I've been thinking about music today. A third of my degree is in classical music. I'm pretty good on Mozart, then I skip a bit until my knowledge gets a lot better with Berlioz and the late Romantics. I'm also pretty well clued-up on English music from Purcell through Elgar/Delius/Holst. But I've always had an artistic problem with classical music, and I've never quite been able to put my finger on it.

Today I realised: it's fucking boring.

Not all of it: the more populist bits of Mozart and Elgar, for example, are great. But most is dull, dull, dull. All these symphonies and things were written before recording was invented. People rarely heard music, and when they did they wanted a good, hour-long shot of it. Today we can listen to whatever music we like when we like, so it doesn't have to be listened to all in one go. Long compositions are dead - I've always struggled to listen to them anyway - I mean, who in the modern world can honestly say they don't drift off a bit in the second movement of Beethoven 5? I think the best way to listen to classical music is on those compilation CDs that offer "Best of" excerpts. You know, "I Really Love Wagner 5".

Perhaps there are a few people out there who genuinely like listening to full-length classical works. That's fine - let them have their Bruckner. The rest of us are waiting for the new Franz Ferdinand album, which, I need hardly remind you, is out next week.

Trillian seems to be enjoying university, which is a relief. For the benefit of those readers of this blog who have recently started their higher education, I present ten of my favourite memories of my time in Bangor, City of Learning¹

1. Sitting in my armchair in my room in Plas Gwyn, eating my lunchtime pie from the pie shop and looking out the window at the fantastic view I had of the high Carneddau - watching cloud scud over the summit plateau of Carnedd Llewelyn, trying to remember all the peaks.

2. Abusing the trust Bruce had placed in me one weekend my giving me his room key. Teaming up with Alex and Clive, emptying his room completely.

3. Doing the Fourteen Peaks with Bruce, Matt, Clive and Dan.

4. Getting mashed in the Union every Friday night, then going out walking the next day. Jonesy trudging up the Gribin with his sunglasses on, going 'ooooh fuck' and stopping to be sick over the lip of a 100 metre drop.

5. Jonesy getting stuck doing an unnecessary climb on a short section of the north ridge of Tryfan. Me to Bruce: 'ha ha, Jones is going to die!' Bruce to me: 'shut up, I think he is.'

6. Saving Bruce's life by wedging myself in a gully as he came tumbling down it, also on Tryfan. To this day he denies the simple truth that if it wasn't for me he'd be dead, instead choosing to believe that 'friction' was 'slowing him down'.

7. My 20th. Getting off with cross-eyed Tamsin while her boyfriend was in the loo.

8. My 21st. Actually, I only remember it in principle and on the basis of reconstructions put together by the slightly less drunk participants.

9. Getting kicked in the back of the head by Ian at the climax of The Boy and the Blindman.

10. Playing the piano in pubs on Anglesey, Jen Pearson singing.

Some kind of degree thing was going on in the background during these events. What was that all about?

^{1. Bangor City Council bagged that name for the town just after I left, which doesn't leave much for, say, Cambridge. 'City of Weird People', maybe? 'City of Effete Traitors'? 'City of Not Having Much Of A Social Life'? Actually I think the Cantabridgieniensionians or whatever they call themselves would be best off getting away from the 'City of..' approach altogether. They'd be better off with 'Cambridge - Fuck Me, It's Cold In The Fens'. Other university towns could take a similar approach. So, for example: 'Durham - We Still Can't Believe Cambridge Rejected Us. No, We're Not Bitter, It's Just That It's So Unfair. We'll Show Them - We'll Show Everyone.... Twitch, Twitch'.}

OK, OK, so this is going to be another post about beer. Well, it's not about beer as such, but the glorious nectar is tangentially involved. This post is about Richmond Co-op reaching its nadir.

If you know Richmond Co-op, you'll realise I'm talking about a pretty impressive kind of nadir. I used to be all in favour of the co-operative principle: employee owned company works hard to make profits which are then split between workers, customers and charities, with no fat-cat shareholder capitalists getting a slice of the pie. The problem is that by opting out the capitalist system they've become deeply uncompetitive. The goal of the Co-op is simply to continue to exist rather than to make as much profit as possible.

