. Remember her tour-guide umbrella? Really not much help in the pouring rain when hundreds of other people suddenly produced identical brollies and made more problematic by the fact that she went trotting off at a speed way beyond my abilities. So we were left lagging and stumbling over the very uneven cobbles. Made it eventually though, but in quite a bit of pain which was exacerbated by the next part of our ‘experience’. Before the meal we were shown the champagne cellars – dug into the hillside under the restaurant and down about five sets of stairs: The underworld in more ways than one!

The rotund and ruddy vintner took a major strop when David and I both turned down a free glass of bubbly. I think he would have been less shocked if we’d dropped our trousers and called him Mary! To call this a ‘tour of the cellars’ was really stretching the point. We stood in a group and looked at some upturned bottles while he showed us a presentation cupboard containing bottles of bubbly signed by famous people who had visited (but I think he had trouble remembering their names and pretty much only managed Antonio Banderas – during Evita filming I guess - and a couple of obscure Hungarian musicians with names that even HE couldn’t pronounce). Then we hiked all the way back up to ground level (I’m assuming up 96 steps) for the lunch. I was somewhat frazzled!

The food was, I think, supposed to be representative of Hungarian cuisine. We had a lovely Hungarian Goulash soup, followed by chicken breast with cheese-stuffed pancakes. The pancakes were unusual. I’ve made them as part of a savoury dish before (rolled up and filled with bolognaise and then covered in cheese sauce) but never presented in this way. This was followed with yet more pancakes, this time stuffed with apple and ice cream. Everyone else in the party was well-plied with wine and, to their credit, the restaurant provided David and me with plenty of soft drinks. Coffee strong enough to strip the enamel off your teeth concluded the meal.

We headed back to the coaches although this time they were parked at the foot of the hill and so we had more steps to descend, which, following the rain, were slippery and for me somewhat treacherous. The coaches took us back to the hotel and we had a few hours then to freshen up and dress for the evening. David had a cheeky nap and I did the ironing!

So now I have to confess to something about which I feel extremely foolish. Anyone who has been following my blog, or indeed my Twitter updates, will know that we went on a special shopping expedition to buy me some new post-chemo trousers so I’d have something smart to don for the formal meal. Guess which muppet packed the wrong trousers!? I confess: t’was me. A year ago I bought some new trousers for work, and they were a perfect fit (SO unusual for me). A fortnight later, thinking along the bird-hand-bush lines, we went back and bought a second pair. However I never actually wore them as that was just before I was rushed into hospital. So they were hanging in the wardrobe, still with their shop tags on. I guess that when packing I grabbed the trousers which were still tagged, thinking them to be the most recently purchased pair. Wrong! Thus, I’m standing in a Budapest hotel room with a 28” waist enjoying the unparalleled spaciousness of 32” trousers! Now an extra 4” can be problematic in any country let alone a place far from home with very little chance of there being a branch of M&S within easy tottering distance. Luckily the hotel provided complimentary sewing kits and so with anguished fervour I set about making alterations. I managed to botch a compromise where the trousers didn’t actually just fall down, but also where there was not so much gathered fabric that they looked like they were pleated. Well, there’s a limit to what you can do in 20 minutes with a yard of thread, a flimsy needle, no scissors or thimble and inadequate mood lighting. That is to say the lighting was inadequate, not my mood. I had plenty of mood. Mood to spare in fact. Anyway, the trousers looked and functioned ok provided I kept my shirt only loosely tucked in and my hands in my pockets when walking anywhere. So – trousers round ankles or hands in pockets looking like I’m playing with myself? I love these win/win scenarios!

We were due to walk to the restaurant for the evening meal but it was absolutely tanking down and so the organisers sorted coaches. That was fantastic of them and must have been a challenge at short notice. We were eating at a place a few hundred yards down the road but we’d have been drenched. As it was, the one-way system seemed to take us miles around the city – I mean it, we must have done a few miles to cover a few hundred yards walking distance. I think those brave souls who did walk must have considered it a real possibility that we’d ‘done a bunk’!

