She did. And she moved it, switched it off and on and several other things besides.

Nothing worked.

So I told her to switch it off and I would take a look later that evening when I got home. In my heart I hoped a chance to cool down, or at least a visit from the Hardware Fairy, would solve the problem for me, and all would be well when I got home.

It wasn’t.

When I started the drive up again, the clicking was still there, a worrying, annoying click, click, click, like some peripheral poltergeist nagging away.

So there was a simple choice, ignore it and hope it didn’t presage some impending meltdown, or try to replace it as soon as possible.

It’s only at crisis times like this you realise just how much of your life is now dependent on technology. Inside that box was a complete music library, several thousand treasured images including all the family photos I’d scanned in and digital images taken over the last six years, and all the websites I’ve ever built.

So there was no choice: I had to buy a new one and stat!

Thank heavens for late night shopping. Even if you do have to put up with sales assistants who really need an introduction to the joys of soap and deodorant.

Silence of the RAM

After fending off one guy who wanted to sell me the Bluetooth speaker for my phone that I DIDN’T want and trying to catch the eye of anyone to explain the choices available, I eventually walked out — £105 lighter — with a 3 TERRABYTE hard drive, with the nagging feeling that I was committing myself to placing even more of my life’s work in the hands of a production line worker somewhere in Thailand who had his mind on the ladyboy he met in the bar the previous night.

It’s taken almost 12 hours to coax the old drive to give up its booty and copy it to the new one. For large parts of that time it was completely silent, no ticking at all, which leads to the thought: “Did I really need to spend out that much money in the first place for  new one?”

Thankfully, just seconds before I switched it off — for perhaps the final time — the clicking started again, like some nanotech Captain Ahab pacing up and down the desktop in search of its doom.

There’s a copy of this blog sitting on the new drive as we speak. It will probably never be opened, as is the case with almost all the files that get stuffed on to extension drives.

The advent of even more storage capacity means that EVERYTHING gets saved these days, instead of the selective filtering that we all used to do.

I remember my first real PC had a 850Mb hard drive — and that was a biggie — and much time was spent in order to remove the “chaff” of everyday computing.

But at least it wasn’t clicking.

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I’ve spoken in public before. I’ve actually relished the prospect.

The difference this time however is that my audience are not novices in their art, or there because they were told to be (although some of them might). They’re not even friends or family: this won’t be a best man’s speech where I can rely on people being slightly tiddly on cheap (or free) booze, even if it is the first session after lunch.

And I hear the food is terrible …

No, they’ll be clued-up, intelligent, critical types, looking for real insights and not happy to be fobbed off with repackaged stats and secondhand opinions.

Out of the shadows

Until this year I was one of them. I used to look forward to “SES” or “SMX” or “LBW out for 30 before lunch”, or whatever the latest acronym is (better an acronym I s’pose than the more cringeworthy “Search Love”, and that ilk). It used to be that three days at a conference would give me months of facts and thoughts to mull over, mash up and memorise. And I too used to complain if the expected revelations didn’t appear.

Anyway, this time the boot’s on the other foot.

I’ve more or less finished the presentation. It looks quite stylish. But is it style over substance? Only time will tell I guess.

Anyway, if I do royally screw it up I can always fall back on some ribald stories about the groom’s childhood. Right?

STOP PRESS: I’ve run it past my boss, Lisa Myers, no stranger to the conference platform herself, and received a general thumbs up. Tomorrow I’m giving the rest of the agency a chance to shoot me down in flames. By Tuesday, I’ll have it licked!

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Someone waiting for a sweetheart or a special friend or their dealer will always choose that point where to do so causes the most difficulty to the passage of fellow humanbeings.

And I’m not talking about waiting under a street lamp a lá Lily Marlene, either. It could be a bollard or a sandwich board or a dustbin.

And they don’t stand behind it where it would act as a shield against people walking and texting — another menace of modern existence. No, they stand inside — between it and the wall — making it hardest to get past.

Even worse are those who stop dead in their tracks as they walk along, or, as a variation, march out of a doorway blindly and then stop.

My ultimate hate are the people that positively accelerate to overtake you in the street, walk in front of you and then slow down, or even stop. If you did that behind the wheel, you could be charged with Driving Without Due Care and Attention.

This happens so often as to be more than coincidence. Why?

I have one theory and it takes me back to the time I used to play hockey — field hockey, that is — at school. I was a goalkeeper and my coach was constantly telling me to “narrow the angle”, in other words run towards the attacking player and block his path so that he had less goal to shoot at than was blocked by a stocky bloke in heavy protective armour and waving a hockey stick around in panic.