The result of this is that Co-op management - at least in Richmond - is jaw-droppingly, stunningly, record-breakingly incompetent. As long as they can survive, they don't try to go any further. So they have a dozen checkouts but only staff two at a time, or maybe three if they're flat out busy. Staff don't know where stuff is outside their own section. At peak periods they don't bring in extra staff or do an 'all hands to the checkouts' call like Tesco does. They leave snotty notes on the grapes ordering shoppers not to sample the fresh produce. They spend thousands upgrading POS gear that never gets used. Their veg is crap and the deli staff don't know what they're talking about.

The nadir of which I speak happened earlier today. I'd gone to one of the aisle-end coolers for some cold beer. I noticed that the cooler was full of brown ale and bitter - Black Sheep, Batemans, Theakstons. Bitter shouldn't be refrigerated. All the bottles of lager - Stella, Grolsch, Nastro Azzuro - were on the shelf, getting nice and warm when they should have been refrigerated. In a spirit of helpfulness, I spoke to one of the hollow-eyed supervisors.

'Excuse me, do you know you're supposed to refrigerate lager, but not bitter?'

There was a long pause, presumably while she stopped breathing in order to free up enough brain power to parse a sentence containing both the interrogative case and a conjunction. For a scary moment it seemed the effort of having to follow this up by constructing an intelligible reply would cause her to lose bowel discipline, but she managed it:

'Yeah, I know' - and then the killer logic - 'but the lager bottles don't fit in the fridge.'

'But,' I said slowly, 'nobody will buy chilled bitter.'

'I just do what the manager tells me.'

Jawohl, Herr Kommandant. I can't wait to move out of this town.

Hectic few days, as there's been a lot on. Also, I was down at Mum and Dad's fortieth (Golden? Ruby? I keep forgetting) on Sunday. That was fun, and I even got to make a speech.

I've finally got around to getting a broadband connection sorted. That may sound ridiculously stone age, but I've managed to run the business quite happily on dial-up for ages. But I'm getting to the stage where it really would be useful to upload graphics really fast while talking on the phone.

I've gone with BT. Unsurprisingly, in this age of high technology, I have to wait exactly one week for the service to be enabled on my line. Why is this? God knows. I thought about ringing them up, but didn't fancy being stuck on the phone for twenty minutes just for some bored call centre slave to tell me it's because Reg the Broadband Switcher-Onner has run out of black gaffer tape.

Off to think about rebuilding my own website now. Whoo-hoo. I love CSS.

People keep asking me to explain who's who in my blog entries. Here's a quick guide. I'm going to backpost it a month ago so it's buried nicely in the archives, and put a direct link from the main page. It may be updated from time to time...


Ben

Tall, rangy, hyperactive. Strong Teesside accent coupled with inability to say anything with using the word 'fook' (or one of its derivatives) every five or so words. One of those rare people who can speak in italics. Training to be a lawyer.

Bruce

University friend. Works in London, accidentally unplugging HM Government's £50,000 servers for a living and/or consigning same servers in batches of ten or more to HM Government skips, on the basis that they're 'the wrong colour' or 'they don't fit in the server room'.

Clive, aka Pies

University friend. Professional actuary working in the city, has recently travelled the world in search of excess carbohydrates and even uglier girls. Recently surprised everyone by hooking up with Carmel, an Irish fellow-actuary with a level of good looks hitherto considered way out of Clive's league.

Captain Furball, aka Furby, Ewok

Former boss of BH and Dave (qv). Officially the world's nicest man, the Captain derives his name from the thick hair that covers his entire body, which fluffs up (apparently) after he's had a hot shower.

Chalky, aka Chalky-San

University friend of BH. Fearless mountaineer and outdoor instructor, runs www.stillwild.co.uk. Given to pontification. Resembles mountain goat.

Dave, aka Dirty Dave

Another contender for the world's nicest man. Pure, wholesome and clean living. Formerly worked alongside BH under the supervision of Captain Furball (qv). Endures constant goading with saintlike patience.

Matt, aka Jonesy

University friend. Short, Welsh, ginger. In long-term relationship with disturbingly good-looking South African girl who is a clear foot taller than him. Normally placid, becomes incredibly aggressive after drinking cider. A bit like a Popeye, only without the homoerotic overtones.

