Why did Stromberg hijack a third submarine? He didn’t need it, and it led to his ultimate downfall.

Where did Major Anja Amasova get that red dress? She must have been given it back on Atlantis, but then wouldn’t Stromberg have accounted for it getting wet at some time or another. Why, then, did it leave a big red stain on the white cushions in the escape capsule?

Why is there garden furniture in the operations room onboard Liparus?

Why didn’t Jaws warn Drax that he, too, was doomed to failure since his aim was identical to that of Stromberg, merely more ambitious?

Where did Major Amasova get that horendous blue eye shadow? Again, was it Stromberg? And why would he have made up her eyes if she was his prisoner? Was he a frustrated beautician? Would psychiatrists argue that his actions could therefore be explained as an extreme and unnatural reaction, the sole aim of which is to hide the more feminine side of a split personality?

Who is the man on the beach with the bottle? He is clearly an enemy spy himself, since he appears again on the next mission, and then once again on the one after that, yet we never know his name.

…like the Lotus, the plot is clearly leaky; it poses more questions than it answers.

So yesterday started late and ended even later. I’m getting to know the post-midnight vomit comet trains well now.

Spent the morning working from home thanks to a very broken railway. Two trains had had an upset somewhere just east of London and between them pulled down the wires. The way they said it on the radio you’d have sworn they’d been fighting. Anyway, they were agreeing with the railway web site that you should avoid all travel unless absolutely necessary, so I sat at home and wrote my editorial and did my best to change my car insurance. There was something fairly surreal about sitting around on hold at an Indian call centre listening to Gareth Gates singing Spirit in the Sky.

So much for not travelling, though. At 2 I braved the elements and walked to the station in the drizzle (I’d not seen the car in three days thanks to getting home too late to get it out of the car park). I arrived on the platform just as a train pulled in and 27 minutes was stepping off it in London. That counts as a record.

I was in the office by three and in Porters with Kathryn, Mark and Ross by half six. I’d sworn I’d never go back there after leaving PCW. In fact, I even gave away my founder member’s card to Dylan on my last day and told him to practice forging my signature for cheap drinks at the bar.

We took tables in the basement and slowly the group grew. First it was Will, and then Vinnie, who reminded us of the good-will egg disaster of the night before.

Among the guinea fowl and sushi they were serving at the gallery, there had been fried quails eggs, balanced on dainty little quails-egg omelettes. But omelettes aren’t as good as plates. They don’t keep their shape and when you’re trying to hold them and a drink at the same time you’re bound to drop one. And so it was that on my sixth or seventh one of the tiny fried eggs slipped off and bounced across the floor, coming to a halt beside a group of guests, a moment away from being squashed into the polished wooden floor.

So of course we scooped it up with an invite. And the invites looked like postcards. And the exhibition was… postcards. So when we put it discretely by the edge of the skirting of a wall full of pictures it took less than two minutes for a curator to assume the whole thing had dropped out of the display. With a look of horror on his face, he pulled on soft gloves and picked up the invite and dropped egg with the utmost care, then carried them off to some important looking place beyond the doors.

Sophie did her best to pick up a South African at the bar. He carried her drink, but soon got scared when she gave him her card with ‘call me’ on the back … and mine with ‘or me’ scrawled on the reverse – the only way she could think to work out if he was gay. Probably pouncing on him with a scream as he came out of the loo was not the best move.

After that we resorted to sending far less embarrassing messages around the pub by Bluetooth. Sending them off at random and then watching to see who gets them actually gets quite amusing if you’ve had enough to drink.

What time we left, I don’t know. All I remember was I was starving and I hit bed at the time that is all too rapidly becoming a regular.

I really wasn’t in the mood for a night in last night so did a quick scout about on messenger and dug up three parties. Two pretty much open to all, and one an invitation-only exhibition at the Royal College of Arts. I picked the latter, blagged myself an invite and buzzed down to South Kensington to meet Ross and Vinnie at the door.