In practice, the approaching forward would either swerve around me — after all they weren’t carrying a ton of protective gear — or fire straight at me.

Their favourite target was between the legs. The fact that I’m a now dad of two gives some testament to the mechanical properties of polyurethane goalie goolie guards.

Yet the principle was a sound one — not in the same way as cork ball against box, of course. Narrow the angle. Cut off the opportunity to escape.

And that’s why I reckon the urge to stand in the most awkward place possible must be a remnant of primitive hunting behaviour.

I believe humans, with 10,000 years of civilisation and our must touted urbane ways, demonstrate every day that we are all actually just bald monkeys with a penchant for a meat stew.

When we stand in the most annoying place possible it is simply our primitive sub-cortex making it harder for lunch to get away.

So we’re probably stuck with it. After all, if it hasn’t disappeared after centuries of farming livestock and popping down to Tesco’s for a quick Findus Shergar horse meat lasagne it ain’t likely to disappear soon.

Our only hope is conscious choice.

So of you’re picking a spot to wait for the Missus to emerge from Boots, or you are the Missus about to quit that matchless High Street cosmetic and pharmaceutical emporium, just think for a millisecond. Can you see me walking down that same street?

If so, just get out of the bloody way!

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It’s also (apparently) my boss’s favourite quote but she’s Norwegian, so we’ll let her off.

No surprise then that even before I’d properly joined Verve Search she had announced that she was going to put me up as a speaker at this month’s SES London search conference.

Do or not do. There is no try.

Lisa’s motives were entirely selfish. She’s been a regular fixture at almost every search event I’ve been to over the last few years and I was always impressed by her insights.

That was one of the reasons I was so keen to work at Verve in the first place.

She said she just wanted to sit this one out, take a holiday with the family, part of a wider context of leaving the frontline work at Verve in the hands of someone capable while she devotes time to developing the wider business. And I’ll be helping him.

Anyways, I am Lisa by proxy for SES2013.

I won’t be an exact stand-in of course: I’m 6ft 4ins tall (and a man) and our dress sizes are most definitely different for starters — besides, that would be just creepy — but I will be doing my best to do what she does: making people think about doing Search properly (you’ll notice no uses of the word “try” in there).

And here is my problem: I’ve never done that before.

Yes, I’ve been to tons of search conferences and joined in the discussions but because of corporate sensibilities I’ve never stood on a platform and given an audience of like-minded enthusiasts a piece of my mind.

Oh, I’ve addressed company audiences. There was the three-hour off-the-cuff lecture to a room full of straight-faced German marketers; it had to be unscripted because of a mix-up at Munich airport which meant I didn’t have the right cables and couldn’t start my computer, let alone attach it to an overhead projector. A tough audience but they asked me to come back.

Or the Washington crowd who arrived as SEO skeptics and left as Organic Search evangelists.

And that’s not to mention the countless boardroom presentations and sales pitches when I was at an agency before.

But a room full of other SEOs?

Of course, given a sample of 100 SEOs you’ll get 101 opinions … and four of them will be mine. That’s what’s worrying me: will I get the right four?

Deadline day is under two weeks now. First task is to decide what I’ll be angling it on.

Expect me to come back to you frequently over the next 10 days or so via this blog and my Twitter accounts @maxormark and @BiginSEO to bounce some ideas off you or just vent.

I love my job.

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But five days a week now I thunder down the line from Waterloo to Surbiton on the 9:12 to Basingstoke, calling at Surbiton, Walton-on-Thames, Weybridge, Woking, Brookwood, Farnborough, Fleet, Winchfield and Hook.

It’s a close run thing sometimes. The first part of my journey is via red shuttlebus — crammed with lazy school kids many of them travelling just one stop — and then by Southeastern Trains from Grove Park to Waterloo East. That offers much opportunity for something to go wrong and delay my progress by literally hours.

I could cheerfully rant on about Southeastern and do so regularly on my personal Twitter account, but that’s for another day.  I have much greater experience of their shortcomings but I have observed that it’s only when the trains don’t run to schedule that I have the time to pontificate.

So, if Southeastern actually did manage to run a proper service I’d have no time to complain.

But five days a week now I board the 9:12 to Basingstoke, first stop Surbiton, Surrey.

Only it isn’t.

It is according to the boards at Waterloo and it is according to the train times app I use every day on my iPhone.