Now, the next time you pop over to Hungary, as I know you do every few weeks, you really must see the Café New York “Deep Water” - what an amazing place. A combination of gold, crystal, marble and cherrywood, with every vertical surface and ceiling decorated with plaster mouldings and classical paintings. We are talking serious neck strain just from trying to take in the decor. One can never have too many cherubs!

The food was lovely and paced at a speed that allowed me sufficient time to eat slowly and not end up being sick. I have to admit my worst nightmare was that I’d have one of my unannounced and instantaneous stomach upsets; cherubs with chunks is not a decorating style the place was likely to welcome! But I was fine. Didn’t eat everything but that was through a need to limit my intake and not any complaint with the food. We all noted that the main dish was heavy on meat and minimalist in terms of veg, but Gerda (our ebullient coach guide) explained that is the Hungarian way. It seems that traditionally meat was cheap and plentiful to produce whereas veg were not – although I can’t see how a cow is easier to farm than a potato. That said, the steaks, although beautiful, were only just a step up from actively grazing. I’m sure mine let out a little moo at one point! It certainly still had a pulse.

The wine drinkers were all a little perturbed by the very small measures they were given, although glasses were topped up whenever they asked. And they should consider those who did not drink wine and were offered no alternative beyond a jug of water that was already on the table. That really is my only criticism: with our not drinking wine, it would have been nice if David and I had been offered an alternative. It was a very enjoyable night and the rain had stopped when we left the venue so we walked back to our Hotel which really wasn’t far away at all. Others went on to various clubs, casinos and dens of iniquity but neither of us is big on that sort of thing and we were happy to head back for some sleep.

Sunday turned out to be a miserable, wet, grey day. Our transfer to the airport was at 4pm so we had time to kill – and kill it we did, slowly and with determination . We had a damp stroll up to the main tourist street, Andrássy út, and then took the [second oldest in the world] underground metro system to the river. Sadly the weather was just too miserable to do very much; we would have liked to take a boat cruise along the Danube to see more of the waterfront architecture but that would have been pointless with the conditions deteriorating.
We did poodle around a bit, dodging the worst of the rain and sheltering under trees wherever possible. It was a shame as some of the buildings are stunning. There is a mix of styles; Baroque, Classicist, Romanesque, Gothic and Art Nouveau – plus a few ‘carbuncles’ that probably seemed a good idea at the time but on hindsight are out of place and jarring. I gather that there is a big Venetian influence too and at one point there were plans to have a network of canals running up the middle of the main streets – instead they now have trams, which don’t have quite the same romantic appeal as gondolas! On reflection I wish we had booked in for a spa treatment on the Sunday, as the city has a number of thermal pools and that would have been a great experience – well, better than being rained on anyway.

Back at the hotel via a quick meal in a local cafe and some more rocket-fuel coffee, we met up with the others flying to Manchester and headed out for the airport to be gifted with an hour’s delay. Add to that the fact that we had to lose the extra hour we’d acquired on the trip out and we were well knackered by the time we arrived home. Still, this time last year there was a very real chance I’d not make it to the end of the week, let alone be well enough to travel abroad and for that I count my blessings. Reality bites deep and hard. ‘Chinese woman opposite’ is still flaunting her knickers in the bedroom window. Cats still need feeding. Garden demands watering. Washing out on line and then it rains. Cooking. Cleaning. David’s back at work tomorrow, but despite all that it is good to be home.

What of today?

Well I’m sure you will want to join me in wishing a very happy birthday to Delia Smith. Do you think she makes her own birthday cakes? Half-baked, over-egged, whipped but not beaten, slightly soggy bottom, a bit crispy round the edges, well past the best-before date but turned out ok all things considered? And the cake will be nice as well. I should also mention Paul McCartney who was born on this day too – although carbon dating has yet to reveal which century BC we’re talking about. Heather Mills was once a model? Oh come on! She’s no Naomi Campbell. Or does she have Airfix stamped on her back? Maybe by ‘model’ they mean like the ones I made as a kid out of Play-Doh and which bore no resemblance to anything that has ever actually walked this Earth. [Reaches for tub of Play-Doh kept forever to hand in case I need to be transported instantly back to my childhood with a single sniff] And my birthday honours list would be as incomplete as a jigsaw bought at a car boot sale if I didn’t mention Paul Eddington, born today, had a Good Life and went on to become Prime Minister. The Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister shows were, in my opinion, British comedy at its best. Sharp, intelligent, witty, beautifully performed and such superb observational comedy, proven more-so by the fact that they remain astutely accurate and shockingly relevant even today.

