Spent most of the day working on what turned out to be quite a short speech for the awards ceremony on Wednesday. Put in a few jokes, they said, but how you do that when you’re talking about graphics cards and flat panels, I don’t know.
Rather over-cooked dinner (or at least the left overs, that [...]

Watering the garden is turning into a dangerous battle between me and the hose. The puncture is quite close to the end you water with so it follows you around as you walk round the garden, spraying ten feet into the air. At one point it had me trapped down by the greenhouse until I [...]

I woke up too late to see the wildlife, most of which had finished its early morning social and got on with the day.
The clandesting garden hosepiping looks like it may have come to an end. We can down for breakfast and were looking up at the cloudy sky when Paul asked where the water [...]

Drifted downstairs far later than I would have liked and in the absence of any real orange juice on account of not shopping for a week poured some squash into a glass. Turned on the cold tap and watched it dribble, cough, and then stop. Hot water was working fine. It was the same in [...]

I didn’t think the breakfast show call was actually going to come. I’d made a disgusting cup of tea and was sitting in the study so I could be near a landline (all the other phones here apart from the one in the kitchen seem to be the walkabout type) playing Solitaire and watching the [...]

I did 115 sit-ups in the gym this morning, which was probably just as well, as Wendy and I went to Marks and Spencer at lunchtime for what we thought looked like healthy salads but turned out be 20% fat - 72g of fat in a 360g pasta salad. I abstained from chocolate for the [...]

What a day. Everything has happened at once. All the proofs for two sections of the magazine arrived in a bundle and by lunchtime I had about 80 pages to read and sign off. Fortunately Riyad took some of them off my hands mid-afternoon, which considerably lightened the load. Editorial meetings, writing my overdue column [...]

The last thing mum and Andrew say before going on holiday is always ‘don’t forget to water the garden’. The tomatoes, apparently, and some delicate blue things growing up the fence, need water every day, whether it’s rained or not, so even though I woke up to a grey sky and a wet garden this [...]

Today I was the spawn of a Retsab Heklian. And a mechanical cataract remover. And an automated autopsy device. I was almost a demented lift for a couple of scenes, too, but someone else took the part so I sat and listened.
I don’t think I’m a very good actor (any good, actually), but Mark asked [...]