And it’s going to be weeks before I can sort it out.

Ack!

Please.  Just take it.  You can have it.  Only two careful owners*.  It’s yours, if you will just let me uninstall a couple of programs from this laptop so Kirsty can give it to her friend.  Just make it work, without my staring at spinning wheels of death for another two hours.

* an overcomplicated story involving an experiment on ebay, Kirsty, the office Secret Santa a few years ago, and a mischievous colleague. Best told in person, so until then you can make up your own story from the above.

I must therefore dedicate the rest of this evening to night-before father stuff, like present wrapping. Kirsty has sneaked away for the week, possibly for the sole purpose of avoiding this most dreaded of tasks, so I’m on my own. I have scissors. I have sellotape. I have pink paper with hearts all over it.

I have only limited patience for this sort of thing, and an endless propensity for stabbing myself when I’m in a hurry.

There will be blood…

All worth it for my girl. Up to, but not including, the loss of fingers.

Happy birthday sweetheart.

This is my daughter’s trampoline, upside down, in the neighbour’s garden. A curious place to store it, you might think. Ah, but yesterday, same trampoline was pert and upright in our very own garden, about twelve feet stage left, ready for the springtime and more bouncing.

Then came the storm, during which the trampoline was lifted into the air, over the fence in the foreground, to be deposited on the fence in the background. It was then manhandled to where you see it now, in the lee of the house. Kirsty woke me at midnight, after I’d sensibly decided on an early night, and I came downstairs terribly befuddled by the whole thing. I remembering wondering whether, next time I woke up, I would be given consideration to how I came to be on that Yellow Brick Road.

The trampoline has now been torn apart and moved back to our own garden. When the weather improves later in the year, we’ll see whether it is salvageable…

Apparently, right, there was this old lady who swallowed a fly. Nobody is quite certain why should would do this, but early odds on her imminent death were apparently quite good at the time. Personally, having inadvertently swallowed the odd fly myself, I think this was a hasty assumption, but I’m happy to stretch credibility for good rhyme.

Having gobbled down a fly, quite on purpose as far as I can tell, the old lady went on to swallow a spider. Now, in the child’s mind, there is a certain logic to this. Spiders, after all, eat flies, so there is at least an anticipated remedial effect. Perhaps the old lady should have guessed that the spider would wriggle and wriggle and jiggle inside her, but at least I can see what she was getting at.

Furthermore, when she subsequently swallowed a bird, there is again a certain logic. An Alka-Seltzer is hardly going to make much difference to a wriggling, jiggling spider, and the discomfort would need to be addressed somehow.

The cat was stretching things, but at least cats are reputed for their bird-dispatching qualities. And having swallowed a cat to catch the bird which ate the spider which swallowed the fly (at this point the odds on a fatality are starting to look more credible), wolfing down a dog follows a similar logic.

And then the old lady swallows a cow. A fucking cow. What the blessed fuck was she thinking? How, when considering the dog-devouring options open to her, did she reach the extraordinary conclusion that a cow – nature’s pacifist - was going to do the trick? Even Eva, aged nearly-four, gives me a quizzical look. “Cow’s eat grass,” I can hear her thinking, and then the wheels turn, and her face twitches as she tries to picture a world where packs of ravenous cows prowl the back streets of our inner cities, bringing down stray canines and feasting on their steaming remains. Kirsty is forgiving, suggesting that after eating a fly, a spider, a bird, a cat, and a dog in quick succession, the old lady might not be entirely in her right mind. I don’t buy it. Swallowing a cow is not the sort of thing you do on impulse, almost by accident. There would be plenty of time to come to your senses

I struggle on, hoping to move Eva away from such images, only to discover that the cow’s natural predator is not the wolf, or the bear, or the lion, or even man. It is, in fact, the horse.

My view of country living is by now twisted entirely upside down. A horse to catch a cow? Yes, over distances, that might be credible. A horse can certainly outrun a cow. But would it bring the bovine down, perhaps rip out its throat and retrieve it for its master? I always thought not. And besides, the advantage of greater speed over distance is all but made redundant within the confines of an old lady’s small intestine.

At least the old lady dies at this point, and I am spared the truth of what might be nature’s antidote to the horse. The rhinoceros, perhaps? The sperm whale? I shudder to think…

I finish the story with a strained smile, and leave Eva to dream of bloodthirsty herds of Fresians, and rant at Kirsty at the madness of the whole thing. “I’m going to go and bloody well write a blog about it,” I inform her dramatically, as she spoons couscous and roasted veg into a bowl.

“Lucky readers,” she replies, her features barely twitching.

And so you are, my friends. So you are.

The spam filters around the comments function of this site are being put hard through thier paces at the moment – yesterday I removed 98 spambot droppings from the moderation queue. Over thirty of them started with the above subject line.

