Last night, dinner with the ladies. And it was literally just the ladies this time since Sparky was bedded up, ill. So, I wandered down to VNU to meet Kathryn and Ems in reception and bumped into enough familiar faces to stand gossiping for a quarter hour before we decamped to the Alphabet Bar. It’s quickly becoming a habitual haunt. I felt absolutely worn out. Too many mornings of working before work have started to rack up now, and I could do with a good few days of sleeping. Working through the weekend didn’t help either.

Anyhow, we quickly mellowed out with a bottle of the lowest teen-priced wine on a deep and scuffed settee and talked about holidays and every kind of rubbish.

Kathryn was just back from her first trip to America – Miami upgraded to San Francisco on account of the storms – and Ems quickly got me very jealous with tales of an impending trip to Ljubljana, Vienna and Budapest, the top three cities on my ‘need to visit next’ list. It was very useful, actually. I’d been wondering how easy it would be to fly to Venice, then take the train to Ljubljana, and from there to Budapest before railing it up to Vienna, but apparently it’s much better to do it the other way around: Ljubljana – Vienna – Budapest. You cut off about ten hours of travelling, and can switch from train to a hydrofoil down the Danube for the last leg if it takes your fancy (and it very much does).

I think we could all have stayed there all night if it had a reputation for good food, but we left – eventually – and wandered along Wardour Street past all the film companies, looking at the menus in the restaurant windows, and eventually – after a bit of a dog leg – ended up in Kettners, which has changed its menu yet again, and still hadn’t reinstated the vegetarian burger. That would be enough to rule out a repeat trip if the pizzas weren’t so good.

Oh, and they put us right beside the piano so we had entertainment, too.

Kettners had only been a semi-thought-of place to eat, but it’s kind of appropriate, really. Hunting it down on the web I see that it was famous as a place where Oscar Wilde used to take rent boys, and I’ve almost finished reading The Portrait of Dorian Grey. It’s the biggest pile of crappy trash I’ve read in ages. It’s like three ill-suited stories stuck together with a big blob of irrelevance in the middle, and all the way through you can see that Wilde is trying desperately to live up to his reputation as a wit who is good at thinking up smart sayings. It’s absolutely littered with little snatches of conversation where he’s trying to be clever and failing miserably, and he comes out of it looking like a tedious, pretentious cretin.

I’m sure the waitress thought I was taking them both out to dinner, which couldn’t have been further from the truth, but nonetheless she talked to me about the wine (big mistake), asked me to try it when it eventually arrived (I deferred to one of the others) and then tried to get me to sign the credit slip, in spite of the name on the card so obviously being preceded by a ‘Miss’.

Even in Soho, people cling to well-worn cliches.

Ho-hum. A day of work. We’ve had too many short fortnights lately, with all these office moves, days spent judging and holidays. So, I’ve listened to almost all of my iTunes library (well, the best bits – it’s not that small a library) and a couple of hours of the French 80s station, which seems to have lapsed into something of a Queen-o-rama this evening, inducing a rapid click of the very handy mute button.

Was quite worried that I had enjoyed their two hours of crap one-hit wonders this afternoon but am putting that down to the fact that French musical tastes are plainly somewhat under-developed.

Gymmed, after that, in an effort to stave off Deep Vein Thrombosis from too much sitting down, so ran for 4km, then did some lifting and pushing stuff, then a swim, at which point I thought I’d earned half an hour in the jacuzzi.

Of course that’s far too long. I came out looking like a soggy flannel and staggered back towards the showers barely able to see, my head swimming.

Gym = evil.

Not being much of a one for birthdays (in spite of the evidence of last year) I was quite glad only Julian knew about it at work, and he forgot all about it when it finally came around on Friday. So, the only extraordinary thing about the day was the number of people missing from our team. We were down to five, which is pretty much half rations, and the whole day was strangely quiet.

I got away at seven, which was earlier than I’d expected, and so called Paul to arrange with him, Jon and Trevor to head out for dinner. As tradition dictated, we let ourselves get waylaid in their conservatory, and sat there drinking drinks and nibbling crisps until the last moment when we had to make a mad dash up to Galleywood in time for last orders. The guy behind the bar was clearly pissed off that we’d arrived in time to catch the kitchen, and bullied us into making quick choices, demanding to know which table we would be sitting at even though you can sit wherever you want and they’d not yet given us an order number.

Still, the food was good, and after Trevor had finished showing us his pictures of cute puppies the size of a flip-flop I handed around that day’s Press Gazette, which includes Seven Days in the life of Nik Rawlinson.

