Currently in the Apple Store on Regent Street with my iBook, where I am waiting to see a Geeeeenious at the Geeeeenious Bar who will hopefully be able to fix the thing. See, clearly it works since I'm using it now, but when I tilt the screen more than 90 degrees back away from the keyboard the display conks out. Thus I can either type or look at the screen but not both at the same time. This is not ideal for a laptop. So I'm sitting here on a bench waiting.

Ho hum.

Maybe I'll listen to a bit of net radio or something.

i am in floridita, which used to be mezzo. it is ludicrously loud down here; i can hear nothing except the band and the wrong people.

Edit (2:33am, not posted via SMS): however shortly afterwards we found the right people, moved to a quieter area and consumed cocktails involving rum. Well, I did, anyway. And it was good.

I don't know whether it's just me, today, or whether it's everyone, all the time, but the latest crop of stories about how Political Correctness Is Stealing Christmas are getting on my fucking nerves. Whether it's “oh no they're not doing nativity plays any more” or “look at the loony lefties banning tinsel“, it's a load of straight-banana scaremongering that very rarely has any basis in fact.

And who really cares? I suppose if you're irrationally obsessed with keeping Christmas exactly as it was when you were a nipper you might, but if you're actually getting angry about changes I think you really need to look at how much you are investing in what you consider to be deep cultural traditions that likely didn't exist ten years before you were born. And why.

Let's not go into the constant sneering about “multiculturalism” that accompanies all of this – well, let's not because I should get off the computer now and let someone else have a go. Rant curtailed for the moment.

He has and all!

It took the petty morality of the British media and public to do it, rather than your scaremongering and fascist policies, but what the hell.

Apparently Blunkett is due to resign tonight, according to Radio 4 anyway. Party poppers at the ready… if they haven't already been confiscated as terroristic devices.

Try not to think about who he could be replaced with who's worse.

I got an email yesterday about the black bean chilli penguin sauce that I posted about back in February.

Hi

Just thought you'd like to know, that sauce company was founded by my grandfather in Hong Kong. The logo's a penguin because my dad was a chubby little toddler who walked like a penguin. Just thought you'd like to know. Whether the penguin is lost and why it is in such an environment I don't know. Hope that helped you

Laurel

So there you have it. Cute, too.

This thread on brits_americans (of which I am still a member) made me laugh an awful lot.

I have some sort of “thing” going on at the moment which involves me being tired, vomiting (and vomiting involuntarily, at that, which almost never happens) and making lots of trips to the loo. I am not having fun. It started at eight this morning and it's still going on. Therefore I am not going to be writing, or doing, a lot today.

In the meantime, since you all seem to like the dog so much, here's a video of her being cute (360K MOV).

Things which I have consumed:

• Curry
• Proper-sized pint of Stella
• Marmite
• Cheese and pickle sandwich
• Salt and vinegar crisps, several brands
• Pork scratchings
• Full English breakfast
• Pot Noodle

Things which I have yet to eat:

• Small doner, chilli sauce, salad
• Pork pie
• Steak and kidney pie, not that I actually like them
• Saveloy

As I tick off items on the latter list, I feel that my whinging expat status will gradually diminish to zero, until I am merely a whinging ex-expat and thus effectively indistinguishable from any other blogger.

I feel a bit sick now.

Just shut my fingers in the window. Well, actually, I slammed them between the frame and the fingerholes while opening the wooden shutter that covers it… but, typing with my left hand, I don't really feel like going into detail. So that's the first two fingers of my right hand stuck in a glass of ice and water. Not too painful right now. Swearing was involved at the time.

Not been doing well on the injury front since I've been back.