I don’t know whether it was pure chance, or whether I was unconsciously looking for it after my enjoyment of Doctor Who the other night. At any rate, whether the inspiration was conscious, unconscious or remotely directed by mice/dolphins/Bill Nighy, I walked out of Smiths today clutching a DVD copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Not the radio series, nor the TV series, computer game nor even the commemorative towel, but the brand new feature film. I paid eight quid for it, reduced from seventeen. I didn’t know whether to be pleased that I got it cheap or annoyed that the low price must reflect a certain apathy on the part of the public towards the work of Douglas Adams.

Anyway, it’s great, though a little like the new Doctor Who I can see how it might possibly annoy hardened fans of the radio series, TV series, computer game or towel. There are several new additions – most notably the romantic subplot between Arthur and Trillian, which gets barely a passing mention in previous versions. I don’t see how the anoraks can really object to this. Hitchhiker's has changed in each of its incarnations. DNA fans who try to emulate Trekkies and Star Wars geeks by wittering on about whether plot changes and retcons are ‘canonical’ are just wasting their time. Adams himself wrote nearly the whole screenplay, with a ghost brought in just to tighten things up a little after he died. It must have been plain to everyone involved that to adapt the rambling, surreal storyline of the original radio series – which was as much dictated by the weird sound FX Adams wanted to try out as it was by narrative arcs and plot points – a lot of serious changes would have to be made. As far as I can see, all those changes are for the better. The plot’s still anarchic.

And, after all, why shouldn’t Arthur have a shag? In the novels he has to wait until So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, when he meets Fenchurch. If I was stuck on a starship with only one other surviving member of the human race – and particularly if that human was Zooey Daschenel – I wouldn’t be wandering around chafing about cups of tea.

Oh yeah, and the soundtrack’s brilliant too. Nice to hear a bit of classic banjo action in reference to the original radio/TV theme tune – and as for the main title, well, as far as I’m concerned Neil Hannon just can’t go wrong with anything.

In case you didn't see it, the Doctor Who Christmas special was pretty damn minty. There are a few things I like about the new Russell T. Davies regime, though I wonder exactly how much they may begin to grate on hardened fans.

First, Doctor Who is much funnier than he used to be. I can imagine that quite a few long-time lovers of the series may find this irritating (GCB: "..it's just NOT the SAME. Doctor Who isn't supposed to be FUNNY. It's supposed to be SCARY. I may be 47 years old, but I STILL want to feel like hiding BEHIND THE SOFA when it's on because I'm SO SCARED.")

On Boxing Day the papers were full of the political slant the Christmas special took. But for me the absolute highlight was David Tennant's doctor asking Billie Piper's Rose if he was ginger. Is it only me that sees a Chris Evans gag lurking there?

Second, the references. This may be evidence of my inner geek making a bid for freedom, but I had a whale of a time spotting all the sideways nods to other science fiction series. We had Star Trek (transporters), The Empire Strikes Back (the Doctor getting his hand cut off in a sword fight on the edge of a precipice) and The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy - Doctor beamed aboard alien spacecraft that's about to destroy humanity wearing only his pyjamas and a dressing gown. It says something for the quality of the writing that this particular gem wasn't spoiled by Davies having the Doctor spell it out.

Third, everything's going a bit meta. Eccleston's Doctor was a good distance from Eccleston's character in the RTD-scripted Second Coming. But the new doctor seems to owe quite a lot to David Tennant's starring role in the RTD-scripted Casanova. OK, Tennant's Doctor is a little harder at one extreme and a little softer at the other than the smooth, compromising Casanova, but the core of the two characters - or at least their behaviours - is very similar. Mind you, a lot of writers spend their careers endless rewriting a single character in multiple guises. Perhaps that's what's happening here.

In summary, top marks to the BBC.

I've just been doing a few last minute things in Darlington: bought some new jeans and a copy of Mark Steel's Vive la Revolution, dropped a card into the Furballs' and ran into Sara-Jane Hardy. Town was packed, though not quite so heaving as it was a couple of days ago. Everyone seems to have got the shopping in early this year.

Just a little down the road from the HSBC bank the Salvation Army band was playing. There are some types of faith I have a particular respect for, and the Sally Army's is one of them. They quietly ignore the stuff about enduring suffering in this world in order to guarantee a place in the next. Instead, they do their best to help and comfort those who suffer. They are friendly, undemonstrative, fearsome hard workers.

Down the other end of High Row, standing beneath the market cross, was an altogether different type of Christian. He was youngish, wearing jeans, a leather jacket and an ill-advised moustache. He had a poster slung over the stonework behind him, helpfully reminding us that we're all sinners who should repent and find love and peace in Jesus Christ. In case we didn't notice his poster, he had a mic and an amp and was getting enthusiastically stuck into a prolonged exhortation. The gist of it seemed to be that:

1. We are all sinners
2. We are all going to hell
3. We might squirm our way out of being sent to hell if we all love Jesus.

