Paris ripped to shreds

Yaaaayyyy! There's one real journalist left in America!

A new team adds spice to Britain

The deal at the top is finally done. The shadowy leader, after long years of patient effort, puts his team together and announces it to the world. No, I'm not talking about Gordon Brown... the Spice Girls are getting back together!

Shouldn't that really be 'Spice Women' now? Girl Power's all very well, but with everybody hitting their mid-thirties and several kids between them it's probably time they ditched the teenage look.

Save us from the plucky underdogs!

Watching a DVD of 'The Constant Gardener' last night, I found myself siding with the drug company rather than the crusading eco-bore.

The story's the usual corporate skulduggery one, of an evil corporation and the brave underdog trying to expose its dirty dealings. In this case, a drug company rushing a new TB vaccine onto the market. The vaccine works, but in a small fraction of cases has nasty side-effects, i.e death.

The drug company is covering the deaths up, discover Rachel Weisz and Ralph Fiennes. So they try to stop the drug trials, which are happening out of the media gaze in Africa. What heroes! But such 'heroes' always seem to miss an important point.

That point: what about the big picture?

What if - as per the story - a new TB epidemic is on its way? And what if this vaccine could save millions of lives, even at the cost of 0.1% of sufferers dying?

If the alternatives are a million slow tortured deaths by TB, or a thousand deaths because the vaccine's not perfect, then shouldn't the crusading heroes at least THINK about the 'least bad' choice? By interfering in 'unethical' but essential trials, they might be delaying the production of the vaccine, making them responsible for a million deaths. When they think, in their goody-goody small-picture worldview, that they're 'doing the right thing'.

I'm not claiming it's right for corporations to act as a law unto themselves. All I'm saying is there may be cases where harassing protesters and covering things up may be 'ethical' - if you take the 'big picture' view. Perhaps even to the point of bumping them off, as happens in the film.

The world's too full of little thinkers - people who go for the smug self-satisfaction of the quick win without considering its less personal but far greater global effects. There aren't enough 'big picture' people around who are prepared to take difficult decisions that are for the greater good. And I'm on the side of the big picture.

Pharma companies wishing to offer me a board post can do so through my website :-)

Gordon moves in

OK, brief happiness over. He's moved in!

He's GONE!

At last! At bloody last! I will permit myself a few moments of happiness before tax-and-spend Gordon starts wrapping us even more tightly in New Labour red tape.

Vanquishing the Black Dog

OK, my six months of troubled thoughts are nearly up. I've made my decisions (get back into mainstream marketing direction), achieved my objectives (get into a top MBA programme), and resolved my inner turmoil (about ,structure versus form.) On 1st July I'll be in equilibrium again. It's been a painful six months, but necessary to reach the next level of existence. Mission - done.

Tony, I won't be baaaack

What on earth is Arnie doing at No 10? And what could Blair be saying to him? "T-1000, I have a little job for you..."

Truth stranger than fiction

Just when you thought the world couldn't get any stranger... Tony Blair... Middle East Peace Envoy?! I had to check the calendar, but April 1st was months ago.

Rebooting the Dome

Another heavyweight piece of the new urban landscape clicks into place, moving London's centre of gravity another few metres to the east. The renamed O2 Dome opens this weekend.

Despite its white elephant status - the old Millennium Dome symbolised all that's wrong with New Labour: obsession with control, cultural superficiality, bread and circuses instead of substantive policy - I wish it well. As a piece of architecture, this giant eggshell is breathtaking, and it never deserved to be padlocked for the best part of a decade.

And finally, a few minutes with Google Earth has answered one of those questions that never quite seemed important enough to bother looking up: where the hell is it? I was shocked to discover it's not on the Isle of Dogs. (Somehow I'd always thought it nestled alongside Canary Wharf and Excel, even though I know both those areas well and I've never seen any big white tents between the 'scrapers.) Not only is it my side of the Thames, but it's within three km, arguably walkable although there's no convenient road to follow. Just a couple of Tube stops, with the Jubilee line doing the heavy lifting of crossing the river twice. (I think they should revise their map, though, which seems to put North Greenwich Station in the middle of the river.)