But equally, every day, as the 9:12 passes Vauxhall it begins to slow down as it pulls into Clapham Junction — “Britain’s busiest station” — where it stops to let on dozens more people.

At this point, the iPhone app shows Clapham Junction as a station stop. This morning, it was apparently 2 minutes late!

This isn’t an occasional event, like when they stopped the train at Wimbledon for a few mornings because of the bad weather to ease the congestion caused by scrambled services, this happens every morning.

Now, I know this isn’t a mystery on the level of the Marie Celeste, or where do elephants go to die, or why does food smell better than it tastes, but it is a puzzle.

Why does South West Trains, or National Rail, want to conceal from people at Waterloo that there’s a perfectly serviceable train to Clapham Junction every day at 9:12?

Is it because they fear the resulting exodus of passengers at 9:12 could tip the balance at Clapham Junction into commuter meltdown, civil unrest, urban chaos, bloody revolution and civil war, and thereby end western civilization as we know it?

Or is it because somebody made a cock-up somewhere and the instituted a sticking plaster solution to get around the problem?

Either way, the 9:12 from Waterloo to Basingstoke arrives in Surbiton on (or around) schedule at 9:30 every morning — this morning it was actually a minute early!

And I’m ready for work and raring to go.

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Almost two years ago I signed up for Oh Life, a service which offers you the chance to write a personal private journal about what you did that day.

You get a reminder in your inbox every evening at a time to suit — suggesting “Just reply to this email with your entry” — and it comes with a previous journal entry chosen at random for your education and entertainment. It truly is a “Dear Diary” for the 21st century.

Of course, I don’t always respond. Let’s be honest, no-one’s life is that exciting. And even if it is sometimes “action-packed”, after a while familiarity kicks in and I simply can’t be arsed to hit that reply button.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to see what you’ve actually done, and often quite astounding to see how long ago — or how recently — quite significant events took place.

Tonight’s reminder email read …

Remember this? One year ago you wrote…

Another Sunday sat in a hotel room. This time the Lincoln Centre, Dallas, at the start of a week-long odyssey around the US, ending up in New York.

Well, what a difference a year makes.

In contrast, I spent today variously getting excused from donating blood because of various minor infections and medications, meeting a friend of a friend to offer some free technical advice about his new financial spread betting web site and having an espresso coffee — and espresso chat — with another chum of long standing.

And if that wasn’t exciting enough, I rounded off the day with a hand stuck down a crap-brimming toilet trying to unclog it (with limited success) and give the family some much-needed relief.

Not sure really if that is an improvement or not.

But that American journey, begun 365 days ago today, is still clear in my memory.

It began with a long tiring flight from London to Dallas made worse by a 40-min delay on the ground at Heathrow caused by someone who carelessly failed to board the plane.

Confused

Once above the clouds I was too hot. I was dehydrated. I was bored. There wasn’t even a even a good view from the window, it being slap bang over the wing.

On late arrival at DFW, I then stood in a queue for more than an hour to have my passport checked, then another 20 minutes to collect my bags. I faced another nervous wait while I discovered whether the firm I was hiring a car from really DID need the part II of the driving licence I’d left behind, as they claimed on their web site.

Well they didn’t, which was nice.

What wasn’t nice was not being able to work out how to use the car AND the Sat Nav. I then spent a frustrating hour or so driving around Texas in the dark looking for hotel that didn’t seem to be in the database until finally pulling over and trying the GPS again, this time using the Dallas Galleria shopping mall — which I knew to be opposite the hotel — as a landmark.

Even then, with the Hilton Lincoln Centre in plain sight, I took a wrong turn and had to endure another five-mile detour just to get back to square one.

At the end of this, I’d been awake 24 hours before I finally made it to bed. And there wasn’t even a chance of a relaxing drink in the hotel bar because there was some sort of conference checking in and the lobby was filled with orange-coloured Avon ladies shrieking and yelping in a way that only perky Daughters of the Alamo can.

Later that week I flew by cramped commuter jet to Washington DC for a meeting at corporate HQ — a white knuckle ride on a raging storm into Reagan International Airport — with a classic stinking head cold developing all the while. At the weekend, drugged up on Advil, I took the Acela Express to New York to meet my wife who was flying in separately from London to sing at Carnegie Hall. Yes. That Carnegie Hall.

New York was wonderful but freezing. My potentially deadly bout of Man Flu slightly took the edge off the proceedings, but only slightly.

