I was on the internet yesterday, ignoring my family while I read this news story on the BBC website. Apparently a couple in South Korea were so busy raising a virtual daughter in an online game, that they forgot to feed their real baby and she starved to death. It's not as unlikely as it might sound. If it wasn't for the fact that Amelie can point at the biscuit tin and shout "Bic-Bic" ad infinitum at the top of her voice, we'd never get Lisa off Facebook. But as it is, the only living things around here that are shrivelling up and dying are Lisa's crops in Farmville.

In other news, I was sitting here last night with my hand in my peripherals, having a good rummage around, when I came across a song I recorded more than three years ago. It dates back to 3rd March 2007, and had been missing in action, presumed dead, since my computer blew up a couple of years ago. I hadn't put it on CD because... well, because frankly I didn't think it was much cop, but it turns out there was a copy saved on an external hard drive in the corner of the living room, which Amelie enjoys pulling out from under the table and sticking in her mouth. It's a bit like discovering a lost track by The Beatles. Albeit one that was recorded by Ringo Starr. On an off-day. With low budget equipment.

Anyhoo, it's a Rob Thomas song called 'Ever the Same' and I recorded it two days after being turned down for a job as a fish feeder, which was something of a low point in my career. Lisa had also hit a couple of pot holes in life's road, which is all the more surprising as she can't drive. So it wasn't exactly what Dickens would have called the best of times.

But having rediscovered the recording, I've decided it wasn't quite as rubbish as I'd first thought back in the dark days of 2007, so I've brought it out into the light and set it to some previously unseen footage of Amelie pigletting around on the coffee table last month...


Three years after recording the song, the visuals prove that actually things aren't ever the same.