Okay then. Let's see if I can get back into doing this on something approaching a regular basis...

I'm not quite sure what led me to remember, but the other day I suddenly found myself thinking about my old chemistry teacher Mr West.

Mr West was not, in the nicest possible way, a normal man. Once a year, if you were very 'lucky', he would offer to show the class his repertoire of impressions. He didn't do people or celebrities though, he did animals and objects. The impressions were the stuff of unfortunate legend, and consequently everyone wanted to see them. One fine day, our time finally came.

The impressions session began with the locking of the classroom door. This in itself should have been something of a bad sign, but nothing prepares you for the full onslaught of Mr West's creativity.

The highlight was his impression of a cooked breakfast. He would begin by bashing himself quite hard on the head, and then convincingly 'drip' like raw egg onto the floor, where he would then pop and fizzle in his imaginary frying pan. We sat there aghast as he repeatedly thrus his groinal region into the air as the 'yolk' cooked. He would then roll around, declaring that "I am a sausage".

I don't think you'll find this kind of thing on the syllabus any more.

The Supermarket gets me every time.

No matter how thoroughly you plan, and no matter how firm you believe you're being with yourself, you will always emerge from the supermarket with a bag full of crap. It's guaranteed.

Fact number one: I don't require 12 pork pies.
Fact number two: Thanks to the miracle of 'buy one get one free' (free! It's FREE, dammit!), I have 12 pork pies in my fridge.

And so it goes on. In the fruit juice aisle, they offer you 'Any three for...', followed by the statement 'this means you will save...', followed by a pleasingly large number. But the truth is that you will save even more by only buying the one carton you were intending to get in the first place! I'm just too weak-willed, and will inevitably decide I need three cartons. Or perhaps six?

I read somewhere recently that to have too much choice is to sow the seeds of confusion. Yes, absolutely! Don't make me choose between 24 varieties of jam, I just can't cope. Panic buying for me doesn't mean going home with eight loaves of bread. It means going home with a bag of olive & oregano focaccia because the pressure was just too much.

In other news, Sparkle our completely dotty cat has started to explore downstairs on a vaguely regular basis. This is progress. She has also decided she loves to claw the rug in our bedroom at 6am. This is NOT progress. I think it is purely an attention seeking device, because once one of us sits up to tell her off she will stop scratching and purr contentedly. Job done.

I hope this doesn't sound offensive, but I think that babies and cats are very similar.

Fiona and I have a young cat, and our friends Pete and Becky have twin baby boys. They act the same! A tickled head results in a squeal (or purr) of delight, either of them might decide to chew on your finger without warning, and just when you think you're forming a special bond with them, they curl up and go to sleep. One thing the babies do that our cat thankfully doesn't do is pull down ladies tops to try and access some breast milk. Apparently the twins are very good at doing this in public. The worst thing Sparkle has ever done in front of a guest is lick her bottom.

I was able to establish these similarities because a large group of us went out for a meal last night and the twins came along for the ride. The food was delicious but we were frustrated by the constant interruptions to our meal from an over-enthusiastic soundsystem playing 'Congratulations' by Cliff Richard every five minutes. I can understand that restaurants might want to make a fuss of birthday groups in the hope that they will generate repeat business, but why does this have to involve the whole restaurant?

By the fourth time the opening bars of Cliff's Eurovision winner began to echo around the restaurant, I felt like walking up to the hapless birthday boy, blowing out his candles and shoving his face into his cake.

"Well done, you're a year older! Now shut up and leave me in peace to enjoy my overpriced rack of ribs."

Just before I left the restaurant I visited the loo, as you do, and discovered that something rather unusual was playing over the speakers (why do they pipe music into the toilets? It's the last place anyone wants to get down and boogie). It was, I kid you not, a 'teach yourself Spanish' CD. The restaurant, who shall remain nameless, have obviously decided that what we need most when relieving ourselves is to learn how to ask for directions to the train station in a foreign language.

THIS ANIMATION will keep you entertained for all of thirty seconds. Your cursor is the red ball. Move it around between the different people and they will 'play catch' with it.

In other news, I put up a shed over the weekend! Well, I say 'I', it actually took six of us about 10 hours to construct, including laying heavy paving slabs for the base and getting everything level. Let's hope it's watertight.

THIS IS A GREAT LITTLE VIDEO. It makes the point that the idea of 'beauty', as portrayed by countless fashion magazines, is total nonsense. We all know this of course, but this rams the point home once and for all.

In other news, I'm still trying to figure out why Heather Mills deserves such a huge slice of Sir Paul McCartney's fortune (£24.3 million awarded). If I were the judge, I'd have bunged her a million and told her to shove off. It's not like she had a long, happy marriage with the guy, is it. Plus, she's not even trying to maintain a positive media image any more. She threw water over Sir Paul's lawyer! And then launched into a major rant in front of the assembled press...

Blah, blah, blah.

My dear brother is living in Japan at the moment, and this brute is native to him!

The Japanese giant hornet. Lovely.

Apparently it can spray flesh melting poison. Uuurgh. It'll happily chase you for up to 50 miles, and once it's squirted you other hornets in the area can smell you, find you and get stuck in to a jolly fun stinging session.