Whinge, Moan, Gripe

Well, that’s all behind me now. I’ve left my job with Hilton — where I was in charge of the company’s Organic Search policy — and I start work in just a week at a respected UK search agency as Head of SEO.

Leaving Hilton is a mixed blessing. My old job was high profile and high kudos. I got to travel the world and stay in the best hotels, and meet some really great people. I’ll miss them.

However, to paraphrase Rossini’s verdict on Wagner, there were “some wonderful moments … but awful half hours”.

For now I’m swapping the glamour of the international hotel business for blocked toilets and unpacking boxes of metaphorical crap following our recent move to the first house we’ve owned in 16 years.

As a corporate wage slave I found it very difficult to blog, just in case it reflected badly on the company. But the freedom of working for an agency now means I can get back to my first love. Writing about stuff.

Watch this space.

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For the past few months (or is it years) it’s been very difficult to post to this blog — or any personal blog — because of commercial sensitivities: anything I’ve said might be misconstrued as the position of my employer, one of the world’s major brands and a very big name.

Well, that’s about to change because I’m moving to a new job.

I’ll post further details when the dust has settled but I’m looking forward to a little more honesty in my life, and in this blog …

Piss, poo, titty, bum.

Oh, and there’s likely to be more of that too!

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Then, hours later, Kim Jong-il died, a man for whom any obituary seems like comedy.

The myths pedaled by sycophantic hangers on, and written into official history in the Poeple’s Republic of North Korea include …

Divine Birth

A double rainbow and a glowing new star appeared in the heavens to herald Kim’s birth in 1942, on North Korea’s “sacred” Baekdu Mountain. (Note: Soviet records indicate Kim was born in Vyatskoye, Siberia in 1941). Incidentally, North Koreans are told Kim’s birthday is celebrated throughout the world.

High Achiever

Official records show Kim learned to walk just three weeks old, and was talking at eight weeks. While at Kim Il-Sung University, Kim apparently wrote 1,500 books over a period of three years, along with six full operas. His official biography relates how all of his operas are “better than any in the history of music”. Take that Mozart, Verdi and Wagner!

In sports, the first time Kim picked up a golf club, in 1994, he shot a 38-under par round on North Korea’s only golf course, including 11 holes-in-one. Reports say each of his 17 bodyguards verified the record-breaking feat. He then decided to retire from the sport forever.

No Shit!

Kim’s official biography on the North Korean state web site — since taken down — revealed that Kim did not defecate.

But Kim’s more verifiable traits are equally as weird. Perhaps one of the reasons the North Korean leader was so reclusive was his fear of flying (as was his father, Kim Il Sung). If Kim did travel it was by train. His preference for rail travel is poignant because his death reportedly occurred during a train journey to a region outside of the capital, Pyongyang.

German media reported in 2007 that Kim hoped to solve the famine in his country by breeding giant rabbits. An east German farmer who bred rabbits the size of dogs was asked by North Korea to help set up a big bunny farm to alleviate food shortages but found the batch of 12 giant rabbits he sent to Pyong Yang on a trial basis were all eaten at Kim’s birthday banquet that year.

That’s not all he liked to eat. While on a famous 2001 train trip to Moscow, a Russian envoy reported that roast donkey and fresh lobsters were flown to the train every day. Kim also reportedly ate the food with silver chopsticks, and washed it down with French wine and Champagne. Kim was also said to be one of the world’s biggest buyers of Hennessey cognac.

In the 1950s — purely for propaganda reasons — Kim built an entire city called Kijong-Dong, also known as the Peace Village, in the North’s half of the Korean Demilitarized Zone. To this day it has no residents.

Kim was said to be an avid film collector, amassing more than 20,000 video tapes and DVDs including Friday the 13th, Rambo, Godzilla, Hong Kong action fims, and anything starring Elizabeth Taylor.

In 1978, he ordered the kidnapping of South Korean film director Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife Choi Eun-hee so they could build a North Korean film industry. A decade later, they reportedly escaped while on a trip to Austria, and have since been granted refuge in the United States.

You couldn’t make it up!

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Anyway, I thought that it was time I entered into the fray to highlight some of the people you probably don’t even know — or what they are famous for (or aren’t). You probably didn’t even realise they existed but that’s fine because they didn’t.

Mervyn Hurley (1921-2011)

Mervyn’s great claim to fame was that he thought up the idea of taking perfectly good cheese and sticking weird stuff in it.

