My golden rule of pensions: eight points clear

It's a mark of getting older that you start to think the pensions pages are a really interesting part of the newspaper.

Well, I'm not grey yet, but I've just completed my planning - and finally, found a simple rule to invest by. (There's a simple rule for anything if you look hard enough.) That rule: to get the fund value I want aged 60, I need to keep eight percentage points between the inflation rate + the fund fee rate, and the fund growth rate.

The reasoning behind this is that with a reasonable and annually rising contribution from me, the funds' value when I hit 60 will provide a One Percent Principle level of income, adjusted for inflation and rising with it. While the pot it's drawn from will still be growing at above inflation even after the cost of my monthly withdrawal is taken into account - because the amount I draw per year as a percentage of the fund will be less than the (by that time large) pot's annual growth rate minus inflation and fees. in other words, the pot will last forever. That's important, because I plan to live a long, long time.

(The One Percent Principle - aim for a salary that gets you into the top 1% of wage earners - is relevant. The current level in the UK, about £100K, is enough to provide an excellent lifestyle for a family, but not enough to be tempted by anything that needs a crew. A rich man once said, "The three things that lost me most money were my boat, my plane, and my divorce. The moral: if it flies, floats, or fucks - rent it.)

Of course, nothing's certain. Funds can crash; economies can fail. But I see 60-year olds struggling on a State pension because they did nothing, their dignity gone; I'm just playing the percentages here, and I've decided what's riskier.

But keeping to this rule means my quarterly review of funds becomes easy: if there aren't eight points of blue sky between costs and growth, I switch that fund into another that's performing better. While past returns are no guarantee of future performance, the reasonably risky funds I'm in all show five-year averages of 16% or more, well above the level I need even with costs of 2% a year and inflation rising to around 2.5% in the UK.

So that's all you've got to do. Decide what annual income you want at your retirement date in today's pounds, work out the monthly contribution needed to amass a pot where that annual rake-off as a percentage of the total pot is no more than a safe bank savings rate minus inflation, and start paying that monthly contribution into a fund with eight percentage points between negative and positive NOW. (It's eight for me; if you're still in your 20s it may be lower. If you're in your 40s, you're already in the danger zone where there's no reasonable chance of finding good enough funds to invest in.)

Incidentally, no 'safe' savings method will provide this performance, so I'd suggest you talk to a proper IFA (the 'I' is the most important bit) and start planning your future prosperity. In the last couple of years, I've gone from wondering why anyone bothers with pension planning, to wondering why anyone doesn't.

Such exquisite agony

Oh, this is fucking wonderful. No, I mean it. This is the ultimate, absolute fucking classic, that bittersweet combo of the best and worst of all that can possibly happen in life.

I have tix for Covent Garden's Mozart on Thursday, and I was all ready to invite TMBGITW* along. Today I heard a new client had an 'Associate's Evening' on, and since I really like the new client (a group of consultants operating out of the West End) I really want to go to that too. Although I haven't asked her yet, TMBGITW wins out: if she says yes, it's hello Amadeus.

And then I discover tonight the client's evening involves POOL.

Not the wet stuff - with a 24min 1500m, I'd hardly be scared of that. I mean the stuff involving green baize and eightballs. I'm no slouch at that either, but I'm not good as such (I just like the brand image of potting balls at midnight with a girl who's got a dragon tattooed on her ass).

But I really, really like playing pool.

So, I can ask TMBGITW* for a date. Or I can go out with the new client and climb the percentage probability towards new business in Q4. Or, maybe I can ask TMBGIW* to the client's evening and try to combine the two - but it could lead to disaster, since she's an intelligent woman and would probably be headhunted by the client, which would lose me another client with certainty.

Forget Michelangelo arching his back below the Sistine ceiling: this is where the agony truly starts getting exquisite.


* Come on, surely you've guessed by now?

Blair wins the day

This makes me forget Blairism's flaws for one moment. An utterly brilliant line ruefully reflecting on Cherie's whispered 'That's a lie' about Gordon Brown yesterday -

"Well, at least I don't have to worry about her running off with the bloke next door!"

Pure New Labour: all spin, no substance, designed to deflect. But at the same time - utterly brilliant copywriting.