The Münsterländer, aka 'aaarrrgh, let go, I haven't got any!'

Dog. Very demanding of bikkits and possessive of her umlauts. Never barks unless BH is trying to sleep, trying to concentrate or on the phone to a client.

Niall

Friend and neighbour of BH. Another contender for world's nicest bloke, Niall enjoys a level of bad luck comparable to Job's. Is open, upright, honest, plain-dealing, direct, friendly and trusting, and therefore utterly unsuited to life in Richmond in 2005.

Sab

Singer in The Blue Mondays, also performer of several of BH's songs. You can hear samples here and here.

TLMH

The Lovely Mrs Hilton. One higher in the pack hierarchy than the Münsterländer.

Trillian

A character in Douglas Adam's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, encountered by Arthur Dent on board the spaceship Heart of Gold. Also personal assistant to BH at musical and other events. Nearly as scary as Trinity (qv), but not quite. Speaks Serbo-Croat.

Trinity

Head of security at all of BH's musical events. As she's the most terrifying person on Earth, no further security is needed. Currently training to be a doctor, presumably to refine her torture techniques.

I was delighted to discover, earlier, that the Co-op has started stocking Bateman's XXXB - the jewel in the crown of Lincolnshire beers. It was XXXB that was on tap, free, the night that BGS jazz band (including yours truly on piano) blew out all the electrics at Mr. George Bateman's 75th birthday party in 1993. We did about three grands worth of damage, but Mr. George didn't bat an eyelid - he just laughed, got his flunkeys to bring a load of candles, and asked us if we'd be happy playing a couple of acoustic sets.

We used to serve XXXB at the Burton. Owing to an administrative foolishness at Whitbread - one of many - the stuff was transported from Bateman's Wainfleet brewery to the regional distribution centre at Sheffield and then to us. This was foolish because the brewery was about five miles down the road from the pub. Every Tuesday Frank and I would watch the dray lorry sail past, carrying our beer on its 150-mile round trip. Batemans is perfect but it doesn't travel well, so by the time it got back to us it tasted like wee.

Today's entry, by the way, is dedicated to the memory of Robert Wise. When you're a Jet you're a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette till your last dying day....

The Münsterländer - who is increasingly fussy about me including her umlauts - is depositing hair everywhere. You wouldn't think one medium sized dog could produce so much. We've easily had enough off her to stuff a sofa.

She was at the vet today, being rejabbed and having kennel cough vac squirted up her nose, so I enquired of Dr. Chinnery whether or not she would soon be completely bald. Apparently all this moulting and the comparative dullness of her coat is to do with the hormonal changes that go with being spayed. I suppose if someone removed my ovaries I'd lose my shine for a while.

The only other thing of note was that she moved while being jabbed with the result that the needle nearly got stuck in me. Mind, not that I'd complain about being immunised against canine distemper.

I talked to two people who were wrong today, and neither of them were Niall.

The first was a Darlo chav on a daytrip who nearly ran me down while I was walking the munsterlander and then made the mistake of stopping to argue with me. It wasn't a mistake because I was particularly witty or authoritative - I never am in these situations - but because he was driving a car with his company name and phone number printed on the side. Duh. Prestige Paintjobs of Darlington, your employees are wankers and I google higher than you.

The second was a client who reprimanded me for starting a sentence with 'but'. Hm, let's see. How about:

       But to be frank, and give it thee again -
       and yet I wish but for the thing I have:
       My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
       My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
       The more I have, for both are infinite.

..or, possibly:

                            But in these cases
       We still have judgment here;

...or maybe even:

       But she, being mortal, of that boy did die;
       And for her sake do I rear up her boy,
       And for her sake I will not part with him.

If starting a sentence with 'but' is good enough for him, it's good enough for me.

Good game of pool with Niall, during which he talked about his mother, and, unusually, about love. The boy's a dreamer still.

Apart from the cricket, the main event of today was the first edition of the new Berliner Guardian. Mostly I love it, though I was a bit pissed off the other week when I found out they were ditching Pass Notes, which has always tickled me.

You can imagine how furious I was this morning when I found out that they'd dropped bloody Doonesbury. There'd been no warning that Saturday's was to be the last strip - it just wasn't there today. A panicked email to a Guardian functionary hammered the message home: I wasn't simply failing to find it, it had been dropped.