Building on the work of predecessors like Auther Dietzsch and Leonardo Conti, his first experiments were with prunes and kiwi fruit but somehow the combinations did not go down well with focus groups. Years of trials followed until he fell upon the humble dried apricot, which is otherwise universally shunned by all right thinking people. Even so, the prototype using processed Cheddar had teething problems: the Cheddar didn’t taste of well, anything and the sharp, cloying flavour of the apricots was just … damn!

Looking for a stronger cheese taste, Mervyn tried Stilton, but its blue veins coupled with the knobbly orange apricots made the whole thing resemble a tramp’s feet. In blindfold taste tests, reaction was favourable but when the blindfolds came off most of the test participants felt nauseous at the sight of what they were eating. The meticulous Hurley of course kept notes of the resulting “heave-ho” to see if he could use them for future compounds (see: ready meals). Then, when a consignment of Stilton arrived at the test plant in which the characteristic mould had been left out for health reasons, leaving a sickly-looking, creamy white waxy substance, a test batch was fortuitously put together by the plant’s only colour-blind technician.The resulting fruit-impregnated concoction proved a hit.

The success of White Stilton with Apricot led Mervyn to try many other amalgams (with mixed success) including, Wensleydale with Cranberries, Caerphilly with Leek, Norwegian Jarlsberg with Dingleberries and Dairylea with Plywood. Mervyn died in July, after a wine and cheese party, from the effects of cholesterol poisoning and cirrhosis, but his legacy lives on. Look out for such thrilling taste combinations as Emmental and Banana, Brie and Snickers Bar, Monterey Jack with Wasabi and and Stinking Bishop, Tuna and Linseed, coming to a retail outlet near you in 2012.

Julie Bowman (1953-2011)

Anyone who has ever enjoyed the opening short film on every DVD which begins with the immortal words: “You wouldn’t steal a car …” has Julie Bowman to thank. It was back in 2004 when Julie, after a night out with the girls, forgot to tick the box on the programming set-up which enables users to skip across unwanted content, meaning that forever after anyone attempting to save four precious minutes of their life from having to watch the same paranoid, overexcited exhortations to people who had already eschewed the temptation of illegally copying a DVD, would be greeted with the legend “action not permitted”.

Julie never corrected her mistake on subsequent recordings fearing that someone would connect her “oversight” with the pile of vomit in the new photocopier, and it then became an industry standard because everyone thought it must have been done for a good reason in the first place. Julie passed away in February after being hunted down by a frenzied gang of film lovers and beaten to death with a VHS video cassette.

Ali Rhuperand 1949-2011

Rhuperand, the son of a humble chapati flour seller from Lahore, came to the UK in the 60s to work as a tube driver and quickly worked his way up to street sweeper, but it was his invention of the tiny pot of salad that you get in every Indian meal (but that nobody eats) which is his claim to fame. Rhuperand, longing to get back to agrarian roots in Pakistan, got himself a council allotment in Dalston Garden Suburb and quickly became expert in the techniques of growing lettuce, onion and tomatoes in the fertile soil made bounteous by the rotting victims of a series of revenge killings by East End gangster twins George and Gerald Skank.

However, the resulting glut of production led him to offer his surplus to his brother-in-law, Vash Govinda, a local restaurant owner and Freemason. Torn by family loyalty and owing Rhuperand money, Govinda finally agreed to aportion out the salad in small partially-used spittoon cups which Rhuperand found in the back of a London Transport bus garage where they had been overbought in bulk for the 1949 London Olympics. Govinda quickly found the spittoon salads were popular, mainly because people threw out the salad and used the container for its original purpose.

Like many other  traditional giveaways, including prawn crackers at Chinese restaurants, no-one can now remember why it’s a good idea but, hey, it’s free. Rhuperand died in October, in his sleep, shooting through a gap in the central reservation arnco on the M6 just out side Cannock.

His Excellency Lionel George Ndobe, President for Life of the Republic of Kharsi (1935-1997 and 1953-2011)

Ndobe, dubbed the “Butcher of Kharsi”, rose from obscurity as a seller of pork and beef in downtown Kharsi City, to become the leader of the most oppressive regime west of Tunbridge Wells and parts of Gillingham. Although it now seems he gained most of his power over his supporters who misread his “Butcher of Kharsi” title to be more metaphorical than it actually was, Ndobe did have a reputation as a cruel dictator who would think nothing of passing the port to the right or taking seven items through the six items or less queue.