I arrived to find a string of tents erected on the pavement with strange-looking people tightly bundled up in jumpers and sleeping bags sitting beside them. I assumed it was a protest of some kind, but it turns out they were actually waiting for the exhibition to open to the public tomorrow morning. Or, more accurately, they were waiting for the exhibition to go on sale the following morning.

It was a collection of 2,500 one-off postcard-sized pieces, some by famous artists and some by relative nobodies, each for sale at

Well there we go. Proof, if ever it was needed, that the images they show on the screens of mobile phones in the ads really are ‘simulated’, as they say. Four writers, in a pub, tonight. If you look carefully you can just make out their faces. Those are the pinkish reddish bits in the four corners.

Just about the best use we found for them, beside taking pictures that look like roadkill, was sending each other rude messages by Bluetooth, which clearly doesn’t say too much for our social skills.

Hmmm…

Bad, bad interview this afternoon. Very impromptu. The phone rings and I pick it up.

Voice: Hello. It’s XXX from XXX. Did you hear the Times launched a tabloid edition this morning like the Independent?
Me: No.
Voice: Well, as you’re kind of a technology person do you think you could do a quick piece on how small is the new black?
Me: Ummm
Voice: Great. Hang on – I’ll transfer you to the studio.

Naturally, I did not cover myself in glory with that one.

I was bluejacked on the way home. That’s the first time it’s happened. Or at least it’s the first time it’s happened in the wild – we’ve tested it in the confines of the office, but then it’s not a surprise. I never heard it happen, unfortunately, or I’d have tried to spot who it was that had done it. Instead, the first I knew was when I got to the station and pulled the phone out of my pocket, and a string of poorly formed words shone out from the screen:

-you’ve been bluejacked

That’s a bit like emailing someone a message that just says ‘you’ve been emailed’.

If I’m going to be bluejacked, I want it to be by someone who has something to say. Someone advertising their web site, or asking if I’m single, or trying to arrange a secret liaison in aisle six when they spot me in the supermarket.

As it was none of those things, I hit delete. Whoever it was, though, the next time they spot an available bluetooth device with the name ‘Meeester Nik’ I hope they’ll send it something more interesting, and if it’s first thing in the morning… make it something to smile about.

Bluejacking: verb; the act of sending a message to the screen of another user’s mobile phone through the use of a Bluetooth connection. The message is stored as a contact in your address book and, to all intents and purposes, is untracable. Great for confusing people on the tube who think they’ve received a text message several hundred feet below ground.

A thoroughly unproductive day. Such things should not be allowed.

I sat down to write my editorial, but instead drank cappuccinos, vanilla lattes and gallons of tea. I ate ginger biscuits. I was still nibbling the biscuits as I left for the gym, so was fairly pleased when I weighed myself there to find that I’d dropped 8.5kg in the last two weeks.

Turns out the scales were wrong.

After we’d calibrated them by having the Midnight Weatherman stand on them in his Patricks I’d only dropped a kilo.

I’m not sure I like him so much any more.

Thursday wiped me out until lunchtime today. It started in Islington at ten for Mac Expo, transferred to the office some time around lunchtime in the middle of the anti-Bush demos, moved on to the hotel mid-afternoon, the awards in the evening, and then partying until half five Friday morning.

So anyway, the Expo was at the Business Design Centre in Islington, which I’ve not been to in about ten years. I still can’t decide whether or not it was once a train station but it certainly looks like one with its metal struts, big arched roof and an enormous clock at one end.

I spent the morning flitting around between the various stands, shaking hands with the exhibitors and dispensing business cards and at one point met up with Rachel – technically my sworn enemy since she edits the competition – for a brief natter on her stand. She asked if I was nervous about having to give my speech that night but strangely I wasn’t, and it stayed that way right up until the point I had to make it.

Grabbed a cab back to the office around half one and got stuck in the middle of the anti-George Bush protesters marching through Bloomsbury to congregate outside the University. There were thousands of them, from all walks of life. One had a teddy bear sticking out of her bag; it was holding up a little ‘librarians against Bush’ placard.

