Farewell to Blogger

Dear Blogger,

We've been together a long time, haven't we? Two years. That's a long relationship in anyone's book. You've been there through my rage and my joy- and that's what's going to make this so hard.

I'm leaving you. I'm really going. There have been times when I've ignored you before, I know, but this is it: it's really over. I wish I could say it was just me, but it's not- it's all your fault.

You've changed. The user interface I knew and loved has gone, replaced by something I don't understand.

Do you remember a few weeks ago, when I opened my heart to you, what you did? Do you remember what you did with everything I told you? You threw it away. Every last word I'd written, gone.

That hurt, and it was the last straw. I'm leaving you, for ever- and there's nothing you can do.

You see, I've already found someone else. I wasn't looking for it- these things just happen. As little as it matters now, I didn't act on it, I promise. I don't know why I have to tell you- I really don't owe you anything. I guess I'm just making sure you know my conscience is clear.

Much as I wanted this to be amicable, you haven't left me with much of a choice. Your customisation is limited, your scheduling just doesn't work and you've lost my work on more than one occasion.

I'm moving on with my life, and so should you. Let's make this clear- I am never going to take you back. Maybe though, if you sort yourself out, you could make someone happy again, have the relationship that we used to have.

Yes, we've had a past- a wonderful one. I just can't see us having a future, though.

If you need me, I'll be at www.sachtastic.wordpress.com. I'm still moving in at the moment and everything's all over the place, but that's where I'm going to be. Goodbye, Blogger. Goodbye.

-Sacha

Bathe in the rays of my blazing genius

I have had a selection of brilliant ideas recently, probably due to the large amount of free time I have had recently. It's amazing what not having to study for a Physics degree will do to your creative processes.

Firstly, in a dream, I read a label on a tin of food which read "80% vegan, 95% vegetarian and pescatarian". Brilliant. First class. A low meat content is a marketing nightmare. However, vegan food is supposedly healthy (though anyone coming into contact with vegans may want to dispute this). So, sell the food as mostly vegan.

Another brilliant idea came off the back of the brilliant and comical invention of the spork. It is fun to say and to use. It is a multi-purpose camping delight. On the other hand, I think there is a gap in the market for non-functioning cutlery combos. If anyone from MenKind reads this, I wish to sell you my idea of the Spife, Knork and Foon Set, a full set of entirely useless bits of cutlery.

The Spife: the business end of the device is elliptical, entirely flat and gently serrated around the edges. It has no useful piercing tip nor hollow for scooping things up. Using it for cutting will end in frustration due to a regular back-and-forth motion being made awkward by the presence of a steep curve.

The Knork: a knife-shaped item, lacking a cutting edge. Instead, it is pronged, with the prongs lying at ninety degrees to the handle. Trying to pick anything up using this item will lead to the user looking a little bit mental.

The Foon: arguably the most useful of the three, the foon is an anti-spork. It is square headed and gently curved, but lacks prongs. Not having any kind of wall, it will make a very ineffective scoop.

All three are mine in their current incarnation, as is the idea of selling them in a set. If you steal the idea, I will find you and my rage will hurt you. Knorks of course already exist, but as useful things. However, Fofe didn't sound or look right, and combining the three cutlery names then gives me Fofe, Knoon and Spork. And everyone knows what a spork is.

I also came up with the soup spork, and the tuning spork. The tuning spork is actually a lovely idea- its a spork which chimes at a particular frequency. I just need someone to make is a physical reality, and then I'm set.

So, friends. Cast down the shackles of more intellectual pursuits, and dedicate yourself to the magic of glorious invention. It's terribly good fun.

Pick a project (or two)

With the great summer holiday yawning out in front of me like the Grand Canyon, I'm terrified. For once in my life, there's not much at all I need to do, so I need to work on something extracurricular, something beneficial to me as a person, as opposed to me as a physics robot.

So what do I do? I have no idea. I'm going to try and renovate my dolls' house whilst training to become a Football Association referee, paint some pictures for my new flat whilst writing a novel and start a scrapbook whilst dabbling in getting a basic overview on all the world's religions.

I'm an obsessive learner and hobbyist. I can't help but try and accumulate skills, strings to my bow. Despite numerous internet searches, it seems that nobody has sought to pathologise this fear of idleness just yet, or to research why or in what individuals it tends to occur. Which is probably a good thing, seeing as I'd probably try and develop a working knowledge of that as well.

I can't stand being uneducated or incapable. I'd like to think that you could engage me in conversation on pretty much any topic, and I would come out of it not looking like a fool. Then again, though I try and justify my behaviour, there's no real thinking behind it most of the time. I just think "wouldn't it be good to try and write a novel about this?" and off I go.

I never find that the wheels on a project have come grinding to a halt- very little can stop me when I have something in mind. No, the only thing that will ever put a project to bed is the birth of a new, and therefore infinitely more exciting project.

