Well, I woke up with a pleasantly clear head. I could have laid in, as after I wrote my entry for yesterday I called LBC to talk about the breakfast show featurette but James said not to worry - they’d reorganised the running order and dropped in Richard Whiteley (anagram: dirty wheelchair) instead.

I made sure I was ready in case it fell through, but listened to it go out as I brushed my teeth, and when it was over set out on the walk to the station. I’d left my car at the station last night.

It was very pleasant. I took the long route by the river and through the high street, checking out the nice new apartments they’re building by the lock, and the floating restaurant on the canal. It reminded me I need to book at table for Sal’s birthday, but until just now I’d forgotten again.

The office slowly filled up with pained expressions. Clearly a lot of drink was consumed yesterday afternoon. I guess starting straight after lunch and going on until late in the evening without any more food this was inevitable. It’s small consolation that pretty much every email from each of our guests included at least one line on the state of their head.

Drank lots and lots of tea and caught up on the bits and bobs going on in other bits of the pub last night.

We bought Roses and Mini Heroes and munched chocolate all morning, feeling far better by lunchtime. Very naughty.

Made good progress on my jobs list, so left the office for ITN at half four feeling fairly righteous.

Chatted with Sam about Sunday’s ‘London this Week’. She’s found a great list of guests again, and already given me a pile of research to read over the next couple of days. I’ve brought them home and will digest them thoroughly on the train tomorrow.

The Lab went well. Will doing news, and later on the MD of Lycos, who basically gave us a clean slate to talk about pretty much whatever we wanted. It’s always good when someone comes in without an agenda (apart from mentioning their company name a few times).

Most bizarre story of the evening, though, is the competition currently being run by the New Scientist. They are relaunching the magazine so are giving readers the change to relaunch their lives. Collect enough tokens and you can go into the draw to be cryogenically preserved, and thawed out in the future when clever bods with high foreheads work out how to bring people back to life.

I really don’t get cryogenic preservation. The experts talk about how they have frozen sperm and human tissue before and thawed it out perfectly safely (and healthily) some time later. What they never seem to mention, though, is that those things were never dead in the first place. All they did was put the life on hold.

Surely if you’ve actually died before being frozen that has to introduce a whole new set of complications.

I wonder if you can specify you shouldn’t be the first one thawed out, just in case it doesn’t work - after all, you don’t want to be the experiment that goes wrong.

It’s half past eight and I’m writing this in the office because I don’t know if I’ll actually get home this evening. There is nobody else here and the air conditioning is on loud. Everything is moving around quite swishily.

Today was the PCW Awards, when we presents awards to the best products and companies of the last year. I presented them last time around, on September 12th - a rather sober day, for obvious reasons. Dylan did it today, though, which was a relief.

Popped into the office for half an hour, to drop some copy on the server and check my email, then decamped to Cafe Royal on Regent Street for the ceremony and lunch. Very nice surroundings. Pretty ceiling. Nice food.

It all went rather swiftly, and we sat around chatting until moving on to the pub. Spent from two till four chatting with Jeremy Adobe and Sarah Macromedia, intending to leave at four to return to the office to finish my work, and buy some tea on the way.

Now it’s late, though, and I’ve just got back here. I’m checking the wires for a story for the breakfast show in the morning. But my head is too wooly to read the words and I can’t make my mouse click the Start button. I have to get home, and I’m going to have to get up in the morning.

I also need to eat, I think, but I’m not hungry.

I’ve hit a lot of doorframes. I think I should to listen to loud music on the train.

Hmmm… I’ve signed up to Blogsnob. They put little text-based ads for other blogs on my front page, and in return then place little ads about my site on other peoples’ pages around the world.

It’s interesting to see what comes up every time I reload the page, as every member gets to write their own ad. Mine says ‘Journalist, talk show host … cat lover’. About three in a hundred displays of that results in a hit on my site. It’s about the same percentage as the number of people that surf away from my site on someone else’s ad.