So this is where I was going to have a full-scale rant. However, the Guardian has already cravenly given in to the will of the mob. That's very pleasing: Doonesbury is intelligent, dry, restrained and ironic. In fact, it's a little like the Simpsons in that it's useful for proving to the hardcore sandals 'n' muesli faction among the paper's readership that American humour is no less sophisticated than ours. In fact, if you looked at some of the rest of the cartooning in The Guardian you might rapidly come to the conclusion that it's much more sophisticated. Apart from Martin Rowson - who, as far as I'm concerned, is the God of Cartoons - there's precious little on offer. Steve Bell at his best is funny, but when he can't think of a good gag he settles for vicious abuse that's as clearly designed to play to the prejudices of the paper's readership as are rants about asylum seekers in the Mail. Posy Simmonds? Harry Venning? They sometimes raise a smile, but nothing more. As for Dix, well, I'm sure he's a top bloke, but his cartoons are bloody miserable.

I like the Berliner format. In fact - I was thinking this as I walked back from the paper shop, weighing it in my hands - in a strange way it's kind of... kind of, well, sexy...

I think I'm spending too much time with the papers.

Excuse me if today's is rather a short post. I'm doing some more work on learning a lesson about myself that I should have learned when I was twelve: that I do my second best work when then deadline is five minutes away, and the best when it's five minutes ago.

I'm writing this post in Bangor. I'm staying here overnight because I was at the Lake Vyrnwy Hotel today playing the piano for a wedding.

Top hotel, top piano. Vyrnwy's lovely, but it's one of the most remote spots in Wales. The main road into the valley is about ten feet wide and as greasy as hell. I nearly put Maisie in a ditch twice.

The hotel sits two or three hundred feet up the side of the valley's eastern rim, commanding views of the length of the lake, which recedes into the misty, mountainous distance as if it were an inland sea. It's not a real lake, but a reservoir built in the mid-nineteenth century to provide Liverpool with water, which it continues to do to this day. The gothic Straining Tower - which is not actually a grand Victorian privy but a device for making sure that Scousers don't get algae and dead voles in their tap water - is like a miniature Gormenghast sticking out of the lake. The Hotel continues the Victorian theme of gloriously unnecessary decoration; it was originally a hunting lodge, and you can see the influence of colonial architecture. The interior is a beautiful mess of stripped oak beams, staircases, pillars and parquet.

The piano was a fourteen foot Bechstein and just about the best hotel joanna I've ever played. A lot of hotels, even really top ones, have shit pianos. But this was beautiful - they obviously take care of it, and it was a pleasure to play. Even the people at the do were lovely. Obviously they were pretty rich, but pleasingly down to earth with it. As well as getting paid I got effusive thanks, which isn't something that happens every time.

I suppose it's the whole spirit of Wales rubbing off on people. As I was driving back through the dim forests, northward toward Bangor, I recalled some words of wisdom I once heard a very, very old Welshman utter as he sat on a boulder of slate in old Dorothea Quarry, above Bethesda. Ffordd ddeuol un milltir o'ch blaen, he said, his rheumy eyes seeming to stare into the far distance.

He was right, too.

Ah, chargeback heaven. A quick reminder for those of you who haven’t been reading carefully. A couple of weeks ago a client of mine – whom I won’t name, as he’s a nice guy and doesn’t deserve to be associated with all the swearing that’s about to happen – did an $800 credit card chargeback on a fee he’d paid me three months previously for copywriting his corporate brochure.

The chargeback was a mistake. It wasn’t even his mistake – it was an error at Am*x. Two weeks later, I still haven’t got the money back. But then, neither has he.

So where’s the fucking money? Ah ha! It’s in the financial limbo that cash travels through when it’s transferred between accounts. Modern electronic networking means that money can be transferred instantly. Or rather it could be: banks and other financial institutions still insist on a ‘clearing period’, usually of three days.

(Unless you deal with First Direct, that is, in which case it will be much more than three days. First Direct works out transfers by employing dyscalculic gibbons to move beans from one pile to another. Sometimes they drop the beans, or get hungry and eat them, or just plain lose count and have to shuffle them back into equal piles and start again.)