Take for example:

• Head of MI5: We can't have unfounded, arrogant press speculation. That's the last thing we want.
• Hacker: Even if it's accurate?
• Head of MI5: Oh, especially if it's accurate.

Must watch the DVDs again. They just don’t make comedy like that these days.

I want to make amends for the anti-American comments I made a few days back (about how they were much more palatable when stampeding across the prairie shooting each other with bows and arrows, in black and white). To wit I shall ponder for a moment on the fact that today marks the anniversary of the day that American air pioneer Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. She was not the pilot on that flight though. I’m assuming she spent the flight wandering up and down, smiling inanely, asking, “Tea? Coffee? Would you like anything from the Duty Free Trolley?” – who knows?! She didn’t make her own solo transatlantic crossing until 1932. Presumably she’d got bored with pointing out directions to the Emergency Exits, located her, here and here. She should perhaps have paid more attention during the safety announcements and may have known that the straps on the life jacket pass behind your back and tie in a bow, like so. It could have made all the difference since in 1937 her plane disappeared without trace. She might have survived if she’d removed her stiletto heels, put on her own life jacket (before helping anyone else), tugged on the oxygen mask which dropped from the ceiling and, at very least, known that there is a whistle for attracting attention.

I mention this because at about this time tomorrow David and I will be in the air en-route for Budapest, so matters of aviation are paramount in my mind. Whilst I do not have a current copy of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (my iPhone being the nearest approximation available) I do recall what it says on the subject of how to fly:

There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pick a nice day, [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] suggests, and try it.

The first part is easy. All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and the willingness not to mind that it's going to hurt.

That is, it's going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground. Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.
Clearly, it is the second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.

One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It's no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won't. You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else when you're halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it's going to hurt if you fail to miss it.

I’m guessing Amelia got confused and didn’t realise that ‘failing to miss the ground’ is, for the sake of this thesis, exactly the same as ‘failing to miss the sea’. Or maybe she was just distracted by a damn good in-flight movie, some 1930s chick-flick featuring women who wore dead foxes round their necks and smoked French ‘tabs’ through 16 inch cigarette holders and slick-back haired men in suits with creases so sharp you could cut cardboard and moustaches manicured to within an inch of their lives. Must have been a bugger getting the organ into the cockpit [Matron!] though!

Still thinking of things that fly, It is funny how time flies (like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana – Groucho Marx, but currently being quoted by Wogan every half hour on the telly) or “tempus fugit” if you want the earliest Latin version, which actually translates as “time flees” and is often mistranslated due to the similar phrase tempus volat hora fugit ("time flies, the hour flees"). See, you learn something by coming here, even if you don’t bally well want to! This shit doesn’t just happen you know, I research and everything! Focus, Adrian, focus! Where was I, yes, time flies and it seems that the trip to Hungary has approached at breakneck speed, leaving me with the penultimate day’s packing ahead of me. Clear the decks boys, I’m going in! I’ll need the spare room clearing out so I can make piles. I’ll need the scales readily available to check luggage allowances at 15-minute intervals. I’ll need my electronic list to hand. I’ll need you to anticipate what I need you to bring, but not a second before I require it. I’ll also need you to know that since I asked for you to get ‘the blue one’ I have decided that ‘the red one’ would be more appropriate and you’ll need to have anticipated this. I’ll need cups of tea bringing. I’ll need the itinerary to cross reference to my list. Get me 20ccs of Morphine. Damn, I’m flat-lining. I’m going into shock! Quick! Quick! I’m losing it! IV Adrenalin, STAT!