There is no way on this earth that I am alone in this. Numerous fictional characters exhibit the same trait. Wallace, from Wallace and Gromit, starts every film having just established himself as the local pest control officer or window washer or cheese-seeking astronaut, and is accompanied by various impressive, yet clearly half-baked contraptions.

Wallace is a jack of all trades. A cruel man would also call him a master of none.

Mastery is tricky to define. To call yourself a master is a tall order, and can be done through the acquisition of formal qualifications or to earn your living in that fashion. For us eager amateurs, though, it's a rocky road. To be an amateur used to be an admirable thing. It means "lover". We love what we do. Over the years though, it acquired a sting. A sting which meant amateurs aren't good enough.

I am a jack of all trades, and I am the master of my art. I am engrossing, and powerful in my ways. I am a trier, and never accept failure. In fact, I would go so far to say that any person who dismisses the work of an amateur dismisses their own abilities far more.

When you sneer and call someone amateurish, you spit in the face of their attempts to better themself. Nobody starts out a master. And nobody will end up a master without dabbling a little.

Incidentally, as a final, and appropriately off-topic, word: to all those who commended the Ukranian officials for stripping the England brass band of their instruments, shame on you. They may not be good. They may only know one song. However, they're different, and special to us. If you want to sound like every other awful team in Europe, go on. But we don't have the lungs or the spirit of the Dutch or the Irish. We do pomp and ceremony and delusions of grandeur and for that, we need brass.

Journalism: Exposed

Journalism has a bit of a gloss on it. Not least because the people we get our information from are journalists. Journalists write books, make television serials, documentaries, and most importantly, report current affairs.

Nobody ever wants to believe they're doing something other people can do. So journalists, with the power to tell large numbers of people something, and for them to believe it, can essentially say what they want. In particular, they can say what they want about journalism, because only journalists know what that actually entails, and even if anyone else did find out, they're not in a position to tell anybody.

So as things are, nobody knows anything about journalism because journalists are basically allowed to believe their own hype.

Not any more. I'm blowing the lid on journalism. No longer will it be swathed in mystique, starring noble lay detectives who will do anything for the truth. No longer will it star larger-than-life antiheroes, with an ego the size of the moon and a conscience that can only be seen under an electron microscope.

Nepotism aside, before starting work as a journalist, you must qualify. Before you can qualify, you must undergo a period of work experience. This is not as a means of ensuring you have the necessary skills. It's to thin the ranks.

Having just spent the best part of a week working at the Oldham Evening Chronicle in my former home town, I can speak with authority on the subject.

The first massively disappointing thing about journalism is that, if you've ever worked in an office, as most of us have or will for an enormous chunk of our lives, you've experienced the bulk of it. It is office work, in a grey, windowless environment, where lunch hour is the cue to run and find something vaguely exciting to stop you going mental. Such as a car park, or an escalator.

At the Chron, I had a desk, with a phone and a computer. The phone was not ringing incessantly as story after story came in. The only time it ever made a noise was to tell me I'd accidentally knocked it off the hook. The computer was not top-of-the range, with twin monitors, one with my current article loaded up, the other with a rolling barrage of breaking news. It was an Apple Mac, running OS 9.

For anyone unfamiliar with OS 9, you may want to go and find an abacus, and try typing up a 300-word article on that.

To access the internet, I had to go to another computer, which was shared by all the writers.

Yes, not exactly what we'd all been led to believe. Not once was I asked for a skinny latte/scotch by the editor. Though, I don't think anything about me suggests I have the temperament to stand for that kind of treatment on work experience.

When it came to chasing leads, there certainly were an awful lot of chases going on, and ninety-nine percent of those were of the wild-goose variety. I made phone calls, nobody was there. When people were there, they didn't know anything. When they did know something, they weren't allowed to say anything until they'd spoken to PR. When they'd spoken to PR, they told me I had to go through someone else, who was either on holiday, didn't know anything, or had spoken to another journalist but a few seconds earlier.

I also got a chance to go to court, which I can't say anything about or else a magistrate will come and get me.

Joking aside, it was an interesting experience, and though it did take all day to get to the case we were there to see, I saw things I'd never seen in my life before.

Journalism is largely fruitless. It's not characterised by writer's block because usually the gratefulness of finally getting the pieces of a story together will force it out of you. It's not characterised by sucking up to the boss, nor throwing away the rule book or any of that. Those are plot devices. It's real life, and it's boring.

Or it should be. It's just not, though. Maybe I'm just mental, but I enjoyed it. It's the feeling of finding a needle in a haystack. It's seeing the words "by SACHA TORREGROSA-JONES" on a real-life news article. Knowing someone's going to read it, be moved by it in some way.

One of the people I met working in Oldham had previously worked at a fashion magazine, and assured me that things were infinitely worse there. Journalists were only expected to write a single article per week, and did very little else. No wonder Ugly Betty was cancelled.

I was never bored. Not for a second. I was thrown in at the deep end and expected to keep myself afloat, and I like to think that I did. Journalism isn't for everyone, I see that now. I see no reason why it can't be for me, though.

