A long, long day today. I was still in the office at half eight tonight, battling the server alongside Kathryn as it resolutely refused to save the pages we were working on. Two crashes and two reboots later we got things sorted, printed off a batch of prints and headed out the door.

Probably just as well. The trains have been mucked up for the last two evening so I may as well have been sitting in the office as sitting on some tracks going nowhere. I might have known that slagging off the trains a couple of entries ago would have brought this on me.

So, last night I left the office and got to the station to find an angry red stripe of ‘delayed’ and ‘cancelled’ signs on the departure board, and an angry throng of pissed-off passengers on the concourse.

I found my way onto the 19h45 eventually, unfortunately next to an irritating American family. For the next hour and a half the mother repeated again and again and again ‘I can’t understand why they’d let us on a train if it wasn’t going to go anywhere.’ She clearly doesn’t comprehend the concept of taking a train out of a platform so you can get some more incoming trains in.

Her kids slurped and noisily ate boiled sweets. Her husband drawled.

Ahead of us, a freight train had broken down, the signals had failed and the passengers on a slam-door train had mutinied and deserted their train, scurrying onto the tracks like ants. That brought everything to a halt and wet had no choice but to sit it out.

Today, much the same. Lines down, I believe, at Hatfield Peverel.

With a rail infrastructure in this condition, perhaps that 186mph Eurostar record was not merely the first time a British train has run at that speed – but also the last.

I find it extraordinary that everyone is getting so excited about the Eurostar finally making it to 186mph in the UK today. We’ve waited for it long enough, and it’s been doing that on French tracks for ages. Every news bulletin is talking of it ‘smashing’ the previous UK record, without pointing out that the record was so feeble it was an embarassement in itself.

So, putting today’s ‘achievement’ in context and comparing it to other train services around the world… There are many slower services, of course, but here are some of the fastest. It makes today’s achievement look rather mediocre.

I first used the net at university, and back then there was no such thing as Internet Explorer. You still had to pay for Netscape Navigator, but that really didn’t matter as connections were so slow that they made graphical pages practically useless. Instead we used Lynx, the text-based browser, often running on Vax terminals rather than stand-alone PCs.

Lynx is still popular – especially among those with a visual impairment who use it with screen readers. So, coming across a copy at lunchtime I thought I’d browse the front pages of a few sites to see how they faired. The principles of good site design disctate that whatever works in Explorer or Navigator should work equally well in a text-based browser, and European regulations could soon see companies that do not make their sites accessible to the visually impaired fined.

So, kicking off with the BBC News site, we get this:

The whole of the first page is taken up by menus, forcing users to cycle through them all until they get to the one that they want, and that’s before they even get to read any news.

It does far better than the Odeon Cinemas site for online bookings and film information:

I have trouble using this in anything other than Internet Explorer so was not in the least surprised to see that in Lynx you got just six lines of text. They aren’t even links, so all you can do on the site is read these words and then leave. Very poor.

My old university did a better job:

Its front page renders as a series of common sense options leading to the most commonly used parts of a university site and would be a good starting point for prospective students who are forced to run text-based browsers.

The offering from Channel 4 was rather disappointing, though:

Some of the images were just labelled up as ‘ADVERTISEMENT’ and the meaty content of the page was split up by a lot of [spacer] tags. Clearly Channel 4′s designers are friends of the 1px Gif.

The Eurostar site was a dead loss:

That screen shot shows the completed page. It appears blank, having completely foxed the browser. Time for the visually impaired to get on the phone.

After all that I was a bit worried what my site would look like. It uses a fair amount of images and there is some javascript going on in the background making things happen. So, with a sense of trepidation I typed it in and was pleasantly surprised by the results. It renders well, with the content right up there at the top and all of the links and menu options in place below.

Today I am smiling.

Summer is a lull time for IT journalism. Issues get a little bit shorter because there are less new products out there, and manufacturers stop taking you away on exotic trips to show you something they could just as easily have brought into your office.

