Dilbert versus Nostrodamus (26th September 2001)

I would certainly never make light of the terrible goings-on in the USA two weeks ago, but I wanted to draw your attention to something. Many UK newspapers who were doing a fairly good job of covering the terrorist attacks with a measure of respect and dignity let themselves down by falling back on the sensationalist issue of "did Nostrodamus predict it?". Nostrodamus, real name "Michel de Notredame", you may recall, was a French scholar who lived five centuries ago and wrote several volumes of predictions (entitled "Centuries"). Well, to be precise, he wrote several volumes of bollocks that some people interpret as predictions that occasionally come true. Alright, he did predict the rise of Hitler (Nostrodamus called him "Hister"), but his prediction of the rise of Napoleon was so vague that it could have been interpreted as the rise to fame of Sachel Distel or Zenedine Zidane. Nostrodamus wrote so many "predictions" of cryptic proportions that I bet if you looked hard enough you could find some tenuous reference to Kylie Minogue getting to number 1 in the UK charts or Bill Gates getting hit in the mush by a custard pie.

On this occasion, Nostrodamus referred to "hollow mountains" (Century X, Quatrain 49) supposedly meaning the two towers of the World Trade Centre, and in the same verse he writes "King to be outside, he will keep far from the enemy" supposedly referring to George 'Dubya' Bush being in Florida at the time. In Century VI, Quatrain 97 he says "at forty-five degrees, the sky will burn, fire approaches the great new city". It was quoted that New York is near the 45° line of latitude, but it fact the city is nearer 41°. There was also a reference to "two brothers torn apart by chaos", but scholars of Nostrodamus say no such verse exists (it was a hoax).

Now, if you want to see something truly spooky (and somewhat unfortunate), track down someone who has a Year 2001 Dilbert desk calendar (one of those that you tear off a page per day). See if they kept the pages for 11th September 2001 and the subsequent days. Nostrodamus...? Pah.

The Euro - good or bad? (16th September 2001)

While in Menorca last week I became aware of the fact that Spain soon enters a period of transition in it's eventual adoption of the single European currency (a.k.a. the Euro). Personally I won't miss the Peseta... the currency has an annoying habit of providing small coins that seem to breed in your pocket. As soon as you get rid of a handful, your next purchase generates another kilogram of copper tiddlywinks and washers.

Personally, I have no idea as to whether the Euro is good for Great Britain - my financial knowledge only goes as far as "how much do I have in the bank?" and "how much can I put in the building society and not go overdrawn?". My wife fills out my tax returns. To me the workings of mortgages are like some numerical conundrum. But as a financial layman, this is why the Euro appeals to me... you won't have to keep changing currencies when you travel around Europe. Great - no more being left with a trouser-leg full of Peseta coins that the bank won't touch. What you don't spend on holiday you simply bring home and spend here. The Italians must be looking forward to it too... the Lira gives prices with ludicrously high numbers of digits (£7 makes you a billionaire in Italy).

However, the Euro would come to Britain with one cautionary thought. It will turn you into your grandparents. Huh? Let me explain... one thing I always fondly remember about my dear departed grandmother, Alice 'Midge' Bradford, was that she always converted everything into 'old money' (pre-decimal). "Ooh, my word" she'd say 15 years after decimalisation, "that's five shillings and sixpence in old money". After the adoption of the Euro, that'll be me... "Seven Euros? That's £4.43 in old money".

Hooray, it's footy time again (19th August 2001)

Was it Perry Como who sung that old Christmas classic 'It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year'? Or was it Andy Williams? Well, whoever it was they were wrong. The Premiership has kicked off again and it started with an Arsenal win (0-4 at Middlesboro). Unfortunately it also started with a win for Somerset's favourite marketing franchise, the odious Moan Utd (no, that isn't a spelling mistake). Mind you, they nearly had their complacency rattled by Fulham's return to the top league, the Cottagers (they can't be happy with that nickname) going ahead twice before the £19 million man with the dodgy knee, Rude van Naselspray, caught a dose of Utd's jammy affliction and netted twice to cheer up all those who'd had a long journey from the South East (no, not the Fulham supporters, the others who'd had a long journey from the South East).

Also of note is the fact that the BBC's Match of the Day is no more, being replaced by ITV's 'The Premiership' hosted by the increasingly smarmy Des Lynham. There have been lots of complaints about it's timing (prime-time Saturday evening, when Cilla used to be organising a lorra lorra blind-dates). ITV say that it will mean that more people can see the program compared to the Beeb's defunct offering. Surely not... most Moan Utd fans will still be queuing on the M42 when it starts. Never mind, by the time the extended highlights air some time after 23:00 they'll be back in their comfy armchairs... in Basingstoke.

