The good thing about not being able to sleep at 4 o'clock in the morning is that you come online and discover FANTASTIC e-mails sent to you shortly after midnight. This has brightened me up no end...

"Dear Phil

i am flattered that you feel the need to use my name to sell your website, and that my work has enraged you enough that you feel the need to discredit me, however i work to heal and help people to be positive in life, unlike you. Your thought's about me are untrue, and i thought had been removed me from google and yahoo search's. I see tonight that you have return to using my name in a unture and illegal way to sell your negative thought's about other people. I do not want to have to resort to taking legal action against you, i shall give you one more chance to remove it, i am sure you would have a much happier life if you were less negative and nasty about people and thing's you know nothing about."

Sadly it's not signed, and I'm not sure it's entirely in English either, but the liberal use of apostrophes for no apparent reason can mean only one thing...

It's from SECRET OF LIGHT!!!!!

Although for a while I thought it was Orlaith e-mailing me from inside the Big Brother house.

Anyhoo, it's nice to know that old Secret has been keeping well since our last correspondence. Obviously I'm still struggling to understand what the heck he/she is talking about, but the fact that they've taken the trouble to get in touch again means a lot to me. I'm particularly pleased they don't want to have to take legal action against me. That's a relief. Especially as I'm beginning to wonder if I'm talking to Andrea Foulkes (regression therapist and confirmed charlatan) herself here. She knows Phillip Schofield, and he's not a man you want to get on the wrong side of.

But I think I'll stick to my guns and hold out for a free regression therapy session. It might not change my unhappy life, my negativity, my general nastiness, and my complete ignorance of all things (I think that's an acccurate summing up of the charges), but with a bit of luck it might help me sleep.

You've got to hand it to that Orlaith on Big Brother. The girl's a star. Obviously she's as dull as ditchwater to actually watch, but she's done this to my Telly Critic stats:


I thought I'd done well to more than double my average hits, with a total of 127 unique visitors on Monday, most of them looking for Orlaith in some state of undress, but that was before the girl stepped into the shower naked on Monday night's show. I happened to have used the word 'shower' a couple of posts previously, which was a stroke of luck - I hit 185 unique visitors yesterday, 90% of them Orlaith shower related.

Although my personal favourite came at 11:35pm, after Tuesday night's show, and was a hit for 'big brother maxwell saskia had sex day 28 bottom'. I think he covered all the bases there. I particularly like the way he added the word 'bottom' as a bit of an afterthought.

Anyway, (he said, making full use of Blogger Images, which he'd previously slagged off, by getting the text to flow neatly around the little picture on the right), if you think that the kind of people who do searches for such lowbrow subjects are sad, inadequate individuals with no brainpower, you would of course be wrong. As you'll discover if you click on said image.

Oh yes, my visitors are public school educated.

In other news, I've had an e-mail from the BBC, officially announcing the winners of the Last Laugh competition. It says, and I quote, "If you didn't make it onto the short list, don't loose heart".

Marvellous. I do love these people who e-mail me to tell me my writing's not good enough, whilst simultaneously littering their own efforts with spelling mistakes. I think I'll ask the BBC for a job writing their rejection letters.

I know it's wrong to laugh at such things, but I came across this advert on the web last night...



Is it just me, or is there something inherently funny about Google's ads catering specifically to the victims of nun abuse?

Ok, it's just me then.

But I clicked on the ad anyway, and it led me here. Which really is funny. Not the content of the site, obviously, (and I for one stand shoulder to shoulder here with my nun-abused brothers and sisters in an unflinching display of solidarity), (sorry about the insensitive use of the word 'sisters' there), but simply the fact that a website called Abusebynuns.com actually exists.

I realise I'm digging myself into a hole of bad taste here, so I'll stop. But I must say I like the way their logo resembles a nun in the crosshairs of a sniper's rifle. Or maybe that's just my imagination.



No... I don't think it is.

I'll go and brace myself for another batch of hate mail...

I spent a lot of time yesterday doing endlessly dull research over at Wordtracker, to try and identify the keywords I should be using to attract people to my various websites. As it turns out, it was a waste of time. I already have the keywords I need...

On Friday night, Kinga, Orlaith and Eugene entered the Big Brother house. I give them a brief mention over at the other place on Saturday morning, and what happens..?