It’s a period of calm and contemplation in the run up to Christmas, which on our calendar starts in October and comes to an end the second week in January. The October start date is when we get to see all the new products that will be in the shops by December. November is when they take us out for dinners and drinks to remind us how good they are. December is when there are four parties every night as each group of PRs tried to prove it is a better friend than all the others, and January is when the stragglers have their ironic post-Christmas Christmas parties that we’re all too tired to attend.

That’s not to say July and August are dull months, though. I’m busier now than I can ever remember having been in this job in the last six years. It’s just that it is predictable busy-ness (or should that be business?) with predictable deadlines that don’t spring out at you from nowhere.

So why am I still working on my column? I have a dozen half-formed ideas in my head. Some of them collide and would make a great combination, but none of them are quite meaty enough to fill a whole page of text, on which the only distractions are a headline and a goofy pic of my face.

I read a column by Stephen Fry once where he had precisely the same problem. He admitted as much in the opening paragraph, and then went on to do what he freely admitted every writer can only do once in their entire career – he wrote a column about how the column is written. Where he sits, what he uses, when he sends it off and what happens to it between then and the day it appears on the newsagents shelves.

So, what does he do now? Where does he go from here? There’s a lot of years’-worth of writing left inside him, and yet already he’s used up his joker. He has no trump card left to play the next time he’s hard up against a deadline with an empty page and an empty head.

Of course, writing about IT, I could quite legitimately do the same, and talk about the various bits of technology used to get my ideas out of my head and into WHSmith, but can I afford to do that after just ten years?

Oh, I do so like testing printers. It means I get to print out lots and lots of photos using someone else’s ink. Now my desk is covered in little slips of curled paper from where they wrapped themselves around the roller. They are drying over night ready for carting home tomorrow.

Lunch at Carlton was very nice, helped no end by the fact that we were sat on a long table at the back where the sun streamed in through the window. It certainly beat the Star Cafe hands down. Granted the retro decor might be more interesting at the Star, but at least we all got our food at Carlton. Last time we ate at the Star they were one plate short, which led to a few embarassed faces and some serious damage limitation exercises from the management, which they didn’t quite pull off.

Not my birthday barbeque – Andrew’s annual family gathering under blue skies in the garden. We were so lucky with the weather. Last night it lashed down, but by the time I arrived at lunchtime, bearing a box of freshly baked coconut haystacks, the grass was dry enough to be walked on in just socks.

Arrived to find Viv, Sal, Dan, Kim, Steve and Andrew’s mum, plus an almost-two-years-old James already there. James is a true enigma. On the one hand, I can’t believe he is two already. It seems no time at all since he was still a lump sticking out the front of Kim’s maternity-wear. On the other, though, he is so perfectly behaved you could almost believe he was a young adult. No crying. No tantrums (even when he is tired). He eats what he is fed. He sleeps when he is laid down. He doesn’t pull the cat’s tail.

It’s almost enough to make me consider my steer-clear opinion of kids altogether. Almost.

Anyhow, as barbeque protocol dictates we all ate far too much. I even did my own brief turn of prodding the various meat things over the flame while everyone else ate, but only because I’d done all my vegetarian stuff under the grill so finished eating well before the rest of them. We wandered down to the meadow when we were done and let it all settle as we fed apples to the horse, then headed back up to the house for dessert and an afternoon of sitting and chatting and feeling uncomfortably full.

Tony and Diane had arrived by then after sitting in static traffic for hours and a bit. Tony had his Noel Coward hat and looked like he should have been striding around Rangoon rather than a large back garden in Chelmsford.

I briefly popped home to do some preparation for tonight’s slot on Through the Night and picked up my email, which included a link to a none-too-flattering video of me wandering around the streets of Sitges. Am rather concerned that in having my camera bag slung over my shoulder it looks like I was carrying one of those hideous man-handbags. I don’t know who it was that filmed me – the email just said ‘one of the guys’ – but they seemed to catch everything but my good side. Not their fault – I was half asleep, and dawdling.