It’s got me wondering what blogging is all about, though. It seems for most people it’s actually about ranting. ‘Personal rants of…’ or ‘The rants and raves of an angry…’ or ‘My life and other rants by…’ seem to be how a lot of the ads begin.

Are people really interested in getting home from work (or sitting at) work and reading someone banging on about what’s annoyed them over the last twenty four hours?

Why, oh why, oh…

oh… bugger! Now I’m doing it!

‘Twas a slow day.

Woke up to the strains of ‘A Little Mouse with Clogs On’ (’clip-clippety-clop on the stair’) and it went downhill from there.

So today I returned to the gym for the first time in a fortnight. I have good excuses - plenty of them. I had a bad cold, and you shouldn’t work out when you’ve got a cold. Then I was cat sitting, which added half an hour onto my journey to the station in the morning.

It felt good to be back, though. I’ve not enjoyed the gym since my HipZip was stolen from the back of my car. With it went my music, and running without something loud in your ears is far more difficult, slightly unpleasant and, to be honest, more than just a little bit boring.

I guess it would be better on a real road and not a treadmill.

But today I worked out with Morten Harket. Well, kind of. I’m playing with a dinky new MP3 gadget and it certainly helps the k’s fly by. The first time I noticed the clock I’d been running 25 minutes and now my legs are jelly. I’ve already walked into two doorframes.

Perhaps that was a bit much for kicking off the first time back in a fortnight.

I’ll suffer tomorrow.

Hmmm…

Called dad and chatted about the floods where he lives. Two of his holidaymakers had to be rescued from the roof of their hotel by helicopter, and his flat has flood stains on the ceiling of all places. Sounds like Britain got off quite lightly.

A rather rough-looking postman delivered my Eurostar tickets this morning. Need to get my internal travel sorted. The Lonely Planet has dire warnings about using the trains at night. Tales of knock-out gas being sprayed through vents in the carriage doors and passengers waking up several hours later to find their bags gone.

I feel worn out now the weekend is over. Yesterday spent working and today spent… erm… working.

Still, Sundays are fun, even if they do call for a train to London earlier than I’d like. I got to ITN by half ten - an hour before I needed, and sat on the settee where guests are deposited to run over my questions and scripts.

It’s nice being in at that time. The sun comes in through the glass roof of the atrium and with so few people around it feels like you’ve been let into a bit of a secret just being there. Perhaps it’s also because I’m not arriving after already spending a whole day in an office so I’m still fresh and awake.

Anyway, after last week’s show, which I was not completely happy with until I listened to it back, I’m very pleased with the way today went.

The hour absolutely flew by to such an extent that I looked at the big studio clock as we were starting to item scheduled for 13h20 and I saw it was gone half past already. The 13h30 segment rolled in at 13h40 and what we’d planned for the last slot never made it to air.

I’d far rather that happened than anything had to be stretched longer than it should just to fill time - that would sound awful on such a fast-moving show.

I think it was the first interview that threw the timing off. Professor Jacqui from University College London, measuring how much damage my activities do to the planet. I was shocked at the results. I only fibbed once - slightly - saying I did a long-haul flight every month so it would illustrate the point being made far more effectively. That used to be the case but has tailed off in recent years. Anyhow, it turns out that with that much travel I’d need to equivalent of 13 hectares of productive land to support my lifestyle. The average is five. An American uses 10. The average resident of the African continent uses just three and a bit.

Of course, if I answered the questions in relation to the way I live now I’d be more in line with everyone else, but I guess I should spend a couple of years living hermit-like to balance things out.

Read a German guide book on my pollution-free train home, preparing for my pollution-free train journey around Germany next month, then settled in front of the telly for some classic X Files.

Spending a fortnight cat-sitting at mum’s has brought out bad habits in me. I never normally watch TV. This weekend I’ve watched at least four hours of rubbish already.