Incidentally, I have been offered a placement at BBC Focus in September. As ever, I'll keep you informed.

Finally! A reason for my blog to be.

Frequent visitors to this blog may have wondered what it was all about. I do not blame you. I must admit, I was also struggling to work it out.

Despite multiple attempts to write articles with some sort of underlying theme, my boredom would inevitably get the better of me, and I'd find myself writing about tea one week and the theatre the next.

This is a problem.

As an aspiring journalist, a blog is an essential tool. It gives me practise when it comes to writing for an audience, and also provides me with work that I can showcase. However, all articles aimed at whippersnapperish journalistic types of my calibre clearly mention the fact that a blog needs a theme. This is how an audience is created and captured.

I have no theme. I have no guiding light, I have no purpose. I do not know my audience, all I know is that I want them. I need them.

I need you.

I don' t mean to sound desperate, and I'm really not. I am assured that "Is Anybody There?" is a fairly well-read blog. Even the title cries for attention, though- I ought to be ashamed.

I am not ashamed. I now know what this blog is. This blog, like the thousands which detail the many laments of thirteen-year-old girls, is about the life of the author. However, unlike the many desperate pleas for attention flung into the ether by adolescents, this is worth reading.

I will tell you why this blog is worth reading. I will tell you why this blog is worth putting in your favourites list. I will tell you why it is worth following @sachtastic on twitter. It is worth doing all those things because I am a person worth listening to, and I have things to say.

You had a dream once. It was probably to be a fairy princess or a superhero bus conductor. You're secretly still working towards that dream, I know you are. You've changed it a little, rubbed out the physically impossible aspects, but you've still got that dream.

My dream was to be a fantasy hero, riding a white horse so fast that none could beat it. I would be adept at archery and swordfighting, as well as being an enigmatic deuteragonist with a dangerously sharp wit.

Note deuteragonist. I don't want to be the hero that everyone loves. I want to be the slightly mad one that everyone wishes they could be. Including, evidently, me.

I want to sit in the background, playing puppet master, creator, hero and fiend all at the same time. In short, I want to write. I know I can do it. The thing is, there's no point to my fantasy character if nobody reads her.

So read me. For once, this blog is not about tea, or Alan Bennett, or the perils of the internet. This blog is actually about me, about who I am, and about the course I am steering for. I am here now, exposing my metaphorical squishy sensitive parts that you might peruse me, and if the scratchy hessian mittens of criticism* bring tears to my eyes, what does it matter?

In my writing, the hero of my imagination, who put me to sleep as a child, is born.

I turned twenty earlier this month. I am into my third decade on this planet and I can't help but think that I'm going to have to start making sure I have an impact.

From now on, this blog is about the journey I am taking. I will one day be a writer, a real writer, not a blogger, not a smidgen above angsty teenager, a proper writer. If all goes well, I hope it will serve as a guide for the budding journalists and writers of the next generation. If all goes badly, I hope it will serve as a cautionary tale to the budding journalists and writers of the next generation.

Deuteragonist seeks protagonist. Must be willing to offer me a job, and to let me ride a white horse. Ta.

*Note: I am not serious about this metaphor.

Spare Time, or What's Left of It

In the Douglas Adams novel Life, the Universe and Everything, Slartibartfast expresses his intention to take up the octraventral heebiephone. As Adams explains, Startibartfast has "the wrong number of mouths", and any attempt to learn to play the heebiephone therefore would be, "pleasantly futile".

The point behind my latest diversion into the world of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is this: when I have something important to do, my spare time tends to be consumed by a far more complicated, and therefore more enjoyable, task. One which can be described in no better manner than with the words "pleasantly futile".

I have, at the moment, a very important thing to do. This is to revise my little blue socks off for my upcoming exams. This is of course, happening, but progress is slow. The problem is this- it can never truly end, thus rendering it a task which is unpleasantly futile.

Meanwhile, I have been using my Sunday and the fifteen minutes between revision hours attempting to construct a family tree for the entire pantheon of Greek gods. This is an incredibly slow task, especially as different writers give gods different origins and different names.

So far, I have positioned 59 different Olympians, mortals, Muses, Protogenoi, Titans and so on. I have written a biography for all but a handful. I am not yet proud of it, but I do feel a sense of impending pride.

I have hit upon something of a hurdle, however. After becoming tired of the many and varied progeny of Zeus, and returning to the primordial gods for some amusement, I hit upon the Wikipedia entry for Thaumas, the son of Gaia and Pontus (earth and sea). It said that he married and Oceanid.

Not thinking I had anything to fear, I tapped the link.

The writings of Dr. Wikipedia kindly informed me that the Oceanids were the children of the Titans Oceanus and Tethys, and there were three thousand of them.

Now I accept, being immortal, that you tend to have a lot of time on your hands. Boredom is going to set in eventually. "Tethys dear, shall we try for another?" "How long since the last one, Oceanus?" "About six hundred years." "Oh, that's a reasonable age gap, I suppose we could."

Three thousand, though? And that's just the daughters. The sons were known as Potamoi. Care to guess how many of those there were? That's right, another three thousand.