Good morrow fair reader, for you are most welcome in my little cloud amid the blogosphere. I trust this day finds you full of joy with a spring in your step and the careless gambol of a new-born lamb? No? Drink more water – they say that’s the answer!

I have to report on a development on the FuxTunes front – that “wonder-software” that completely screwed up my iTunes music collection - and there were some tracks in there I’d never be able to replace, I mean, Joe Dulce and “Shaddap You Face”, René and Renato’s timeless “Save Your Love”, Barry Manilow’s “Bermuda Triange” (It’s his birthday today so I DEMAND that you stop what you are doing and sing at least the chorus from Copacobana – and don’t try to tell me you don’t know the words...

• “At the Copa, Copacabana,
• The hottest spot north of Havana,
• At the Copa, Copacbana,
• Music and passion were always the fashion,
• At the Copa....they fell in love”

You’ll be singing that all day now – God I’m a bastard!) Well, true to my word I did write to the company who distribute the software, explaining my grievance and only just falling short of suggesting that I should visit their offices and leave them in a similar state to the post-apocalyptic disaster area that their software seemed to think was appropriate for my music. This is what their website proclaims:

FixTunes is an easy and powerful program that will fix any missing or misspelled song details, add album artwork, remove duplicates songs and organize your music.

Now doesn’t THAT sound fantastic?! I told you yesterday about the reality though and the text should in fact read:

FuxTunes is a difficult and annoying program that will take ages to run, thus slowing down your computer to the point of un-usability, fuck any missing or misspelled song details as well as ones that are perfectly correct, add album artwork but not necessarily for the right album and if you already have the right artwork it will probably remove that too, remove random songs and completely un-organize your music.

But I do pride myself in being able to take the moral high ground. When you’re 5ft 4’ (ish, it fluctuates) you tend to opt for the higher path whenever one is available, as a matter of course, if only for the novelty value of seeing people’s heads instead of being roughly at nipple height, and I will say now, in writing, that Kelly the very nice lady at FuxTunes has actually refunded the cost of the software. Halleluiah. Choirs of over-excited angels sing in praise, like they've each drunk a litre of Sunny-D at the Last Night of the Proms. Triumphant seraphim proclaim the existence of one good soul on Earth. Cherubs are, as I write, swooping around the room, playing flutes and harps. The Angel Gabriel is knocking on the door, which either means proof of divine intervention or possibly I’m due an immaculate conception! (Or maybe that jam I had at breakfast had started to ferment a bit and I’m in the early stages of something akin to an acid trip?) So, well done Kelly at cloudbrain.com and thank you (but no, I won’t be trying your pending new version when it comes out).

Something I will try though is the TweetDeck app for the iPhone – I like twittering twaddle, although half the time I don’t know what I am doing! I’m an unashamed celebrity stalker – follow lots of the lovvies. Just found Sue Perkins (apt I guess as we watched her in Supersize Me the other day), but when I saw her tweet I didn’t recognise her from her username and nearly blocked her. Well, she’s @sueperkins – I misread it completely and thought she was a brand of cigarettes, @superkings! Doh! I must be tea-deficient, need a cuppa. OMG, just had a dreadful thought: we’re off to Hungary on Friday for the weekend – what if they don’t have proper tea there?!? Shit, will have to add tea-bags to my packing list, or we could end up drinking some local concoction made from dried courgette strained through the perforated skin of an Aubergine. Or maybe my preconceptions of Hungarian cuisine will be proved wrong. Well, not wrong, I don’t do wrong, lets just say “in need of an upgrade”.

It’s as black as your hat here at the moment, and hats off to the weather which looks like it’ll pour down at the drop of a hat! Enough to make you throw your hat in. But you don’t need to listen to this old hat; I’m talking through my hat anyway, which is what comes of being as mad as a hatter! (Do you think I ran a bit too far with the hat metaphors? Sorry, I got a bee in my bonnet!) Seriously though, it’s dark, cold, windy and generally very gloomy today; a far cry from the glorious sunshine of yesterday. That is the yesterday that I spent indoors, unable to enjoy the splendid weather, in hospital, hanging around for hours in the sweltering heat waiting for blood test results and to see my oncology consultant. Why couldn’t yesterday have been miserable and today nice and sunny? But hey, this is England and the last thing we should expect is cooperative meteorology! However, despite being baked alive in the hospital waiting room, yesterday’s visit did prove worthwhile.