Of course, this explains why I never knew where it was. As every jungle guide says, you never know what's around the next bend in the river!

Substance vs form

More deep life realisations, aided by Neil Gaiman's 'Neverwhere' graphic novel.

The story didn't start life as a comic, but Gaiman's better known for his comics, so an adaptation with pictures was always on the cards. Gaiman's central conceit: 'beneath' our city there's a parallel one called London Below, made of all the things we've lost or forgotten. When you leave something in a coffee shop or on a train, it becomes part of London Below. (There must be a lot of umbrellas there.)

Its population is a strange mix of runaways, madmen, and violent eccentrics, all those who fall through the cracks in the society 'above'. London Below's Tube stations are those the real London shuttered long ago, like British Museum and Down Street. You can get to Earl's Court (and meet the Earl) using the Central Line. Night's Bridge is difficult to cross. And the Angel Islington ... has wings.

Buying the book on impulse today was prophetic, because I've been thinking about substance and form.

Substance and form explain why I feel everyone's doing better than me.

Most of my peer group are 'substance' people. They left University, got good jobs, and have steadily climbed the ladder in incremental rungs of promo and payrise for a decade plus now. On the surface, they're at the same level as me: successful affluent professionals. But if you scratch them, you'll see layers supporting the surface, strata they've added each year to get where they are now. They're London Above, living lives of quiet desperation but with depth and story.

I'm all 'form'. I've done a huge number of different things, all so different that they don't really reinforce each other. There are no strata that have made me what I am today. Everything I've done has been for the surface thrill, the quick win, the fast lane. I'm London Below, a discombobulated yet sensual feast. Scratch me, and all I do is heal.

What this means is that while on the outside I look like a normal member of the professional middle class, I've got much less 'supporting' that position than others in my peer group. This results in my present frustration. Because while they'll carry on making incremental improvements in life - the next quarter's pay rise, another head on their team - I will find doing the same much more difficult. Nothing built up, no momentum.

Subsisting on 'form' does have some advantages. When 'substance' people hit their mid-thirties, they're contending with divorce, diabetes, early onset heart disease, and obesity. Whereas I've been able to switch jobs and countries in an eyeblink, I've jumped on new technologies and methods without a problem, and I've got the body of a man ten years younger.

(I call him Arnold. I keep him in the attic. He hasn't talked in quite a while.)

The downside, though: when you've got no inertia, it's difficult to get any momentum.
It's as hard to win a day's fee today as it was five years ago.

The driver was the thrill. My life choices to date have not been: Is This Adding To Me? But rather: Is This Thrilling? All surface. All form. No substance. Winging it with a day rate, rather than earnestly building up personal and intellectual equity, layer upon layer.

On the surface we may look the same. But the surface of the 'substance' people is the top layer of a coherent life strategy, whereas the surface of the 'form' people is as fragile as wallpaper with the wall taken away.

My life problem is substance vs form. I wondered why doing MBA appealed to me, why I ever thought it might be the answer: now I know. An MBA is my shortcut to substance. At last, I have the 'why'.

Just call me 'student boy'

An earth-shattering life change: I'm going to do an MBA.

It's now two months since the first dark thought of switching off the Work light for a while appeared. I've attended half a dozen Open Days up and down the country, made several applications and had several interviews, written countless essays, and studied/sat the pre-entrance GMAT exam. I've endured eye-popping incredulity from academics who couldn't quite comprehend that someone who dropped out of school at 16 might actually be capable of learning. I've enjoyed gut-busting laughter with mad bastards willing to take a chance.

I now have two offers with another interview still to go, so it's now very likely I'll be taking a year out for a degree starting Oct or so. Finally, my old Mum will get to attend a graduation ceremony, 15 years late. Chris the High School dropout is going to business school.