It may have been Saturday but I had loads to do today. I’m glad to say I made good progress.

I was out of bed, showered, dressed and sitting at my screen before I’d usually even be at work. I called Mark and arranged for Ja to pop around and borrow one of my cameras. They are off touring the kingdom for a week from this afternoon and wanted some way to record their trip.

He arrived in his flash new convertible car, which I sat in and made the apporpriate appreciative noises as he demonstrated the electric seats, electric roof and cruise control, although he did agree with me that engaging cruise control for anything more than two or three minutes at a time on the British roads would be something of an achievement.

So, he popped off with the camera in the boot and the roof down and I returned to my screen with a string of cups of coffee lined up to stave off the hunger until lunch. I get a real sense of achievement working from home - I get far more done, even if it is the weekend when I should be out playing in the sun.

Paul came around and we ate lunch on our laps in front of repeats on the telly. They weren’t even particularly good repeats, but we watched them already, then kind of feel into Who Wants to be a Millionaire and sat wide-eyed and open mouthed like drowning fish for the next thirty minutes. Have we nothing better to do than watch repeats of well-worn formats?

Hmmm…

Must have an early night tonight. Tomorrow is episode two of London this Week.

I feel fairly righteous for being at Tesco by half seven this morning. I didn’t realise mum and Andrew were coming back from holiday so early in the afternoon, and we have an informal agreement to fill each others’ fridges whenever one or other of us is away.

It’s a fairly good time for cruising the aisles, being half empty but well stocked by the overnight shelf-stackers. Loads of tills open with nobody queueing. Sped home to pack everything into the fridge and bumped into Maisie at the front door. She’s leaving us in a fortnight so we ended up having a polite chat in the porch as I made lurching movements towards the car. I don’t think they hinted clearly enough that I was in a hurry.

Made the office on time, in time for a long meeting that ate into scarce testing time. After this week’s computer disaster and data recovery mission I’m two days behind on my work and testing isn’t something you can rush - tests take a set amount of time no matter how urgent your deadline.

Called mum while I was waiting for one of them to complete to see how the holiday had been and arranged to go around for dinner and look at their pictures. Promised to leave the office on time and not be late, so ended up with some bits and bobs left over to do on Monday but looking at my schedule they should be OK.

The not-being-late plan rather fell to bits when I arrived at the tube, though. The Central Line had been closed eastwards from Holborn. I came back out again and queued with the rest of the west end for a bus. Fifteen minutes later it arrived, and was already full.

I gave up on that idea and walked to Euston. It was then that they announced Liverpool Street was closed and would likely remain that way for the rest of the night. I rang ahead to warn I was going to be late.

As it turned out, by the time I’d struggled as far as Barbican it had reopened, so I got home an hour or so after that. It’s not a surprise, though. London’s transport network is in a terrible state. I’m constantly amazed by the other European capitals, many of which have far cheaper and far more efficient transport systems.

As I read once in a newspaper - although I can’t for the life of me remember which one - it is sheer madness that public transport (and the trains in particular) are expected to make a profit in this country while the roads are not. Perhaps if it was the other way around we would not be in the state we are.

Dined, viewed photos, tickled the cat goodbye then moved back home.

It’s nice to have my own bed back.

And my own tea bags and coffee.

OK, so maybe computers don’t suck so much today. Without a second thought the replacement PC rebooted the knackered drive this morning as though nothing had ever been wrong. Sneaky git. I bet it just wanted a new home so sulked until I put it inside a new PC.

Anyway, I’m assuming this is merely a temporary resurrection, so I copied everything off onto the new drive amd I’ll not use it in the future.

It means I’ve got back all my documents, photos and stuff. My contacts are still proving somewhat elusive, though, remaining buried somewhere in an encrypted file deep within the Windows directory.

Clearly it needs some further coercion.