The perfect breakfast

After the interesting time I had in June, I try not to skip breakfast these days. But when you're an owl and barely functional before 10am, dealing with kettles and toasters at 7 is fraught with danger. Fortunately, I've found a solution: Innocent smoothies! One 250ml glass of this glorious stuff - they've recently expanded the 1ltr packaged range with a mango & passion fruit offering - and you may still be hungry, but at least you're less likely to end up on the floor of the emergency room.

The Tao of supermarkets

Aha! I knew the supermarket moan below would give me at least one creative thought this weekend. The last 48 hours haven't been a total waste.

The thought: I've just realised that every relationship I've had for the last ten years has been a dating one rather than a living one. Basically, every time I see a woman I'm with it's some sort of event: restaurant, cinema, show, something date-like rather than just kicking back and enjoying each other's company. Even nights at my place tend to be pre-planned with table settings and bath bombs at the ready; I must be Lush's highest-grossing non-gay male customer.

I am the Tesco's Finest of boyfriends, everything packed and wrapped and ready to eat. While high quality with a wide variety of options, once you've chosen your option, you know exactly what you're getting: no surprises. A date with me is a tested recipe, carefully selected ingredients prepared with care and absolutely zero bloody spontaneity.

I dunno, shouldn't I just... relax or something?

Which brings me back to supermarkets. That Sunday morning thing of wheeling a trolley round the aisles and deciding together what to have for dinner... not worried too much about how you look or what time it is... that'd actually be quite nice, wouldn't it?

Have to give it a try. After all, what could be cooler - what could better demonstrate to a woman that you have nothing to prove - than asking her to go to the supermarket with you?

That was the weekend that was

Jeez, what happened to the weekend? 10pm on Sunday and I've done nothing. Slept late yesterday, gnawed through email, drifted around Covent Garden for a while, headed for the gym, decided not to head there after all, bought some Verdi, browsed a Charing Cross bookshop, then home to some sausage and a bottle of Rioja. Today: bought the Times, went to the pool (made it this time), had a coffee and panini at Canary Wharf, went shopping at Waitrose, which as ever on a Sunday was more of a singles club than a supermarket.

(Aside: how exactly do you meet women in a supermarket? Gesturing basketwards and commenting on the firmness of your melons strikes me as a pathetic opening, since it's so obvious: saying it instantly puts the woman in control of the conversation. And given that you've just demonstrated a complete lack of originality, she's a lot more likely to be laughing in the aisles than checking you out at the checkout. But what other subject is there surrounded by bread and broccoli? Canary Wharf Waitrose knows this problem and has helpfully provided a sushi counter and champagne bar for instant dating, but how many women would really agree to a date there and then?)

Anyway, finished my shopping and left (quickly, to avoid any trouble with the woman with the melons in her basket dialling 999 on her mobile.) And spent the evening devouring the papers, no TV, no music, no wine.... and somehow it's now gone ten.

This is my life. And it's ending one minute at a time.

Extemporising on Sunday

Reading that post below with the benefit of sobriety, I'm gratified that I don't actually want to delete it; it was extemporaneous, after all, and coming out with *anything* that flows under those circumstances is worthy of note. I realise, however, I couldn't have done it without a bottle of wine and three pints of the Polish beer that sponsored the event, and that's a scary line to walk. Just right, and you're confident and entertaining. Too little, or even the right amount in the wrong state of mind, and you're just boring - or worse, an asshole. It's easy to see why substance abuse is so common in showbusiness: drugs and booze are just too damn useful.

A client recently commented on how my fitness/healthy lifestyle routine squares with somewhat regular, if mild, intoxication. I can only quote from the great film 'Fight Club':

"Self improvement is masturbation. Self destruction - now that's masculine."

"Looking down at your life..."

"You! Looking down at your life from the Sweet Valley High.

Can you be proud of yourself? --- Are you proud of yourself? --- Drilling, drilling down into the cheap plastickated transparented laminate of your wood-effect life,

-- Your life! Your life, full of Dulux Brilliant White and £5 per square metre kitchen tiling ,can you be proud of yourself, with your life, your half-defined life, your life of sweet-lemon odour and shallows in the thing you call life?"

I'm no good at poetry, but it's always good to beat someone at the thing they're best at.

