Well, that was an impressive distillation of our conversation, but at least it’s an accurate representation.

Why is there suddenly national paranoia about iPods and their headphones. The Times devoted half of the whole of its front page to a story about how wearing the white headphones that ship with an iPod makes you a target for muggers.

The Register explains why:

West Midlands police have issued a stark warning to iPod users: ditch the white headphones or pay the price.

So how many people have actually been mugged for their iPods? Not many, I’d guess. The first I heard about this was a couple of months ago when the BBC rang me up and asked if they could send a TV crew out to film an interview with me in the office talking about how you can make yourself safe when wearing iPod earphones, but it was such a nothing story I turned them down.

In spite of that, the woman from the Express who rang me up today to do precisely the same interview for a piece she is writing for tomorrow’s edition seemed completely amazed that it wasn’t a piece of breaking news.

Anyhow, I did her the interview and there was a lot of tapping going on in the background as she typed out my words, so it’ll be interesting to see how it comes out when it’s published. I’ll pick up a copy on the way into work.

I wore my white iPod headphones with pride all the way home tonight, though. Lead by example, they say, so I’ll show the residents of Tottenham Court Road it’s safe to listen to music on the move.

When my dad moved to France he left a lot of things behind, one of which was a fat blue case full of photos and slides. A lot of these were taken before I was born, including a series of slides of Paris, on which the developers have stamped various dates from 1971 to 1973.

A lot of the colours have gone out of whack on them, where the emulsion has degraded over time, and several of them have scratches and nasty marks on them.

I spent Saturday afternoon scanning in 14 of them, though, and then cleaning them up, and have put then online at offline.

What they show is a city strangely devoid traffic, as it was before the age of mass tourism. The Place de la Concorde – lethal to the present day pedestrian – is almost empty, and the only thing moving in front of the Moulin Rouge is a man on a bike on an otherwise empty road.

They show, in essence, the Paris in which Amelie spent her childhood.

It’s the first day of summer. My phone said so when the network tried to change the time. So did my PC and my PDA. My iBook was strangely silent on the matter, but she seems to have updated her clock without complaint, so I guess it must be true.

Anyhow, regardless of the grey skies that called for a trip out – coffee in flask, camera in bag and tripod in hand.

So I put on my muddiest boots and headed for Dengie marshes. There was a story in the paper a few weeks ago about a man who had murdered his friend and then dropped the body from a plane into the marshes. He’d not noticed, apparently, that the tide was very low, and so rather than sinking into the mud the body had just laid there, half in the water and half out. It was found very quickly.

The story was accompanied by a picture of the paths running through the marshes, which looked kind of interesting, so I set out to investigate.

Somehow, though, I never found the path. I found the edge of the marshes, being whipped by the strong cold wind, and I walked for an hour and a half in either direction, arriving back at the car tired and full of mud. (Although not, it has to be said, nearly as full of mud as the man crawling through the marsh on his hands and knees picking at the topsoil as though he’d lost a contact lens).

As it turned out, it was barely worth taking the camera at all, as the most interesting thing I found to photograph was the leichen growing on an old pier that stretched out into the mud. Close up, though, it looked like the trumpets of daffodils, which made them the most spring-like thing I saw all day.

Anarchy descended on Tottenham Court Road this evening. I left the office late – some time around eight, I think it was, and walked down to TCR tube, passing by Micro Anvika which was shut up for the night. One of the PowerBooks on display in the window was displaying a cheery warning box:

Do you want to accept the incoming message ‘You’ve been bluejacked ’

Beyond that, at the junction with Oxford Street, was a couple of hundred cyclists, sitting in the middle of the road. They were ringing their bells and looking pathetically at the motorists, who were backed up right down the street leaning on their horns and making a deafening row.

In among them all was a dozen or so police officers, in uniform and wearing flourescent yellow jackets. I guess they were there in an official capacity, but perched on the saddles of their bikes, making no effort to move anyone on, I guess they all approved of whatever the protest was about.

‘Critical Mass’, it said on the plackards, and a quick Googling of that term throws up this site, campaigning against the damage done by car use in the city.

Considering the car unfriendly policies of the mayor it’s hardly surprising the police were doing nothing to stop them, which strikes me as a decidedly good thing.