I viewed it, then quickly shut down my media player. I don’t think we shall be revisiting that

Anyhow, that all took a bit longer than I’d intended, and I arrived back there an hour later, just as they were all sitting down to more food. I should really have abstained, but when it’s all there and everyone else is tucking in it’s just far too easy to join in, so I loaded up another plate and vowed to work it off with an extra session in the gym some time this week.

It wasn’t long after that that people started to drift off. I shut the cat in a room upstairs to keep her out of the way of the packing, and the moving of cars, and forgot she was there until she appeared on an outside window ledge high up above where we were sitting, calling for attention. I let her out and she stalked off huffily into the garden just in time to say goodbye to Sal and Dan, who gave me a pretty carved elephant from their trip to India. It’s sitting on a shelf now, facing the door to my lounge, as all elephants should do.

So, with only four of us left we set about the washing and clearing away and an hour later were done, leaving a couple of hours for Viv, mum and myself to sit down with the Rummikub tiles and some mugs of steaming tea.

I feel bizarrely exhausted. I don’t know why. When you look at all that was done today I barely did a jot. Perhaps it was the hot weather, and all the sunshine, and the rushing back and forth between there and the flat.

Whatever the reason, I feel comfortably relaxed now, sitting back at home with my feet up and a cup of Earl Grey.

…and a fridge full of left over food that should see me fed until the end of the week.

Yesterday was payday, which makes everyone happy, so we booked ourselves into Carlton for lunch on Monday. They are very smiley and friendly in there every afternoon, and chat to us as they make our tea, so asked if we’d like them to get in any special food for us, and whether we’d like to make it a nice long leisurely lunch. Unfortunately we can’t, but they seemed genuinely excited to be having us in for more than just tea.

If I ever stopped working in Soho, I’d miss them. I’ve been in there every afternoon at four o’clock for years, and know all the faces and half the names. They even give us free cakes or croissants with our tea now and in the past have subbed us on the office-run when we’ve come out without enough money. There’s not many Soho cafes would do that.

On either side of that was a whole day of editing. Raw stuff, and words already laid out on the page, which is not so bad. It means you can plug yourself into an iPod and forget about what is going on around you as you buzz through the words. I still ended up bringing a load home, which is sitting in my bag right now, calling softly and reminding me it is still waiting to be done some time tomorrow.

Last night, though, rather than sit in and put red pen through small black words, I headed off for dinner with Helen and Mike while Paul installed their new computer. I didn’t see it, but from what I hear it’s rather snazzy, and all the necessary bells and whistles chime and peep fairly quickly. It means I ended up sitting through the final of Big Brother, which considering it was the first and last time I’d seen an edition of the fourth series was quite a surreal experience. I had no idea who the contestants were, but the guy who won seemed nice enough.

Today was Mardi Gras, to which Trevor, Jon and Paul headed. Not particularly my kind of thing, to I stayed home, did some work and spent five hours working on my photos. Actually, working on one photo. Admittedly the finished thing is 21cm x 47cm, and it took a lot of work and retouching, but I’m very happy with the result, and it was great to get a whole afternoon to work on it. It has been sitting around waiting to be finished since September last year – a full ten months.

I’ll get it properly printed on Monday and then roll it away and store it with the rest. I need to find some extra wall space to put them up. As it is, then sit rolled loosely into a Sainsbury’s bag – the longest, 180cm, wrapping up all the smaller ones inside it.

After so much time working on it, my eyes were fried. I flopped down in front of the telly and re-watched Life Less Ordinary as I ate some dinner. I’ve not seen it in years.

I’d forgotten quite how… mediocre (is the best word, I suppose)… it is.

So after two nights of taking half doses of the brown manure-stinking gloop, it seems to be working. Perhaps I’m tempting fate there, but it’s sent me off to sleep, just as it promises. There have been no nasty side effects like there was the first time, so that’s a bonus.

What it does do, though, is knock me out for precisely eight hours. So, go to sleep at half midnight and you’ll wake up at half eight, regardless of the fact that the alarm has been keeping everyone in the block awake since seven o’clock, or the bin men are chucking around glass bottles right outside your open window and smashing them with glee in the back of their lorry.

