How remiss of me; completely forgot to pimp my latest project, MacFormat presents The Essential iTunes & iPod Handbook, chez recedinghairline.co.uk, so get ready for some pimpin’. Basically, it’s an everything-you-need-to-know guide for anyone with an iPod, with reviews, tutorials, features and more, and it’s written for Mac and PC users in clear, jargon-free English. Plus, there’s purdy pictures – you can download a pack of stunning images of the iPod range to use as desktop backgrounds – and a free copy of the excellent CoverScout 2 (worth €30) for Mac users. Look at the pretty example spreads!

Trudy – a cross between a collie and a lab, I think – was described as ‘very boisterous’. Quite. Still, after the first twenty minutes of mentalness, she settled and would even sit well – until the very last lungey second – as we waited to let other dogs pass. More pictures on Flickr. (What is Dog of the Week?)

Despite the 5am start, today’s visit to Brighton was wonderful. Met up with some of the dudes from Realmac for brunch, then caught up with The Nicest Man In The World® Simon Handby. Man, it was lovely to see him again. Then it was time for The Dave & Mendy Hour™, and it was all kinds of wonderful to see the little pair of scamps again. The most surreal moment – apart, possibly, from the tale of the glow-in-the-dark paint in the marital bedroom – was when a random biddy came up to our table in the middle of an anecdote to ask us if we could send a text message on her phone for her. Fair enough. Bemusedly, Dave complied, as the other three of us fought hard to avoid eye contact.



It would all have been fine, even though she then just started randomly telling us facts about her life and basically just not buggering off again after the message was sent, but for one odd little postscript to her rambling. It could have been ‘the gays’, but I think she was actually complaining about all the coons, and how they get everything and we get nothing. It’s apparently why she won’t go to London. At this point I made it clear somehow – it may have been by saying ‘goodbye’ with uncharacteristic firmness – that we were done talking, and she ambled off. The bigoted old trout.

Some people take pictures of their first born. Some takes pictures of the amazing places they have been privileged to visit. Me, I use photography to immortalise such epic meals as tonight’s risotto, which looked so fine in the evening sun as I brought it through from the kitchen that I thought it deserved capturing, uploading to Flickr, Twittering, posting on Facebook, and blogging here. It was that good. Good job, Wife.

Stig, my most favouritist of the nutjobs from the Bath Cat & Dogs Home, is shortly to get a new home. It’s not ours, sadly, so we took him for a last walk today. Man, I love this dog.

It was a Venn diagram intersection of serendipity: I wanted to muck about with some portrait photography, and Wife fancied some up-to-date shots. So off we toddled to Westonbirt with my cheap-but-lovely f/1.8 lens and a bag full of shrugs and egg yolk to take some pictures. Much fun was had there and in Lightroom, and further results can be seen on Flickr.

[SKIPPABLE INTRODUCTION I’m late to the Darwinpalooza, but I want to say something about evolution. Good little child of the enlightenment that I am, I accepted evolution as fact from whenever I was aware of the idea, but it wasn’t until early teens that I really got it. I can’t remember if there was a particular book, radio programme or whatever that caused the Damascene moment or whether it had just been ticking away in the back of my head, but to this day I understand the basic idea of evolution as follows below. I’m recording it here because in all the Darwin stuff that we’ve seen in this anniversary year, I haven’t seen it explained like this, and either I am therefore a genius, or I’m fundamentally misunderstanding the process. Or both. Comments in the usual place, please.]

Detractors of evolution say that you can’t see it happening. Supporters of evolution say that that’s not bloody surprising because the effects take millions of years to be readily discernible. I say bollocks; I say, you can see the process of evolution happening every time a baby is born. Let’s take humans, because we can – unsurprisingly, and not a little punnily – relate to them. If a Caucasian man and a Caucasian woman have a child, the child will be Caucasian, yes? Let’s take a more specific example: If a man with an enormous nose fathers a child, that child too has a chance of having a similarly Brobdignian schnozzle. The child inherits – not exactly, not perfectly, but it inherits nonetheless – some of the traits of the parents. And if those traits are useful or desirable, children who inherit them grow up to be big and strong and will have nookie and will make new babies to whom they will pass these traits.

(Note: nobody – save perhaps Hitler and other eugenicists – consciously decides what constitutes useful or desirable. It might be a slight resistance to malaria – in which case the child will have a better chance of reaching sexual maturity and being physically able to reproduce – or something less quantifiable. The mechanism isn’t perfect, and we may prize characteristics that have no apparent evolutionary pay-off – why, for example, do gentlemen prefer blondes? – but it keeps poking away, pushing and thrusting in different directions to see what works.)

It takes so long both because the process is inexact – we don’t create clones or even averages of two parents when we reproduce – and because we don’t practice eugenics. We may think that a genetic propensity for baldness, myopia or a pot-belly are undesirable traits, but, as your humble narrator can attest, they’re not sufficiently debilitating in the short-to-medium term to stop people growing up and bonking. That species go extinct suggests that evolution is simply too slow to accommodate changes to the environment – both in the ‘trees and clouds’ and the ‘animals and shit around you’ sense – and I wouldn’t be surprised if folks were to show me examples of where evolution has pushed a species down an awkward road from which it can’t retrace its steps, but none of that argues against the basic mechanism. Look at a child, see how like its parent it looks, extrapolate a little and apply your understanding of basic reproduction, and evolution, I think, looks inevitable. The theory of evolution isn’t tied up neat with a bow – there is, I’m told, lots still to work out – but I remain puzzled at how the contentious the observable facts are; we pass on characteristics, and if they prove useful to a species, they stabilise and flourish, and shape species over their lifespans.

Marvin was, despite his angelic looks – brought to you here courtesy of my review iPhone 3GS – a bit of a Bad Dog. He was very young, pumped full of Collie madness, and clearly not dealing well with kennel life. Still, that was no excuse for jumping up, grabbing my t-shirt in his mouth, and tugging at it. It was all in play – no damage to the material, even – but never have I issued a ‘No!’ with such force. Bad dog!