Year: 2000

So I’m walking down the street when I slip on a banana skin and land hard on my back. The weather isn’t brilliant so I get this kind of sky-grey haze moving behind the glowing spots that dance around in front of me. This weird-looking guy with a big nose and an eye-patch helps me up. Everyone else kind of walked past.

We didn’t say a lot to each other, but he didn’t make a very good first impression. You know the type – completely self-involved and nauseatingly smug. Instantly frustrating. He did, however, have a nice arse.

After helping me stand up, we did some “British” thing that you see on TV programs like Friends, but which never actually happens in England (possibly we looked a bit sheepish and mentioned the Queen) and went on our separate ways. God help me, I hope I don’t bump into him again…

Waferbaby corners Matt Haughey. His list of regular reads is interesting (and not just because he seems to read plasticbag.org every so often. I’m more impressed because of his level of committment. I will be completely honest – while the logs I read varies from day to day, I doubt I read more than five or six in any one day.

My fictional love-life (prelude): I’ve had a couple of e-mails lately asking about the state of my love life at the moment – people are, it seems, desperate to get some kind of vicarious thrill by watching me shag my way around north London.

Unfortunately, I have no love life at the moment – various reasons (including exhaustion, grumpiness and general crapulence) have precluded any down-and-dirty bedroom action. So I have a temporary solution. I’m going to generate a fictional bloke who I can write about here. And all you guys have to do is pretend with me that what you are reading is the real thing. First entry to come soon…

Delightful news: “Poof and Slag” has won Best Comedy at the Emmy Awards. Find out more about this thrilling series with this guide to the lives of aspirational homosexual Will and his brightly clad female accomplice, Grace: Will & Grace.

I’m bored. It’s official. I am apparently incapable of being on my own for more than four days without having some kind of organised activity. How pathetic is that? It hasn’t been this way for long – less than a year ago the very idea of starting a non-freelance nine-to-five kind of job filled me with horror. I loved my freedom, and used it mercilessly. Perhaps it’s been too long since I had a holiday. I have a week and a half left and I can’t think of anything to do with it.

This was brought home to me today by a visit to the office. I had to go in because I thought there was a bill that I had left at work which needed to be paid. Everyone looked at me with mute astonishment as I walked into the room, and in short order I found myself discussing work-related matters with my boss over a pub lunch.

Twenty minutes later and I’m sitting in an internet café thinking how bizarre it is to find myself in this situation, and beginning to get a sense in my head of why my step-father spent such a long time at the office, and why people with stressful jobs feel obselete when they retire…

A translation of the German. [from publog translated by prolific]

“Blog on for an ego trip. I always thought that weblogs are about links with commentary. (That’s what it also looks like in this program on Austrian television)

“In the meantime you can almost say: A weblog is a site that is made with Blogger, or a similar tool. Also, the term ‘blogger’ is on its way to become an ordinary word (like ‘walkman’). Is this one of Pyra’s clever masterplans, or is it all just a coincidence?”

According to blogger, I am the eighth person in the last 24 hours to mention kottke.org. Having checked more thoroughly, it transpires that I am the sixth person in the last 24 hours to mention the redesign.

I had this really good idea for something to do on the site, but unfortunately I can’t implement it. I was going to dig up my teenage diaries and see if I wrote anything for these dates and run them in parallel. But I can’t seem to find them anywhere. Which is probably a good thing, considering how embarrassing they probably are. I know that at times they lapse into porn-novel territory. So I am thinking instead of doing a “History of Tom in Pictures” thing, which will have a number of sizeable absences in it as I refused to have photos taken for years at a time in fits of post-adolescent grumpiness.

You can perhaps imagine how cheerful I was this morning to check my regular dosage of post-Katy kitschbitch, only to discover a horribly unpleasant photograph of myself scanned in by the evil Mr Cornwell, who managed to capture me looking particularly long and moose-ish. I can’t remember the last time I have cringed with such horror at a photograph. Please god let me not look like this: Moose/Man.

The picture, incidentally, was taken at the recent house-warming of Toby, an old friend of mine, who – perhaps incongruously – does not live in a huge mansion full of suits of armour and secret passages, but in a rather nice little flat off England’s Lane in Belsize Park.

Sourground has redesigned. It’s so … simple. There’s a good portion of me that is quite jealous of him on this one – it looks so simple. It makes plasticbag.org look so overcomplicated – which really wasn’t the intention at all. I wanted it to be clean and clear and different and cool. Maybe I haven’t succeeded. I must think more about this.