So, I’m happy. In fact, I even look forward to going to bed for the first time in weeks. This time last week I’d have been dreading it.

It’s been a hideous day today, though. I sat down to what looked like a nice quick tweaking job at half ten and finished at two this afternoon, feeling flustered and frustrated. Crazy directories, hideous coding and a monstrous style sheet had me swearing at my screen for the whole morning (albeit very quietly and very discretely). I don’t think anyone noticed.

Then this afternoon, picking up little facts here and there to build a set of tables and graphs. Such sloooow work. Quite rewarding by the time you get to the end, but it seems to go on forever.

Fortunately UK Gold shows non-stop comedy repeats on summer evenings, or I’d be tearing my hair out, and there’s little enough of that left as it is.

I’m trying to work out some train routes for a trip in September. Russia is on hold at the moment – probably until next year – so I’m looking at Bodo in Norway. It’s up above the Arctic Circle on the end of a very scenic railway line that runs north from Oslo.

The German Railways site, Die Bahn, has a trip planner for the whole of Europe, but it gets very confused when you start heading north. It recommends setting off east on a train to Harwich, then taking a boat to Demark and heading on from there. Even forcing it to go via Brussels skips the Eurostar, once again pushing you to Harwich for the boat, this time to the Hook of Holland.

In one final attempt to find a route through the tunnel to mainland Europe, I forced it to plan via Waterloo, from which the trains head across to France, and after some chugging it gave me a result: Chelmsford to London, London to Chelmsford, Chelmsford to Harwich, and then a boat across the water to Denmark.

Gah!

It’s interesting to see what people think you might look like if they read your stuff in a magazine but don’t take a look at your picture. This guy mailed me today:

Hello there Mr. Nik Rawlinson,

My name is __________, I am an 18 year old male and I was very interested in an article of your’s in an old PC magazine from May 2001. I can’t quite recall the name of the magazine. But anyway I’m a brown eyed black haired guy as well but I just can’t seem to find someone on the net to chat with. Maybe there aren’t any available (i.e. there all taken) or something.

Please if you happen to find some lonely hearted Miss somewhere, tell her to write to me using my email address shown.Thankyou.

I’ll be waiting for your reply or that sad Miss in that case.

Thankyou.

Apart from the fact he’s hoping I’ll fix him up with an Internet date, he seems to think that like him I have brown eyes and black hair.

Another guy, though, seems to know very well what I look like and, after sideways comments on every other writer picture in the mag, gets around to me:

The only pleasant guy amongst you appears to be Nik Rawlinson, which is slightly ironic given his uncanny appearance to Montgomery Burns

Right, so the sleeping mix I thought would be a harmless clear liquid turned out to have the consistency of water, the colour of treacle and the smell of… manure, I guess would be closest. Fortunately it didn’t taste of anything.

You mix it up in a little bit of water, knock it back then thirty minutes later go to bed. Next thing you know, it’s next morning and the alarm is going off. There’s a gentle breeze blowing in through the window, and you feel wonderful. The world is a pretty place, you have bags of energy, and you even look forward to a train ride in to work.

Then, around one in the afternoon, it comes back to haunt you. One minute, you’re feeling fine, then the next you feel it take over your body. It’s like a wave that starts in your limbs and climbs higher and higher until mere seconds later it hits your head, weighing down your eyelids, taking all strength from your neck, and you slump back in your seat, barely able to keep awake.

‘Are you alright?’ asks the person beside you.

‘Have you been sleeping at your desk?’ asks someone else as they walk by five minutes later.

I shake my head at them, which by now feels like it is full of cold, and make a supreme effort to focus on my screen and get on with something useful for the next hour until eventually, slowly, it starts to wear off, leaving me with the shivers.

I am fine now, and I was fine all the way through pilates on a mat beside a newcomer with a permanent hard-on he kept hiding with his hands. I think perhaps the dosing on the side of the bottle is too much for me, though.

I will try again tonight, but I will use half as much, and if I lay awake again, staring at the ceiling until 3am, I will try something different next time around.