Twenty five sheets of A4 paper, some toner or ink, sellotape, a large office window in which to stick it all, and a small photo of one of your work colleagues.

That’s all you need handy to make beautiful, terrifying art with the Rasterbator.

It’s the grooviest Flash application on the net, allowing you to import, resize and crop an image, then have it translated into an enormous PDF made up of small vector dots. Once you print them out and stick them together in the right order you get a wall-sized version of the picture you sent it. Best of all, the files are tiny. A photo taking up 42 sheets of A4 was just 1.4MB to download.

I had my blood pressure taken today.

The nurse said it was perfect. ‘One ten over seventy,’ apparently.

‘What does that mean?’ I asked.
‘Well, the one ten is the pressure when your heart is squeezing and the seventy is the pressure when it’s relaxed.’
‘Seventy what?’
‘Seventy millimetres of mercury.’ She pointed at the little piece of machinery on the desk.
‘Which is what?’ I asked her. ‘Pounds per square inch?’
She looked at me for a moment. ‘I don’t know. I’m only a nurse.’

The books in favour of papers swing is paying dividends already. I’m steaming through Yoga for People who Don’t Want to do It and haven’t missed Metro at all. Unfortunately, though, I have made the mistake of updating my feed reader (and in fact updating my Mac in the office to OS X 10.3 just so I could do so) to Shrook 2.

Shrook 1.33 was the best feed reader you could get. In fact, I gave it an award in the mag two issues ago, because of the way it ordered stories by currency, so the most recently updated feeds were displayed at the top of the screen. Now, though, it has an iTunes-like Library and all sorts of columns popping up and disappearing as you click on various entries. It’s hardly intuitive, and with the interface changing all the time smacks of bad design.

The old, elegant Shrook looked like this. Simple, uncluttered and easy to use:

The new one, which doesn’t even render as well at the same small size as the grab for Shrook 1.33, looks like this:

I wish I’d stuck with the old one now, but won’t let it force me back into picking up the free news rags.

So, I should be done with Yoga for… by the end of next week, I reckon – proofs permitting. I’m pretty undecided about it, though. It’s very gentle and relaxed, but that’s because nothing happens. Someone on Amazon criticised it for being a bit of an ego trip (I see the reviews have now gone) and I suppose it is. There’s a lot of random wandering off into irrelevant long recitations of meaningless conversations that go nowhere, and a whole chapter where the point was nothing more complex than the fact that the author played a game of tennis ball catching with a friend at the top of a waterfall. Nobody fell off. Nobody got hurt. They didn’t lose the ball.

Hmmm…

It’s relaxing, though. Probably too relaxing for a holiday, when it would most likely induce a coma.

Bleurgh. I’ve eaten so much this weekend. Yesterday evening, dinner at mum’s for her birthday. Today, lunchtime, back around there again for a big (Quorn) roast for mothers’ day, then afterwards over to Alison’s for a whole-afternoon picnic on rugs on her lounge floor, followed by dinner and a whole melted brie for dipping. Very seventies fondue.

It’s a good job I did a serious gymming yesterday afternoon.

It was a strange afternoon today, though, as so many of the usual crowd couldn’t make it. There was just the four of us most of the time – me, Alison, Andy and Mark P, with Andy retelling his bed-blocking tales.

He’s been at the hospital for six years now, so knows about pretty much every nastiness that can befall a human body, including a particularly uncomfortable and unpronouncable condition where an ingrowing bum hair (I believe he called it an ingressing anal folicle) burrows its way through your skin into a cavity at the bottom of your spine, which it proceeds to fill over several years. Eventually you have to have the big knotted hairball surgically removed and the wound is left open to heal au naturel.

The embarassement of explaining that in the office the next morning can be nothing compared to what happened to a guy who wandered in last month, whose ‘girlfriend’ had lost a vibrator in his colon after it had ‘wriggled out of her hand’ and gone a bit too far of its own accord. I can’t imagine how long the two of them must have spent trying to get it out on their own before finally admitting he needed professional help, but by the time he turned up she’d made herself scarce, and the vibrator was still switched on, too far gone to be visible to the naked eye.