More witless attacks on Ferguson's millionaire brats soon.

If it wasn't for the M6 at Birmingham... (26th April 2001)

...then I would willingly drive to Manchester. Unfortunately the traffic jams over a 15 mile stretch can put an extra hour or two on your journey. Even so, I'm beginning to think that flying takes almost as long - although Heathrow to Manchester should take only 35 minutes in the air, when you combine time spent driving to the airport, time spent waiting for the Pink Elephant parking bus, time spent waiting between check-in and boarding, time spent on the plane on the tarmac waiting for takeoff, time spent in holding patterns waiting for air traffic control to sort things out (particularly back into Heathrow), time spent walking from the plane to the taxi... you get my point.

A couple of days ago I had the misfortune to be on a flight that was like a 'Hall of Shame' special. I boarded at 11:30, and the evil iron bird eventually took off at 12:35. Air traffic control delays? No, not that day. A certain airline who shall remain nameless don't take a hard line on hand luggage (well, to be fair, like most airlines). It came to pass that they eventually decided that they couldn't fit all the hand luggage in the overhead lockers, so the cabin crew started to insist that the larger items were removed from the cabin and put in the hold. Hence the delay. To add insult to tardiness, they asked me if I could put my small bag (containing my laptop and not much else) underneath the seat in front of me, so that they could fit the 'bag' of the bloke next to me into the overhead locker. I say 'bag', but to be honest the last time I saw a piece of luggage that big I was watching the film adaptation of 'Around the World in Eighty Days' and David Niven was stuffing his entire wardrobe and two months worth of caviar into it. So, there I sit, devoid of the last remaining scrap of leg-room, because this absolute w*nker can't be bothered to wait for a bag arriving on a conveyor belt sometime later that afternoon (or later that week if it goes via Tokyo).

If it couldn't get any worse, as soon as the seat belts sign went off, the girl sitting next the window has to go the toilet, and she returns when myself and Mr Giant-Holdall have a drink and a sandwich on our little tray tables. And to make matters worse still, I find slices of red pepper stuck in the middle of the chicken sandwiches (see 'Hall of Shame').

The final insult... 35 minutes in a holding pattern coming into Heathrow on the return journey. Suddenly the M6 has some appeal. Next stop in my jet-set life-style is Brussels in early May, and the aeroplane / EuroStar decision has become a bit of a no-brainer.

Honestly, we had no fun at all (9th February 2001)

I've spent the last couple of days trying to convince some fellow Lotus people (those who didn't attend the EMEA Sales Meeting) that I had absolutely no fun whatsoever in Dubai, and that it was more a case of endurance rather than enjoyment. Then some bright spark e-mails everyone back in Blighty a newsletter - and there on the back page are pictures of members of the UK Technology Group beneath a blazing sun riding the water slides at the Wild Wadi water park, right opposite the luxurious Burj Al Arab hotel at Jumeirah Beach (a hotel so expensive that Bill Gates might think twice about having a mineral water from the mini bar).

I think we need to say a few words about the Wild Wadi water park... for starters, it has a very good web site which is well worth a visit. It's unlike any other water park I've been to, and while it's not as good as the one on Sentosa Island in Singapore, it does have two rather outstanding features. The first is that you start at the bottom and make your way 15 metres uphill via a series of very powerful water jets which propel you and your inflatable ring to the top of the rapids. Then, with aching buttocks and an extremely clean bottom (did I mention how powerful those water jets are?) you make your way back down via another series of slides, including the totally dark 'Tunnel of Doom'. The second outstanding feature is the 'Jumeirah Sceirah' - a slide which claims to be the highest and fastest outside of North America... 35 metres high apparently and you can reach up to 80 km per hour (50 miles per hour in old money) on your descent. Personally I can believe that speed to be true... the mark of a man that day was a complete set of friction burns on the back, and the lining of your swimming trunks entangled with your duodenum. You see, no fun at all.

Long live WAP (22nd January 2001)

Who was it who said "reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated"? I don't know, and it doesn't matter, but the point is that reports of WAP's death have also been greatly exaggerated. Let's get this straight... WAP is cool, as long as you find the right use for it. Of course, those who should be promoting WAP have actually done their best to stick the proverbial knife into it. They have promoted the WAP phone's ability to surf the web without mentioning that it doesn't apply to every site... disappoint follows for the poor sap who purchased the item thinking it was his gateway to a mobile world of information, only to find that, actually, it's only certain sites that have been WAP-enabled.

