First Fame Academy winner David Sneddon is quitting his career as a pop star to become a songwriter, less than a year after winning the talent contest… “He was never entirely comfortable with living the life of a pop star,” the statement [from his management] said. (source: BBC News)

…but you have to question how after just two singles he knows what the ‘the life of a pop star’ is.

Please, please let this signal the end of all these pop-star wannabe TV shows. They have hardly launched a string of massive careers:

1. Will Young wins Pop Idol, but runner-up Gareth Gates seems to have received far more media attention and more chart placings.

2. A Google search for winner Will Young returns 50,300 results. A Google search for runner-up Gareth Gates returns 74,800 results.
3. Hear’say win Pop Stars, but soon split up, replace one of their number with a newcomer and then… split up for good.
4. Pop Stars runners-up Liberty X, meanwhile, seem to be going from strength to strength. Is there a runners’-up theme developing here?
5. Girls Aloud, winners of Pop Stars The Rivals, pop up in the charts several times, but then one of the band members gets dragged into court, accused of getting in a fight with a toilet attendant, and is sentenced to 120 hours community service.
6. Meanwhile, runners up to the runners up of Pop Stars The Rivals, Phixx look like grabbing the available limelite in the wake of this courtroom debacle. Rumour has it that their name came about because they considered the show to be a fix (phixx – get it?).

Enough said, I think.

Round and round and round it goes. Life, that is. It doesn’t matter what you do or where you do it – if you get to a certain level in publishing, one thing is a cert: your photo on a column. And so today I had to pose like a prune for the picture for my editorial column, like I have done many times before.

Each time it happens, though, it gets a little better. My first one was about as bad as those ID photos I posted on here last week. Now, though, they look pretty good. Or perhaps I’m just more relaxed about how things turn out. I even quite liked the one with sticky-out ears, today.

Strangely, though, it only occured to me once I was out of the studio and the photos were winging their way to the server, that I was wearing the same clothes I had on in my latest picture in PCW. If my weak maths is right, too, I should be wearing the two identical tops in two competing magazines on the newsagent shelves at the same time.

Written in this morning’s Metro:

But [George W Bush] issued warnings to both Iran and Syria not to let terrorists cross into Iraq from their countries…

not written in this morning’s Metro:

…because if they did, America would have no excuse to attack Iran.

I’ll be the size of a house if these lunches continue. Ha Ha on Monday. Mash yesterday. The Dorchester today. Somewhere or other tomorrow. Another four lined up for next week. A few for the week after that… so far. I wonder if we could do meetings in gyms instead. There must be an opening for up-market salad bars with tables big enough for business.

I’ve reached tea saturation point, too. That’s what comes of having decent tea and coffee-making facilities.

Was still in the office after seven when the IDS-ousting was announced. No great surprise there. Anyone who couldn’t see that coming on the very day he got the job is clearly blind. I remember the surprise in the LBC newsroom on the night he was elected to the job, 777 days ago. We were all stood around one of the TVs slung low from the ceiling, fully expecting it to go to Ken Clarke.

Best quote of the day comes from BBC News:

John Strafford, head of the Campaign for Conservative Democracy, said the way Mr Duncan Smith had been removed was totally undemocratic. He told BBC News Online: “It looks to me like the biggest stitch-up since the Bayeux Tapestry.”

So a secret ballot is undemocratic? Hmmm… Now there’s a party in touch with reality.

Perhaps now there will be some real opposition to the government, but I doubt it. The Tories have never really recovered from the Thatcher downfall.

Still, IDS can’t be too upset. I hear he gets a

Oh, what a tit I am. I spent an hour on Saturday afternoon trying to buy a new phone and cursing when the web fell over three times and chucked me offline. Now I know it was all karma: some guardian shopping angel making sure I never made my purchase.

Why?

Erm… because rather embarassingly it turns out my phone was under my desk in the office.

So we had a happy reunion. Kind of. It didn’t help that I’d been looking at the shiny new models in the way in to work and had found two I like and my old one was on strike since the network blocked the SIM. Hmmm.

Lunched with Neil. Not done that in a long long time, but it turns out that since the change of job I’m now just 90 seconds by foot from the studios where he works. In fact, we’re so close I walked straight past and had to double-back on myself. We went to the Ha Ha where he lapsed into his bizarrely accurate Keith Skues impersonations, complete with double time checks and revived forty-fives.