I get eleven hits for 'Orlaith naked', plus the following quality search engine hits, all in the space of 24 hours...

orlaith shower [x3]
big brother 6 orlaith naked [x2]
big brother kinga boobs [x2]
kinga minge
orlaith belfast pictures topless
orlaith nude shower
kinga's boobs
orlaith shower pic
orlaith kinga naked [they're not fussy]
orlaith bb topless pictures
pictures of big brother 6 orlaith topless
big brother orlaith shower
orlaith big brother 6 naked
orlaith nude big brother
kinga secret garden picture of boob
orlaith model shoot
big brother orlaith nude
big brother kinga's tits
kinga's tits big brother
orlaith breasts
big brother 6 naked orlaith
orlaith belfast model
orlaith big brother nude
big brother 6 - kinga's boobs
orlaith photo shower
orlaith shows boobs

... as well as one deeply disturbed individual who searched for 'Lisa I'Anson tits'. But I'm ignoring him.

The irony is that I was only saying to Lisa last night that Orlaith does nothing for me and I want her evicted. I've changed my mind. Eugene's got to go, for the simple reason that no one wants to see him naked.

Although on the plus side, he does look like Donna's son...

I've decided to get into internet dating. I mean, being in a relationship for thirteen months is all very well, but sometimes it's just not enough. So I've joined a dating site. I'm sure Lisa won't mind.

Actually, it was her idea (well that's my story and I'm sticking to it). It so happens that one of Lisa's friends (who shall remain nameless for legal reasons) has recently joined such a site, and has requested help from yours truly (resident love guru and romance writer extraordinaire) to pep up her profile with the aim of attracting a better class of bloke. Preferably one that will actually turn up for a date.

So despite the fact that another of Lisa's friends recently dumped her boyfriend after she discovered he'd been going speed-dating (which sounds unlikely, until I mention that she also knows of someone who had a brain aneurism and forgot he was gay. Frankly I think she's making these things up. But I digress...), Lisa handed me the task of tracking down her friend's profile on said dating site, with the aim of rewriting it for her.

Unfortunately I found that you can't browse the profiles unless you're a member. So I was forced (against my will, obviously) to join. But fear not - in an effort to avoid unwanted attention, I decided not to be absolutely honest about myself. So I said I was under 5ft, considerably overweight, with multi-coloured hair and 4 children.

As an extra precaution, I added that I'm looking for a 6'3" widow with no hair. Although of course if there is a 6'3" widow on the site, she'll be thinking all her Christmases have come at once, and will be shaving her head as we speak.

But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. In the meantime I successfully located Lisa's friend. She looked quite attractive. So we're going on a date next Friday.

In other news, this blog had one of its most productive days yesterday, with a total of 78 unique visitors. Which I'd like to claim is down to the lure of my writing, but is in fact because Blogwise have had a technical breakdown, resulting in my blog being permanently stuck on their shortlist of 'recently updated blogs' for the past 24 hours. Which is marvellous, coz it means that 78 people got to see it looking completely crap. There's nothing like making a good first impression.

HALLELUJAH...

I'll say one thing for sitting up until 2am on a Saturday night - sometimes, just sometimes, it results in the solving of a problem. As well as a headache caused by eyestrain, and the ruination of a Sunday morning you planned to spend writing. But hey, my font's back. And it only took four hours of work.

Scouring Technorati for recent references to this issue, led me to blogs such as this one, which at least identified the problem for me. It seems that as of Friday, Blogger have started inserting 'clear' tags around each individual post which are beyond the reach of your template, thus ruining the blogs of people like myself who have chosen not to go with one of the default Blogger templates, and have created their own instead. Not that I'm suggesting this was the reason behind their actions. Not much, anyway.

Anyhoo, the fix quoted on that site didn't work for me, so I searched on until I came to this one, which said "It's astonishingly stupid of Blogger to force arbitrary formatting commands into a text block that is the basic currency of the page" (something I'd agree with if I hadn't promised Chris I wouldn't slag off his employers any more), and finally led me here, where after a bit of discussion, an alternative workaround was proposed.

Half an hour of experimentation later, and I finally got it to work with my template shortly before 2am.