Forecast for later: airborne porcines and a dramatic temperature drop in a fictional afterlife for non-good people.

There's never been a wrong one

Has he gone yet? Oh blast, still 24 hours to go. His last words to Cabinet were 'This is the right moment to go'. Tony, there's never been a wrong one.

Of course, Brown's still up his usual tricks. With Labour support falling, Brown doubtless believes he'll need a Lib-Lab pact if he wants his tenure to be longer than a year or two, so offered a Cabinet job to Liberal Paddy Ashdown. When the Liberals said no, he called Paddy in for a meeting and offered him the job directly.

This mirrors the way Brown has operated at the Treasury - a constant campaign of I-know-best, undermining carefully-laid decisions by commissioning 'independent spending reviews' and the like whenever he wanted to cut off a Cabinet colleague's plans. This underhanded modus operandi will be a lot more obvious when he's in Number 10.

But I worry: Brown's an intelligent guy and with this Ashdown thing, he may have realised he can't behave the same way as PM. If this prompts him to learn the basics of teamwork and collaboration - i.e. he starts actually listening to people - we're really in trouble, because it boosts his chances of draining the UK's middle class dry for yet another five-year term. Don't change, Gordon!

Agent provocatively says 'Knickers' to glory

It really annoys me when people make a song and dance about refusing honours.

I don't like the honours list either. If someone offered me a knighthood (about as likely as the galaxy spontaneously mutating into a giant space aardvark) I'd turn it down too; the trappings of the Establishment simply don't interest me and anyway I believe the Royal family should close its doors upon the death of the present Queen. (By what authority, in the modern world, do they claim me as a 'subject' on my passport?)

But if your personal beliefs prevent you from taking a CBE or OBE or whatever, be true enough to those beliefs to just... not take it. Don't make a fuss. Don't call a press conference. Don't use an honestly-made offer as a soapbox to shout out your reasons for not wanting to join the club. If nothing else, that's just plain rude.

Joseph Corre of Agent Provocateur doesn't care about honours, and cares about them so little that he's informed the media, in great detail and at great length, of his decision not to accept an MBE. Apparently before telling the honours people themselves. This is really unpleasant of him. Almost as unpleasant as the image he conjures up when saying he'd 'be delighted to have the Queen as a customer.'

Far from being offended, Corre gives the impression of being secretly delighted at having a chance to air his views.

What's all the fuss about? In Blair's Britain, people who want an honour can just buy one.

Flying over the sea

Wow. It's a real shame moorings are so difficult to secure in London.

Just how much does it suck to be me?

I am greatly concerned that I will never have a relationship with a woman again.

My last proper date was in January, and like the four before it (dates, not months) contained zero expressed desire for future liason by the woman involved. I've been flying solo in all aspects of life the last two years or so, and too much time spent alone has caused my understanding of that basic male/female interactional grammar that leads to successful intimacy to melt away. Presenting an aura of worthwhile companionship now seems to be totally beyond my talents.

At 36, in excellent physical condition and not too bad looking (compared to, say, Rowan Atkinson) I should have women in the 28-32 demographic THROWING themselves at me. There is a surplus of over 30,000 single women over single men in this age group inside the M25. Instead, they throw UP at me. And these days I cannot even imagine talking to a woman 'off the cuff' in a wine bar; actually, I can't even imagine going into a wine bar any more. What, exactly, is happening here? Am I becoming a recluse?

2007: undoubtedly the worst year of my life.

Freedom, liberation, and ... pricier wine

The latest threat to freedom and democracy: France's CRAV, a fearsome group of balaclava-clad French winemakers. Cheers!

Oceans of garbage

I'm in shock.

In a Coffee Republic moblogging. (Slogan: 'Real Coffee. Real Food. Real People.' As opposed to what?! Ditchwater, protein pills, and Replicants? Actually, that's a fair description of the average Starbucks...)