Since coming home and Googling him I’ve discovered I didn’t want to know what he looked like at all. He’s not quite the dithering old man crouched low over a mixing desk I thought he was.

Skues, I mean – not Neil.

I’d imagined someone with the gravitas of John Simpson, but from the looks of things he ought to be presenting Catchphrase.

Five years ago today I became a homeowner for the first time. It was a Monday, and it was the first day of a long, long, five year lock-in on my mortgage.

I collected the keys from the estate agent, as tradition dictates, and then zizzed around in the car. I opened the door with a sense of great excitement and walked into the admittedly fairly shabby flat that was to be my home. It hadn’t been shabby when I’d first looked around it. In fact, I still have the notes I wrote when I left after my first viewing. ‘Excellent decor,’ I wrote.

But on that first day there was melted wax spattered over the walls in two or three of the rooms. The grill pan was half an inch deep in fat, and there was something unidentifiable (sausage? bacon?) on the trellis.

The carpet was filthy. What he’d done in the month or two between me coming to see it and him moving out, I really don’t know. I didn’t particularly care, though, and although it was hard work I wasn’t so bothered that it took two months of sanding, painting and re-artexing to get it into a state fit for habitation before I could move in.

Not much has changed since then. The bathroom has gone from being blue to white to something creamy, and it’s had an extractor fan fitted, but that’s about it. Everything else is the same yellow I painted it back in 1998 – except the kitchen, of course, which remains a deep sea blue.

And so now I have to decide what I do next. Five years on I’m free of the lock in. I’m earning enough to buy a much larger place in which to live – with room for a spare bedroom or two, and perhaps a garage and garden.

Do I really want all that, though?

Admittedly it would be nice to have the extra space, but I think I’d miss much about living in a flat.

I like hearing the sound of footfall on the floor above as I drift off to sleep. It makes me think I am back in the family home and there are others about. I like the way I can look out to the roofs of the garages and watch as the rain bounces off them in a storm. I like the way I don’t have to mow my own lawn or pull weeds from the borders, but can instead rely on the bussed-in gardeners to do the whole road on my behalf. I like the way that when I step out of my front door I am in a carpeted hallway, not on the kerb of a busy dirty road.

So I’ll not be rushing into a move. For the moment I’ll stay here – at least for the winter. It’s so much nicer here in the summer, when the sun streams in through the back windows. I know that if I wait until then it will sell far quicker, and by then I’ll have made up my mind.

I sometimes think I’m not cut out for this whole technology lark, and today my faith in that belief has swung wildly from one extreme to the other.

It started well enough. After copious downloads I got the new Windows machine sorted out. It’s still not as easy as the Linux install was, but it does look nicer. In installed the Windows version of iTunes, too, and think I’ve perhaps found the best piece of Windows software I own. It’s so smooth – very Apple – and it’s a doddle to stream the track library across my network.

Other things, though, didn’t go so well. I can’t get the iPod to talk to Windows – perhaps because it’s so chummy with my iBook – and I got myself horribly confused trying to buy a new mobile phone.

Somehow – somewhere – I lost mine on Thursday night. I think. I don’t know where, or quite when, but it was probably either in Mildreds or in the taxi home. It was switched off, of course, as it always is, but in spite of that I’ve been ringing it two or three times every day since to see if I can hear it ringing – or if someone else has picked it up and got past the keycode.

Anyhow, I finally admitted defeat this afternoon and sat down with the websites to dig out a new one. But things have moved on a long way since I got my last one. I don’t want picture messaging. I don’t want a camera. I don’t want a colour screen. I don’t want polyphonic ring tones. Tri-band would be good, but I don’t need GPRS, and with no other Bluetooth devices there’s hardly any point having that, either.

But they all have them – or at least a selection of them. All I want is my old, battered phone, four years old if it’s a day, and unable to do anything more than talk and text. It felt clumsy and brick-like before I lost it, but now it just feels missed.

Perhaps the answer is to buy one on eBay. If I can find one among the tat…

Hmmm… well that’s half a stone gone in a week and a half. Either that or my scales are somewhat wonky. That’s what comes of not snacking between meals. Vaguely made up for it last night by meeting up with Kathryn, Mark and Ems for dinner.

We met in Alphabet Bar, Mark and I almost an hour late, then went on to Mildreds where the daily burger was far too orange to be courgette like it said on the board. It was as fab as ever, though, and the wine (organic) tasted of honey, which was surprisingly nice. Left feeling bloated and swayed down the street, then into a taxi home. It was way too cold to walk.

