The northlondonhippy

Archive for July, 2009

That’s a fairly bold state­ment up there in the title. How will I ever live up to its promise?

Sim­ple, its com­pletely trans­formed how I inter­act with the inter­net. (And please note not “sim­ples”. I am sick of that shit already).

Again, another fairly large claim about a “com­plete trans­for­ma­tion” of my surf­ing habits.

I ain’t lyin’ neither.

In the old days, I used a browser to explore the inter­net. I’d plug some­thing into a search engine and let it trans­port me to another site, which might then lead me to yet another site, and so on and so forth, until I returned to the search engine to start again. Of course, I book­marked sites too, but the point is I had to think of a site I wished to check out, then nav­i­gate to it again.

Over time, I devel­oped my own inter­net rit­u­als, vis­it­ing my favourite sites on a reg­u­lar or semi-regular basis, check­ing for new con­tent. This style of surf­ing meant I would occa­sion­ally arrive at a site to dis­cover it hadn’t changed since my last visit, but I wouldn’t find that out until the page loaded and wasted some of my valu­able online time.

And then, I dis­cov­ered RSS feeds and read­ers. Sud­denly, I didn’t have to visit all of my favourite sites to check for any­thing, instead I waited for their head­lines to arrive in my reg­u­larly refreshed RSS reader. If I wanted to explore the arti­cle fur­ther, I could click once and eas­ily open the page in my browser.

But RSS read­ers don’t work in real time, there’s no push-type sys­tem to receive the head­lines. Instead, they refresh auto­mat­i­cally at a pre-defined inter­val or if you are a bit obses­sive like me, man­u­ally refresh­ing every 10 sec­onds just in case. It worked, but it wasn’t perfect.

Then I dis­cov­ered Twit­ter and Twit­ter clients. The “client” part is impor­tant, because if you’re access­ing Twit­ter via your browser, you are miss­ing out on some of its use­ful­ness. I’ll come back to that.

Twit­ter is more than just read­ing about what peo­ple had for break­fast. There are other meals and snacks to read about too.

No, what I really mean is beyond fol­low­ing indi­vid­u­als, you can also fol­low web­sites. Web­sites with RSS feeds can marry them up with a ser­vice like Twit­ter­Feed and auto-generate a tweet link­ing to new con­tent pub­lished on their site.

I use Twit­ter­Feed here on my site and it auto-generates a tweet to my Twit­ter account, @nthlondonhippy with the title & first line of the post, along with a short­ened bit ly link to the full text.

Admit­tedly my site is not the busiest in the world, but if you are fol­low­ing me on Twit­ter, you will be alerted to any new con­tent. Even if you are not fol­low­ing me, you still may dis­cover the tweet and it might even be how you ended up here right now.

I would spec­u­late that around a third of the accounts I fol­low on Twit­ter are auto-generated from web­sites I reg­u­larly visit. Head­lines and links flow onto my computer’s desk­top via my pre­ferred Twit­ter client, which at present is TweetDeck.

I fol­low many news out­lets, loads of the Guardian newspaper’s Twit­ter accounts, the New York Times, var­i­ous Apple and gad­get sites, celebrity news sites, con­spir­acy sites, all sorts really. My tastes are var­ied and diverse, but luck­ily so are the choices avail­able to every­one on Twit­ter. If you’re inter­ested in some­thing, chances are there’s a Twit­ter feed (or 20!) that would cater to you.

Twit­ter is also a fright­en­ing good source for break­ing news. As Twit­ter exists in the “nearly now” and moves in real time, when some­thing hap­pens any­where in the world, it doesn’t take long for it to bub­ble up to the surface.

There’s an organ­i­sa­tion that uses Twit­ter for just this pur­pose, @BreakingNews — BNO News, which is run by a 19 year-old in the Nether­lands. They’re scary fast and often beat the more tra­di­tional old-style media out­lets by 10–15 min­utes. In the age of “now”, that’s quite an edge.