I'm on stage at a poetry slam, less than five klicks from my home and yet a million miles away, yelling into a mike against a black competitor. We're facing each other and the vibe is good. He's yelling, I'm yelling, Triple-A in the doldrums of Deptford, different poems in different pentameter yet the respect - big R - is obvious. It's like rap without all the horrible noise. Or black people.

OK, there are a lot of black people here, but it's not a black event; no racial taking-sides evident in the rows. The top prize is just £100. I can't win here. He is fighting for his honour; I'm merely fighting for my dinner. The point here is not to create great poetry; it's merely to keep going, to keep your meter against your opponent and not falter in the halting meter of failure. Maybe I can get post-ironic here.

"You're facing the London Wall and it's not like you're heading for the Museum. It's nine hundred years and you see fit to defy it, to think you 2000s culture and your white-vibe similarity hits the spot that proves the fact that melted down.

You're standing, standing it the spot where you think it failed, the spot where you gave up. The SPOT where you let it all go, let Socialist, white Socialist guilt take over from your righteous pride, turned the vibe from being proud into being proud just to TAKE IT. Take, take, take, when the bumptious vibe spread into secrets, we've got agents for all the bloom..."

OK, there's a lot of beer flowing by now. But there's a roar. I've got some brave friends here.

(To be continued. Because there's just too much beer flowing tonight.)

At the pump: new copy, new clients

Ever since I changed a few paragraphs of copy on the 'pump's homepage, I've had a startlingly different type of client.

Two years ago, most of my client roster was ad agencies. Now it's 20% (okay, one agency.) Now, I enjoy agencies - it's nice to work in a buzzy-but-laid-back, jeans and T shirt environment - but I'm enjoying the new clients more.

What the new clients have in common is that they're built on an idea. One is in workforce development, but instead of selling training services, it diagnoses Employers and demonstrates how development will close any gaps. Great idea. Another client looks like a web agency, but its reason for being is to track web traffic and smooth it into increased conversion rates. A third and fourth are consultancies that do no delivery at all: they raise the value-add of other people's services by contextualising their bits 'n' bytes stuff as business strategy, then letting someone else click the boxes together.

In short: my clients these days aren't merchants, they're ideas people. Thinkers doing something a bit difficult. And the work's got more substance and solidity to it than any ad campaign.

Cruising towards the Pitts

It's definitely turning into Brad Pitt's year. Not only is Shiloh beating out Suri in the baby stakes, but Brad is being lined up to replace Tom in the next Mission: Impossible film. After the awful 3 - which compared to the terrific 2nd episode in the same way Godfather III compares to II - the series could probably benefit from a change in characters; Tom retiring to civilian life with his new wife would be a fittingly non-violent end for Ethan.

But Brad Pitt in the leading role? Hmmm. We can expect a more loose-limbed fighting style, more clumsy-looking climbs, and there'll have to be more than one leading lady for him to impregnate.

Espresso still rules, thanks to RP

I've got to pay more attention to espresso stories. I mean, I designed that thing, and it's still attracting brilliant little acts of literature like this. I'm just glad RP Bird is holding up well despite his other, rather extreme, challenges in life right now.

Thai PM out of a job

Thai Prime Minister Thaksin cancels a speech to the UN after the Army deposed him tonight. Well, you would, wouldn't you?

Walking on clouds

Tuesday night, after a very good day. Got plenty done, enjoyed a glass (OK, a bottle) of wine, cooked some fine seabass on my six-ring. Now it's late, and I'm smiling and sobbing on my balcony, as usual on such days.

Because...

There's just so much good stuff in the world. All you can do, sometimes, is just stand with a glass of wine and think and wonder. It's just too much to take in.

This world - this city, even; my own tiny part of existence - is just beyond incredible. London is the greatest of cities, in this greatest of all possible worlds.

The brave obloid of Canary Wharf, dead for a decade before bursting into life and dragging London's entire trillion-pound centre of gravity eastwards. Now it blinks wet-eyed into the night sky awash with the shifting stars' admiration of it. On every plane coming in, a hundred voices chant out loud when that Cleopatra's Needle on the Isle of Dogs hoves into view. It seems just metres from where I stand, a mere two storeys up, on my little concrete balcony.