He clearly believed what he was saying. 'Save yourselves,' was his argument, 'like I've saved myself.'

And within that argument, ladies and gentlemen, is everything you need to know about evangelical Christianity: self, self, self. Evangelicals appeal not to our kindness or our sense of decency, but to the craven desire that exists within all of us for simple self-preservation.

I wouldn't have been annoyed if it hadn't been for the Big Issue seller standing twenty yards away. A young Asian woman, maybe 25 or 26, she was simply repeating 'Big Issue, Big Issue..' in a quiet, desperate, humiliated monotone. Did Mr. Evangelical do anything to help her, or even express his support? Did he bollocks. He was too busy banging on about how everyone should read the Bible. It seems he hasn't been reading his own Bible quite closely enough:

'If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.'

But perhaps Matthew 19:21 was missing from his copy, because he ignored the woman and continued to advertise his idiocy to the world. I tried to think of a word to describe him, his particular type of belief and his attitude. 'Selfish', I thought, was close - but it didn't reflect the damage he was doing to the honest members of his faith, the ones in uniform quietly rattling boxes a little way down the road. 'Hypocritical' was better but less accurate, as he clearly lacked the grain of self-knowledge that true hypocrisy requires.

It was another ten minutes before I worked it out. I'd walked away from the town centre by then, down Borough Road, past the Italian delicatessen and the sex shop, towards the quiet, leafy street opposite Polam Hall where I'd parked Maisie. I was a bit surprised, really, when I realised that the word I was looking for was 'evil'.

OK, OK, so I read The Guardian. But you could never accuse me of being a Guardian Reader - a breed separate and distinct from the rest of humanity. Probably the best analysis of the type comes from George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier. He's actually talking about the intellectual, middle class socialists of his day, but the description fits the classic Guardian Reader just as well:

...a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting...One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England. One day this summer I was riding through Letchworth when the bus stopped and two dreadful-looking old men got on to it. They were both about sixty, both very short, pink, and chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other had long grey hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their appearance created a mild stir of horror...

Today, the average fruit-juice drinker, nudist and sandal-wearer has a new misapprehension to twist his already slightly deformed worldview. It's been added by Bobbie Johnson, the Guardian technology correspondent, in his article The sparring and spin of the Google dance.

According to Johnson's article, some SEO companies '..use unethical strategies to boost their clients.'

Well, bugger me, you don't say? And I thought all those keyworded footer pages represented the dawning of a new literary style. To prove how easy it is to manipulate Google PageRank, Johnson created a mock website purporting to sell eco-friendly flip flops, and used a variety of blackhat SEO techniques to force it to the top of the Google rankings pretty quickly.

This, of course, will confirm the suspicions that Guardian Readers (and a few people who simply read The Guardian) have about the Internet: viz. that it is the creation of the CIA and multinational corporations, expressly designed to control our minds and brainwash us into buying SUVs and Crazy Frog ringtones.

Johnson has done the Internet a disservice. He writes a particularly entertaining blog, so I don't intend to slate him personally - but I have to take issue with a few things in his article.

For a start, Johnson writes that he added "invisible data" - copy written in the same background colour as the page - to boost its rankings. This would have worked very nicely in 1999, but by now Google is sufficiently sophisticated to compare HTML/CSS font and background colour markups, and disregard any copy which is tagged to be invisible. Nobody knows for sure that it does this, but I'd be pretty amazed if it doesn't - it's certainly the case that no contemporary SEO companies I know, whatever the colour of their hats, still recognise it as a viable technique. Likewise, the sidebar information implies that it's still possible to fool top search engines using metadata keywords. Again, it may have been in 1999, but no longer.

Second, when he created his mock site Johnson seems to have been rather disingenous. The reason www.ecofriendlyflipflops.co.uk got to the top of the rankings so quickly is that it's one of only five sites out there that contains his major search term, "eco-friendly flip-flops", as a contiguous string - though obviously that's going to grow as the story gets commented on by people like me. One of the other five is his own home page, and the rest have since discarded the string. If you don't believe me, type the term into Google exactly as it appears above, with double inverted commas to tell the engine that the string should be searched only in its in entirety rather than as fragments. It's only when you search it without the inverted commas, and Google starts looking for every page that contains the words individually, no matter how far apart they are, that the site gets to the top of 'hundreds' of results. Getting a top ranking like this is a piece of piss: if he'd set up a site dedicated to Britney Spears, B.A. Baracus or even Bungle from Rainbow he'd have had a much harder time getting so far so quick.

I guess he used these wheezes because he had to prove a point, and prove it in such a way that simple newspaper readers could grasp it. It's true that blackhat SEO is a problem, and it's right that newspaper readers should be alerted to the fact that websites don't get PageRank simply by being useful and relevant. But to overstate the case just to make a point is damaging. Those fruit-juice drinkers may never trust the web again.