And yes, I do work in the old-media, but it doesn’t worry me. The smart old-media out­fits will adapt and change with tech­nol­ogy and most of them have started already. Twit­ter is re-writing the rules here too.

This is where a Twit­ter client really comes into its own. If you’re log­ging onto Twit­ter via their web­site, you are pre­sented with a fairly usable inter­face, with one flaw, it doesn’t refresh auto­mat­i­cally. To see new tweets, you must man­u­ally refresh the page. It works, but its not ideal.

A Twit­ter client is a stand-alone app, that sits inde­pen­dently on your desk­top and they can refresh in real time or nearly. Many of them are feature-rich and allow you to do all sorts of cool things with Twit­ter, often with one-click.

I have been using Tweet­Deck for a while, but there are oth­ers avail­able, most of them have free ver­sions, so you can try them out and see if they work for you. I like Tweet­Deck because it is col­umn based and is col­lapsable into a sin­gle col­umn, which is how I run it most of the time.

With Tweet­Deck, you can have sep­a­rate columns for your main feed, your men­tions, your DMs plus you can cre­ate other columns to fil­ter your stream even more. You can search with a hash­tag and see real-time results and you can cre­ate groups from your main fol­low­ers list too.

You can also do things like reply, send a DM or retweet with one click, as well as fol­low­ing and unfol­low­ing with the same ease.

With it set up like this, a quick occa­sional glance keeps me up to date and can alert me to any­thing that might inter­est me, while I do other things on my com­puter. Like write this post.

While I’ve been work­ing on this fine piece of Twit­ter related prose, I’ve helped some­one with an iMovie ’09 ques­tion and replied to sev­eral tweets addressed directly to me. I don’t see it as a dis­trac­tion, but rather it aug­ments what­ever I’m doing and in this case, actu­ally informs and enriches it.

If I have any sort of ques­tion that I haven’t been able to answer with more tra­di­tional means, like search engines or forum posts, I’ll tweet it. Before long, an answer will come back, one that wouldn’t have been easy to find any other way. Call it the col­lec­tive knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence of every­one inter­act­ing on Twit­ter at that moment, or the “hive mind” if you will, but what­ever you call it, it is a quite pow­er­ful tool.

You can instantly col­lect opin­ions and reac­tions to some­thing from a broad cross sec­tion of the planet, or find local knowl­edge of an event or sit­u­a­tion right now.

Twit­ter has become my point of call for just about every­thing online. I use it to keep track of the news, of web­sites I like and sub­jects that mat­ter to me. I engage in dia­logue with other, like minded peo­ple, shar­ing my own knowl­edge while at the same time, ben­e­fit­ing from other’s.

More sig­nif­i­cantly, I don’t surf in the same way I used to; I don’t really browse using a browser any more. Instead of seek­ing out sub­jects of inter­est to me, I have them streamed onto my desk­top con­tin­u­ously and in real-time, cherry pick­ing the spe­cific pages I want to see and only then open­ing them up in my browser.

Just as the inter­net has evolved in the last 10 years, from slow dial-up con­nec­tions with mainly text-only pages to fast, always on-broadband and media-rich con­tent, our ways of inter­act­ing with the inter­net have changed too.

Twit­ter has become my inter­net aggre­ga­tor, my media and infor­ma­tion fil­ter. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Is it too soon to tell?

How about you?

Has Twit­ter changed your surf­ing habits? Do you use it as I do? Or have you found some other ben­e­fit I may be over­look­ing? I’d gen­uinely like to hear from any­one who might have any thoughts, so please feel free to tweet me and include my Twit­ter ID: @nthlondonhippy in your tweet, to make sure I see it and respond. Thanks!

You might not have heard, but Michael Jack­son kicked the bucket recently. You’d think that sort of news would get around.

In truth, it did get around, shock­ingly fast. Thanks to TMZ.com and Twit­ter, the sad news spread around the world at the speed of tweet.

And just for today, MJ doesn’t mean mar­i­juana here, it stands for Michael Jackson.

I was work­ing the night he died, just head­ing into the office as the news broke.