I know that functioning grammar is too much to expect from a humble spambot, but this one boggles my mind every time I see it. I mean, what is it saying? It raises so many questions.

• Who is she? A nubile young filly full of sexual stamina, or somebody’s great-grandmother? Is the statement an enticement, or a vaguely worrying threat? Does the product being endorsed guarantee me a psychotic stalker?
• Does it mean she will love me more than she loves other guys? How many other guys is this hussy seeing anyway? Am I to be part of some sort of harem?
• More worrying still, does it mean that she will love me more than the other guys will? Is she, in fact, part guy? Does that mean this product make me irresistible to shemales? Is that something I want in my life?

When you’ve read the declaration as often as I have in the past twenty-four hours, these questions become inevitable. I almost want to follow the links, just to see if there are answers on the far side. Perhaps it’s a riddle, and great rewards will be bestowed on he who solves it…

Anyway, for those who have met the moderation message, that’s why it’s there. Theoretically, once I’ve approved one comment from you, telling the website that you’re a proper person (hopefully with some vague notion of why grammar was invented), your future comments should be passed automatically, and published immediately – so if you see it, don’t shy away. I don’t censor people posting (well, if things got abusive I might, but that’s not likely), I’m just trying to make sure this doesn’t become a default porn site by association.

Oh, and you may have noticed that you can now tick a little checkbox when making a comment. Doing so means you’ll get an email notification whenever anybody else, including me, posts a comment on the same article. Helpful, if you want a reply but haven’t time to keep coming back to see if I’ve got round to it…

The cost to send it air mail to New York? £42. If you’re in the US reading this, that’s $81. In Canada, try $94. Australia? $103. Japan? 9550 yen.

You get the point. When I’d regained the power of speech, I bravely handed my card over to the Post Office lady, attempting to pretend that such a figure was nothing to a man of my means, and tried not to cry as I tapped in my pin number.

It’s easy to forget how radically the Internet and email have altered how we communicate. Just eight years ago, my submission were whirling around the world by post as a matter of routine, and the chance to submit by email was a rare and splendid thing. Not the opposite is true. While there’s something pleasing about taking a physical letter or package to a post office, it fails to balance up against the sheer inconvenience attached.

That’s what we expect these days, I suppose – instant gratification at minimum cost. I’m so used to it, that I get slightly giddy when I can’t have it.

Hey ho. I’ll be feeling the sting a lot less if the book is bought, I suppose.

In the history of British music, has there ever been anything more charmingly bonkers produced than Jeff Wayne’s musical The War Of The Worlds?

I first discovered this musical insanity when I was a kid, going through some tapes (remember those?) my uncle had left behind on one of his infrequent visits to the family home (he was a jetsetting chef, working contracts in chain hotels all over the world). Being familiar with television adaptations of Wyndham’s The Tripods, which the Martian war machines on the cover reminded me of, I thought I was putting on an audio book of that story. It took about fifteen seconds before I realised how wrong I was.

The other day, in a fit of nostalgia (and also, for various reasons, because I needed to get into a Victorian mindset), I picked the remastered version of this bizarre rock opera off the shelf at HMV, and have been listening to it since. It’s easier to see its flaws today, but that doesn’t kill the love. Firstly, there’s Burton’s fabulous performance, straight out of old style radio drama. Forget your James Earl Joneses and Morgan Freemans – if the end of the world needs to be narrated, Burton is the one I want to hear do it. His performance is what binds the whole thing together – the utter obliviousness to the fact that he’s in an opera at all is what sells the story. His crisp, matter-of fact narration is perfect, making the most of some gloriously evocative bits of text, and when he ups the drama with just a vocal twitch (the quaver when he describes a war machine over Big Ben, or the tiny break when he sees his missing love pulling out of a harbour on a heaving ferry), it’s perfect.

As is the story, but do remember to read the book. The musical only hints at the horror of the martians rooting for human bodies, or the doomed, heroic last stand of the Thunder Child and her crew as they try to defend the last boat out of England against five war machines, or the madness of Nathaniel, a man of God struggling to rationalise the demons he sees around him with his faith. Consider this the Cliff Notes, set to prog-rock…

Because, yes, it’s all surrounded by the most bizarre studio rock you’ve ever heard. Some of it is brilliant – the soundscaping around the first Martian crash on the common, or the red weed growing over the earth, for example. Some of it is horribly over-earnest, like the saccharine Forever Autumn, played over the Burton’s otherwise intensely evocatve descriptions of six million refugees running headlong through the streets of London.

Somehow, it all works. It really shouldn’t. I absolutely should not feel an intense joy as I listen to it. My partner’s right – it’s an embarrassing mess.

But I adore it.

Now, if I could only remember where I put those William Shatner albums…