^{*This post also appears on my main business blog}

I forgot to include this in yesterday's entry. While in Cologne, I came across a really funny joke, written on a beermat:

Der Pessimist sagt: 'das Glas ist halb leer.' Der Optimist sagt: 'aber nich mehr lange!'

The weird thing is, it's not half so funny in English. Is this a first?

I've just rescued the Münsterländer from A1 Boarding Kennels and Cattery, Brompton-on-Swale.

Ann phoned while I was in Germany to tell me that the place had been shut down by the police and the RSPCA. Apparently the woman who runs it had some sort of breakdown and her husband had legged it to Ireland. The dogs didn't get looked after properly, lacked food and water and were up to their necks in their own poo. Fortunately the Münsterländer was only there 48 hours before the RSPCA took over. When I dropped her off all had seemed normal - behind the scenes, it seems, things were on the brink of collapsing completely.

I'm not going to lash into the people that own the place. What I will say is that those RSPCA guys were superb. When I arrived there were two of them on site, both wearing the hollow-eyed expression of men who have just earned Society Medals for Sheer Volume of Shit Shovelled and - from what I could see - were well on their way to adding bars to them. They were polite, kind to the dogs, friendly but firm with Mr. Owner (who has slunk back from Ireland) and obviously very bothered indeed about their jobs - even though they don't get paid enough, deal with some right bastards and probably make shit-shovelling motions in their sleep.

The Münsterländer herself - I need hardly say - is not in the least traumatised, although she would have everyone think otherwise. Bring me more bikkits to ease the pain, human slave, and bring them now.

Just flown into Newcastle. KLM managed to park us for seven hours in Schipol on the way out. The turnaround was tight, the check-in queue long, and TLMH aroused the suspicion (or something) of a lesbian security officer, who decided a thorough frisking was in order.

Later on I saw a couple of Dutch coppers giving a hard time to some orthodox Jewish bloke. To be fair, the Jewish bloke had been arguing with one of the check-in staff, and the two heavies were quite polite and restrained. But they loomed more than somewhat, and Jewish guy seemed intimidated. Clearly Holland (national motto: "In The SS? Us? No, You Must Be Thinking Of Denmark") doesn't take the trouble to remind its flatfoots that some of their countrymen were less than impeccably behaved during the war.

Anyway, this post is about Germany - so the war must not be mentioned.

Cologne was a treat. The Christmas markets were the exact opposite of anything you'd find in the UK: fun, not consumerist; tasteful, not tacky; neat, tidy and friendly. There were no teenagers in trackie bottoms lounging around, swearing and barging into people. There were no bootleg DVDs, imitation footie strips or piles of tatty Mills and Boons. The stuff that was on sale - art, sculpture, glassware, textiles, models, garden things, handmade clothes - was worth buying. The food stalls ranged from your traditional German bratwurst-inna-bun to west African stews to deep fried stuffed Peruvian potatoes.

Stalls that wanted to sell alcohol sold alcohol, most often in the form of mulled wine fortified with Amaretto or brandy. Can you imagine that being allowed in the UK? Germany isn't that dissimilar to us in terms of alcohol culture. It's certainly no lame, boring 'café society' of the sort that TB and his Islington mates are trying to promote over here, in which all drinkers will forswear Stella and Smirnoff Ice in exchange for a nicely chilled Chenin Blanc sipped al fresco at a roadside table. Nope, the Hun likes to get pissed, and good luck to him. Selling booze from market stalls doesn't cause rioting in German streets and neither would it in British ones. But our bloody Establishment can't shake off its fear of the mob.

Talking of beer - and there are few things I like talking about more - there is some great stuff to be drunk in the Braureries of Cologne. The local stuff, Kölsch, is about as smooth a lager as you'll ever taste. The only downside is that it's traditionally drunk in 300ml glasses. What's the point of that, then? There was even an Italian moment in one restaurant where the Herr Ober didn't (apparently) understand me when I asked for a 'grosse Kölsch' rather than a 'grosses Kölsch'. Mind you, Great Uncle Jimmy did bomb the shit out of his home town, so you can understand a bit of wilful misunderstanding of beer orders.

'Bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger. In every conceivable way, bugger.'

I should really have posted that tomorrow, but I'm off to Cologne for some Christmas shopping until Sunday. Flight leaves Newcastle at 6am. So unless I really pull my finger out and find an internet café I won't be posting for a few days.

Whooaaaaa, there - hold those presses. Niall and his lass Elaine (not Nikki, as I have previously called her) are back on. Love, once again, reigns supreme for the marvellous boy.

Mind you, knowing his luck she's probably decided she didn't shit on him from a sufficiently great height last time, and is now lining up to do it again, this time with additional altitude.