When I tried to find out the names of all these children, Dr. Wikipedia pointed out that only a "relatively small portion of their names" were actually given in Greek writings. It surprised me that Hesiod hadn't taken up the majority of his Theogony with listing them. In fact, fewer than two hundred Oceanids and Potamoi are named in all known Greek works.

All I can do is speculate then, that none of them were called Blue Ivy.

I must admit, the prospect of filling out another six thousand biographies, the latter 5800 with the word "Unknown", has moved my task from the realms of the possible but daft, into the land of the impossible and barking.

Back to revision then. Or learning the names and locations of all 27 French regions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Oceanids

In this game, you have to be more than just ahead

At around half one on the twelfth of December, I passed somebody in a doorway who gave me the news that there would be a broadcast from CERN the following day, and that there had been “findings”. I emailed my editor almost immediately, requesting to report on those findings, whatever they were.

I got no response.

At just before one on the thirteenth, I sat in the centre of the front row in a seminar room to watch the broadcast. I had my notebook in my arms and my Dictaphone on my lap. I was ready. Nobody was going to take this away from me. I had been ahead of the game.

Physicists: lecturers, researchers and students alike crammed into the tiny room at the University of Liverpool. The screen at the front of the room displays row after row of excited academic faces just like ours. The older members of the audience whisper the names of those they recognise; they are jealous of their position.

The aroma of sandwiches and crisps filled the room. Let it be known that, even when the world stands on the brink of the greatest scientific discovery in decades, lunchtime must be strictly observed.

When the broadcast started, there were early technical difficulties. As it progressed, they became on-going technical difficulties, and by the end of the broadcast, were late technical difficulties.

I ended up moving to another screen, standing in a warm corridor with plenty of other people who had no idea what was going on, holding my Dictaphone above the others’ heads.

I must admit, I knew at the time that what I was doing was futile, that I was resigned to the fact that my editor had ignored my email and that the story would be passed on to the first of my illiterate cowriters to fumble a desperate message on their iPhone.

The eventual response from my editor, when I asked if someone had got in before me was “hiya yer”- Which added quite a bit of insult to my already considerable injury.

Do you know what, though? Sod them. I’m reporting on what CERN found, right here, right now.

Two experiments possibly found something, in roughly the same place, but not quite. It’s all a bit vague. They do, however, agree on the fact that we are a long way off confirming anything and the Higgs Boson will not be announced as a discovery until after more experiments in the following year. I wasn’t disappointed by this, but many of my (mentally) younger colleagues were.

The ATLAS experiment, represented by Fabiola Gianotti, concluded that the Higgs mass is somewhere around 125 GeV. All good scientists should know, however, that a discovery is not a discovery until it has been found to be accurate to something called five-sigma. The Higgs was “found” by ATLAS at 126 GeV at 3.6 sigma. This, incidentally, is a long way off five, and in theory, the readings that scientists are hoping is the Higgs… well, it could just be statistical anomalies.

These are fun in their way, but a massive waste of time and money. As Ms Gianatti put it, “I think it would be really kind for the Higgs Boson to be here.”

After ATLAS concluded their piece, the majority of people left. Only the most advanced particle physicists, many as they were, understood even half of what was going on, and being so advanced, they mostly had better places to be.

I must confess that I too left the corridor and returned to the problem class I was supposed to be in an hour earlier.

I am proud of being there though. I have, on my Dictaphone, a recording of a physicist making a joke. I suffered to get that; I had to trawl through a great deal of tape that was too noisy, or too scientific to use- just for that one sound bite. My arms ached from holding the thing aloft for the best part of an hour.

I was there, though. I stood on the edge of history, all for the distant and evanescent hope that I might one day write it.

Oh, and Merry Christmas. May your dreams be as deep and crisp and even as you want them to be, and may I have the sense to write a festive blog entry next year.

Universally Challenged

I know. I’ve been away. It’s because I’m struggling to express one particular concept. To corrupt a cliché, I have managed to snatch failure from the jaws of success.

Anyone who knows me, or has read this blog before will be mightily aware that I have a certain infatuation with the idea of appearing on University Challenge. The sad fact is, I may be about to miss that train.

I’m the reserve. I’m the cursewording reserve.

Out of the fifty or so who took the test, most were abysmal-let’s face it, most people are at most things. It’s a fact we live with, move on from but still have to put up with at times. There were just six candidates that stood out well above the rest. The team were in that six. I was in that six. One unlucky fellow was also in that six.

I guess I should count my blessings that I’m not him, her, it, zir or em. Another day, different questions, and I might have been. Say, if George hadn’t told me that Niels Bohr had said a particular something, or if I hadn’t looked up the dates of Immanuel Kant that morning. These two facts have now slipped my mind, but they came to my aid when I needed them.

That person is wandering around right now, stunned by the fact that they aren’t as much of a genius as they thought they were. Do they know how close they came?