I was early and paused out­side the build­ing to have one last smoke before going to my desk. As I flicked through a Twit­ter app on my iPhone. I caught one of the first tweets that stated MJ had been rushed to hos­pi­tal in an ambu­lance with a sus­pected heart attack.

A col­league of mine joined me at this point and as he lit up a cig­a­rette of his own, I told him what I had just read and we started spec­u­lat­ing on “what if” it turned out to be the worst case and he was dead.

For both of us, work­ing overnight in a news­room, MJ’s death trans­lated into utter fuck­ing chaos for many, many hours. What­ever the out­come, I knew it was going to be a nasty-assed night.

In real­ity, it exceeded my expectations.

Beyond that, the rest of my night at work is not really impor­tant. It was yet another busy one, deal­ing with a large break­ing story. I’ve had count­less nights like that.

It wasn’t until after that night, and the sub­se­quent few at work, that I really had the chance to con­sider the sig­nif­i­cance and mag­ni­tude of his death. That’s not meant to be an over­state­ment, its huge news that will carry on run­ning for a long time, as will MJ Inc. which will exploit his pass­ing even more than the media ever could.

Before you start think­ing I’m some mega-fan of MJ’s, I’d like to take a moment to point out that I’m not. I didn’t hate his music either and I can appre­ci­ate his unde­ni­able tal­ent, I was just never a fan of his solo stuff.

As a child, I did like the Jack­son 5, but it was prac­ti­cally children’s music. A-B-C, its easy as 1–2-3… It was like Sesame Street does Motown, before Sesame Street existed.

I liked some of his music videos, because they were inno­v­a­tive, ground was bro­ken with sev­eral, but I never bought an MJ record.

I should also men­tion that I believed the alle­ga­tions about him. Always did, still do. Per­haps its just my view of the smoke+fire equa­tion, but every­thing I read about it, makes me think there’s some­thing to it.

Every­one seems to be skip­ping over that part of the story right now, per­haps I should too.

I’m old enough to have vivid mem­o­ries of Elvis Pres­ley dying. Its dif­fi­cult to really explain how momen­tous this was at the time. Elvis was even younger than MJ when he died, all bloated, pinch­ing a loaf while squat­ting on the bowl.

Not a pretty picture.

Elvis was big when he was alive, they didn’t call him “the King” for noth­ing, but in death Elvis was even big­ger. You only have to look at his estate’s accounts to see that he’s grossed more money since he died than he ever did alive.

Now, think of the “King of Pop”, or MJ Inc. as I’ve been think­ing of it. MJ’s music is more mod­ern, his audi­ence is still on the young side. Elvis’s audi­ence was mature when he ate his last fried banana sand­wich, yet he has still kept on selling.

Also, MJ’s music sounds more mod­ern, it can eas­ily sit on the radio along side music being released today. An Elvis song sounds old, because they pretty much all are now; per­haps “dated” would be a more appro­pri­ate description.

I liked Elvis, I thought he was cool, at least until his 1968 come­back spe­cial. If you’ve never seen it, it really is worth your time. After that, he kind of became a par­ody of him­self, which was sad to see. I do have one Elvis CD, a com­pi­la­tion of his Num­ber 1 hits.

And even though I like Elvis, I’ve still man­aged to make a cou­ple of jokes at his expense. Imag­ine the MJ jokes I could make; or bet­ter yet, don’t imag­ine, just think of some you’ve already heard from your mates.

Only the really funny ones, please.

Its too soon, we have to con­tinue to feign rev­er­ence for a while longer, before we can stop whis­per­ing the jokes and speak them out in full voice, in a crowded room, to thun­der­ous laugh­ter with­out a hint of shame. Try it now and all you’ll get are muf­fled gig­gles and unde­ni­able gasps.

No one dubbed MJ the “King of Pop”, the title was self-anointed fol­low­ing a spon­ta­neous intro­duc­tion when being pre­sented with an award. Once adopted, MJ’s PR peo­ple forced the media to refer to him as “King of Pop” and after a while it stuck.