When he was toppled in August in a wave of popular unrest taking its cue from the Arab revolts to the north, raids on his prisons by jubilant supporters found there to be no prisoners at all. Ironically, Ndobe’s defiant crowd-pleasing taunts to Western powers from the late 90s, and his effective propaganda shield which gave the impression of a tyrant of the likes of Muamar Ghaddafi or Idi Amin, hid the fact that he was born Norman Smith in Sunningdale, south of London, who had been employed to teach the real Ndobe’s son ballroom dancing, and who found himself put up as a business-as-usual stand-in by power-hungry ministers after the real Ndobe died in a freak bidet accident.

Psychologists now believe an early life living in Sunningdale and reading the Daily Express made it easy to slip into the role of an intolerant, bigotted, martinet. Smith’s poor disguise, mainly in using stage makeup left from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s touring production of Othello in 1959 to mark the small sub-Saharan nation’s independence from Britain, was never rumbled by media watchers, possibly because no-one ever paid the non-oil producing nation any attention. Ndobe/Smith died when he was ripped to shreds by a crowd of irate port drinkers who had nothing decent to go with their Stinking Bishop and coffee bean cheese.

Gertrude Sphincowicz (???-2011)

When Gertrude died in February she was the world’s oldest woman. But after she died she wasn’t. Her real age at time of death is still under debate, but it is known that she was younger than Sir Bruce Forsyth’s wig. Tree ring data has provisionally indicated she was 173 and three quarters.

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But it’s not quite the same place as last year. The weather is better, sure. And the plants look greener: I guess Bulgaria’s been getting at least some of the rain that Old Blighty’s had all year. But it’s a lot busier than at the same time last year. That’s probably the Global Economic Meltdown: part people wanting to find a bit of a bargain in a country that’s as likely to descend into unrest and terrorism as the Isles of Scilly and part in seeking a refuge from the constant barrage of over-hyped bad news stories that you find everywhere. That could explain why there are so many Germans here: it must be the only place in Greater Europe they haven’t had to bail out yet.

Or could it be a folk memory? Wanting to visit all the places that Urgrossvater Heinrich spent his summers (and winters) back in 41-44? Heaven knows the Bulgarians seem ambivalent to their European patrons; after all, between 41 and 44 they were allies of Germany until the Red Army marched in to “liberate” them in September 1944. Judging by the respect that the average Bulgarian gives to the monstrous war memorials erected to that liberation in almost every big city here I wouldn’t take up offers of a bunting franchise in time for the 70th anniversary in 2014.

We’re again in Sunny Beach, the sprawling resort created by the Soviets after the war for the “trusted” few to take a “foreign” holiday in a place where they could be “trusted” not to flee to the West. For a long time now, however, the Black Sea coast resorts have been as western as any Mediterranean town and the hotels are as good as any you’ll find on the Costas (at a lot less costa, geddit!?)

The Russians are still here but the apparatchiks have been replaced by the St Petersburg chicks roaming the beach topless (I see boobies … everywhere!) on a girls-only holiday out to top up such a tan as to make those left in the office feel green. There aren’t many lobster-people here — as I said, the Brits are in a minority — but there are enough mahogany-coloured folks to make David Dickinson feel a bit anaemic. At least when they die, riddled with secondary cancers brought on by malignant melanomas (SCCs – this detail is on the insistence of my better third @berberis), they can feel appropriately smug as they donate their bodies to DFS to appear as a rather nice Chesterfield in the latest sale event.

Bikini weather

My wife is also trying to top up her tan but as she works as a medical secretary dealing with dermatology cases she is perhaps over-cautious about sun exposure, however, that didn’t stop her overdoing it a bit yesterday leaving a little pink patch on the small of her back (in the bit she couldn’t reach). She is now happily wearing bikinis she wouldn’t have dared to a year ago — and sometimes only the bottom half. This is partly because in the intervening 12 months she has joined a gym and partly because last year we saw so many examples of women wearing bikinis who just shouldn’t, that she now has greater confidence that she won’t be pointed out as some sort of freak. After all what size 12/14 woman doesn’t feel like that?

As I said, I’m hiding under sunscreen and parasols watching the boobies, and not all of them on women which makes me feel less of a freak. And I’m back writing this blog, partly because it’s the first free time I’ve had in months what with all this business travel: Washington one week, Singapore the next. It’s almost like I don’t know my Witchita from my Wolverhampton.

The other reason is that there is much here to record and comment about which doesn’t include bounce rates (apart from the obvious pun), drop-off (that one too) and entry and exit points (this is getting silly).

If you’re interested, watch this space.

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