I wonder if he came on the bus (terrible pun unintentional), suffering the stares of fellow passengers as they tried to work out just how hungry he’d have to be to have such a rumbling stomach.

Anyhow, by sevenish our group of four had grown to six, and by eight it was up to nine, which made it a relaxing, entertaining way to end the weekend. The hospital mishaps, fortunately, came to an end before most of the food arrived, which perhaps explains why I now sit here feeling like I’ve eaten an elephant.

I must start swimming again next week.

I have made a pact to rationalise my reading habits. It came from being barely able to lift my ruck-sack when leaving work the other night (that’s a wild exaggeration) and wondering why it was so heavy. Looking through it to sort out the things I could leave on my desk until the next day, I realised it was all the magazines and books I’m reading at the moment. So, some thinning-out is called for.

First to go will be Metro.

I pick it up every morning and read pretty much all of it, but only out of habit. As soon as I get to work the first thing I do is check the BBC site for updates and I have a feed-reader running so I don’t really need a rag full of recycled press releases.

The rest of it will be difficult to thin out, though. I generally read PC Pro and Computer Buyer every month, and will continue to do so, as well as The Week most weeks.

The Week, almost always a resident of my bag, summarises the world’s media on a weekly basis (perhaps not surprisingly) so is a good way of checking out what’s being said overseas about stories that have made it into the news over here.

Wired, I consider to be required reading, on account of the fact I can’t work out who it’s aimed at just as much as I like the writing style. Sometimes I think it’s a computing magazine, sometimes politics, often science, sometimes social commentary… I’m not sure why it works, or how it manages to sell in so many countries, but it seems to have tapped into a vein nobody else has spotted, and apparently I’m somewhere in that vein. Once I work out what Wired is about, I’ll probably work out a lot of stuff about myself.

There are two reasons for reading Mens Fitness, one of which is an interest in staying fit (and reading interesting snippets on how to sew your own wounds or kick down a locked door). The other is easily guessable from the cover design.

The Spectator is a now-and-then mag for me. A bit too right-wing, but then it helps to keep an eye on what the opposition is talking about now and then. Besides, the book and film reviews are good and you can learn a lot from the way it is written. It’s way too text heavy to buy on a regular basis, though, so it can go the way of Metro.

So, of the four magazines currently in my bag, The Week, Mens Fitness and Wired remain.

Also in there are two books: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Yoga for People who Can’t be Bothered to Do It.

In spite of the glowing praise on the back cover, Roger Ackroyd it turning out to be very pedestrian and hum-drum. As such, I’m sure I’ll be missing all the clues as to who dunnit. Poirot peaked with Murder on the Orient Express, I think, although that may have been as much to do with the fact that I read it in one sitting on a long train journey. I started it as I pulled out of Cologne station and finished it five miles from home, having passed through Germany, Belgium, France, the tunnel and the UK.

I suspect the surroundings may therefore have had more to do with how much I enjoyed it than the story-line itself, as it was highly implausible.

Yoga for People who can’t be Bothered to Do It is turning out to be far more interesting. I’ve not read enough of it yet to have formed a good impression of how it’s going to pan out, but the writing style is wonderfully fluid and it just carries you along. It’s pretty much how I’d hope my novel turns out when I get around to finishing it off.

It’s only just struck me that I should probably swap these with my bedside reading matter as they’re far more throw-away and forgetful than what I’m reading before I go to sleep: the Rhyming History of Britain, and The Political Animal by Jeremy Paxman.

The Rhyming History is a fantastic piece of work – the history of the country from 55BC to 1966 written as a poem. I wish I’d thought of doing that. You do have to concentrate on it, though, or else you find yourself losing track of the rhythm and then you can’t follow what’s going on, but if you pay it proper attention it repays you several times over.

The Political Animal, of which I’ve so far only read the first 50 or so pages, is turning out to be a very well-researched piece of journalism looking at the type of person who wants to run for Parliament. Full of interesting snippets along the lines of:

…there were fifty-one Prime Ministers from Sir Robert Walpole to Tony Blair… twenty-four – almost half of the total number – had lost their fathers before they reached the age of twenty-one…

So, some sustained effort is required to clear the reading backlog so I can get on to those sitting on the bookshelf beside me as I type. Perhaps some time off, a beach and nothing else to do is called for…