Which illustrates the main thrust of this blog: I'm surrounded by low-quality creative. Ads, TV, films, everything.

Ocean's 13 is a case in point: I still can't quite believe what I've just sat through. It's as if the scriptwriters did their brainstorming sessions, wrote a script, then accidentally handed their brainstorming notes to the producer instead. This film's got everything - characters, plot devices, gadgetry, locations - EXCEPT a desire to arrange them in any meaningful sequence.

It's an hour of mindlessly complex exposition - Clooney, Pitt, and Damon having drinks in hotel rooms explaining what they're going to do in the second hour - and then they spend the second hour doing it. There aren't even words to describe how bad this is.

There are precisely two other movies that I've ever, almost, got up and left halfway through ('Dreamcatcher' and 'Revolver') but with Ocean's 13 I have another. And I love cinema so much I paid to see 'Resident Evil'... twice. Ocean's 13 is that bad.

Now usually, if I'm sat in a cinema near a couple of noisy kids and a colicky baby, I'd have something to say to them. But in this case, they made the inutterable awfulness of what was happening up on screen a little bit better.

I woke up this morning actually feeling ok. And now the Black Dog has me firmly in its grip once more. Is this something the world is doing to me? Are Clooney and Pitt in on it? What did I ever do to them? Look, George, you were GOOD in 'Three Kings'. Brad, I LIKED you in 'Snatch' (or was it 'Lock, Stock'?). What the hell is happening here?

Even Hollywood is turning against me.

Drinking and thinking

The circle at the centre of Deptford Park is surprisingly quiet, given that all roads lead here. Every entrance to this urban patch of greenery enters onto a line of gravel terminating at the centre, a microcosm of Hausmann's radiant Paris in surburban southeast London. Yet as I sit here with my bottle of wine in the rain, nobody's around.

I was in San Francisco, years ago, with a woman: all we wanted was to share a glass of wine, looking out over the Golden Gate Bridge. But in the sudden manner of Northern California, the day turned foggy and gave us the shivers, and there was construction work in the park. So: instead of a glass of tawny pleasure supped 'twixt the sparkling vistas of the Bay, there was a brown paper bag in the rain, slurped furtively in between mouthfuls of grit and dust from a digger.

Alcohol's not allowed in Golden Gate Park. Consider, just for a second, how utterly Satanic that is, even by fundamentalist America's standards.

Parks are open to the public, municipal areas for the good of the citizenry. Yet in a public space, somehow the USA has decreed that a legal substance in the hands of adults may not be consumed within its borders, just because a certain subset of American society has deemed it improper. I invite you once more to consider just how completely weird that is, in a land that purports to be free.

The trouble you'll get in Deptford involves people trying to take your bottle away, true, but here they don't wear uniforms and you're legally entitled to fight them back. And I do. Oh yes.

When you're feeling down, take heart...

... you could be dating this woman.

Rebooting

It's weird how the human brain works. A few weeks back I hit rock bottom. But those few days being a barely functioning husk seems to have executed a Ctrl-Alt-Delete on my brain; it's coming back online. Basic drivers setting up the I/O, higher functions layered on top of them, productivity applications - all my skills and talents - starting to reappear in my frontal lobes like shiny new icons. In the month, perhaps the new Desktop will be complete and I'll be ready to go. We'll see.

Starting out with Office 2007

Some new software: Microsoft Office 2007. I haven't bought a new version of Office since 2002, so today I bit the bullet and grabbed the £199 upgrade. I didn't even know there was an Office 2007 until last week; like Vista, the market's just sighed and shrugged. Microsoft's becoming no more important to the computing world than British Rail is to transport: you don't get excited about it, it's just a bit of infrastructure you have to use.

Microsoft understands this, so the one coruscating idea behind Office 2007 is to make it as visible as possible. Of which more later.