Now, no one could take that crown away from him if they tried.

His death was tragic, as is any death at a rel­a­tively young age, but his is made more so because of his immense tal­ent. If ever there was a tor­tured artist…

MJ didn’t have a con­ven­tional child­hood. How could he when he was rehears­ing and per­form­ing from such a young age. His father sounded like quite a taskmas­ter, which is polite speak for moti­vat­ing Michael and his broth­ers by beatin’ on their ass(es).

Michael told Oprah as much on tv, so it must be true.

MJ was screwed up, dys­func­tional even, but I believe the cur­rent, accepted term to describe him is: eccentric.

The prob­lem with being the King, be it Elvis or MJ, is no one ever says “no” to you. For Elvis, it was fatty foods and pre­scrip­tion drugs, for MJ, well we can be fairly cer­tain it wasn’t fatty foods.

If we believe what we’re read­ing in the media, then MJ was using all sorts of doc­tor pre­scribed good­ies that most likely killed him. Most dis­turb­ing is the report of one of the drugs being Propinal (AKA Diprovan), a pow­er­ful anaes­thetic that should only be admin­is­tered in a hos­pi­tal because it is a con­tin­u­ous IV drip and requires full mon­i­tor­ing by a qual­i­fied doc­tor. The risks include res­pi­ra­tory arrest, which is fancy doctor-speak for: shit, he’s com­pletely stopped breathing!

Fuck. Why didn’t I hear of this before? Talk about a celebrity endorse­ment! Where can I get my own pri­vate med­ical doc­tor to come round and make a few days just zip right by, while I’m comatose and prob­a­bly mil­lime­tres from death? All the cool kids are going to want to do some POP (PrOPinal = POP as in the King of, its new, street name).

How messed up in the head do you have to be to want to be dosed up like you were hav­ing your appen­dix removed? How much would you want to escape both the entire world and yourself?

And what sort of licensed physi­cian would admin­is­ter that to some­one pri­vately, in their own home? Don’t they take an oath that says some­thing like, “First, do no harm?”

Play­ing with anaes­thet­ics sounds seri­ously harm­ful to me.

Which brings me back to where I started, with this becom­ing an ongo­ing news story. One of the biggest, most con­tro­ver­sial pop stars in the world died sud­denly, pos­si­bly at the hands of some­one else.

Yes, I am talk­ing murder.

And so is the LA Police, or so it would seem to me. Just because they say they don’t sus­pect foul play, doesn’t mean they don’t sus­pect some­thing foul happened.

If I was to gam­ble, I’d say some­one will end up being charged in con­nec­tion with his death. Some­one will become known as the man (or woman) who killed Michael Jackson.

And even though his funeral and pub­lic memo­r­ial are today, this story will run for years and years.

Expect more rev­e­la­tions about his pri­vate life to be com­pet­ing with the twists and turns in the legal bat­tles, crim­i­nal and civil, while he con­tin­ues to break records for music sales and MJ Inc. makes hun­dreds of millions.

What does it say about our soci­ety that we can wor­ship some­one for their tal­ent, while being fas­ci­nated by their eccen­tric­ity, yet repulsed by their alleged proclivities?

As a char­ac­ter, MJ is about as com­plex and rich a tapes­try as you’re likely to find.

And what does it say about our soci­ety that so many tal­ented peo­ple, in so many dif­fer­ent areas of the arts, are so trag­i­cally fucked up? MJ’s not the first mega-star to suc­cumb to such a sad end.

He won’t be the last, either.

I flirted with Twit­ter for around 6 months before I prop­erly signed up and started tweet­ing. I didn’t really get it at first, which is not unusual, for it has become a vir­tual sub-culture on the inter­net, with its own rules and eti­quette, that must be observed if you wish to play a part.

By rules, I don’t mean any­thing offi­cial, per­haps con­ven­tions or an infor­mal code of prac­tise would be more accu­rate, but for sim­plic­i­ties sake, I’ll stick to “rules”.

