I left my soul in south Essex.

I've just been down to The Big Shed In The Middle Of Nowhere and come back with Billy. Billy is, of course, a bookcase, as are his friends Billy, Billy and Billy. Benno, on the other hand, is CD holder. Thisseems to match my unofficial survery of Ikea customers : most of what everyone bought was Billy bookcases, although a few people bought other odds and ends also. It is basically a bookcase shop with pretensions. Exactly why it has pretensions to being a disused aircraft hangar I've no idea, but hey - everyone needs a hobby.

A friend of mine said a while back that a particular visit to Ikea was the gayest thing that had ever happened to him. It must have been a different Ikea, because if being gay was anything like my experience this evening (and that on my previous visit some months ago) you'd all have killed yourselves long since.

Still, I managed to get it all home without obviously breaking anything. Next I have to put the things together and get all the books and boxes of detritus onto them.

Friday: B-movie. Good. In a notable reversal of recent clubbing outings, I noticed several songs we'd played at the Calling three days earlier. Since then . . . hanging about doing not much. Ventured into town yesterday to start the Christmas shopping, and went to WUS in the evening, which was nice and relaxing. Listened to some Colorblind James Experience in the early evening. I got asked about a Canadian punk band Called My Dog Popper while out, and was told they had a song called We're Old We're Fat And We're Slow, which Dave at work's mentioned a few times. He didn't know who it was by, so now I can tell him. Apparently they're worth chasing up, which means that I might need to track down a copy of their album that I saw advertised in MRR in the late eighties - 668 - The Neighbour Of The Beast. I should also probably find We Are The Support Act by I, Ludicrous (still going, fact fans), which also sounds worth a listen.

Unlike several of my friends, I haven't seen The Two Towers yet. I will, though. And not in a filthy hobbit-fancying sense either.

I notice that various sets of plans have been proposed for redeveloping the site of the World Trade Centre. More than one would involve building the world's tallest skyscraper. Nice to see that humility's on the agenda. It'll be interesting to see whether the New York Fire Department once again argues the difficulty of fighting fires at those heights, and it'll be even more interesting to see whether they are again overruled by the men carrying the chequebooks. Last time, the owners of the site - the Port Authority - were their own planning authority, which put them in a fairly cushy position. They have a problem this time, in that people will actually be paying attention. They may (and that's "may", not "will") have to do it properly this time.

( And finally, a tasteless cartoon : )

Twang!!!

Well, I've been out playing at bows and arrows again, and it turns out that the folk from the archery club like me. In fact, they like me so much that they gave me a bottle of wine. Which is nice.

Their pretext was that I'd outshot the rest of the course, which in a tediously technical sense I had - by 20 points (a score of 410 for a Portsmouth round (5 dozen arrows, so a maximum possible score of 600) over 20 metres). They implied that this wasn't so bad for a third session, which was very nice of them.

It turns out that one of their weekly shoots is within walking distance of the house. So . . . do I join their club or not?

Captain's log, supplemental : We've just had a transient power glitch here at Fuckwit Close. Zariba-under-the-stairs, which handles mail and routing, had an uptime of a bit over seven months. Now it has an uptime of a bit over seven minutes. The last time was a power glitch also. It's Maggie's fault, you know. I distinctly remember karmicnull explaining to me, sometime around '89 or '90, that deregulation of the electricity supply industry on the terms imposed was inevitably going to lead to a general decline in the quality of the AC supply and a boom in sales for UPS and mains filtering companies. And how right he was. Take a bow, Simon . . .