So, yesterday the car was broken into and a few inconsequential bits were stolen. Today half of a windscreen wiper was pulled off. When I switch them on they just scrape the glass like fingernails being run down a blackboard. Not at all nice.

I sacrificed my Tuesday night in front of Delia Smith on the telly for drinks with Harvard PR at Bar Soho. Very pleasant, but it meant I got home too late to buy new wipers so it suddenly makes the weather a far more important affair. I can’t drive it without windscreen wipers and the flood plain is still under a lot of water, so it could leave me stranded at home if tomorrow morning is as wet as the weekend.

I don’t really mind the theft, or even the vandalism (although I have to admit that does prick me a little deeper than the break-in). What annoys me is the council, which locks up the car park at half ten every night. It means you can’t stay out too late and still drive home, or even work longer than you intended.

The reason? Because the people that watch over the ugly concrete levels and the screens connected to the cameras that swivel around on their ceilings go home. Without them, it would appear, the car park is insecure. Our cars are at risk. I would argue that there is no more risk then than when they are watching.

For this I pay over

Three extraordinary things happened today. Something else happened that was actually rather bad.

The first of the nice things was an email I received when I arrived at the office.

I guess you’d be somewhat surprise reading this mail, but that is okay. I got your contact after browsing through the pages of the computer oriented magazine ‘What PC’ that was given to me by a Red Cross staff.

My name is **, a 26yrs. Sierra Leone refugee residing in The Gambia since the 27th May ‘01. I am poor and destitute. It is a long story how I came here; I lost my family and everything in the foolish war that ravage my country. I managed to come to The Gambia through the help of some UN troop and since then, I have been staying at a local charity home in the hamlet of Nagora, in Basse helping out to look after the children in the home.

I’ve not written for WhatPC for about two years, but it’s nice to know the prose lives on.
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Of course, we left late last night, but then we always do.

Then we got lost, so we had very little chance of meeting them for a drink before the play started anyway. They left our tickets at the box office and I had to try every surname I could possibly dredge up that came anywhere close to Fellowes to try and retreive them.

I got it eventually, which was a miracle. Roger had booked them and I have never known his full name before. Trevor had tried to tell me what it was down a crackling mobile line as Paul parked the car outside a rough-looking pub and the battery cut out. I am always suspicious of pubs whose windows are not frosted. They’re cheaper to replace, I suppose, which makes you wonder how often they get broken. Probably more often than most.

We half-ran, half-walked down towards Covent Garden and arrived in the bar of the theatre just in time for them to call us to our seats, right up among the lighting and associated pulleys, cables and wires, where the air was hot and thick. It was incredibly full, and Paul and I were sat on the opposite side of the stage to Trevor, Jon, Roger and Graham. As the lights dimmed down we could just exchange a quick wave before we were plunged into darkness and transfixed for the next two and a half hours.
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A very, very frustrating day. I have got the shiny new server up and running and most of the files transferred back to the nik.co.uk domain from the site’s temporary lodging place over here on digitalnik.com but can’t get the database that drives the whole thing to work properly.

Most annoying.

It could be something to do with the cache on my ISP’s servers never quite clearing itself down and presenting me with a series of pages it read ages ago. It’s done that before. I just don’t know, though. I’ve spent all day flicking back and forth between the two sites, copying the configuration files from digitalnik over to nik.co.uk and setting the file permissions again and again and again but it just won’t cheer up.

I have to stop now, anyway, so it will still be broken when I switch on again tomorrow. We’re all off out to the theatre in London. Six of us - Paul and I, Trevor and Jon, and Graham and Roger, who are paying. It’s a belated Christmas present.

The weather today was very exciting. So windy. Lots of flooding, which is probably more distressing than exciting, but the kind of day cats love. Jess goes mad when it’s blowy like this.

I’ve been trying to sort out train tickets to go to Manchester in two weeks and a popup on the Virgin Trains web site warns passengers not to expect to travel beyond Preston until tomorrow at the earliest because of the weather.

LBC called just after lunch to see if I could do a piece on people who play too many computer games and get repetitive strain injury from their joysticks so I said I’d pop in on the way home and do it in the studio instead of on the phone. I walked from the office and all the way up Grays Inn Road the wind was pushing me forwards. It was so strong it flung my bag out in front of me and I think I made the distance in half the time I usually do.

I waited for Chris the Midnight Weatherman to be ready to leave and we walked back to Farringdon together down streets that were unfamiliar and had the feint smell of sweage. We leant into the smelly wind as we walked and it was strong enough to hold us up.

I had a vision of it suddenly dropping and the two of us falling on our faces on the pavement.
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