So I'd just like to say that Blogger officially sucks, I refuse to be bullied into using a dull standard template by such underhand tactics, and... um... I wish I'd kept a copy of my original template, because the moment they decide to change it back, I'm screwed.

Right, now I'm really annoyed. I've just published a new post over at the other place, and now that blog's ruined too.

Not only has it inserted a giant white space underneath the title of the post, but it's removed all my gorgeous formatting - my smooth font, my lovely padded spacing between the lines, my indented paragraphs on each post, everything.

And that blog isn't even hosted on Blogspot, I'm paying for that site, dammit!!!

I think I'll go and have a lie down.

After I've sent Blogger another nasty e-mail...

This is not a logo you want to see at the top of a letter on a Saturday morning...



Especially when it's followed by these words...



But fortunately they haven't discovered my illegal taping of pop songs off the radio, it's actually...



So after 14 years of driving and not a single penalty point on my licence, I can now either accept three of the little blighters and a £60 fine, or go to court and plead mitigating circumstances.

As it happens, there were mitigating circumstances. And not just because Lisa was distracting me at the time by talking about Cambridgeshire Christians. I've driven that stretch of the A14 dozens of times, I know full well that there's a 50mph limit on that stretch, and I always slow down. But they were doing roadworks on the bit of road leading up to that section, and I was busy staring at a million cones and 'free recovery starts here' signs, meaning that the '50mph limit ahead' sign went unnoticed.

Frankly they should be grateful I wasn't doing eighty miles per hour. And thanking me for being the only person at the Ben Folds gig not to have had a drink. So I'm not happy.

And talking of not being happy, I've e-mailed Blogger to complain about the fact that since their triumphant launch of 'Blogger Images' yesterday, the font on my blog has been permanently buggered up, and asking what they're going to do about it.

They've responded with:

"Thanks for contacting Blogger Support. Since we cannot always respond personally to every message we get, we encourage you to check Blogger Help, where you can find answers to many common questions."

Marvellous. I do love an automated e-mail which in no way answers your question.

The big news story of the day is that sweaty people are apparently calling 999 to complain about the hot weather. Which is ridiculous. They should wait until they're hit by the golfball-sized hailstones we're meant to be getting later today, then they'll really have something to call the emergency services about.

The other exciting news is of course the success of plucky Brit Andy Murray, who's won his second round match at Wimbledon, beating the number 14 seed in straight sets, and fulfilling the potential we all knew he had. So I'd just like to state for the record that I've always had a lot of faith in Andy, I knew he was something special, and I won't hear a word said against him.

Apart from when I'm slagging him off on my blog. But hey, that was nine months ago. I was a different person back then. I didn't know what I was saying. And besides which, I was ill.

So that's that one cleared up. I can go back to my writing now. As it happens, I wrote a five minute comedy sketch yesterday. Unfortunately it was for a competition for three minute comedy sketches, but you can't have everything. I think I'll add a couple of lines and call it a play.

Today I am mostly listening to...



I got it in a Brighton charity shop on Monday. Obviously I'd never heard of Hot Rod Circuit, and I only bought it for the picture on the cover, but the good news is it's actually very good. Although it turns out the girl on the front isn't in the band.

Anyhoo, against my better judgement, I ended up staying in Brighton on Tuesday. Mainly because Frankie Dettori was riding at Brighton racecourse that afternoon. Sadly I didn't get to meet him though. Possibly because I refused to pay the £12 entry fee. But they were selling his pizzas at Asda, so I bought one of those instead.

I eventually arrived home shortly before 2am on Tuesday night. There were no traffic jams on the A12 this time. Oh no. This time they'd closed the whole road. But it meant I got to see the backroads of Colchester from behind a juggernaut at 35mph.

Yesterday I was busy being useless, but in a coincidence of gargantuan proportions, there was a horse running in the 9:05pm race at Epsom last night called 'Depressed'.

It came second. Beaten by a neck. So that did a lot for my mood. And who was riding the suicidal nag? Yup, our Frankie. That man has a lot to answer for.

After writing my blog yesterday, the evening paper arrived, with the front page headline "GRIDLOCK", a photo of hot people in cars (myself and Lisa sadly not included) and the subtitle "City grinds to a halt as thousands flock to coast".