As I’ve used Twit­ter, I’ve devel­oped my own set of rules, or rather they’ve evolved as I’ve learned bit by bit what works for me.

And that’s what I believe is the key to Twit­ter, learn­ing what “works for you”. Dif­fer­ent peo­ple use it in dif­fer­ent ways and I’m going to share few things I’ve picked up since I started tweeting.

Fol­low­ing people:

At first, I really didn’t know who to fol­low beyond @wossy and @stephenfry and while they are both enter­tain­ing and pro­lific tweet­ers, it wasn’t enough to make Twit­ter worth my time. And its one thing fol­low­ing celebri­ties, they expect your atten­tion and ado­ra­tion, but how do you find other peo­ple to follow?

I was a bit shy about fol­low­ing peo­ple at first, after all you are choos­ing to learn a great deal about some­one who is a ran­dom stranger on the inter­net, but I’m far less so now.

When I started, I only really fol­lowed peo­ple who fol­lowed me first. Silly, eh? Don’t be afraid to fol­low some­one if you want to, even if their updates are pro­tected with a pad­lock. Mostly, that’s to keep out spam­mers and porn­bots, not gen­uine peo­ple like you. Occa­sion­ally, an account is truly pri­vate, but I’ve yet to per­son­ally encounter one.

Nearly all of us are on Twit­ter because we want to be fol­lowed. And who wouldn’t want some cool rockin’ hippy like me trail­ing them in cyber­space? Now tell me, what colour is your thong today?

Unfol­low­ing:

Occa­sion­ally, I unfol­low some­one and if it is you I unfol­lowed, I don’t mean any dis­re­spect. The biggest rea­son I unfol­low peo­ple is they tweet too often and its mean­ing­less crap — and that’s my job on Twitter!

Recently, I’ve unfol­lowed peo­ple because of the con­tent of their tweets. I’m rarely offended, so if you man­aged to offend me, you’ve said some­thing extremely loath­some. And I’ve unfol­lowed peo­ple who’ve signed up for adver­tis­ing tweets — I don’t want your stream to be inter­rupted by a word from YOUR spon­sor. It reduces Twitter’s value for everyone.

Fol­low­ers:

Its not a num­bers game. Don’t be suck­ered into think­ing that it is.

At first, I was con­cerned about how many fol­low­ers I had, and what peo­ple would think of me, if I didn’t have many. I soon learned the num­ber of peo­ple fol­low­ing you doesn’t mat­ter as much as the qual­ity of your fol­low­ers. And if the qual­ity of your tweets is high, you will attract fol­low­ers soon enough.

If you have a smaller num­ber of like-minded peo­ple fol­low­ing you, that beats mil­lions of ran­dom fol­low­ers any day.

If I cared about the num­bers, I’d let all the spam­mers and mar­ke­teers con­tinue to fol­low me, but I don’t — I block them. If I did leave them in place, it would prob­a­bly dou­ble my num­ber of followers.

If you fol­low me, I won’t auto­mat­i­cally fol­low you back. I might fol­low you, but only after I’ve had a look at your pro­file to see if your style of tweets would be inter­est­ing to me. If I don’t fol­low you, please don’t be offended. I only take a quick look and then make a snap deci­sion. Some­times I get it wrong.

And if you want me to fol­low you, just send me an @ mes­sage and I will. There are too many “online mar­ket­ing spe­cial­ists” who can help me make money on Twit­ter try­ing to fol­low me, or girls who want to show me their sexy pri­vate pic­tures, for it to be sen­si­ble to auto­mat­i­cally fol­low back.

Find­ing people:

I stum­ble upon new peo­ple all the time, in many dif­fer­ent ways.

Some­times, some­one using a hash­tag I’m track­ing will catch my attention.

I often look at who other peo­ple are fol­low­ing or fol­lowed by as well. And on occa­sion, I see some­one I’m fol­low­ing exchang­ing @ mes­sages with some­one and while fol­low­ing the con­ver­sa­tion thread, the new per­son catches my attention.