The organic curves of St Mary's Axe, also visible from my balcony, greatest of the Fosteresque high-techs, points accusingly into the sky at the top of my local shopping street. They should have put a bell at the top. It could scream into the nothing, yelling great solemn orgies of brass giganticism for the sheer hell of it.

The City, itself, its endless corners and alleys. I know barely a tenth of it. The little wooden church that somehow survived two centuries; the 200 pubs that thrive when modern beer lorries can hardly park outside. The city beneath the streets - you see it sometimes, looking down through roadworks and the odd grille - of passages and service crawlways between the surface and the Tubes, sometimes visible going down eight storeys, causing a switch in perception from standing on solid ground to feeling we're just floating on a soap bubble of precarious temporarity.

There are a million hidden corners in my city. And I want to know them all.

The three kilometres of human joy I walked through on the riverfront on Sunday after the Duathlon outside the city... the strange, uplifted glory of the mass of people enjoying the simple pleasures of street theatre and frying onions. That's great too. I'm usually stiff as a board two days after an event, but today - almost nothing. The ride and walk home, through my amazing city, calmed the stuff of my muscles.

And there's a woman. Or rather there's not. BUT sometimes it's enough just to know such women exist, that the most cynical of hearts can at least... feel. I broke up with a truly amazing woman earlier this year, after realising the life I'd have had with her would never have been enough. When you've met TMBGITW*, even if she has no feelings for you, you can't be satisfied with any other, ever. And I think about her, every twenty seconds, day and night. On a good day, when I haven't seen her for a few days, it drops to forty seconds. Sometimes.

She's young, and she likes me, but she doesn't like me enough: and that shall be my triumph and that shall be my tragedy. (With apologies to Neil Gaiman and Ebliss O'Shaughnessy.)

But there's plenty left over in my city. Buildings. Opera. Theatre. Food. And the walking, thousands of kilometre of history and discovery, that it's not possible to ever get bored with. And I won't.

There's too much good stuff in the world. And I'm going to experience all of it.


*The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.

Shiloh vs Suri

This is about as funny as it gets. Proving beyond doubt that Chinese journalists DO have a sense of humour, the small matter of two celebrity babies is elevated to the level of an A-list redcarpeted spatfest. So poignant you can almost hear the strains of Lisa Gerrard's Layer Cake Aria in the background.

The perils of being an honest politician

The Hungarian PM's speech transcript that's causing all the kerfuffle in Budapest is brilliant. Choice cuts:

"We have not much choice. Because we have screwed it up. Not just a bit, (but) big time. No country in Europe has ever done anything so impudent that we did.

"We have obviously lied over the past one and a half, two years. It was absolutely clear that what we were saying was not true."

"...we haven't done anything for four years. Nothing. You cannot mention a single major government measure that we could be proud of, apart from pulling the government out of this shit by the end."

"I almost died when I had to pretend for one and a half years as if we were governing. Instead we lied in the morning, we lied in the evening."

But what lesson does it really contain for Europe's politicians? That the one thing you should absolutely never do is tell the truth?

A day in the 'burbs

Working from home is such a dirty little pleasure.

Despite working for myself and having no office to base myself in, I rarely spend a day working at home. There are clients to visit, prospects to court, and fun to be had during the dead time in between the day's tasks; I probably spend more time in town than most 'real' white collar workers.

So actually taking a day out - letting the alarm clock snooze a few minutes past 7, enjoying a leisurely bagel, and donning old jeans and crumpled shirt instead of suit or street - feels deliciously naughty, like taking the last chocolate or accidentally dodging a DLR fare (no turnstiles) and realising you've got away with it. Also, I get to sit at the Redmachine, a honking multi-Pentiumed aluminium-boxed PC that doesn't get used much these days: Worth at the Mighty Wurlitzer. Working this way, as long as it's an interesting assignment, doesn't feel like work.

On top of that, seeing your own neighbourhood at times you're not normally there is an experience. Living 10mins' ride from the Square Mile isn't exactly the suburbs, but it feels like them, with the mass unemployed walking their shabby dogs and bored teenagers staking out the park. It's a different atmosphere in daylight.