Apparently at the peak of the jams on Sunday, it was taking people four hours to drive from the outskirts of Brighton to the sea front, and "some visitors vowed never to return to the city after spending hours stuck in traffic". Which is good news - it'll be quieter next time.

But amidst the tales of overheating cars, overheating tempers, and people taking 3 hours to get to the pier from the other end of the road, there is a positive side to this story - ice cream seller Sam Isted says he's never had it so good.

Anyhoo, yesterday evening Lisa and I ventured out onto the streets of Brighton again for a trip to the cinema to see Sin City. Intriguingly, it wasn't our decision to go - we'd actually been asked by Lisa's mother to take her to see it, and despite me questioning whether it was really the kind of movie we should be escorting pensioners to, I was overruled with the words "It's ok, she likes violent films". So I agreed. Mainly because if you find out that you have a possible future mother-in-law who likes violence, you tend to do as she asks.

As it turned out, I quite liked Sin City. Admittedly, everyone in it sounded like they could use a packet of Strepsils, and most of the time you didn't know what was going on, but even so, it was quite entertaining. My favourite moment was about 45 minutes into the movie, when Lisa turned to me and said "It's everything I hate about films, all rolled into one". A couple of slaughter-filled minutes later, her mother added that we should've brought her 6 year old grandson. I think she was joking. But that was before the bit where Bruce Willis rips off a man's penis with his bare hands, so I'm not sure.

On the down side, I couldn't help feeling that Elijah Woods' villain looked like Harry Potter, so the scene in which Mickey Rourke chopped off his arms and legs before feeding his torso to a wolf while he was still alive, lacked resonance for me. I did like Clive Owen's shoes though.

So I give it three and a half hot-dogs out of a possible five. But for an alternative view, you can always click here.

Wimbledon started four hours ago. Are there any British players still in it? Personally I've not yet had a chance to watch any plucky Brits battling their way to failure in straight sets, due to being out in the Brighton sunshine all day.

Yes, that's right, I've been in seven charity shops. But I've only bought one shirt. And it fits me. Probably. I also resisted the obvious temptation to buy a secondhand copy of Michelle McManus's first (and probably only) album. It may have been for charity, but even I have limits.

Oh, have I mentioned that I'm back in Brighton? Lisa and I returned here yesterday afternoon. I'd won another £14.50 on the final day of Royal Ascot, making an overall profit for the week of £80. So the mathematicians amongst you will be able to work out exactly how much I lost on Friday.

Before leaving for the sunny south coast, I spent an enjoyable couple of hours moving heavy bookcases in extreme heat. I'm being forced to clear my hallway so that my landlord can fit new carpets. Not that I don't want new carpets, but where am I supposed to store thirty foot of shelving and books, not to mention a vacuum cleaner with a thick layer of dust, in a flat where it's already difficult to swing a cat. Unless you shave her first. She takes up a lot less room now.

Anyhoo, we left Shotley Gate at 3:30pm, dropped in on my parents to deliver a limp Father's Day offering, and made it to the outskirts of Brighton at 6:35pm. Lisa's flat was little more than four miles away. Unfortunately those four miles of Brighton streets were gridlocked due to the London to Brighton bike ride. I know that, because after crawling at less than walking pace for a mile, we finally reached a sign saying "Advance Notice: London to Brighton bike ride, 19th June", which advised us to avoid Brighton for the day. So that was nice.

We eventually made it to Lisa's flat at 8:10pm, so those four miles only took an hour and a half, and the temperature in the car wasn't much over 90 degrees. So I can't complain. It beats a home sauna any day.

Yesterday Lisa and I travelled down to Southend (sorry, I mean Westcliff-on-sea - it's much posher) to visit my brother and his family. Naturally we were half an hour late, but fortunately they're even worse than we are, so they weren't actually in when we got there. It turned out they'd had an important appointment at the cake shop.

We were soon inside though, and being welcomed by my six year old niece, who sarcastically rubbed in the fact that I haven't visited for a while, by asking "Have you been here before?", and then sticking this sticker on me...



... and telling me she'd chosen it especially "because you like wigs, don't you Phil".

So I take it she's seen the photo of me dressed as Elvis.