You may recall that since early February I have been waiting for a PET scan. In simple terms they inject you with glucose laced with radiation. Cancerous cells need more energy than normal cells, so they use more of the glucose and consequently cause concentrations of the radiation – ‘hot spots’ that can then be detected. Most other scans, Ultrasound, MRI, CT etc look for hard tissue mass, but not necessarily active cancer. Because my lymphoma was so widespread, in my soft tissue and my bones, my consultant (who I shall call Dr Dolittle – not for his ability to talk to animals but for reasons that will soon be revealed) said back in February that he thought I should have a PET scan to make sure that the cancer had been eradicated. This had to be done at a different hospital – Christies – as it is a specialised test but, he reassured me, because it is so specialised there is practically no waiting list and he would see me for the results in three weeks time. No appointment arrived, despite me camping out at the letter box each day waiting for the post. I contacted Dr Dolittle and he said he would chase it. Four more weeks passed and still no date from Christies. At my next check-up I (diplomatically and with much sensitivity) suggested that maybe Christies had lost my details and Dr Dolittle went a shade of red best left to very ripe tomatoes, and said that he had in fact not arranged the appointment. Ooops – he’d do that straight away. I shall edit out a few more check-ups for the sake of a jaunty narrative and with absolute faith that you can fill in the blanks yourselves. In the intervening months I have had armfuls of blood taken, several other tests and repeat ultrasound scans – as a reaction to raised enzymes and some damage to my liver which will eventually need treatment but not for a year or so. So at yesterday’s check-up the subject of the PET scan was raised once again. This time Dr Dolittle said that “I don’t think you need to have that now. Your blood test results are looking much better, your white cell production is recovering well [chemo destroys your bone marrow and thus your ability to produce antibodies], your ultrasound was totally clear, there is no evidence of cancer at all, so we’ll not request the PET scan. No need.” Now, this is fantastic news, don’t get me wrong, and I’m over the moon, but does that not rather smack of an admission that four months later and he had still not actually put me forward for the scan? That’s four months of worrying, thinking “He wouldn’t’ be sending me for this ‘specialised’ test if he didn’t think there was a chance that there may still be active cancer on my body” He was effectively saying so much time has passed now that I must be okay because I’ve not got worse! Well, I suppose ‘leave him and see if he dies’ is one diagnostic technique in the NHS arsenal – actually Hugh Laurie uses it all the time in ‘House’ but you kinda don’t want to think that actually happens. Still, the Do Little approach is probably quite cost-effective and I’m sure I have had more than my fair share of NHS expenditure over the last year – and a personal thanks to everyone for paying taxes that has made this possible. You all helped save my life. I mean that. Thank you!

You may recall that yesterday I talked about some software to reorganise my iTunes music library and I used the analogy of a shed or spare room, a little cluttered, half-piles of stuff, bit untidy and needing a good sort out? Well that is exactly what this software is supposed to do. Although now, having run it overnight and for most of yesterday I see that the results on my music library are roughly akin to the impact of allowing two rutting stags loose in aforementioned shed, after calling each of them a bit of a girl and questioning the moral rectitude of their mothers! Chaos – complete disaster! Piles of poo everywhere, bits of blood and guts sprayed liberally around the landscape and any semblance or organisation now shot to kingdom come! I have quite a few compilation albums, greatest hits collections and so on. So it has taken each song, worked out which album it originally came from, created that album and shoved the song in there. So now, instead of “Now that’s what I call music 50” I have 25 albums each with a single track, each by a different artist. Oh, and for most of THOSE albums it hasn’t found the right artwork! So let my lesson be a warning to you – never use a thing called FixTunes . I think they meant FuxTunes! And what really gets my goat is we actually PAID for this crap. I’m going to write a letter. It will probably be very long, but have in it lots of very short words (although I may choose to jumble the words a bit, remove a few, change some others, disassemble all sentences into their constituent nouns, verbs, pronouns, adverbs etc and then spit them out with acute unawareness of any sort of common sense. So, to start, “Sir dear, software shit your is. Arse your up it stick. Load what a of wank. “