Same today. Winter has well and truly arrived so I wasn’t entirely unhappy about spending the whole day in a nice warm room having meetings.

Took in my iBook so I could take notes in the meetings and switched it on during a late afternoon coffee meeting in Starbucks. Up pops a wireless network, which was an unexpected bonus. Marked up as ‘Jon’s network’ I guess it wasn’t officially supposed to be open to the public, but having done a Google hunt on the most likely keywords, it seems that area is a fair hot-bed of wireless activity anyway:

Today’s discovery is that there is a free wifi point in and around Bagelmania on Goodge St, London W1. I realise I’m doing what gourmands never do – reveal their favourite restaurants for fear of overpopulising, however … Upon seeing a sticker for “wireless internet access

Time to say goodbye to the Linux. It’s been my main OS for a year or two now, sitting happily on my fastest, best-equipped PC. Well, I say ‘happily’ but it’s been grumbling for the last few months. It fell out with the hard drive and the two refused to play together nicely each time it tried to boot up.

Since then, though, my iBook (Barbara) has become my main machine. She lets me pick up my email wherever I am, thanks to her Airport card, and she’s far nicer to type on.

One of the main reasons for zapping the Linux, though, was that my XP machine is decidedly buggy. Plug in a USB device and you have to reboot – a decidedly ungood thing. Its drive is full and fragmented. Basically, it’s a mess. It’s also old and slow, too. No firewire. No USB2.

Trouble is, it’s the machine on which XP is activated, so I’m reluctant to zap it entirely and I can’t be bothered with cleaning it up at the moment, which left me with only one alternative – kill the Linux box and install Windows 2000.

What a faff. It can’t find my network. It took six trial-and-error guesses to get the graphics card and monitor sorted out. It can’t see the sound card. It’s pleading for drivers for the USB2 ports. Sure, it may look nicer than the Mandrake Linux that was on there before, but at least the Linux installed in far less time, did far more thanks to the bundled applications, connected to the network and had me browsing right away, made good use of the sound card and drove my monitor from the off.

Already I want to switch back to Linux. Why it’s not taken off in businesses I really don’t understand.

If the day you get your security pass marks the first day you’re really working for a company, then for me today was that day. I now have a smart red card to open all the doors I need to get through, and I no longer have to sweet-talk someone else into letting me in. As for the picture… hmmm. Well, it’s not my worst, as a swift browse through my cards of the past reveals. In vaguely chronological order:

Where did that massive nose come from? It’s me, circa 11 years old, on the under-16s photo card that went with the train ticket I used on the journey to school each day. I guess I can only be grateful the nose and face are now in better proportion to one another.

Post-16 the nose is less of a worry than the hair. Either I’d slept on it funny that night, or there was a gale blowing somewhere in the vicinity of the photo booth. Not one of my better efforts.

Perhaps the first post-school picture appears on this Link FM security pass. There are two problems here. First, the shirt, subsequently worn by Christine Hamilton in ‘Louis Theroux meets the Hamiltons’, or whatever it was called (I swear this is a man’s shirt – even the buttons do up the right way around). Second, the hair, which seems to have transmuted into some kind of dark brown ferret that’s trying very hard to make itself comfortable on top of my head.

Oh dear. All I can say is I was a student, which explains the early stages of a pony tail, which only got worse the following year…

Unfortunately it was about this time that I had my passport photo taken, which perhaps explains why I’m pulled out of line so often at airports. The only consolation there is that the hair is not quite so obvious in the passport. Even so, I’m glad it’s up for renewal next year.

Sadly (stupidly) I handed over my VNU pass when I left PCW two weeks ago, so the only one I have from my time there is the ITN pass that I used to get into and out of the building to present The Lab on Thursdays and London this Week on Sundays. Notice the presence of a collar on that shirt – very rare indeed, which suggests I may have been trying to make a good impression.

That picture was taken some time around 2000 or 2001 in the green room for Channel 4 News, which is only slightly larger than (although significantly grottier than) the old BBC London green room in Bush House. Perhaps not surprisingly, the room wasn’t green, which fits in with the pattern of every other green room I’ve been in.

And finally, most recently, my gym pass for Fitness First. I’m not a member there any more, having since joined Esporta where they don’t put your picture on your card.

I hope nobody was supposed to police your entry on the basis of this picture. It was taken with a webcam, and like all webcam pics it’s practically impossible to see. Unlike all other webcam pics, I’m not naked.