Lisa was soon kidnapped to look at Disney princesses on the computer, so I ate one of the Barbie apples I'd bought from Tescos, and accepted a gift of sausages from my sister-in-law.

The evening featured a game of 'Fishes', a complicated pastime which essentially involved violently flapping a duvet in the air and attempting to cause serious injury to a 6 year old. But on the plus side I was assured that "Mummy and Daddy don't mind". So that's alright then.

Afterwards we sat around eating take-away pizza and ice cream, while I told my sister-in-law about the diet I'm on, and she gave me the lowdown on her 24 hour detox plan. She's a big fan of Channel 4's 'You Are What You Eat', she told me as she helped herself to more garlic bread.

Meanwhile, my niece demanded to know if Lisa and I are going to get married, before taking Lisa upstairs and asking if she's going to have a baby. Which was quite sweet, until she added "If you do, you won't give it more attention than me, will you?". Personally I just stayed downstairs and tried to persuade my brother to buy me a flat in Brighton. I think I'll use Lisa's baby-sitting services as a bargaining tool.

We eventually made it home at midnight. It didn't take long - there aren't any speed cameras on the A12.

In an outrageous twist of fate, I actually made a loss of £2 on the horse racing yesterday. Which means that certain people did better than me. I'll be asking Kingster for tips this afternoon. But having backed The Geezer for the Derby, I'm tempted to flog a dead horse (almost literally) by tipping him again today in the 3:05. Which I'll probably regret. I also like Simple Exchange in the 4:20, but the price has collapsed from 9-1 this morning, to around 5-1 as we speak, so I'm obviously not the only one keen on that.

Anyhoo, enough horse raing chat. Yesterday Lisa and I made our way over to Cambridge for a Ben Folds gig...



You may notice that we arrived seven months late, but fortunately we didn't seem to have missed anything. And having already slagged off Mr Folds on this issue once before, I'll say no more about it.

Before hitting the Corn Exchange we dropped in on my pal Helen, who cooked us spaghetti bolognese, showed us a photo of her dressed as a nun, and then drew all over my map of Cambridge city centre. But on the plus side, I bumped into my aunt and learnt that yobbos are ruining Bulgaria for the Saga holidaymakers, and that you need to be immunised before mixing with Asians. I think she'd been at the sherry again. But she did give us a jar of marmalade, so it worth agreeing with her.

As for the Ben Folds gig, it was actually very good. Support came from a guy in a white suit and red baseball cap, who introduced himself as Clem Snide and played a few songs on the guitar, one of which was so good I went straight down to the foyer and bought his CD. At which point I found out his name's Eef Barzelay (Eef???), and Clem Snide's the name of his band. It was quite confusing.

Ben Folds was more straightforward. You've got to hand it to the man - he played for almost two and a half hours with no break, and put more effort into the gig than anyone I've ever seen. Including Steve Brookstein and G4. I felt quite exhausted just watching him. It was worth waiting eleven months for, anyway. The man's a star.

The journey home was brightened up (literally) by a speed camera on the A14 which had the nerve to flash at me purely for breaking the speed limit. It's an outrage, and I wasn't happy. So that's my horse racing profits down the drain. I knew I should've stayed at home.

Day two of Royal Ascot, and a profit of £24. Hurrah! I should be doing this for a living. Especially the way things are going on the writing front. Having been out in Ipswich for most of the day, I discovered late last night that the BBC made this announcement yesterday afternoon about the Last Laugh sitcom-writing competition:

"Right everyone step away from your phones. The short-list has been drawn up and the people have been called. If you haven't received a phone call from us yet then I'm sorry but you haven't made the short-list."

Damn that phone for not ringing. It's another travesty. But on the plus side, I'm sure the word 'shortlist' doesn't have a hyphen, so that's some consolation. The BBC clearly don't know how to write either.

So instead of being contacted with multi-million pound comedy contracts, I'm left fielding e-mails like this one, which arrived yesterday:

"Hi there, I'm on the look out for an MB boardgame called 'Spider and Fly', which you review on this site. Do you or your friend have one of these games to sell? Many thanks, Lewis."

Funnily enough, I do have a review of that game on my site. Frankly it's the best thing on there. And anyone who can find it, without resorting to the search facility, wins a major prize. No, really. Your time starts now...