If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Apparently I’m a mixture of techno and Santana-esque guitar. I ran into Midnight Weatherman Chris on the train home and he said he’s been working on some new ads and jingles for the show that we’ll be using from this week on. ‘Basically techno,’ he said, ‘but with a kind of Santana guitar because you and Gordon are both quite soft spoken presenters’. It’s weird being characterised by a piece of music you’ve never heard, and quite exciting, but I’ll be sad to see the old jingles go. We’ve been using them for 11 months now and I know the rhythm.

Rather unusually for me I fancied a swim instead of the gym this morning so did some leisurely lengths before eight then sat in the bubbly spa feeling springy. I think I could almost get into swimming, but I’d need to buy some goggles: if I swim most of the length underwater, I can do it in 15 strokes, which ups to about 22 if I keep my head up. Opening your eyes underwater there, though, is a fast track to getting them burnt out, so I didn’t, as I had a pension form to fill in on the train.

Why they have to make those things so complicated I don’t know. I fail to see how I can be expected to know what my tax office is, and don’t fully understand what possible bearing being long or short sited can have on my retirement age. Felt mildly depressed to be sitting there planning what will happen in 33 years (assuming I retire at 60) and ended up wondering whether I would ever actually get there to start reaping the rewards of an hour of forward planning, and what I’d have achieved.

I really ought to sit down and have a bit of a think about what I want to have have done by then. Five best-selling fiction books that would still be readable fifty years on would be quite an achievement, but going on how long it has taken me to make any significant impact on writing just one it doesn’t look all that likely it’ll happen. Perhaps I’ll just settle on READING five best-selling fiction books that would still be readable fifty years on…

Bought a new answering machine at lunchtime to replace my 8-year old workhorse that had a bit of a fit last night and screwed up a tape. They’ve certainly moved on over the years. It took me 25 minutes to work out how to record an outgoing message. I really am a bit of a luddite when it comes to consumer electronics. I wanted another one with those little tapes but couldn’t find one anywhere so had to settle for a BT digital one instead with three synthetic ring tones I’m not sure I like.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2001 at 8:18 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.