(Open this scan as a 95KB popup)

So all in all it was a fairly early night for a birthday – sometime around twoish when going back for drinks and coffee and more fatty nibbles were taken into account – and this morning was a slow start, followed by an even slower wait in a very long queue at the bank that made me remember why switched to doing the whole money thing online.

The net effect was a late arrival for lunch around at mum’s, where the house had been taken over by a very well behaved seven-week-old, which was putting on some very successful sentry duty and keeping the cat out of the lounge. Eventually it fell asleep and the cat came for a cautious prowl and sniffing session as we ate lunch. I think she (the cat) was quite glad when she (the baby) was loaded back into a car an driven away, in spite of the fact she (the baby) has been immaculately behaved the whole time she had been here.

In 17 minutes I’ll be 31. That year’s gone quickly. This time last year I was in Venice, sitting in a square out of sight of a canal (an achievement in itself) drinking a vodka and lemonade. That’s something that’s changed – I can’t stand it with lemonade now and have to have tonic – a sure sign of getting old.

We were staying in a hotel just off St Mark’s Square, and I was very glad to be away from Rome, which had annoyed me with its dire public transport system. The next day, as I slipped from 29 to 30 (and so from my third to my fourth decade) it rained, and we spent our whole time hopping from one cafe to another as we made halting progress from the lagoon to the train station by foot and bridge, and then back again by boat and damp seat.

It’s been a busy 12 months since then. So busy, in fact, that I’ve not touched the book since before heading off on that holiday, which is a very bad thing. It still stands at 110,000 words, so I must make an effort to get it finished before I turn 32.

32 sounds very grown up.

I’ve just looked back at what I wrote this day two years ago: 23 September 2002. It sounds eerily familiar:

But… hmmm… there is a lot I haven

Well, I saw Jerry Springer: The Opera for the second time last night. Same verdict as first time around: first half very funny, but by the second half the joke was starting to wear a bit thin. Still, it was fun, as it was a PR thing, so everyone was there, and it was preceeded by a nice dinner and, before that, a nice lunch with only a short meeting in between.

Coming out for a drink at the half-way mark, there were two Americans behind me.

‘I wonder if they get Jerry Springer over here,’ said one of them.

‘I don’t know,’ said the other. ‘They don’t seem to understand it, though, do they. Some of those lines are really funny but they’re just not laughing.’

Either they didn’t know the play had been written and produced in the UK, or they thought it was some kind of musical documentary.

Winter’s drawing in. You can feel it in the air. I spent today sitting in the sun at my dining table, working. It was lovely and warm. But this evening, after a 15-minute demonstration of a bed (yes, really – it even had motors to make it joggle around – very strange to spend 15 minutes lying on that in the middle of a crowded furniture store) I drove down to Burnham with Paul and we walked along the waterfront with a flash of coffee.

The wind off the water was slapping the rigging on the boats against their masts, and pulling at our coats and hair. In the end we had to take cover behind a high earthy bank as it was getting too cold, and stinging our ears.

We stayed down there as we walked back into the town to find the car, but got waylaid by a Thai restaurant where they played far-eastern versions of Ronan Patrick John Keating songs. (Unbelievably, looking at his site I see he’s about to release a best of the last 10 years of Ronan Keating album. How?)

So, for the second time this weekend, I had green curry with tofu, and it was a world away from the one I cooked myself on Friday night. Light and creamy and very fragrant, with wonderful coconut rice like a sticky mashed up Bounty bar.

The perfect way to close a busy weekend.

Why didn’t they just put a big banner over the door to the cinema: ‘Vote Kerry’. Or at least I assume that’s what The Village is about.

The following contains spoilers.

Without giving away the twist at the end, the plot is a fairly simple alegory on the so-called war on so-called terror. The people of a village (America) cut themselves off (isolationist policies of the early Bush administration) from the towns on the other side of the woods (countries on the other side of the oceans). However, when they are attacked from within their own village (September 11) they send out an ambassador to get help from the outside world (‘you’re with us or without us’) because suddenly they realise they can’t survive on their own. When she gets there she meets someone who works for Walker Security (Walker is the W of George W Bush, of course) whose job is to ‘protect and preserve the border’ of the nature reserve in which the people live (the border of America).

It gets far more political than that, though. The leader of the village even speakes in George W-ish blocks of – two words – at a – time and – no more. He also talks about the death of one of the villagers as having served a good purpose because it made people keep on believing the stories about the monsters that were out to get them so they will be able to scare everyone into continue believing that the rest of the world outside the village is evil and bad and so they must preserve their current way of life as it is.

I could be wrong about all that, of course, but until I spotted that going on in the background I was finding it all thoroughly unengaging. From then on, though, I was hooked.