Maybe this is all punishment for something bad I did in a previous existence? Maybe I inflicted some terrible ill on humankind and this is Karma (I assume not of the chameleon variety) putting things right. I do sometimes get a weird feeling that I have lived before. Not Déjà Vu, more complex than that. For example just occasionally I could kill for a cigarette, I need the hit, I know what it feels like to take the first drag after a long wait for a roll-up. But I’ve never smoked in my life. Not once. So there is no way I could know these things. And I’ve described them to a smoker before and told I was spot on with what I was saying. So, a smoker in a previous life then. Someone who caused immeasurable suffering to the people of this fair isle and who’s spirit is destined to forever inhabit the bodies of those prone to misadventure, unreliable network access, dodgy software and a “Chinese Woman Opposite” with a knicker exposure fetish. Got it. I must have been Sir Walter Raleigh – he of the alleged tobacco, potato and chopper bike fame. Come to think of it, we had some spuds the other day that were decidedly dodgy. Now this makes sense - I mean, he would be destined to an endless life of torturous misery; think how much damage has been done by cigarettes, either in terms of national health or even such things as increased costs on the fire brigade and the inflated costs of sofas which now all have to be retardant! Still I suppose it is all part of the rich tapestry (now dutifully fire-proofed and certified to British standards of spark retardancy) of life. And don’t get me started on the evils of the potato! Vegetables that grow eyes? THAT’s not natural! Hell they come from the same family as Deadly Nightshade (the clue there is in the name... Deadly!) and if ingested in sufficient quantities (well, green spuds anyway) they contain poisons that can cause vomiting, diarrhoea, headaches and even paralysis of the central nervous system. It’s true. It says it on the interweb. What’s more, and follow my logic here, if Raleigh (or whoever) hadn’t introduced potatoes to Britain then there could have been no potatoes to get blight in Ireland, no famine caused by lost potato crops, no mass migration, especially not to America and probably Americans would still be galloping around on horses, eating Bison, living in Teepees (I watch QI – I know the difference between a Teepee and a Wigwam) killing each other with bows and arrows and adopting silly names like Flying Red Bull and Makes Noise of Heap Big Flatulence. Which seems to me to be a far better way for them to carry on that they have been doing of late! I shouldn’t come over as so racist. I do like some Americans – Marge Simpson, Stewie from Family Guy, Bambi...

And whilst I’m paddling round the subject of potatoes, like a signet caught in a whirlpool, I’m reminded that my step father once grew blue potatoes – honestly. No kidding. If you don’t believe me, ask him. He’ll tell you all about them. For hours. Best have a wee before you start the conversation. You don't need to listen, just nod in the right places. It can be a good time to do other mental activities while your brain isn't fully engaged - maybe the world's biggest suduko puzzle, or perhaps solve a couple of complex mathematical equations that have been bugging you since childhood. Point being, any conversation with my Step Father requires only physical presence, so daydreaming is encouraged, and in fact more conducive to your ongoing sanity. People have gestated babies in the time it can take him to tell a story. And carrots were originally purple. Don’t believe me? Here – have a look at this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1991768.stm - there you see! We’ve just bred the purple out in favour of the expected orange colouring. Sometimes you can still see a faint purple tinge at the top of the carrot where the leaves sprout. And THAT my friends is called genetic engineering – breeding one trait out and one trait in. Its just that we have been doing it for hundreds of years instead of in a lab over a matter of weeks. Same difference though. Nobody questions whether or not orange carrots are supposed to be in the food chain. Who know what damage they are doing! Hell, the purple colour could contain a chemical which, upon prolonged exposure, would protect us from cancer, the common cold – or maybe give us superpowers! Think of THAT next time you make a stew or eat a slice of carrot cake and go all prim and proper on whether or not we should clone sheep. Don't you think THEY have been modified over the years to produce either the best wool or the best chops? I had better rest my case before I start on global warming!