Anyway, during those three days the money is neither in your account nor in the account from whence it came. It is – to borrow a theory from The Guardian’s Chris Addison – on the back of a donkey on the way to Tashkent.

And that’s when the aforementioned banks and financial institutions are playing nicely. When they’re not playing nicely they stick their fingers up their arses and refuse to acknowledge the existence of (i) the transaction, (ii) the people involved, and (iii) this strange ‘money’ commodity we keep talking about – (‘nominal values printed on pieces of paper? Sorry sir, never heard of that. Over here at Am*x we get along just fine bartering raccoon skins.’)

So the eight hundred bucks currently belong neither to me, nor to my client, nor to Am*x. They're out there somewhere, roaming the savannah.

But simply depriving me of my cash isn’t enough for Am*x. They have just charged me $38 for asking for my money back.

Read that again, carefully. That’s not ‘$38 to get my money back’ – I’d happily part with that amount to recover what they owe me. No, they’ve charged me $38 just for the pleasure of asking them, even though they’ve been told by both me and my client that they (not we) have screwed up.

Aren’t they nice?

...or rather there would be, if he had a girlfriend. He does at times come pretty close to having a halo, something which usually strikes me after he's lost his tenth game of pool in succession and he's still grinning.

We were playing last night, and he was telling me about the night out he had on Tuesday (very social animal, is Niall) at the Ship Inn on Frenchgate.

'So anyway, I was just in there, like, having a quiet pint [trans. 'rubbing the regulars up the wrong way'] and I saw this lass. Nice girl like. So I said to myself, I said, "Niall, this feels right. let's go for it." So I did. And - get this, right - I did all right. Do you know what my chat up line was? Eh?'

I indicated that no, I didn't. Knowing a little of Niall's techniques for dealing with the opposite sex, I tensed up the old stomach muscles in the expectation they were about to be put to work retaining my most recent meal.

'I said, "it's really nice to see a woman" - I said woman, not girl, that's important you know, Bill - "it's really nice to see a woman who doesn't need makeup to help her natural beauty shine through."'

'That's lovely. What happened next?'

'We chatted. Her name's Nikki. You know, we were just matey like. Honest, being straight with each other. Then as she was about to go I told her I found her very attractive and asked for her number.'

'And?'

'Well, she doesn't actually have a mobile' - there's a surprise, Niall - 'but she promised to give me a call. What do you reckon? Did I do all right?'

'You did all right. Now play your shot.' We carried on in silence for a while From the furrowing of his brow, I could tell that Niall was thinking hard about something.

'Mind you, she's big.'

'Big?'

'Big.'

'Like, big big?'

'Big.' More silence, a couple more shots. Niall's been out with some plus-size ladies before and never really passed comment on their dimensions - he's fond of saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So his reservations about Nikki's physical charms suggest that the beholder had better have eyes like a fish if he's going to stand any chance of taking her in without actually swivelling his head. Still, Niall and Nikki. It has a certain ring to it.

Before meeting Niall I'd been down at Castle Beecroft seeing how Sab is getting on with the piano part for Alcohol. She's singing it as a kind of farewell spot at Yarm School speech day. She was doing all right, but suffers some the problems of the classicist trying to play anything other than classical music - she struggles to relax into what she's playing and generally worries about the whole improvisation thing. But she's determined to be a better jazz. blues and pop pianist, and she's got the determination and talent to do it. Guess all she needs to do is practise.

So John Humphreys has been rapped over the knuckles by BBC Director General Mark Thompson after making 'misguided' remarks about members of the government during an after-dinner speaking engagement. He was grassed in by former Labour spin doctor Tim Allan.

For the benefit of the villains, some home truths. Mark: although in some ways you seem like quite a nice bloke nobody really likes you. I guess it's because you'll always be associated with craven submission to the government in the wake of the Kelly affair. On the other hand many people admire John Humphreys. He can be cantankerous, true, and I sometimes wonder if he's a bit more rightwing than I'd like. But you have to admit he's sincere. To make things worse, you're bollocking him for simply telling the truth: the notion that contemporary politicians 'don't give a bugger' whether they lie isn't news to anyone. It is not the place of jobsworths to throw stones at giants.