Initial thought: it used to be the case that anybody not buying a 'Professional' edition lost out, with crippled versions and vital apps missing. Not any more. The Small Business edition's got everything I need: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. (There's Publisher too, but nobody uses that.) The Pro editions contain some extra apps only of use in enterprises with specific IT policies: You Will Use Sharepoint, for example. No loss to me.

First up: Outlook. And it's good. The Calendar is better organised, with more of my month visible onscreen (I use a lot of recurring appointments reminding me of everything from my wake-up exercise routine to whether it's a fish, meat, or vegetable-based dinner night, so each day's appointments list tends to look a bit packed if I'm not at 1600 x 1200.) But if anything, it's a bit too vivid. Colours denoting different types of appointment are screamingly saturated, when they should be faint accents providing unobtrusive visual cues. It's going to get tiring unless I can find a way out.

Email works fine. (There was a bug in Outlook 2002 that prevented effective POPping from any account needing authentication, and since my email's in an encrypted volume on a sub-boot scrambled hard disk over an anonymising tunnel, that created issues.) The email preview pane is better organised than before, and a sheaf of emails fall to the eye more easily.

Word. Here's where the problems start. There are some useful touches - like a constant wordcount on the status bar - but the menus and taskbars are HUGE. The UX Redmondites have attempted to update the decades-old standard clutch of menus by grouping Wordy tasks - Insert, Layout, References, Mailing - into 'ribbons', but when you use twenty other apps on a regular basis the lack of good ol' File / Edit / View / Select hurts.

Word 2007 makes the mistake of thinking you need all its functionality visible, and due to this the taskbar is a set of gigantic clunky boxes for stuff you'll only need once in a blue moon: Themes, Styles, Illustrations, Page Background... all mixed in with everyday stuff like cut and paste. WHAT, for example, is the 'Styles' ribbon doing? It takes up half the width of the screen with 11 small examples of how my text would look if I applied a particular style; as visually irritating as having a daisychain of Post-Its stuck to your monitor. Not good; I hope it's customisable, because I want all this gunk out.

Excel. Same trouble as Word, but it's friendlier than 2002. Buttons for summing and other formulas feel more part of the application, equal to the data on the spreadsheet, rather than arcane things to be hunted down and applied with fingers crossed. It seems Microsoft said, 'Hey, it's a spreadsheet' and didn't clog it up with Clippy-type stuff. PowerPoint is the same: friendlier and easier to use.

But Microsoft - why, oh why, does everything have to have that swirly blue background? Can't I just set it to plain white? It seems my point about your software being just plumbing these days really hurts: you're determined that I should never, ever forget who's providing my software, by putting your corporate colours front and centre while I'm working. In a reasonable upgrade, this is bad news, and I'm already searching for a hack.

Not exactly the top rung of the property ladder

It's not every day you accidentally jump a queue, frighten someone half to death, and nearly get done for assault. And the person concerned happened to be TV presenter Sarah 'phwoooaaar' Beeny, wholesome girl-next-door from Channel 4's 'Property Ladder' show. She'll never let me on My Single Friend now!

All I was doing was wandering round the Grand Designs Live show, on the hunt for a new front door. A knot of people were blocking the aisle, and there seemed no alternative to a sweaty tussle pushing through the mob of middle-class bodies obsessing over cornices and high-gloss laminates.

"I know!" thought I. "There's a me-sized gap at the edge of this unseemly scrum, where, if I turn myself through 90 degrees, I can just about fit. I'll have to be quick, though - the crowd appears to be getting bigger."

So I stroll nonchalantly towards the edge of the seething mob, all of whom seem to be holding books, and squeeze sideways into the space inside the exhibitor booth. My eyes fixed on the other side of the booth, an exit strategy already formulated, I strike out for my goal...

...and end up half-toppling over a desk, where the reason for the scrum is seated, busily signing autographs.

