I feel like I’ve taken a two and a half year step back in time. I’m the reviews editor again, albeit in an acting capacity. It must be true - we’re tweaking the web site to say it’s so.

Jason, meanwhile, is off enjoying himself in the Lake District, free of the title and the responsibility it entails. I hope he enjoys himself, and that he has better weather than London has seen today. The rains of Saturday afternoon have returned, only this time they have brought their friends with them.

Being reviews editor again means I have to come up with a column for the front of the section by some time next week. It’s hard enough doing one a month, but for about four of the last six months I have been saddled with coming up with two ideas. It’s still probably going to work out at about eighteen over a twelve month period, but it’s surprisingly difficult to think of an idea that you can develop through 900 words and still sound interesting by the end. I think perhaps I’ll take a look at what I wrote about the last time I did a column for that section and talk about what has changed since then - international issues and the fact I now have a faster PC aside, of course.

So, I spent the morning getting familiar with the reviews spreadsheet again, and reminding myself who was using what codename for which upcoming chip and what it all meant. Fortunately there are some good roadmap sites on the Internet, and as we’re still forbidden to talk about a lot of the products for several months yet there is time to catch up. By lunchtime, though, I had a fairly good grip on things, and I ran them over in my head as I hunted around the more obscure shelves in Borders. I could spend a fortune on books, if I only had time to read them.

At the moment I’m half way through Dead Famous, by Ben Elton. I haven’t enjoyed him that much in the past, but I am absoloutely riveted. I started on Saturday and passed the 170-page mark this evening. I’ll probably have finished by the weekend. The last time I read a book this quickly, it was Them by Jon Ronson, which I see has just come out in paperback. That was scary - this is just riveting. It’s all about a Big Brother programme, in which someone is murdered. In spite of all of the cameras the case still needs to be solved, and a lot of it is told through the police characters as they watch archive tapes of the programme output. Very clever.

Did a scoot around Sainsbury’s on the way home to buy fish and white wine for dinner tomorrow night, but ended up coming home with far more than just that. I’m a sucker for the offers so I now have a freezer full of malt load and potato waffles. Somehow I doubt they’ll go well together.

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