I hope not. It’s rubbish knowing that you were a whisker from success. It’s rubbish being the reserve. I’m not going to poison the others, break their limbs or anything like that. I can’t pretend I wish them all well though.

They’re my Facebook friends. We went out for drinks last week. I had to sit in the pub with them, knowing that if anything on Greek Mythology comes up I’m going to be eating my own shoes in the audience, despairing that they don’t know any of it- but I do. I had to sit in the pub with them, knowing that I’m not really one of them, and that if I really want to get onto University Challenge, one of them is going to miss out.

If that happens, will they hate me? I want it to happen. I want one, non-specific member of the team to go down with crushing gastroenteritis an hour before we go to film the first round. I want him to gladly give his place to me. It might be bad for team spirit, but I’d love to save the day, I really would.

So perhaps it’s my calling to be the reserve. My brilliance has been confirmed, so my ego isn’t suffering. I probably won’t get onto the program, but there is still a chance. There is a chance of me being the happiest person alive for just a little bit, as a door that was creaking shut suddenly opens for me.

I want it to happen. I know it won’t. Wish me luck.

Stupidly Clever

These days, I am giddy with anticipation at the fact that I am as close as I have ever been to appearing on University Challenge. This is coupled, however, by the grim reality of the fact that I am far less prepared to do so than I was at this point last year.

I had a class test this week, a lab on Monday, an essay due the same day, a presentation the following week, an assignment due that I am too busy to even think about looking at. What’s more, this has been going on for a year now, and all of the general knowledge I had previously accumulated has been replaced by Physics.

That’s not to say I’m not a formidable quiz opponent. I certainly have the broadest base of knowledge of anyone I know- but is that enough?

On the entry form, I was asked what my specialist area of knowledge was. Baffled by this, I put “all-round”. I have no idea whether this will play to my advantage or not.

Isn’t this how things should be, though? We are human beings; whereas birds can fly and fleas can jump, the one thing we can do is think.

In any case, I have a 100-question exam next Tuesday. I have no idea what format the questions will take. There are no past papers, nor clues as to what form the test will take.

It’s the most exciting, and the most terrifying exam I will ever take. There are no real negative consequences if I fail- aside, that is, from the lack of positive consequences. Still, I do want those positive consequences.

Think about it. What’s your gift, your talent, your ability? What are you good at? Don’t you like it when people realise?

The older I have become, the more the educational system has wanted to limit what I can study, attempting to make my knowledge more and more specific. The fact of the matter is, that I am a jack of all trades and a master of sweet Fanny Adams. I want an opportunity to show what I still know.

I am not some sort of “mad scientist”. I am not a “bookworm”. I’m a well-rounded human being, and, no matter how much my schedule seems to want to make me fail, I am beyond determined to prove myself.

If it goes well, I’ll let you know how it goes. If it doesn’t, I’ll be too busy sulking.

The Comfort of Strangers

Generally, strangers don’t bother me. The way I see it, I’m probably never going to come into contact with them again for as long as I live, so I may as well act as I please. When I say “act as I please”, I don’t mean anything too extreme, just being myself.

This outlook has its upsides; for example, I have no issue asking for refunds or replacements if something doesn’t meet my standards. I also realise that shop assistants are actually there to assist me in the shop. That’s a little too easy to forget, especially when an awful lot of shop assistants pretend that their job is to stand and chat with their colleagues.

My rules with strangers are these:

1. If they have a job, it’s only right to let them earn their pay. You don’t want them to get complacent.

2.  Thank people when and only when they have done something for you, never out of misguided politeness. By allowing them to think they have done a good job, you have done them a disservice. 

3. You can let them think what they want afterwards. What matters is the few seconds you come into contact. It doesn’t matter if you become a funny anecdote or a haunting memory, just as long as you act in a way that you are comfortable with.

These rules have some exceptions. If people look suspicious, for instance. There’s nothing wrong with being suspicious. It’s not prejudice (most of the time), it’s a complex combination of instinct and experience. It could be that you’ve seen the person on Crimewatch, perhaps, or could be that you associate their features with drug or alcohol abuse. Either way, it’s probably best to avoid causing aggression.

The other exception to the rules is public toilets. There is no logical reason for this, only that when I am in a public toilet, I do not want to seem weird. It just doesn’t seem the place for it.

It might be because of how I would respond to unusual behaviour if I encountered it. Just the other day, I was aware of a girl being in the toilet for rather longer than typical, and then exiting without washing her hands. I was outraged. How lucky that girl was that I did not see her face! If I had, the walls of the university would be plastered with photo-fit style drawings of her, accompanied with the details of her misdeed.

I find it difficult to be “normal” in public toilets though, particularly when hand-driers are available. On a cold day, there’s little better than sticking the hand-drier on and just sitting under it. You could let the hot air blow down your sleeves, dry your damp hair under it, or twist the head around and thaw out the icicles forming on your nose.

If anyone should walk into the toilets, however, dive away from the hand-drier as quickly as you possibly can. It’s not worth the shame.