The gorgeous, pouting TV totty looks up for a second, and her wide-eyed expression is half "What a rude man, pushing to the front like that" and half "OH MY GOD! A STALKER! PLEASE DON'T KILL ME!"

The crowd tenses. I look into the abyss, and it is painted in neutral colours (to create a blank canvas for prospective buyers). They look restless. The situation looks ugly.

I know I have a death wish, but is this really how it's going to end? Lynched by a mob of fiftysomething homeowners wielding rolled-up samples of the latest embossed wallpaper?

Oh well. If I'm to be beaten to a bloody pulp. at least it'll be offset by tasteful beige accents. Not the worst way to go.

If I'd only thought of it in time, I'd have asked her to deliver the line millions of male viewers tune in every week to hear: "Let's go upstairs and take a second look at your layout!"

But rather than letting rip with this masterpiece of articulate thinking, I slink off in the direction from whence I'd come. Well... given that my goals for the day involved a new front door, I suppose I WAS looking for an opening.

Sensible words from... the Daily Mail?

As the journalistic equivalent of Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, the Daily Mail is a newspaper I wouldn't buy for all the free DVDs in China. It claims to be the voice of Middle England, when in fact it's the voice of Little England: a constant spume of foam-flecked fury towards anyone who isn't quite like us, pushing equality on one page while cynically exposing celebrity cellulite on another, and emblematic of Britain's continuing fascination with some dead tart who died in a Paris car crash years ago. But this column makes real sense.

(Yes, I watch Big Brother - and so do you, you liar, even if it's with the same horrified fascination as you'd watch sectioned inmates flinging their own shit at each other.)

The minor crime (white) housemate Emily committed - saying 'nigger' to a black person, neither spitefully nor with bad feeling - was language no different to that used by black people to each other, countless times, every day. It's part of black culture. Yet if a white person says it - however casually - the white person will be hung, drawn, and evicted.

It doesn't, of course, work the other way. If Charley had responded by, for example, requesting that Emily 'get her honkey white ass outahere', no fuss would have ensued. It's somewhat amusing that Charley is the living personification of everything that keeps black Britons on the economic scrapheap - an angry 'beeyatch' who's too busy mouthing about her need for 'respect' to see any other opportunity in life.)

As the Daily Mail states in its rare attack of sensible-ness, Emily was the sacrificial lamb, getting Channel 4 off the hook after the previous racism row. Being a white person, Emily can't complain.

It's symptomatic of the broader malaise in UK society - and once again, it's down to New Labour. In a culture of Whitehall-mandated targets, where 'making your numbers' matters more than the substance of actually solving problems, civil servants from clerks to cops concentrate on the easy wins. It's easy to slam a white person for saying 'nigger': keeps Ofcom happy, keeps the vast diversity industry in gravy, justifies the torrent of legislation telling us how to think and what to say. It's a lot harder to deal with a real problem, like the appalling anti-intellectualism in poor black families that prevents young blacks ever escaping the council block, while the children of other immigrants become doctors and lawyers.

So the culture of Britain today is to go for the easy wins, and ignore the larger problems underneath. Easy wins are sexy, while the gruntwork of solving real social problems isn't.

It's why not one large New Labour project has ever worked. The CSA, the Home Office, ID cards, pensions, the NHS: every single New Labour initiative has wasted billions, missed deadlines, and delivered zero value for money. Because real results require execution, and Labour has no ability to execute.

So when it comes to solving the (largely nonexistent, outside the minds of the public-funds-loving 'diversity industry') problems of 'racism', it means focussing on the one demographic in the UK that isn't allowed to complain about its lot - middle-class white people. Despite white people being the least racist group of all, statistically eleven times less likely to commit a racial offence than all Britain's racial minorities put together.

Yet another blow has been struck against the people who contribute basically everything to the UK's economy and society - middle-class whites. And of course, once again we'll just stand here and take it. Without complaint.