Tim: nobody likes a grasser. Scuttling off to tell your Labour mates that a BBC man has been saying rude things about them does not make you Cato. Especially as you seem to have done it three months after the event during a quiet time for home news. Apparently you're now facing legal action from the company that hired Humphreys as a speaker. Although I wouldn't wish too much ill upon you, being taken to the cleaners for a few grand that you can obviously afford would be a just punishment for being a sneaking do-gooder.

Instead of being bitchy and New Labourish, we should all be more like Eugene Hutz - no relation to Lionel. Eugene is a New York-based Ukrainian gypsy punk DJ. Here's Dorian Lynskey in the Guardian:

His physical presence is riveting... bulging, cobalt-blue eyes atop cheekbones that could slice bread. Unfortunately, the role [as Alex in the coming film version of J. Safran Foer's 'Everything is Illuminated'] demanded he lose his signature moustache, a fabulous, curling creation of the kind favoured by 18th-century hussars. Whenever Hutz is thinking hard about something he starts absent-mindedly grooming it. "Everybody in my family has a moustache," he explains. "My grandfather said, 'If you ain't got moustache, you ain't got self-respect.' It's as simple as that."

And Rod? Rod, apparently, is gay. I know this because 'Rod is gay' is scrawled in lippy on the front door of the YMCA down the road. Well done, Rod - you must be glad to have friends who are so joyful about your coming out. I wonder, do you think you could ask them to find alternative ways of celebrating your sexuality? Only we're trying to sell a house here. And not every potential buyer will be as accepting of your lifestyle choices - or your friends' habits with makeup - as we would all like.

The estate agent is coming around in an hour to take photos of the house. Ann's going to have to find a particularly tough surfactant to clean up the slimetrail he leaves behind.

Estate agents - a necessary evil. Or are they? No, no, I'm not suggesting they're not evil - anyone who can write '...the property enjoys spacious vistas to the south' has clearly sold their soul so far down the Styx as to be irredeemable. I'm questioning whether they're necessary. Perhaps the new economy will kill them off? The WWW has allowed us to buy insurance direct from the provider, thereby sending brokers back to the sulphurous abyss whence them came. Will estate agents be next? When the New Heaven and the New Earth finally arrive maybe the shining city on the hill will be free of shining suits. Then we'll sing Non Nobis and Te Deum and offer praise to God, taking the abnegation of permatanned property imps as final proof of His Mercy and Love, so that the trumpets will sound as His Kingdom is at last established on the Face of the Earth.

('...a particularly fine Kingdom of Heaven enjoying spacious vistas to the south, being 100 million light years long by 150 million wide, detached and with its own gardens featuring well-stocked borders and a mature apple tree. The Kingdom represents an opportunity for the discerning buyer to modernise to the style of their choice, the fixtures and fittings having been sympathetically updated in the recent past to a pleasing standard...')

Some things, Elijah noted, will never change.

I'm told that I should spend less time talking about fonts and more time cracking gags. OK: as the complainant is a Germanist, here's a joke in that language.

"Ich sage, ich sage, ich sage, mein Hund hat kein Nase!"

"Wirklich? Wie iecht er?"

"Furchtbar!!!!"

Ha ha ha. I enjoyed that so much here's another:

Q: Warum überquerte das Huhn die Straße ?

A: Die Feinde des Reiches zu vernichten! Achtung, Huhn!

I must remember to tell Jutta that one.

When I changed my phone recently I forgot to move a load of numbers over from the memory of the old one. So when it rang the other day, I didn't realise who it was straight away. To appreciate the full glory of this conversation, you need to be able to imagine a strong Middlesbrough accent.

Me: Hi, Bill Hilton -

Him: 'ELLO.

Me: Um, hi - who's this?

Him: Whadderyer mean, 'oo is it? It's ME.

Me: Oh, all right Ben. Well done on the A levels. I was thinking that...

Him: Ta. Now listen you. I'm not gonna to do PE anymore at Leeds.

Me: No?

Him: No. It's no good. I'm right, aren't I? PE's no good.

Me: Well...

Him: Right. No good. So I've decided, like, I'm gonna do - wait for it. Are yer ready?

Me: I'm ready.

Him: LAW. I'm gonna be a fockin' lawyer.