Well there we go. A whole new kind of fun: talking to anonymous people you don’t know in places you’ve never been to.

I installed Skype this afternoon and dug out my old PC telephone. I’ve not used it in years – not since I did an interview on it on the radio about how it was the future of communications. The phone is dead and all that. Then Sandy Waugh, who was on the studio end of the conversation asked why you’d want to make cheap international calls that way instead of using a calling card and I didn’t have a decent answer.

Anyhow, Skype’s different because as well as letting you call landlines all over the place for

It’s been one of those weeks where everything’s happened at once. Or everything’s needed to happen at once, to be more accurate, but hasn’t always quite done so.

So, Monday morning was another batch of unpacking. This time upstairs on the third floor. If I look out of my window I can see the London Eye slowly turning on the banks of the Thames. If I peer to the left I can see the roof of the British Museum. Not a bad seat, and within spitting distance of the kitchen, which is a good thing.

I made the mistake of mentioning it in my profile on the end of the editorial I wrote for the new issue of the magazine:

Nik Rawlinson is the editor. This week he’s been mostly packing boxes ready for MacUser’s move to the sparkly third floor. Send all bubble wrap this way.

I’ve had about a dozen emails from readers saying they hoped the move went well, and yesterday, a call from one of those strange people who say both their names, along with a Mr. You always know what those calls are going to turn out like.

‘Hello, I’m Mr James Johnson,’ he said (I think that was his name). ‘I just wanted to ask how large the third floor was.’

‘Oh, well, quite large,’ I said, wondering why he wanted to know. Someone later suggested he may have been trying to work out how many people would be there and how much gas he’d need to knock us all out Pussy Galore stylee. I told him it was bigger than the last floor we were on.

‘Hmmm…’ he said. ‘And have they put you near any PC magazines.’

‘Yes, we’re sharing the floor with them.’

‘Well I hope they’re close enough for you to throw paper balls at them.’

And with that he hung up.

An hour later, we get an email from a reader who spotted Chris of the Phin’s name further on in the issue and wondered whether it was his mum whose chest he used to stare at when she taught him at school:

I was completely in love with her. However she hated me and kept giving me the belt for talking to Sandra Brown and probably for ogling her, your mother’s, chest (sorry to be so indiscrete about your mother).

Chris of the Phin has the rest of the story (and his mum’s reply) here.

Which brings us to today; a day full of spreadsheets and budgets, and fiddling around with the design of the cover, the latter of which was far more fun than the former.

Oh, and an email reminding me that Press Gazette wants to publish a week of my diary next week and that they need the entries by 2pm sharp tomorrow afternoon. For the first – and probably last time ever – it looks like this blog is going to come in very handy indeed.

I’m stuffed, after an impromptu dinner with Trevor and Jon. Nothing planned – just a spur of the moment outing in the rain, only to find the high street closed. We ended up in the Italian by the bus station where they urinate up the windows while you’re eating.

On the outside, of course – it’s not that low rent.

Although it does make for interesting viewing.

Very nice, anyhow, and Trevor treated us as it was his birthday today, on account of which Jon plied us with cake mid-afternoon, much to the dismay of the Midnight Weatherman, who had read on the side of the box that it was 28% fat. Steve’s Challenge tried to scoff a second bit with his swivel chair half swung towards the window, but Weatherman spotted him and dragged him off to the gym for a second time in the day to swim it straight off again.

It’s been a busy weekend. I went to the new house with Paul, Andrew and mum today, and ended up staying there two hours while we looked at the colours of the walls and the size of the garden, then came home and did my tax return for a second time.

It’s bad enough having to do it once a year, but when you use some crappy software that has had its ‘print’ function disabled (“we thought everyone would want to file online…”) it quickly loses its appeal.

Anyhow, I’m not sure whether I need to pay more money, or I’m owed a nice handy kick-back, but it’s done now, and ready for dispatching, so it’s going to be a case of crossing some fingers and waiting to find out.

Yesterday was fairly hideous on account of going to Bluewater. I think I’m getting too old for the place, and found myself forever stepping around people, or stopping for pushchairs to roll over my feet, or walking between Kent chavs with long hair (male) or cropped hair (female) while they had public rows about who was and wasn’t allowed to buy stuff from HMV.

I don’t think I’d miss the shops if they all closed down and you could buy everything you wanted through Amazon.

The upshot of it all, though, is that I didn’t get to the gym at all this weekend which, combined with tonight’s big dinner and this afternoon’s 28% cake, is making me feel very guilty, sitting here.

A new leaf needs to be turned.