The London Duathlon

Despite virtually no training since July, I managed to beat my 2005 London Duathlon time by over 10mins. A 50min run, about as fast as I ever go, then a reasonable bike given the narrow paths and a slow second run... but none of the dreaded bike-to-run cramps I've suffered from too many times in my multisport life.

To continue this trend, I intend to spend the next year vegging out in front of the TV eating burgers and ice cream, in order to win gold at Royal Windsor next year.

Muslims milking it for all it's worth

The Islamic world is seeing how much more mileage it can extract from the Pope's quoting of a medieaval text. Look, guys, what are you expecting the Catholic guy to say? That he agrees with you about the Jesus thing and that Mohammed is the true prophet? In my view, the Pope needs to take a stand: explain that while he wishes no harm to any Muslim, he believes the Islamic view of the world is wrong and that its sacred texts say some pretty nasty things, and let's not have 20,000 strong demonstrations at every little quote or cartoon. Grow a thicker skin, dudes.

It's a pity there's no secular leader prepared to say the obvious truth: that all these guys are wrong, that we don't need supernatural beings to explain the world, and that far more authoritative texts (in maths, chemistry, physics, biology) prove it beyond all reasonable doubt.

Bugged by a bug

Hmmmm, there seems to be a bug going around my clients. Of my 3 majors, 2 are at half strength or less in the departments I work for, and it's the 2 I've spent significant time in over the last 2 weeks.

Could I have brought back some Egyptian virus to which I personally am immune? Have a kicked off a London pandemic? Just call me Typhoid Mary.

The Meaning of Life

Got my year-old notes on The Meaning of Life into something readable. Was about time I put this page up.

The Great Gatsby

Is it me, or I have missed the point of F Scott Fitzgerald's masterwork?

Read it over the weekend for the first time, and, well, it's a great book. Brilliantly written, a section of New York society vividly recreated on the page, and a couple of shocking events. But what's it really all about?

I mean, this is regarded as The Great American Novel. The one. The book that defines American literature. And I just can't see it. It's not an innovative user of language like James Joyce's Ulysses, or an encapsulation of physics like Newton's Principia, or a canon like Shakespeare's plays, or a lesson in narrative like Gibbon's Decline and Fall. It's just a really good book. The trouble is, I had such expectations for this little paperback that I came away deflated.

American readers: help!

A life in Outlook

It's just struck me that my Outlook Calendar is a lot like keeping a diary.

Flicking back through the weeks and years (it goes back to 1998) each page is stacked with appointments, notes, places and people, detailing every day in my life; all it lacks is a 'Dear Diary' on each page. Combined with a blog, I'll look back aged 100 and dream endless memories. Not sure all that strap-a-camera-and-a-terabyte-hard-disk stuff the MIT guys are doing is really necessary. Memories aren't pixel-perfect, after all; they're idealised perspectives and selected highlights, and reviewing an MP4 of anyone's life would be 99% dull as ditchwater. Reading a diary, however, is always fascinating.

72.8kg and counting

With a lot of gym work and eating (the latter is more enjoyable) my weight is gradually climbing back towards the optimum 75kg after the 4kg loss... gotta watch the waistline though.

The open music scourge... and the meaning of life

Once again just experienced what's becoming a scourge on the Tube: kids playing their MP3 phones OUT LOUD, without headphones. Tinny little ditties that raise the blood pressure of the entire carriage. Naturally, I asked them to turn it off.

The principal perp looked up at me with a sneer, gratifyingly slightly shocked. Not a word from him, much less an action. I suggest that continued Play will result in him being relieved of the offending item and his ears boxed. (Fortunately I'm fresh from the gym and feeling pumped, even in my reduced 71kg state.) The player goes off with a sense of understanding, and I thank the teenage perp (very important.)

Once again, I think about how many tax billions are spent 'engaging' such troubled youths, when all that's needed is for an adult to gently put them in their place.

These kids don't need 'empathy'. They don't need 'counselling', or their 'own space', or their 'self-esteem building up' so they can 'come to terms' with their actions. They just need to be boxed on the ears and kicked around in circles until they comprehend their behaviour is not reasonable. Their 'rights' end where the rights of other people begin.

It reminded me of a year ago, also after a violent Tube incident, when the meaning of life suddenly revealed itself to me.