Can I draw everyone's attention to the white band in the top right hand corner of the page? All the millions of regular readers of this blog will know that it usually says "Make Poverty History". The graphic is held on the MPH server and they've just changed it, as you can see. I am actually quite annoyed about this - if I'm going to support them, I'd like to be asked before they change the content of my site.

On the upside, the page it links to is quite good fun. There's a little Flash app that lets you design a Make Poverty History Christmas card which will get sent to TB. Unfortunately you're not allowed that much latitude in the design, so you can't send him pictures of boobs, bums, willies or Muslims having their basic human rights violated. Shame. But you do get to write a personalised greeting and ask him for a PS3 when he comes round with his elf (Charles Clarke in some very hardworking green lycra).

Whhhff. Harrumppph, rrraa rraaa rraaaaa...... wraf.

Find those sounds familiar? You do? Then you've obviously climbed under your duvet on a very cold night and just got nicely settled when your large munsterlander thinks to herself that actually, yes, bloody hell, it is rather cold, isn't it? And decides that rather than sleeping on the bed she's going to right in there with you. This is the noise she makes when she acts on this decision.

If you know your munsterlander well, you will realise that this is the end of any chance you had of a decent night's sleep. True to her German genes, she will not be content with merely getting into the bed. Instead she will have to stretch herself out and occupy the whole damn thing, rolling herself up in the duvet so that you don't get any of it. You'd might as well go downstairs, put on some warm clothing and write bitter posts for your blog.

Brrrrr.

The title of this post doesn't refer to Nietzche's masterwork but to Richard Strauss's fanfare of the same name. It is the appropriate piece of music to listen to while visiting the www.billhilton.biz main page. So download it or ferret it out of your CD collection now. Go on.

Such a momentous piece of music is required because my business website has finally been revamped. The old version was frankly a bit crappy, and I'm a lot happier with the way it looks now. There's an expanded portfolio section with in-depth case studies, plus some articles on the free stuff page which are open for free syndication to anyone who's willing to put my link on their page.

The main page is now powered by Blogger, and it's going to be my official, businesslike, sanitised, Yank-friendly public blog. This one, of course, continues in all its scatalogical glory. I've started a separate official blog because lots of the Mid-Westerners and Texans who form my client base are strongly religious and might get offended by the sort of stuff I write on here. You know, about them all being fat, thick and having had their tiny brains washed by a medieval fundamentalism.

I've been rudging today.

This is a new word I've coined for the action of really enjoying something that everyone says you're going to hate, or thinks you ought to hate. Let's look at how my neologism might be used in context:

Clive: So Bill, what have you been doing tonight?
Me: I've been rudging Guy Ritchie's Revolver.
Clive: And what are you doing tomorrow?
Me: I thought I might rudge to Oasis' Be Here now. What a great album!

Note than in every case, the appropriate conjugation of the verb 'to rudge' replaces the main part of the verb (so 'watch' and 'listen' in the above examples) that might conventionally be associated with the action in question. It may or may not take a preposition; so I rudge (watch) a film but rudge to (listen to) music.

The word's etymology comes from the title of the novel I'm currently reading - or, I should say, more properly - rudging. Since as long as I can remember people have been telling me what a big disappointment Barnaby Rudge is compared to its immediate predecessors (The Old Curiosity Shop, Oliver Twist) in the Dickens canon. Nearly everyone I know knocks it. Most of my English teachers, the bloke who lectured me on Dickens at university, critics, my dog, the bloke who delivers my milk... all of them.

Yet it's superb. In the introduction, John Bowen says:

Stay out of the black and into the red - nothing in this game for two in a bed.

Shit, that's Jim Bowen. Interesting critique of Dicken's later novels, though. Hold on - I'll try again:

Nothing seems to date more quickly than a previous era's view of the past.

- which I guess is the basis of most criticism of Barnaby Rudge. People who see Dickens primarily as a social commentator rather than a storyteller prefer him when he's writing about his own time. I suppose that also explains the relative lack of critical warmth towards A Tale of Two Cities, which, again, I really like.

I'm doing that crazy playing with time thing again, I'm afraid, writing entries several days after their 'official' timestamp. It would be a lot more fun if I had a nice police box and Billie Piper to assist me, but still. To make things just a bit clearer, I've drawn up a code of temporal ethics for bloggers everywhere:

1. Writing seven posts on a single day and then simply backposting them so it looks like you've updated every single day for a week is NAUGHTY.

2. Writing a post about something that occured to you on Wednesday on Friday and then dating it as Wednesday is FINE, as it places your thoughts in a legitimate time frame that, if anything, eases reader comprehension.

3. Reversing the spin of the Earth or making use of an Infinite Improbability Drive in order to turn back time is DEFINITELY OUT OF ORDER.