Nation of Shopkeepers

I am both incredibly proud, and unforgivably ashamed, of being English.

When I say that I am English, I do not mean that I was born in England, or brought up in England, or that my ancestors were English (the majority weren't). It says "British" on my passport. England, having no national anthem, is not really a place any more. It's an idea.

It's not a brilliant idea, mind. It is a collage, a stew, manufactured by the offcuttings of every remark made about the inhabitants of this green and pleasant land. An Englishman cannot be insulted by anything a foreigner has to say; if anything appears to be disparaging, it is dismissed as a humorous misunderstanding, or more frequently, a fault of the foreigner in question.

For example, the Hungarian humourist George Mikes, wrote a book called How To Be An Alien. In the preface to the 24th edition, he complained that the book had been received too kindly- he had hardly annoyed anyone. There was one example of a bank manager reading the book from cover to cover in one sitting and hurling it into the fire for its impertinence, but little else.

Mikes had wanted to stir something in the English, for them to realise that they were being mocked. On the contrary, the Central Office of Information requested that the book be translated into Polish for the benefit of Poles moving to the country.

So that was it. Mikes wrote about the English not as they were, but how they wanted to be seen. And so it was with many other writers- once a nation, the English became a caricature of tea-drinking, island-dwelling, excessively polite cricket fans.

This, in turn, spelt bad news for me. I always read far too much. As a result, I became English.

In particular, I would have to blame the character of Arthur Dent. He scuppered a spaceship for a cup of tea, tried teaching cavemen to play Scrabble, nearly blew up the Universe trying to bowl a cricket ball and, when stranded on an alien planet, made sandwiches. I didn't like him for a long time. Then one day, without warning, I became him.

To prove my point, I will describe something that happened to me just the other day.

I was on a bus, and it was packed. I was standing next to a Frenchwoman and her teenage daughter. Before this story goes any further, I would like to make clear that I have nothing against the French- 1066 was a long time ago and that silliness with Napoleon could have happened to anybody.

In any case, the point of the story was this: I had my hand on a metal bar and the French girl was unashamedly leaning on my hand. With her head. Her hair was on my hand. Fifteen years of education failed to prepare me for that moment.

Arthur Dent, in So Long and Thanks For All the Fish tells a story about how, sat at a table with a stranger in a railway station, he finds himself in an awkward situation. The stranger begins to eat his biscuits. Strangled by English impotence, he can do nothing but eat the biscuits along with the stranger until they part company.

Arthur is relieved to find that his biscuits are hidden under a newspaper, and it is he who has been eating somebody else's all along.

No such relief was available to me. It is most definitely socially unacceptable to rest your head on a stranger in public in England. I do not know about France. It could be that, on a crowded Continental bus, personal space becomes a thing of the past.

Yet there I wasin England, staring into space, pretending someone wasn't leaning on my hand, desperately hoping that the girl's mother would correct her. For twenty minutes, I stood there, wishing I could say something, wishing I could cause a fuss, wishing I wasn't so English. But I wouldn't have it any other way.

Hidden Menaces

As many of you who are on my email contacts list are more than aware, my email was hacked this week. I apologise profusely to you all.

The thing is, how could I have prevented this from happening?

According to the lowlifes down at Hacker9 (don't look them up, I wouldn't want to give them the publicity), it is because I am "noob or [have] very poor knowledge of internet". At least I know that nouns need articles.

One other nugget of grammatically infantile information I managed to unearth from the little toads at Hacker9 is that email hacking can be done in three different ways. The first two I almost certainly did not fall victim to. The third, however, is rather more sinister, and could affect anybody. I'm going to run over all three and how you can prevent them from happening to you.

The first is password guessing. This is something that nobody should fall victim to. If a hacker is a close friend (unlikely), or just a manipulative internet acquaintance, they can have up to a 20 per cent chance of working out your password- by simply guessing. A lot of people use memorable names, dates and places as passwords. What's more, the majority of us use the same password for pretty much everything.

So then, give up on nostalgic passwords for high-importance accounts such as emails. Use a combination of random letters and numbers, preferably more than 8 characters in length. If the website allows it, also use punctuation. The official line for multiple accounts is to use different passwords for each, but this is not always reasonable. My advice, which is in no way endorsed by anyone, is to vary your passwords on a theme. For example, if you have numbers in your passwords (you ought to), increase them by 1 for each new account you open. Or, write the same password backwards. Or half backwards and the rest forwards. The combinations are only as limited as your imagination.

Now, I'm pretty over-the-top when it comes to keeping my password private. I most certainly practice what I preach. If an email comes to me from Paypal, Yahoo or anybody else, saying for security reasons I need to reply to the email with my password, I don't suddenly decide I'm a moron and offer them my bank account details and the keys to my house as well. So I can say with 99.9 per cent certainty that it wasn't this that caught me out.

The second method used by weed-smoking maleducates and opportunist sociopaths alike is Phishing. This is a common beast, and typically wanders round shouting, "I'm really obviously trying to steal from you." Phishing works by asking you politely for your bank account details, email password or similar by promising a lovely juicy worm in return. This worm is usually in the form of a free iPod.