The meaning of life is: to accept the survival of civilisation as your *personal* responsibility. To recognise that when the basic tenets of civilised society are at risk, nobody will do anything about it except you. The government cannot help you. The police cannot protect you. The public do not possess the resolve to step in.

Saving civilisation, in its million little facets, is your task, and yours alone.

I called it the meaning of life because this principle impacts so many areas of human existence. You've got to keep yourself healthy, maintain strength and faculties, make sure you're plugged into cultural and societal information sources to ensure your view of what constitutes civilised behaviour is basically correct. Above all, you need to be *part* of society, to understand your context. And that's why it's the meaning of life.

And executing this principle includes keeping a lid on uncivilised behaviour, like the MP3 incident. For the want of a nail...

What is this, Apocalypse Now?

What the fuck's with all the choppers over Docklands tonight? There's been a swarm of the beasts thwacking out a 150-decibel Ride of the Valkyries less than 60m over my rooftop for the last half hour. If this is about that smoking episode in the desert, I can explain everything.

I need a new girlfriend

I'm just not meeting girls any more.

There's been a shift in my client base over the last two quarters; the consultancies I work with these days tend be staffed by guys rather than the female-filled ad agencies of yore. And it's having a seriously negative effect on mating possibilities.

Without women in the working day, the 'vectors' of societal matchmaking - "There's this guy called Chris, works with my boss, I'll introduce you" - have been snipped off like deadheaded roses. I used to get 2-3 such mentions a week. Most males inside the M25 with looks superior to a decomposed gorilla probably get the same. Not now, and it can't ALL be due to my advancing decrepitude... there's a surplus of 52,000 single women 20-40 over single men of the same age group in London alone.

And adding a bittersweet edge to all this, TMBGITW* works for a company on-off-on my client roster. But she's shown zero romantic interest in me, and besides concentrating on one unattainable female isn't the way to find the perfect woman. You have to go for volume. (There are, statistically, at least 4000 'perfect' women under 30 in London**.)

I'm smart, single, approachable (sort of), solvent and funny (although whether I get laughed *with* or *at* is debateable). Even allowing for August's great blighted burqa-fest, why has it been so long since I had sex that I'd probably blow a hole in a woman the size of my fist?!

All I'm asking for is to encounter women who are devastatingly intelligent, achingly beautiful, athletic as - well, athletes, have big ideas/ ambitions/ goals in life, AND who live in the same city as me. I've been lucky enough to know a number of women with 3 or 4 of these attributes, but never all 5. (Of course I'm limiting this to women who've actually met and like me. i.e. discounting Scarlett Johanssen.)

And so the search continues.



*The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.
** Taking 1 in 100 women as perfect and 400,000 London-based women 22-27

An inquest into WHAT?

Dear me, yet another authoritative investigation into Diana's death? With a few exceptions (Saddam's looting of £55bn from Iraq, Hugo Chavez's wilful abuse of Venezuela's oil, Brown's spending on the NHS) rarely has so much public money been spent on such a stupidly simple chain of events. Look: she got into a car. The driver was drunk. He drove too fast. They crashed. They died.

I'm going to have a few T shirts made up with the following words in 500-pt Verdana. They'll be a hit among the ironic crowd, I'm sure.

T shirt slogan:

SHE DIED IN A CAR CRASH.

GET OVER IT.

Food miles: a straw man

Food faddists talk a lot about 'food miles' these days. It's the concept that a dinner bought from a supermarket, instead of from local farmers' markets, is more polluting due to the distance it's travelled - tomatoes from Egypt, oranges from Israel, apples from Alpha Centauri, etc etc.

This concept, of course, is a complete straw man.

When the do-gooders talk about how many billions of lightyears my Sunday lunch has travelled, belching barrelloads of CO2 into the atmosphere, they're calculating it on a erroneous basis - the basis that each 747 from Egypt carries precisely one tomato. (I was on one last week - a 747 I mean, not a tomato - and can state categorically this isn't true. Although some of my fellow passengers certainly counted as vegetables of some sort.)

An example. That tomato from Egypt carries a sinful load of about 2000 'food miles'. However, a cargo 747 will carry... let's see.. 8000 per cu m... at least 160,000 tomatoes. So my forlorn tomato can dry its eyes, because it's only responsible for an eightieth of a food mile, about 20m. It's a 'green' tomato after all.