Not that there aren't useful WAP sites... take my experience last Saturday. Could this be the day that Arsenal were going to improve on their rather mediocre performances of late? I wasn't in the best position to monitor their progress, being stuck in the middle of a rather long queue at the Brent Cross branch of Ikea, complete with a full bag of stuff that we didn't intend to buy (no change there then). Remembering my mobile phone service provider offers news updates via SMS, I requested the latest Arsenal score... and seconds later it arrived. "Arsenal 1 - Chelsea 1". Excellent... apart from one small detail. The game between Les Gooners and the West London League of Nations was played seven days earlier. What I wanted was the current state of play in that afternoon's game between Arsenal and Leicester. Salvation came courtesy of WAP. Undeterred by the prospect of entering a URL via the phone's keypad (what the hell, looking at my position in the queue, I had time to bash out a short novel), I accessed Football 365's WAP site (http://wap.football365.com) and got those scores. But, cruel irony... technology succeeds but Sylvain Wiltord hits the post - 0-0 at Filbert Street, but Mr Ferguson's men-in-red continue towards another predictable Premiership title.

Living in the South-East of England brings another great WAP opportunity - namely e-mail. What's that got to do with living in the South-East? Simple... we have traffic jams. My twelve miles to work usually takes about 45 minutes - that's 15 MPH. Lucky me, I have several choices... shall I sit in the jam on the Egham by-pass, or shall I enjoy the one leading up to Chobham Village and then the other one leading up to the traffic lights in Virginia Water? Shall I watch the trains go past in Sunningdale (four during a 20 minute wait is my own personal record), or shall I be so-near-but-yet-so-far from the office as I wait for the trains to plod through Egham. Isn't it amazing that there seem to be so few trains when you're standing on a platform, but so many when the barriers come down across the road? Anyway... WAP and e-mail. Working for Lotus gives me the luxury of using Domino Everyplace, so I can sit in my choice of traffic jam and plough through some of the day's first e-mail before I get to the office. So what if you can't access "Am I Hot or Not" on your WAP phone... think Domino, think traffic jams, think queues in Swedish furniture shops... think WAP.

Spectacular astronomical events obscured by clouds - no. 4 in a series of 4 (10th January 2001)

What words can describe the full lunar eclipse that happened last night? How about... unimpressive? I can't believe I bothered to miss two separate minutes of EastEnders to watch what appeared to be a standard waning gibbous (that's a term for a diminishing convex partial moon) with a thick shroud of water vapour in front of it. Of course, next day's newspapers were full of photos of a clear blood-red moon, presumably taken nowhere near the Camberley area.

Not that I should be suprised by the inopportune arrival of some cloud cover... remember the Leonid meteor showers? Although this phenonemnon was supposedly visible over several nights of November 1999, the two best nights were cloudy. Same goes for the other occasion when the moon glowed red - just under a year ago. However, I will confess to being a bit luckier with the comet Hale-Bopp in 1997. I remember one very clear night, when the celestial traveller (who last passed our way when the Egyptians were building the pyramids) was clear in the sky and was not obscured by the glow of street lamps. But it was off on it's travels again by then... on the date of the closest approach (22nd March 1997, when we had a cosmic near-miss of 122 million miles), it was cloudy. I guess this puts things into perspective if it's ever rained on, say, your wedding day, and you think 'oh, why today of all days?'. Hale-Bopp has been buzzing round the cosmos for 4.6 billion years, and only comes this way every 2,380 years... and when it gets here, the weather is crap.

I'm dreaming of a... (28th December 2000)

...White Christmas? No, actually I'm dreaming of a lie-in. Have you ever tried to explain to a two-year old that when Daddy gets time off work, he doesn't want to wake up at 07:00? The sad irony is that, often during the week (when I do have to get up before 07:00), Daddy's little munchkin decides to have a lie-in herself. But never at weekends, and never during the holidays.

Speaking of White Christmases, it was another case of so near but yet so far... for the second year running. Last year, up in the heights of Camberley, we got about four inches of snow. No-one believed us of course - one mile down the road there was but a measly couple of flakes. But perched high up on a hill as we are, we got a White Christmas a week early. This year it arrived late... on the 28th... bloody typical. We only had about two inches this time, but the rest of England got some as well. Not much, but just enough to bring the motorways and train network to a stand-still. And by late afternoon, it had all gone (bar the stuff that had sat in the shade all day). So, another year, another near-miss, and another chance to laugh at how absurd the lyrics of Bing Crosby's most famous croon are for most of England.

One piece of pre-Christmas news - we took Lauren to a Christmas Carol concert at the church where she was christened and where Maria and I were married. There is a certain hesitancy in taking a two-year old to church, whatever the occasion... but she was fine. She stood on the pew (I'm sure God didn't mind) and bounced along with the singing. Then she joined in with the singing... not knowing the words, she started off with a few la-la-da-das. Then she proceeded onto "Everybody Wants to be a Cat" from 'The Aristocats'. Very seasonal, don't you think...?