The outhouse was, frankly, a bit horrible. On the outside, I mean. The woman who lived here before, and had since the 1940s, hadn’t done much to the house until she decided to sell it, at which point she got someone to come around and slap a coat of paint on everything.

EVERYTHING.

Any plants that got in the way were simply painted over. Result: a patchy wall. Doubly so when the big hydrangea that covered one wall of the outhouse, and the ivy on the other walls, curled up and died last summer.

This was the mess they left behind:

Pretty nasty, eh?

So yesterday we set out to sand them down and paint them. And do you know what? It wasn’t nearly so bad as we’d expected. I’d go so far as to say we had fun. The sun was out, the radio was on, we broke for an excellent lunch, and the four of us – me, Rich, Andrew and mum – worked on something together, with fantastic results.

Looksie:

That’s enough to make you feel good about the day, isn’t it.

Admittedly the whole outhouse is now so clean that it looks a bit like a static caravan, but it’s so much better than it was before. The patio is a whole lot more pleasant to sit at, and I think we can all feel satisfied at a job well done.

Coolest use of a Wii to date.

I could never see the point before, aside from Wii Fit, which I think has the potential to be quite fun, but this is the kind of thing that could swing me in favour of a Wii.

If I had a room with no windows.

Toe-curlingly fantastic.

This could be a life-changing book. It’s one I’ve heard about several times over the last few years, and with a new edition out I decided to bag a copy. It’s a US version so all the financials are in dollars, but it’s no less an illuminating read.

The basic premise (and I’m not giving anything away here) is that if you think about it, you don’t really want to be a millionaire. It’s a nice idea, but surely the nicer idea is to have the millionaire lifestyle. In other words, to have the kind of life that a million pounds (or in this case dollars) could bring you, without actually necessarily having the money.

Author Tim Ferriss lives that kind of life, travelling the world while remote assistants take care of his business activities. The upshot is that his working week has been shrunk down from 80-hours to just four, and yet he still earns $40,000 a month. Yes, a month.

This is the story of how he did it, how you can do it and what resources and sites you need to have in your toolbox to make it happen.

It’s pretty inspirational and I actually had to stop reading it in bed as it was keeping me awake. I’d put out the light after a dozen pages or so and then lie awake for more than an hour re-reading it in my head. Switching to reading it only on the tube fixed that.

This new edition has over 100 pages that didn’t appear in the original, with loads of case studies from people who have put the techniques to good use. The layout is great, although obviously that could change when the UK edition finally appears.

If you ever wanted to automate any of the niggling, repetitive, time-consuming tasks in your life then this is the book that will tell you how to do it and, in the process, become more productive and fulfilled.

Nature can be cruel at times.

Had they survived, they would have grown up as blackbirds.

I’ve recently finished reading Talking About Detective Fiction by PD James. It’s a slim book that looks at the development of popular detective fiction from Jane Austin’s Emma onwards.

Casting a critical, analytical eye over Conan Doyle, Poe, Dorothy L Sayers and more recent writers like Patricia Cornwell it’s a masterclass on the structure and workings of detective stories and how they are generally structured. When all of the evidence is gathered in one place like this you see how formulaic a successful detective story is.

Detectives are outsiders who intrude on a settled community (or house, street, village and so on). Most are loners but they generally have a Watson figure with whom they can discuss the case (and of course tell the reader things that need to be told so that the final reveal doesn’t come out of the blue). No detective should have any more information than the reader, or else you’re cheating your audience.

For anyone writing a piece of detective fiction – as I’m attempting – it’s useful stuff from one of the most distinguished and longest-serving practitioners of the craft.

I’ll be keeping it close at hand.

I’ve been lucky enough to live with an iPad for the last couple of weeks. It’s a truly transformative device. I’ll freely admit that I didn’t fully understand the potential of giving the iPhone a bigger screen and taking away the phone bits, but now that I’ve been playing with it, I see exactly why it’s such an important product.

Nobody I’ve shown it to, away from work, has really understood it until they’ve got their hands on it. Sit them down with it and give them a nice fast net connection, though, and you have to prise it back out of their hands.

The sad thing is, beyond the built-in Maps, YouTube and so on, the one app that seems to impress the most is the BBC News application, and the chance of getting that in the UK any time soon is slim indeed.

The interface is deceptively simple, with headlines taking up the left-half of the screen and the contents of your story taking the right. Scroll up and down to read the story and swipe it to the left or right to read the next one. The headlines scroll, too, both up and down and left and right, and there’s a live radio button at the top of the interface that tunes you in to the World Service.