For a local farmer to compete on food miles with Tesco's supply chain, he'd have to set up his farm in the same street. Not easy in SE8. On a per-tomato basis, the local farmer's Land Rover delivering to market is probably more polluting than the same amount of produce from Tesco's pan-galactic supply chain.

So if you buy organic - don't get smug about saving the planet, because you aren't. Buy it because it's better than the rubbery stuff sold in the supermarkets. After all, you're certainly paying for it.

Syd's house up for sale

Syd Barrett's house is for sale. Doesn't the pic of the house look a lot like the cover of a Pink Floyd album that never existed?

Whoa, that was quick

It's already coming true! First two, then six, and now 8 aides have resigned over Blair's continuing refusal to set his departure date - including one named Chris Mole, who's probably tired of all the jokes that get made whenever something's leaked to the press. Come on guys, all we need is a few more (and more senior) resignations and he's toast. Margaret Beckett: you look like a gal who'd transfer her allegiances in a second - let's see your P45 pronto. Ruth Kelly - useless lightweight you may be; here you can finally be of some use. Odds are still on him continuing into 2007, but it's just possible Blair won't last the month.

Misinterpreting the term 'swimming drills'?

Sometimes you find a news source you've just got to add to your Favourites.

Defanged!

It's official. The gym scales reveal a horror: 71.2kg. In a month of hot-weather travel, my 183cm frame shed 3.6kg.

But far worse: it's been lost as a huge chunk of muscle tone, sculpted steppes of flesh turned to mere dripping greasy strings under my dermis. In the pool for the first time since July, I managed just 30 lengths before exiting the water, puffing, limbs turned to reeds thrashing pathetically in water turned to syrup.

I have degenerated to the lowest common denominator of 21st century urban masculinity. I am not ... different now. I have become ... ordinary. I am like a vampire sipping a silver-and-garlic cocktail in the hot sun.

I am emasculated. Neutered.

The desert has stolen from me.

Three kilos plus of solid body mass, lost to the heat and parch of North Africa. I am just a man, now. No faster. No stronger. Still smarter (obviously) but that counts for little in our celebrity-obsessed, image-conscious, surface-is-everything world. I can no longer walk the midnight streets with confidence. No longer ride the tracks to the wrong side, exaltant. I may have to learn what fear feels like.

I have to live life - the next two months at least - as a normal man. Three years of weekly swim / bike / run and a daily 99 crunches + pressups + squats mean... nothing any more. How quickly the elite become... shadows and dust.
And yet, perhaps something good can come of this. Walking among the Normals, I will learn from them, even understand them. I will become their friend, and save myself from irrelevance. I will learn humility.

And in the coming months, as my body walks the path back towards true health, I will remember. What I have gained, from weights and wheels and water and the grim enjoyment of pain. And how it all, so easily, can be lost.

Shadows and dust.

:-)

Blair's last hurrah

So the whispering from the Labour benches has oozed out into a fully-formed five-pager detailing how Blair should conduct his final months in the public eye.

I'm going to make a prediction here. Blair will not go quietly, Gordon Brown will not take over, and John Reid will emerge as the next leader of the Labour mob.

Now, this sounds like an 'in all the confusion' plan. (You know, 'We'll cut the power, set off the smoke alarms, lock the front doors, and in all the confusion we'll steal the diamonds...') But there's an important difference. John Reid won't be part of the confusion, and like John Major in a previous decade, he'll simply throw his hat into the ring when the smoke clears, making him the only untainted choice. The contest will involve Brown, Reid, Charles Clarke, and probably Blunkett will want a go.

So: perhaps a Prime Minister Reid in the next 18 months, and a Prime Minister Cameron a year after that. But that's a long time in politics...

Croc guy gets stung by ray

Apparently, Steve Irwin died while doing what he loved best. What - getting stabbed in the heart by a stingray?

Definitely the way I'd like to check out if I had his job, though. I mean, his funeral's almost going to be jovial.

Yaaaaay Tim!

The Don wins the ITU World Champs! Well done Tim, and I hope the number of times you've whoooshed past me during a triathlon (after starting an hour later) helped you to this title just a little.