You can avoid the Phishermen (or women) by thinking twice before entering your details online. Do you trust the site? Remember, it is very easy to lie on the internet, because nobody can see your face.

Though I must admit to being a little too trusting sometimes, I almost certainly haven't entered my password into any kind of popup, or badly constructed website offering freebies. So that leaves just one more option, one I hadn't fully realised even existed.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to the murky world of keystroke capturing. If you want to avoid this one completely, seal yourself in a box and have your nearest and dearest feed you through a straw for the rest of your life.

It works in one of two sinister ways. The first is by using an actual hardware keylogger, which plugs into the back of the victim's computer and records every single keystroke they make. With an experienced eye, the important passwords are identified and the email accounts accessed. Though this approach seems to target just one person, and be of more interest to private investigators than spammers and scammers, how's this for a thought: what if it was stuck into a public computer? Say, in a library. Or a university.

Here it seems we may have stumbled across our culprit. There is of course, the second, even darker form of keylogging- using a software keylogger. This takes the innocent form of a video of a kitten falling off a chair sent to you by one of your closest friends. Only it's not actually from them, and it's not actually a video of a kitten falling off a chair. No, once you stop watching that kitten, he gets to work.

He makes a note of every keystroke you make, and beams that straight to the internet. On the internet, another kitten (kitten here being a metaphor for piece of software) calculates which of those keystrokes is likely to represent an email password. A third kitten then tries each of these possible combinations until bingo! She cracks it, and suddenly all your friends, family, old work colleagues and former schoolteachers are being offered Viagra.

Or worse. Another little scam running around the interweb presently is the idea that person A is being held hostage, and person B needs to send lots and lots of money to person C to free them. Of course, because the email was sent from Person A's account, Person B thinks it actually is Person A, and sends the dosh. That is, providing Person A typically writes in lowercase Courier New.

Luckily, none of my contacts got this message. They could have done though, and that makes me feel quite apologetic. I must do better. Though I am not noob, and have actually relatively snappy knowledge of internet, the second I let my guard down was the second a criminal tried his luck.

I will no longer write or check emails from public computers. It is terrible to have been reduced to this, but the internet is swarming with armies of kittens working for a plethora of the most diabolical faces you'll never see.

Be careful out there.

A Bit of a Break

Right, I've had a bit of a break, and I'm going to leap straight in with a film review.

Scenes of a Sexual Nature, which, at the time of writing, is still available to watch on BBC iPlayer, and aside from failing to live up to it's title, is perfectly alright. It's not the most action-packed of films, which would probably cause a lot of people to shy away from it. It explores the nature of relationships through a variety of different characters enjoying an afternoon on Hampstead Heath in the middle of summer. Amongst these characters are people on a blind date, a prostitute and her client and two ex-lovers reunited, by chance, after over fifty years.

My favourite, however, was the portrayal of a newly-divorced couple. The scriptwriters had taken into account that things aren't always that simple. People who get divorced don't necessarily hate each other. This couple were still in love, they knew their ex was the most good-looking person they had ever known... and yet they knew that the relationship wasn't right. The novelty of this idea is summed up in this quote: 'Sometimes, relationships get to the point where you run out of things to say. Then, some people say, "I've found someone else." Others say, "It's not you, it's me." I said, "Will you marry me?" And you said, "Yes." '

The film focuses on the delicate nature of relationships, how they're not at all simple or easily quantifiable. My only issue with the film is that I don't feel I got closure on all of the stories, but I guess that's the point. I expect I've been conditioned by Hollywood romances to expect that it all gets sorted out by the end. In real life, though, things aren't always sorted out. You can be happy, but who in real life has a happy ending? For its novel approach to people's lives and loves, Scenes of a Sexual Nature gets four stars.

I had a visit from my parents and brother at the weekend. My mum and I went shopping, which was good fun (though I'm regretting not buying that red-and-black top). What is it with Debenhams at this time of year though? They've got nothing you'd ever want to wear. In any case, after that, we met L. and had dinner at Nando's, which was standard. Wandered round the docks for a bit, Tate, my brother had cake, etc. Was dead nice seeing them all but in all honesty when I run through the things we did, I have no clue where the time went. It'll be nice seeing them again at the end of term.

Dead excited about the end of term. Actually, there's a whole bunch of things I'm dead excited about. Top of the list (not actually, because that's going to the gym later today) is the Winter Ball next Monday. I am going to look amazing. So will L.; we're both going to look so sharp that people will look at us and bleed. Partly because we're that good, but mostly because they're not. Will update you, but in the meantime, bye.

God is music

On a whim, I have decided to learn to play the violin. Well, it's not exactly on a whim. I wanted to do it when I was younger, but as my application to the Lyceum was to study piano, my mum got pretty annoyed when I announced that, actually, I wanted to learn violin.