Me: [without hesitation] I'd hire you.

Him: SOUND. So when the fock do I start getting paid, like?

(Ben Needham is the only person I know who can talk in italics.)

Spent most of today redesigning the website for Telf's 'Personal Statements' book. Now that the campaigns in the Times and Telegraph are over most of our publicity is going is going to come from online sources, notably the Adwords campaign I kicked off this morning. So the website has to work harder at converting clicks into sales. The old site was frankly a bit shit, but then I did put it together in about an hour. The new one, I'm sure you'll agree, is much funkier. It's got a picture of a girl and everything. If you read this five minutes after I've posted, the new version probably isn't up yet - you can see it here.

As I'm not really a visual kind of guy I found myself on James Archer's fantastic site The Return of Design. There are plenty of cool articles and resources there - including a colour scheme picker which is great for idiots like me who have no sense of colour whatsoever. Telf's site has been tastefully redesigned in a scheme called Firewhite, which, though I say so myself, looks jolly nice.

The one arsey thing about the whole business was the fonts. I'm a bit pissed off with Verdana. I really, really wanted to use Eurostile. However, subsection (3) paragraph xviii of Sod's Law states that if I did use it then the site would only ever be visited by people who didn't have it installed. Loading it up as first choice with Verdana & co as choice two would be a pain in the arse, as it's got a relatively small aspect value. (Dave: that means the second choice fonts would look fucking terrible; I'm not sure if I can express that in a less technical way, I'm afraid). In the end I went for Trebuchet MS, which is the font you're reading now, if you've got it installed. If you haven't got Trebuchet MS installed then you're a troll living in a cave halfway up a mountain in Finland. Anteeksi, en puhu suomea.

Why did it have to happen to one of my favourite cities?

OK - I've never actually been to New Orleans, and I've never wanted to: the New Orleans in my head is almost certainly a better place than the real thing. But it looks like that '..legendary Quarter/ Of balconies, flower-baskets and quadrilles' is gone for good. Like Atlantis with Jelly Roll Morton on piano. A terrible shame, and let's hope as many people as possible get out alive.

It should have happened to Thornaby, of course. Filth floating through the streets, desperate people on rooftops, rape, looting, gunfights, disease...Dave would probably have called to tell me that they were having an unusually quiet weekend.

Out with Niall the Nutter last night. He's not welcome in any of Richmond's pubs except the Board, so we went there. As virtually every boozer in town will take just about anyone (the Unicorn actually has a polite notice on the door asking customers to refrain from bringing their knives on to the premises) this is quite an achievement on his part.

Niall has always assured me that he is not violent ('..apart from that bloke I beat up with an iron bar...') so I guess his unpopularity is to do with his appearance, which is frankly alarming, and his habit of loudly advertising his opinions of various of the townfolk in his characteristic righteous tone of voice. He's right, of course: Richmond is indeed ninety percent populated by bumptious middle-class bores and drug-dealing chavs. The people he actually likes he annoys with his constant self-pity, self-aggrandisement and pseudo-profound analysis of the 'fantastic friendship' he shares with them.

So why do I hang around with him? Well, he has a tough life, he means well and he can actually be quite entertaining. He's also great for putting things in perspective. Any problems you may have pale into insignificance when compared with the catalogue of disasters Niall suffers on a daily basis. He's like a lightning rod for bad luck.

He's also - and this is a major selling-point in my view - crap at pool. So crap, in fact, that he's the only person I can consistently beat. The Board is an excellent venue for his weekly humiliations because the pool table stands on a slope on the floor which causes every ball struck to veer in a sharply downhill direction. Although he's quite bright, Niall has learning difficulties across the whole spectrum, so his efforts at compensation usually result in another dent on the cue ball as it lands on the floor, or, in extreme cases, ricochets off the back wall. I beat him three times to a soundtrack of Steve Miller's greatest hits.

Niall's got a date tonight. Probably another desperate fifty-something divorcee. I hope he gets on all right: women are not naturally drawn to him (Sab: 'he looks like a rapist') so he needs every opportunity he can get. He's 38 on Sunday. The other week he told me, in a sad but matter-of-fact tone, that he no longer expects to have children of his own.

A space cowboy he may be, but I've never heard anyone call him the gangster of love.