Amateur anthropology

Another Saturday, another business school Open Day. I've been to a lot of these, and it's amazing just how different the UK's top b-schools are. They all do the same format for showing prospective students around - a coffee intro, a presentation, a Q&A with current students and a sample lecture - but the personality of each institution so far has been totally different.

And each school, so far, has offered primetime peoplewatching.

(I'm dismissive by nature, and sometimes people have exploded at me saying I have 'no interest in people'. That's untrue. I am interested in people, but perhaps only in the way a lepidopterist is interested in termites.)

For instance, this session contained a guy we'll call 'Mr Investment Banker'. Every question he asked, every twist in conversation, was about investment banking. At the Q&A: "What investment banks recruit on campus?" At the presentation: "Which electives do investment bankers take?" And when I left, he was there at reception again: "Can I talk to ex-students who went into investment banking?"

Unfortunately - and he'll probably spend £50K on an MBA before realising it - such people are precisely what investment banks don't want. Nobody has 'investment banker' on their business card; M&A analyst or derivatives dude maybe, but not 'banker'. This guy had no real knowledge of investment banking; he'd just seen the salary levels and wanted in. He believed an MBA was a shortcut (rather than a base requirement) and because of it he's never, ever going to get in. Well-paid they may be, but investment bankers get jobs based on their ability to make money for others, not how much they want for themselves.

Then there was 'Actually Guy'. This guy really, really liked to talk, and was in there on every question during the sample lecture ... but he didn't have the basic decency to construct ideas in his head before uttering them: what came out of his mouth was a steady stream of random thoughts, just letting his tongue flap in the breeze. Every other word was 'actually'. Such individuals annoy me intensely, because they don't realise how disrespectful this is to others: it shouldn't be the rest of humanity's job to decode your stream of consciousness.

Also, at this Open Day there were noticeably fewer Indians, despite the school's Midlands location. Surprisingly, that staccato, high-decibel Indian accent - at many schools up to a third of MBA students are Indian professionals - has really started to grate. It's something I'll have to get used to as the BRIC economies strengthen.

My life among the Normals

At the pool, trying to regain some of the energy I used to have. It's peaceful here, doing lengths just beneath the surface. Maybe I can just stay?

No. It'd never work. When you're in the water, the Black Dog gets off your back - but then curls up into your lungs, like a sackful of wet tar. There's a cancelled triathlon on the cards, because I can't face the distance right now.

Of all the troubles of the last six months, the loss of my physicality has been the worst. When you can feel the solid yoke of your shoulders and the flatness of a toned stomach under your clothes, when every step is a stride and the Thames doesn't seem any more of a barrier for the lack of a handy bridge, you can take anything. But in six months of the gym becoming less and less a feature of the day, my ass has turned to butter - my 99th percentile athleticism probably no higher than the 90th today.

Yet the worst part of all this isn't that I've fallen below the level of any chav scum. The worst part is the sheer, terrifying, crushing nature of Normal Life.

I have become a Normal.

I don't cook any more: I microwave. I'm even the median age of a British citizen (36.) I. Am. Not. Special.

When my brain finally split in two one Monday in May, and I walked out of my front door and forgot where I lived for 48 hours, sleeping wherever I saw a patch of green for days, it was just some subconscious attempt to not descend into the ranks of the Normals. The attempt failed. Just call me Norm.

If I just stay down here, beneath the surface, I wonder which one of us would die first? The real me, or the Normal within me?

Three months from now I'm either in another city or I've gone. Always a few wars going on, and I don't care too much which one. (I'm the ideal mercenary. I don't care about living or dying, nor do I care whose side I'm on.)

A Normal. So this is how it ends. Not with a crash or bang, but with the numbness that comes with being Mr Average.

I'd better start applying for jobs in banks.

Not with a bang

We're doomed. According to a new model of how the Milky Way will interact with Andromeda, we may have as few as five billion years left.

The two biggest galaxies in the Local Group - of which ours is one - are on a collision course, and the first sideswipe starts in just two billion years. The sun won't even have begun flickering. We may still be living here.