Just thought I'd share.

In other news, our cat Sparkle has settled down a lot since her arrival three and a half weeks ago. She still gets extremely jumpy at unfamiliar sounds (sizzling sausages sends her scampering for cover), but generally speaking she's much happier. Perhaps too happy - she likes to sleep on our bed at night, and cries if she isn't allowed. This issue still needs to be resolved! I don't mind either way particularly, but having a vibrating (purring) cat across your legs at 4am can be disconcerting.

It was dark.

We were led around the outside of the house to a shed, accompanied by loud barkings and the sound of straining leashes.

The lady unlocked the shed door and led us into a cold, gloomy interior. Cages were stacked two or three high, and most were occupied. Our arrival was greeted with a chorus of startled cat noises. Many of the animals were kittens, and most of them sat up to see what was going on. Some put on little performances, rolling over and over, flashing their bellies. Cute, but we weren't there to see them.

There she was in front of us - Sparkle. Slightly older than most of the cats (indeed she was mother to some of them), she blinked and stretched. She wasn't particlularly pleased to see us, but then why would she be? She's been badly treated by humans her whole life so far. Her arrival at the rescue shelter hopefully marks a turning point for her, and the start of a comfortable, happy life (no pressure on us, then!).

We eased her into her new cage (which she will grow to hate; it will only be used for trips to bad places like the vet or the cattery) and popped her into the car. After a flurry of protests, she settled down for the journey home.

Fiona and I were very excited to have a cat, but for the first couple of hours she just hid under a table! She's terrified, even now. She has explored the house a bit, and chose to sleep with us on our bed the first night. She likes beds. In fact she now hides in the spare bed every morning, refusing to leave it until mid afternoon. At least she knows what to do with a litter tray!

I hope she settles down and relaxes soon. I'll let you know.

It seems like you are able to get married in more and more unusual places these days. This is a good thing if you want a civil ceremony, but don't want the cloying stuffiness and depressive atmosphere of the average regsistry office. You can marry in all kinds of beautiful locations. Both my uncles picked particularly characterful places to get married, but my friend Mel wins top prize I think for choosing the magnificent Cheltenham Pump Rooms. It was a glorious setting, enhanced greatly by the bright sunshine.

Anyway, I was musing on all this yesterday as I was booking tickets for a show on the Wales Millennium Centre website, and noticed that the stage of the main auditorium is now a possible location for a wedding. Wow! What particularly amused me though was their assertion that "your guests could be seated on the stage sharing the occasion, or they may take their seat in the auditorium to watch the happy couple sign the registrar." Now that sounds like fun!

Think you have a good vocabulary? Wanna prove it, punk? Take a look here:
www.freerice.com
Play the game, test your word knowledge, and watch as you earn more and more rice to donate to the third world. I'm always slightly sceptical about the claims made on these sites; 'Click here, click there, do this, do that, we'll feed the starving'. It's all done through advertising revenue apparently. Worth a go, I reckon. At the moment I'm hovering around level 38/39 with my vocab.

Slice up that pie!
I have a great website to reccommend to you today, one that I came across the other evening while looking for some interesting (i.e. non-chart, upcoming, unsigned etc) music to listen to.

Slice The Pie is stuffed full of goodies to hear. In fact I think I could comfortably sit and listen all day if allowed to. Which I'm not! But here's the killer selling point... the website pays you to listen. Yeah! I think I have your attention now. It's not a strenuous process, you are forced to listen to at least 60 seconds of music (be aware that much of it may not be to your taste, or could be absolute rubbish, so it literally pays to have an open mind), and then you must rate the tune out of 10 and post a comment (2 sentences maximum). Job done! If you're relatively new to the site you get a massive 3 pence for your efforts, but do it regularly and you could see that amount double or treble.

For a music fan it's great to be able to hear brand new stuff and get given a few quid for doing so. For the artists it's even better, because once a month they put forward the twenty highest rated musicians into a showcase, the winner of which will get the chance to record and release a proper album!

I can't stand waking up early, when it's dark outside and you have to leave the warmth of the duvet behind. The solution, it seems, is to wake up even earlier.

I have discovered the delights of Sarah Kennedy's good humoured amble through the morning papers on Radio 2, which seems to be the perfect method of rousing yourself from a deep slumber. Honestly, what would you prefer? An abrasive BEEP BEEP BEEP in your left ear (that's actually the noise of Chris Moyles screaming into my bedroom from his Radio 1 studio), or a soothing voice telling you that Peter Hain is an incompetent politician? (Which is brilliant, by the way. Imagine if you orchestrated an enormous cock up at work, and then your boss stood up to reassure everyone that it didn't matter because you were simply incompetent. Hurrah! No worries there then.)

Anyway, the point is that by 7am I am feeling gently enlightened enough to be able to stagger out of bed and into the shower, and by the time I reach the car I'm ready for 100mph Moyles. Besides, if this new morning routine stops working, I always have my lovely wife beside me, who's happily prepared to rip the duvet off me and give me a playful kick in the right direction.