A lot of peo­ple think #fol­lowfri­day is another good way to find new peo­ple, as its the day to rec­om­mend new peo­ple for you to fol­low. I have to be hon­est, I still don’t really get the eti­quette of the whole thing. To me, every one of the nearly 500 accounts I’m fol­low­ing are worth it, or I wouldn’t be fol­low­ing them. So I choose peo­ple to rec­om­mend, know­ing I’ve prob­a­bly unin­ten­tion­ally left some­one very wor­thy out, or I’ve embar­rassed some­one by rec­om­mend­ing them. Clearly, I’m too neu­rotic to be play­ing in pub­lic with strangers.

My tweets:

I make a lot of jokes, or at least I try to, but some fall flat on their faces. I am occa­sion­ally seri­ous, sin­cere, angry (more than occa­sion­ally), but mostly I am sar­cas­tic with a dash of irony.

I tend to treat Twit­ter like one giant open-mike night and let my inner-comedian run wild. If you worked with me or hung out with me in per­son, it wouldn’t be much dif­fer­ent, only I would type less.

The impor­tant thing is I don’t tweet any­thing that I would be embar­rassed or ashamed of later. I’m polite and friendly to oth­ers, but most impor­tantly I am true to myself.

It helps that I’ve blogged a long time and have learned how much of myself to share with the wider world. Too fuck­ing much!

DM’s and @ messages:

I try to reply to all I receive, as long as you are not offer­ing me a free Mac­Book Air or telling me how to get 16K fol­low­ers in a week, and make money doing it!

If I haven’t replied to your mes­sage, its because I prob­a­bly missed it. And Twitter’s not per­fect, as some mes­sages and tweets get missed out from client to client. I know this because I use a vari­ety of meth­ods to read my tweets and mes­sages and I can see that some­times things aren’t exactly the same from client to client or device to device.

Twit­ter is fast mov­ing plus I keep weird hours most of the time so I do occa­sion­ally miss things.

If its impor­tant, mes­sage me again — I’d rather have your mes­sage twice, then have you think I was ignor­ing you.

I’m happy to hear from any­one, espe­cially if you’re in Nige­ria or a mem­ber of the US mil­i­tary in Iraq and look­ing to trans­fer large sums of cash into my bank account.

Invest time

You need to prop­erly invest time inter­act­ing on Twit­ter. You can’t just send the same tweet over and over, sell­ing your prod­uct or ser­vice. Peo­ple won’t pay atten­tion, they’ll clas­sify you as noise.

Start out slowly, grad­u­ally build­ing your net­work. Give more than you receive on Twit­ter, if you can answer someone’s ques­tion accu­rately, then do it. Don’t be self-centred or self-serving — peo­ple can smell it a mile off and will avoid you.

Know what you want from Twit­ter:

This is the best advice I’ve found on using Twit­ter, so I will pass it along. Think about what you want to get out of Twit­ter and be focused on that.

If you want to extend your social net­work, or use it to pro­mote a prod­uct or ser­vice, go for it, but do it well. There are many guides avail­able on how best to use Twit­ter for your busi­ness. Heed their advice.

I won’t lie, I joined to pro­mote my web­site and “brand”. Are you shocked? Sad­dened? Will you not look upon me with the same ado­ra­tion you had for me yes­ter­day? I’m crushed.

Its worked, I’ve seen a dra­matic upward spike in vis­i­tors to my site since I started tweet­ing regularly.

What I didn’t expect but found any­way, is a com­mu­nity of extremely nice, kind, help­ful, gen­uine people.

I’m quite reclu­sive by nature and more than a bit of a loner, but I find myself exchang­ing @ mes­sages with peo­ple quite fre­quently. Its an unan­tic­i­pated, yet wel­come ben­e­fit of being a mem­ber of the Twit­ter community.

Now, I won­der how many of them would loan me some money? I don’t need a lot, just a few grand to get this shy­lock off my back. You don’t want to see a cer­tain north Lon­don based hippy with shat­tered knee-caps, do you?