Hmmm…

Lunch with the team at Wagamama; a place that has never much impressed me in the past. Today’s Japanese curry (pumpkin, aubergine, yam) was excellent, though. There’s a slim chance I may be tempted back - if only to try the ginger cheesecake I was too full to order.

A fun show this evening, with Zoe from Active and Ursula from Advisor. Some good calls and a pile of emails we didn’t get through.

We tried Googlecooking, where you look in your cupboard to see what ingredients you have, then type them into Google and see what recipes it throws up. I read about it on a blog somewhere or other, but was in a hurry at the time, so didn’t note down the name.

It didn’t work too well. We gave Steve’s Challenge an easy list of food and an hour to come up with a meal, but of our red pepper, courgette, parmesan, rice and smoked haddock we still had parmesan left by the end of the evening.

Arrived home to find an affectionate kitty sitting on the bottom stair and a small pile of cat sick on the kitchen floor. Why are pets always most friendly when they have bad breath?

Computers suck. Official.

I arrived this morning to find a ‘tested for electrical safety’ sticker on my PC. I don’t know how you test for electrical safety but I guess it’s something technical like passing a current through it and touching the sides to see if you get electrocuted.

It looks like it passed, which is a comfort, but it did nasty things to my hard drive and killed my PC.

I spent the next five hours rebuilding it with Leo. Three motherboards, two sets of memory, three graphics cards, two hard drives and and two processors later I gave up and dropped my hard drive into a completely new PC.

No luck.

Five years of documents, contacts, emails, photos, music and work turned into a highly technical, and not-too-pretty paperweight.

I’ve got a backup… somewhere… but it’s a month or so old and where I stowed it for safe keeping… well, that’s anyone’s guess. There’s a lesson to be learned here, of course. Especially as I signed off an email the other day with the words ‘back up, back up, back up’.

The irony of the whole thing is the new PC hasn’t been tested for electrical safety.

It does mean I now have a nice zippy machine. It’s effectively been a downgrade, taking me back to a 900MHz processor, but without all the usual junk on my hard drive it flies along.

I’ve downloaded new copies of OpenOffice, Mozilla and AIM and I have acres of empty hard drive to play with.

I’ve lost the 10GB of ripped music, of course, but it was all completely legit and burnt from my own CDs so that’s easy to replace - one bonus of taking the piracy-free approach to digital music.

So, out of disaster comes opportunities.

The only opportunity I would really rather be able to do without is the chance to rebuild my contact list… from scratch.

Ooh, much excitement. I’ve booked up most of my trip to Germany. I have to be in Munich for a meeting on 8th and 9th October, so have taken some extra days off work before and after and sorted out a route and some places to stay.

Eurostar to Brussels, first, on a Sunday afternoon - right after the show. I was trying to work a way through Paris but the continental trains seem to be more compatible if you head east out of London rather than south. I’ve trained to Paris several times before, anyway, so it’s fun to be doing something new.

One night in Brussels waiting for my connection, then a train down to Munich. It’s an eight-and-a-bit-hour journey and involves a change in Cologne, so there’ll be plenty of time for catching up with my reading and writing. I’m hoping I’ll be able to make some good headway with The Two Towers, but I’m finding it heavy going.

That gives me an evening free in the city before my first meeting the following day, and means I’ll be forced to either use my basic German vocab or starve.

So, two days of meetings, then another night in Munich before heading north once more to Cologne for two nights on the way back to Brussels and the Eurostar home.

Much cheered by the fact I managed to complete most of the exercises in the first section of my German text book on the train home, although it’ll do little to feed me while I’m away. It was the ‘me, my family, myself’ section, dealing with birth, death and divorce.

Hmmm…

Sent the last page of the next issue off to the printer this afternoon, so we hid ourselves in the pub for the last hour of the day and then headed off for an early train home.

I took advantage of the early evening to head out with the camera and take some pictures of red-sky panoramas. Concentated on the area around the World War Two radar tower in Great Baddow, its angular black metal form slicing deep dark scars in the sky.