With a giant sucking sound (metaphorically speaking) Andromeda will start pulling spumes of gas out of our galaxy, moving on to whole star systems over the following hundred million years. The Milky Way will survive, after a fashion, and sweep out around Andromeda, but the respite will be brief. 1.4 billion years later the duo will dance again, and Andromeda's bedraggled partner - us - then starts digesting. Five billion years from now, Andromeda and the Milky Way will merge, but it won't be a merger of equals. Our sun may not even hold onto its planets; there's a 3% chance the solar system will be torn apart, warm life-spawning Earth sent spinning into the darkness away from its still functional star.

When the mayhem settles down in seven billion years or so, the Earth - if it survives at all - will be a lump of rock much further from the galaxy's happening downtown than it is today, inhabiting a cold belt of gas thousands of lightyears from the galactic centre. A distant bedroom 'burb, instead of the funky Zone 2 it hangs in today.

It's bad enough being destroyed in the cataclysm of two colliding galaxies, but to end up in the equivalent of Slough as a result? Pur-leez.

Five billion years. That's all we've got.

You can see my house from here

You get a different perspective from up here.

I mean, it's only a matter of a few metres, barely ten off the ground, and fewer still from my balcony only just below. But sightlines and viewpoints only matter to architects ... and only as far as who can see into whose bedroom and whether you've got enough light; from up here the cosy conventions don't apply. From up here London's landmarks seem less distant, more part of the local scene. The winking hood of Canary Wharf. The tumescent glory of the Gherkin. Even the whooshing of the Brighton trains, close behind but suddenly exposed instead of sealed off by thick concrete.

Yes, it's quite pleasant here, up on the rooftops.

London is more a part of me, and the artificiality of my gilded-cage Mews less constraining. And it exists just a few metres above terra firma, on the terra-less-firma of the rooftops. All you've got to do is raise your head a little, and the world is yours.

(With so many London buildings being connected together, it'd be possible to travel some distance without descending to ground level. I wonder if I could make it to Tower Bridge?)

I'm not worried about my ability to balance, here on the apex of the slates, but I do have concerns about the bottle that's somehow found its way up here with me. I'm not sure the bottle is happy. I wonder if it will be friends with me?

And that's without considering my friend the PDA, my faithful companion of the ether, recording my thoughts as I blog away, an electronic slate even as I sit on slate. It's such a pity there's nowhere to put anything down, even as I put everything down on this blog, over the Wifi signal emanating from my garage several floors below. (The XDA really is a great PDA.)

Regarding the film I've just watched: like Johnny Depp's character, I'm a libertine. Self-destructive to a point, because the world he constructed inside his own head was more interesting than anything he discovered outside it. So he had to keep testing himself just to try and feel something.

I'm the same: one wrong step and I'm gone. There are two choices as to where I could fall from here: a mainline train track, or the 'burban numbness of a communal flower garden. I've always known, somehow, that my death would be one of those embarassing ones, so there'd be no tragically heroic train wreck for me: it'd be the garden, horrifyingly anodyne, to be discovered by neighbours stepping out for the Sunday papers tomorrow morning. "That's the guy from No. 3X isn't it? What's he doing, all squashed down to the thickness of a sheet of A4 like that?"

But such thoughts don't disturb me much. I feel calm, up here on the roof, detached somehow. A model of equanimity.

Now get me that monkey!

Last gasp for the GMAT: aced the AWA score (6.0)

One final blog on the GMAT: my full report came through today, and at least I got a 6.0 (maximum) for the essay writing section. Obviously I expected a decent score after a decade writing copy for a living, but I was still concerned that my idiosyncratic marketer's syntax (and the way I realised with 30 seconds to go that I hadn't written a closing paragraph for one of the essays) might have cost me a point. All that Analysis of an Argument and Analysis of an Issue practice paid off.