Being an iPad app it also obviously works in portrait mode. Spin your iPad around and the interface redraws itself to give your story more space and strip your headlines across the top, making it much easier to read.

And if you want to watch the news rather than just read or listen to it, there’s plenty of embedded media. Tap on a video link in your story and it switches to fast, high quality, widescreen playback, even without an embedded Flash player.

It’s the iPad’s first killer application, yet even when the iPad finally ships in the UK (it’s been pushed back by a month or so because sales in the US are so strong that they’ve created a global shortage) I doubt it will launch in the UK for several months, if at all.

The BBC is simply too good, and its content too strong for its rivals to compete against. That’s led the BBC Trust to investigate whether we should ever see its smartphone and iPad apps in the UK at all. As the BBC’s iPad app pages state:

The BBC Trust has announced a review of the BBC’s plans to deliver content via dedicated smartphone apps. The BBC will therefore not be launching public service news and sports apps for smartphones in the UK pending the outcome of the Trust review.

However, the US iPad app is a commercial activity outside the UK and is not covered by the Trust review. It has been released in the Apple store in the US by BBC Worldwide, the main commercial arm and wholly owned subsidiary of the BBC. BBC Worldwide’s mission is to create, acquire, develop and exploit media content and brands around the world in order to maximise the value of BBC’s assets for the benefit of the UK licence fee payer.

What the Trust will conclude at the end of its investigation is up for debate, but my prediction is that it will either rule against a UK release or recommend putting out a crippled version for the UK market that features only a subset of the US application’s content and abilities.

That’s a shame. This may be a BBC Worldwide product, but the content seems to be largely drawn from output funded by UK license payers. While I’m all for allowing competition and giving the BBC’s rivals a chance, shouldn’t we also be allowed to view, read and listen to the content we have funded by whatever medium we choose – including the iPad?

What a fantastic sunny weekend. The cat has spent his time sniffing around the borders and the chickens have been sun-bathing. We took the tarpaulin off the top of their compound and they’ve been enjoying the warmth, laying down in the chippings and spreading out the wings and legs to soak up the sun.

We’ve been out on our bikes. We rode up to Springfield and into town through Chelmer Village. The sun was so warm, and it’s lovely to be cycling under empty skies with not even an airline trail to spoil them. With all air traffic over the UK and much of the rest of Europe grounded by the volcanic eruptions in Iceland I’m enjoying our silent, deserted skies.

I know it inconveniences those who want to travel, but as far as I’m concerned, the longer it continues the better.

On my desk right now.

Surprisingly weighty, perhaps on account of all the fingerprints.

It’s taken us almost three years (certainly more than two) but we’ve got to the very end of Allo Allo. All nine series and 85 episodes. I didn’t think I’d be saying this when we were sitting through its nadir around the end of series five, but now I’m actually quite sad to see it go.

Admittedly it went on longer than it should, running for longer than the actual war during which it was set. It first aired on 30 December 1982 and finished almost exactly ten years later on 14 December 1992. There was a best-of in 1994 and a terrible ‘Return of’ programme in April 2007, but I don’t think you can count them as part of the actual series.

So what does happen when you get to the very, very end? Inevitably, what follows contains spoilers.

The British and Americans are advancing on Nouvion and the German forces fleeing the town. Herr Flick has plastic surgery to change his appearance and then he and Von Smallhausen try to escape to South America in a bathtub submarine. The plastic surgery storyline was a bit of a fudge to explain the fact that Richard Gibson had left at the end of series eight, and to be fair they pulled it off pretty well because David Janson, his replacement, was so good at mimicking him.

The Germans are thrown in the local jail until the terms of their surrender can be finalised, and then we skip ahead several years. Rene is in a wheelchair and his son has taken over the bar. Mme Edith is more or less bed-bound, as her mother was before her, and Gruber, without his little tank, is now an international art dealer. He is also, bizarrely, married to Helga, despite his amorous pursuit of Rene throughout the war.

The final scene is set in the square outside the cafe. The aged characters are admiring a statue of Rene that has been erected in the square to celebrate his work for the resistance. They manage to snap off one of its hollow arms and, as it drops off, out falls the lost picture of the Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies.

Finally rich, Rene jumps in the car with Yvette and they elope – something he had been promising and failing to do through the whole of the previous nine series.

It was a neat tying off, but we did get the feeling watching the last two series that they were only commissioned for the sake of completing the storyline. That aside, it’s a pretty impressive achievement.

It is cheesy in parts, but that’s half the fun of it, and I think over the course of 85 episodes you have to make some allowance for that, don’t you?