Dig it, hep cats. Your hippy’s back and he’s big­ger, bad­der and higher than ever!

Ok, some of that first state­ment may not be true. Please allow me to decon­struct it for you:

- I haven’t been any­where, there­fore I can’t be “back”

- I’m still the same height I’ve been since I was 16. I’m not “big­ger”, unless you count my ego and I don’t.

- I’ve always been pretty bad, short of mur­der­ing some­one, I don’t think it would be pos­si­ble for me to be “badder”.

- I’m always high, so how could be “higher”? “Higher” than what?

So basi­cally, I’ve already wasted 30 sec­onds of your valu­able surf­ing time with utter non­sense and bull­shit. What a start!

Truth is, much like Lon­don, my brain is a bit fried from the heat. This week’s been a bit unbear­able. And don’t for­get the humidity!

How could I ever for­get the sick­en­ing, thick heavy feel of the atmos­phere around me this week? It would be fine if I was on hol­i­day in the Med on a sandy beach, lying in the shade with frozen daiquiris brought to me when­ever I snapped my fin­gers, but I’m not. Instead, I’m stuck in my north Lon­don ghetto hell.

My lair is bril­liant in the win­ter, it holds on to heat like nobody’s busi­ness, but in the sum­mer that qual­ity is a curse. Also, I have a small, south­ern fac­ing con­ser­va­tory, which acts as a super-efficient solar heater for the entire house. It hit a balmy 46 degrees C in there this week, which eas­ily boosts the over­all temp in my house to 32 or 33 degrees C.

In other words, fuck­ing hot!

And before you ask, the con­ser­va­tory does have blinds, on the ceil­ing and win­dows, light coloured, but they don’t seem to make a dif­fer­ence. I’m con­sid­er­ing replac­ing them with totally opaque blinds, that reflect light and heat. I’ve thought about it before, but its a big job that I couldn’t do myself.

Any­way, I’ve got count­less fans, a cou­ple of dehu­mid­i­fiers (which rock!) and a giant air con­di­tioner, which help a bit, but can’t com­pete with the fierce effects of the con­ser­va­tory. I can just about make it com­fort­able to sit on the sofa in my liv­ing room, but so much as shift posi­tion or god-forbid stand up, and its sud­denly like enter­ing a sauna.

Lon­don wasn’t built for trop­i­cal weather, cer­tainly my 100+ year old house wasn’t. Its early in the sum­mer to be swel­ter­ing like this.

I don’t see how any­one can deny cli­mate change when they have litres of sweat run­ning off their fore­heads and into their eyes. Trust me, it stings.

I won­der if I could get plan­ning per­mis­sion to put a swim­ming pool into my tiny back gar­den. Clearly noth­ing Olympic sized, just a small plunge pool for cool­ing off. How much of a bribe would it take? And how much would the pool cost?

All more than I would want to spend.

One just has to accept that its going to be a long, hot, hor­ri­ble sum­mer in the city and do what­ever you can to just get through it.

And if the heat doesn’t getcha, there’s always the swine flu.

Health author­i­ties in the UK announced this week that swine flu can now not be con­tained, and they are expect­ing 100,000 new cases a day by the end of August. I also read that as many as 40 peo­ple a day could be dying from it in that time as well. Shouldn’t we be panicking?

We’re not pan­ick­ing because its all very abstract. It will become much scarier when you hear about swine flu tak­ing some­one you know. If this is going to be as bad as they say, we’ll all find our­selves in the posi­tion of know­ing a vic­tim even­tu­ally. Oh dear.

So far, there have only been 4 deaths from swine flu in the UK and all of them have had the fol­low­ing code used to describe their deaths: they also suf­fered from under­ly­ing health issues. In other words, you’re more likely to die if you have some­thing else seri­ously wrong with you.

That prob­a­bly won’t always be the case and it will start killing oth­er­wise healthy, fit peo­ple. Ut oh.

Damn, I’ve come over all apoc­a­lyp­tic. Well, when faced with the fires of hell and a pig-based plague from Satan, do you blame me?