After that, I pretty much ignored music. Before, it had been important. At my first school, we would listen to a different piece of classical music every day, and we had to be able to name a vast number of pieces. I listened to Mozart, Holst, Handel, even Beethoven when I wasn't trying to get to sleep.

I mean, it was all music that was designed to send me to sleep, but I did used to stay up and try to listen to it. Thankfully, cassette players (consult the history books if you're unsure what one is) used to finish each side with an enormous clunking noise, which usually woke me up if I was drifting.

Family tradition also dictated that we watch The Last Night of the Proms (on telly, naturally). We watched it religiously, planning ahead, inviting the neighbours around and all the rest of it. I thought it was brilliant.

Music left my life when I was about five or six. I'm not entirely sure why, but it did.

I still haven't got it back, but I'm trying, and it's a gradual process.

The one thing that really saved me, musically, was being forced to learn the recorder at the age of seven. This was at school, and they did it because recorders are cheap. I bought my own, because of the hideous bucket of spit-scented half-chewed recorders that got passed around each week. Words cannot describe how unhygienic that was.

For this reason, I hated the recorder, because, being disorganised, I often forgot my own, nice, wooden recorder, and had to borrow one of the disgusting plastic ones.

Time went on, though, and we were split into sets for music. This appealed to my already-strong notion that I was better than pretty much everyone around me, and when Recorder Club was created, solely for the elite, I was in my element.

I did, however, hate the instrument with a passion, and this was my downfall. I jumped when extra music lessons were offered, and left my recorder-playing days behind me in favour of learning the guitar.

In short, it didn't go well. Despite my disinclination to practise, I was better than everyone else, which was a good start. However, lessons were after school. My mum got a new job and was unable to pick me up after school. That appeared to be that.

I did, later join the school orchestra, though perhaps for all the wrong reasons. I joined because all members of the school orchestra were given a shiny red-and-gold badge saying ORCHESTRA, which was effectively a fast-track to the front of the lunch queue. Although practises were only twice a week, this came in useful on the other three days due to the magic phrase "extra orchestra practise".

To begin with, I joined my old Recorder Club chums, but I quickly came to realise that it wasn't for me. I became the orchestra's one-and-only percussionist, specialising in the glockenspiel. To this day I will get quite annoyed at anyone who calls it a xylophone.

However, that too fell by the wayside when I left primary school. I didn't even listen to music for my first two years at secondary school. I only started to because of homework.

My R.S. teacher (miserable witch- she hated me) told us to listen to the Black Eyed Peas' 'Where is the Love?'. Now, today, it sounds like patronising, meaningless faux-protesting, but I liked it. A lot of people did. It reminded me that music could mean something.

I started to buy CDs. I bought each copy of the Now series, I watched Top of the Pops, I listened to the radio. In the end I got into Green Day, which led me to the Ramones, and the Clash, and the realisation that the best music isn't necessarily what everyone else is listening to.

I started to play the guitar again, then the bass guitar, and the keyboard. I got really into music lessons at school- my teacher loved me to the point where he failed to reprimand me for punching another student in the face.

I elected to study music at GCSE. I watched The History Boys, and discovered The Smiths. I will never forget the day that my mother came home to find me listening to Morrissey. Maybe it was her disapproval that spurred me on, but I've never quite gotten over him.

I realised that not everyone can read music, or can write music for a whole variety of different instruments. I wasn't special, because I wasn't good at any of it, but I wasn't completely useless.

At Cheltenham, I didn't play music, partly because I didn't have time, but also because there was so much emphasis on being good. It's not my way. I'm clever, yes, but I'm not a mathematical prodigy. I can also write creatively, draw an adequate representation of someone's face, speak a multitude of languages to tourist level. I know that there are 88 constellations, and I can tell you the names of a fair few of them, as well as their brightest stars. I can't touch-type, but I know how to run an Excel spreadsheet.

It's not arrogance to say that if there's one thing I do well, it's everything.

So, coming home, I did what I should have done a long time before. I got myself a proper instrument. I've had the violin for about 24 hours now. She's not brilliant, but neither am I. It's something we have in common. I hope I do outgrow her. Then I can take up something else.

I've wasted a few years, but it's not the end of the world. I have relative pitch, which means I don't have to stick stickers on my violin to know where to put my fingers. I can play a major scale without giving anyone a brain haemorrhage. The cat even slept though my playing.

I'm reclaiming music.

My First Blog Post

Okay, so the title won't win me any literary awards. I'm not looking for that, though. Basically, the reason I'm writing a blog is because I'm bored, and also because I want attention. I'm going to be writing about my life, films I've seen, television programmes I've watched and so on.

The subject matter isn't going to be a thrillride, but at least I can spell, which is more than you can say for a lot of people.

People get my back up. To be honest, if I was going to sell myself as a human being, this is probably where I'd start. I know, as a USP, misanthropy is an unusual approach, but that's the point. I'm different; that's why people like me. The reasons people don't like me are many and varied, but usually it's because I didn't like them first and happened to let them in on that somewhere along the line.

I am an unemployed genius with no idea where my life is going until Thursday.