The entire month of April slipped quickly and effortlessly through my fingers. I say “effortlessly” because that is precisely how much effort I’ve put into my site this month and for that I am ashamed.

You shouldn’t have to pay the price for this and you won’t, which is why I am extending the deadline on my “bubbler contest” until the 1st of June, so there is still plenty more time to enter. And don’t worry if you’ve already entered, your email still counts very much so and you will continue to have an equal chance with everyone else.

I’ve had loads of emails with questions about the contest, which I will answer here in a mini-FAQ:

Is the contest for real? YES

What’s in it for you? SELF PROMOTION

Do I just send you an email to enter? YES

Will you really post me the bubbler if I win? YES

How will you choose the winners? LITTLE PIECES OF PAPER WITH YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS WILL BE PUT IN A BOWL AND I WILL WITHDRAW 16 OF THEM, ONE FOR EACH PRIZE, FROM 1ST ON DOWN.

Will you announce the winners? JUST THEIR INITIALS AND WILL CONTACT EACH ONE INDIVIDUALLY TO ASK FOR THEIR MAILING ADDRESS

And that’s it for now. Get entering!

While I’m here, a quick update on why I haven’t been here. I’ve been working too much, I’ve been distracted by other things, most notably a book which I will review at some point here, because it deserves to be read and I’ve been sorting out the usual bullshit at my north London lair.

My SKY+ box died a couple of weeks ago and I thought it was gone for good, but I was able to give it a master reset and getting it going again…for about 2 more weeks before it well and truly went to that great gadget shop in the SKY. It was around 5-6 years old, an original V1 Pace box and I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did.

I booked a call out with SKY, which costs £65 and included a replacement box and I really didn’t have a choice. Well, I did, I could have used this as an opportunity to upgrade to SKY HD, but I’m still not convinced its worth the extra dosh with so little proper HD content available.

The SKY engineer was cool and it took him all of ten minutes to swap the boxes and pair the new one up with my card. The box he installed is a PACE V3, with an 80gb hard drive, though I think that some of it is partitioned for SKY Anytime, which is where SKY choose programmes they think are the best of the week and record them to your hard drive in the background. It can be disabled if you don’t like it, but I thought I would give it a go and see what its like. I’m not convinced if you switch it off that it will free up the other half of the hard drive for my recordings, but its worth looking into if the SKY selected shows are crap.

The new box is about a third the size of my old one, its really dinky. It’s also a bit noisier than the old one, either because of the fan or the hard drive and I’m not certain which. It seems to work well so far and isn’t much different from the old one, except for the aforementioned ANYTIME feature.

It’s not just a device that died, but I found out last night that one of my mother’s sisters, my favourite aunt passed away over the weekend. She was nearly 84 and it sounds like she was surrounded by loved ones and went peacefully. Whatever the fuck that means.

I don’t like many of my relatives, and to be honest I downright despise quite a few of them, but not this particular aunt. She was really special and yes, I know people always say nice things about the dead, but I would have said the same last week, when she was among the living. She was consistently kind, generous and loving and was beloved by many, myself and my younger brother among them.

I hadn’t seen her in years, as is true of 99% of my family and its probably been 4-5 years since I spoke to her on the telephone. I would have liked to chat with her, but she’d become quite deaf and the telephone wasn’t really an option.

One of my earliest childhood memories, which is vague and hazy as I would expect of a minor event prior to my 3rd birthday, over 40 years ago to be, is of my aunt visiting us in a house we lived in, in 1965. She took me for a walk up to a nearby supermarket and I can just remember being excited by this unusual outing with an aunt that I loved and trusted. It’s just a small memory, but I still carry it around with me to this day.

Good bye my dear, sweet aunt, you will always be remembered fondly by the many people whose lives you touched, including mine.