Another carried a far larger sign: ‘America voted for Gore, not for gore’, with the second word ‘gore’ mocked up to be blood and guts. Gruesome but clever nonetheless. The police seemed to be just standing around watching it all happen. Our driver reckoned they were probably on the protesters’ side, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was right in a lot of cases.

After a few delays he got us back to the office, where I checked my mail, picked up my tux and headed off in a snazzy hired car to the Sheraton Park Lane. Of all the hotels in London it’s one of the most beautiful; art deco throughout and with a ballroom that looks like it was taken straight from the Titanic. The story goes that Churchill had decided he’d move the war cabinet there if Germany ever bombed Whitehall so badly that he was forced to flee, and you can see why – it’s two floors below ground, down some wide deco staircases, and there is no mobile coverage anywhere.

Jon Culshaw was already there, waiting for us in reception so we could do a dry-run of the ceremony and check the script one last time while the serving staff continued setting up the tables and chairs for the evening. It went fairly well. We ironed out the last few kinks in the lines and although my part had been slightly tidied up since I’d written it, it was close enough to the original for me to remember it more or less from end to end without looking at the prompt card.

By the time that was over, I’d tuxed-up and watched an hour of news, the guests were arriving, and before I’d noticed, I was doing it for real, unable to see beyond the first row of tables because of the blinding lights. The awards were presented (‘the awardifications were winnerised,’ as Jon Culshaw put it in a George Bush voice), dinner was eaten, much had been drunk and it was suddenly half five in the morning. We were sitting in the Palm Court Bar drinking champagne on someone or other’s expense account and I was on the verge of slumping onto the floor, asleep. I dragged myself up the stairs to bed and lay wide awake until an hour before the 8am alarm went off.

Naturally, that made for a very unpleasant Friday. I was first in, and feeling as bright as a bell, but as the day wore on I got more and more tired and twice found myself drifting off at my desk, so I’m fairly pleased by the amount of work I managed to get through. I didn’t make it back to the Expo as I’d planned after a whole-morning meeting that called for pencils, pens and plenty of paper to draw on pushed everything back and things stacked up. I ended up leaving the office at half eight, arriving home at ten, going straight to bed and sleeping for almost twelve hours.

That wouldn’t have been a problem had I not had to be at the vet at 10.30. I made it, though, and it turns out the reason the cat is losing all of its hair is that it’s stressed. It’s apparently pulling it all out itself, which is the cat equivalent of biting your fingernails. He gave her the cat equivalent of a shot of Prozac and dispatched us with a steep bill and an invitation to come back in three weeks and spend some more money if that hadn’t sorted it out. At that price he’s probably hoping it won’t.

The rest of the day was spent drifting around doing not very much at all. Dinner with Trevor, Jon and Paul, and a repeat viewing of Meet the Parents.

Well that was an expensive half hour. Four of us took off to Oxford Street at noon to hire dinner suits from the smelliest man in London. Phoo. Measuring up was not a pleasant experience. He either didn’t notice or, more likely, didn’t care, going on the fact it smelt like he’d been wallowing in the tangy stench for several days.

So anyway,

Well there we go then. I knew that would happen. The spangly new phone arrives on my desk at the office, and the replacement SIM for my old one simultaneously drops on my doormat at home.

It’s turning out to be less of a dilemma than I thought, though, as the new one is so cute and shiny, and works so well with my Mac, that I’m not in the least tempted to send it back.

It also has one of those close-to-useless cameras on the back which I’ve never been over impressed by, but playing around with it on the way home gave me an idea for a new project. So, starting today, there’s a new strip running across the top of the front page of this site for a phoneblog. I don’t know how well it will work, or how long I’ll keep it up, but I’ll have a go at blogging from the phone. No words will be allowed beyond a simple title on each posting to make it easy to get around, and the pictures, by and large, will be nothing more than random snaps of places passed throughout the day.

When I’ve got my head around how it’s going, I’ll write something about how it’s working, too.

In the meantime, I don’t promise daily entries, or that the pictures will be anything more than grainy and sometimes blurred, but we’ll see how things go…