Ladies and gentlemen, exhibit A: the front page of today's Daily Express. I've always been a little dismayed at the emotive language used in tabloid-style media, but the Daily Express has today taken it to a new and unpleasant level. The language used is emotive and misleading, and the headline is riddled with factual inaccuracies. I've written to the editor, and will, if I haven't received an answer within 7 days, or have received an unsatisfactory answer (them's the rules), forward my letter to the Press Complaints Commission. If you'd like to follow suit, you can download the text of my email here.

I took possession of an old Power Macintosh G3 today for a little project I have in mind, and as part of getting it up and running I took apart an old Apple keyboard for cleaning. The printed circuit board that the keyboard is based around was very crude, but my eye was drawn to the old-style Apple logo that was etched onto the surface. It looked really smart and retro, so I tried to take a photo of it. There's more glare than I'd like, but the shallow angle the light's at does show up the embossed nature of the logo. Those of a particularly geeky bent can download a 1600x1200 version here for use as a desktop background.

In other news, the young lady had a huge vat of steaming soup with chick peas, spinach and chorizo ready for me when I came home from work. I intend to campaign for teachers to get even longer summer holidays.

There are reports of some more incidents in Tube stations. I'm fine, and I think Jenny is too as she should be at home.

And now, as part of the Autumn/Winter 2005 collection, a gold and cream scarf from the Jenny Freckles collection, modelled for us today by the ever-lovely meerkat.

Hell. There were ticket inspectors on the bus this morning, as there often are. Apparently, my annual bus pass expired yesterday, so I'm now £20 lighter.

I always support ticket inspectors, as folk who don't pay their ticket push up the price of mine, but it still rankles that I was fined when I'm always very conscientious about paying for my ticket.

I don't dispute that I was in the wrong - my ticket was invalid - but I wish there was some flexlbility.

A broadly enjoyable few days. On Thursday, the young lady was in town checking up on a surly teenager on work experience, and she came into work towards the end of the day and knitted a fine white and gold scarf for Nik's meerkat mascot. My wedding ring was also ready, so we went to pick it up. Oddly, I felt very different when I slipped it on to make sure it fitted. You know the way you expect to feel different somehow on your birthday, but never do? Well, when I tried my wedding ring on, I felt the sort of different I expected on a birthday, but it took me totally by surprise. With only three weeks to go, I'm genuinely excited, even though it now transpires we don't even have enough spare cash to take the mini-honeymoon we had intended to after the wedding. Ah well.

On Friday I went into the young lady's school to teach some Photoshop skillz to the teachers in the art department. As it happens, a bunch of laconic sixth formers also joined the lesson, and I had to quickly in my head run through the slides I had prepared to make sure that I hadn't inserted some comedy swearing in them. It went well, though time constraints and the fact that the lesson was being delivered to a mixed ability group rather than the group of largely starters that I had expected threw me a bit. Ah well, they seemed to get something from it, and I at least got their stack of graphics tablets out and running.



I also witnessed (and helped teach!) a couple of the young lady's lessons. Some of the kids were little horrors, but the older ones especially were rewarding to work with. Adorably, at the end of the day (since it was near the end of term), her whiteboard was covered in farewell messages from her students, one of which is shown above. Bless!

Yesterday was spend cleaning and tidying in between huge gouts of reading. The young lady wolfed down the new Harry Potter in less than twelve hours, and I finished the very excellent We Need to Talk About Kevin.

Today will hopefully be more of the same. I'm now off to try to recreate a Patisserie Valerie cream tea at home.

I'd like to tell you a story. It's a story which has the air of having happened to a friend of a friend, but which in fact happened to me. The story is this:

Last night, an earwig bit me in the balls.

I felt a little nip on my arm as I was drifting off, but just thought it was a crumb or a more usual bedbug. I began to slip once more into slumber, when I felt a much more deliberate nip on a distinctly intimate area. I fumbled for the light, and saw an earwig (or 'wiggin' as they're called in our house) sitting quite calmly on the duvet.

Though not given to such acts, I'm ashamed to say that the corpse of the offending insect is now drifting through London's sewer system.

There is a tiny shop near our house which sells second-hand furniture. The choice, which spills out onto the pavement and is dutifully packed back into the building at the end of the day, ranges from MFI chests of drawers to Moroccan pierced wood screens of breathtaking beauty. Had you visited yesterday, however, you too could have been the proud owner of this magnificent four-foot high brass eagle.

I was seriously tempted, but then realised he might feel a little claustrophobic in our London flat . It would surely be cruel to cage such a noble beast.

The reaction of Londoners not directly affected by Thursday's explosions has been overwhelmingly pragmatic. There has been little wailing and gnashing of teeth, no melodramatic shouts of "Noooo!" delivered from the knees with arms upraised. Instead, the city seems to have accepted the fact of the event, and, gritting its teeth, gone right back to work.

It's a dignified reaction. The biggest 'fuck you' that can be delivered to the groups and individuals who perpetrated the attacks is the simple act of keeping the economy ticking over through hard work and hard play.

I came across an article today, 'A Letter To The Terrorists, From London,' which manages to summarise the feeling pretty well without being mawkish or nationalistic.

I think I've spoken to everyone by now, but just in case anyone else is concerned, the young lady and I are quite safe after Thusday's explosions.

Well, put it this way: I've had weekends in my life which were more fun.

As predicted, it was spent largely writing for the magazine, and that's me just travelling home from the office now (it's 10:15 as I write this).

There are two small chunks of copy still to be written, but I have to wait until Monday before I have the information which will allow me to write them. As it stands, it's 6413 words long and currently backed up in a quite amusing number of different ways.

I'm going home now. Smell you later...

THE CONCEPT OF VALUE ADDED TAX DOES NOT REQUIRE PHD-LEVEL INTELLIGENCE AND DILIGENCE TO COMPREHEND. WHY THE BADGERY HELL DOES IT CONTINUE TO ELUDE SO MANY PEOPLE? I WANT TO GO TO BED, DAMMIT, AND THIS FEATURES TABLE HAS MORE HOLES IN IT THAN A POOR FISHERMAN'S NET.

DAMN, DAMN, DAMN, DAMN, as professor Higgins says.

I feel better after that rant. Thanks for listening. I'll just leave the money on the sideboard as usual, yeah?