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It’s all dark here. The skies are covered in cloud, and I’m told rain is on the way. Yes folks, there’s a storm ‘a brewing’. I’ve been all headachey all evening, as I’m my own little barometer. Hopefully a good storm will cool things down and get rid of this horrible clammy feeling.

I’ve seen people mention power cuts… here’s hoping we don’t have those!

Still, could be worse. There’s bad weather, but the New Orleans thing is just taking the rise. I wouldn’t want to be in the residents position right now. Not nice.

I tend to listen to BBC Radio 2 in the car. I used to listen to Radio 1 in the afternoon on the way home from work, but I got fed up with it, so it’s now Wake up Wogan in the morning, and Johnnie Walker on the way home.

Occasionally, if I manage to leave a little earlier, I’m treated to the wonders that are Steve Wright in the Afternoon.

I just wish it could be Steve Wright at 3am.

I can’t stand the show. He seems like a perfectly nice guy – everybody on the show does, but the show as a whole grates on me something terrible. Firstly, there’s how his show has to start and end with a galloping instrumental sting that just seems to act as filler. Nobody else’s show does this. I have a hunch it’s because Wright’s show is recorded/played out from his home studio, so they have this filler whilst everything comes up.

Next, there’s the whole ‘Zoo’ format they use. This show was the first in the UK to do it. It’s always been big in the USA, and Wright was the first to bring it to the UK. As a format, it’s not too bad. It’s better in some respects than having one DJ yammering on for three hours. It gives another angle to interviews, so in that respect it works. The main thing I hate is how everybody else on the show seems to act like a braying idiot. Any joke, no matter how simple or just plain unfunny it is, is greeted with rapturous guffaws, often followed by walrus-like clapping. Why? I really don’t understand this. Something that would probably make you smile is suddenly cheapened. Much like every single joke on Friends.

The music is OK, but I feel it lurches between genres and the decades too much. A good DJ will show some sort of continuity with songs, but that seems strangely missing. I think the word ‘uninspired’ fits best here.

I mentioned the Zoo format working well for interviews, which I think it does. I do hate the final treatment of the interviews. As most of the show is recorded, apart from a few little bits here and there as it plays out, the interviews are often chopped about. You can tell this because if you listen to guests talk, you’ll notice they rarely take a breath. All of the breathing gaps and slight pauses nearly every normal person inserts into conversation are gone. An actor talking about their latest show is reduced to sounding like the disclaimer on any financial advert. Everything is clipped, and fast paced.

I find Radio 2′s output to be good on the whole. I think Wright’s show is a big blot on their output overall. It feels like a show lifted from some commercial station, or some unknown station. It’s just a bad piece of programming in my opinion. Now, I tend to put my iPod on in the car when I’m driving between 14:00 and 17:00.

Isn’t weather strange!

This morning, it was sunny, quite clear. It was a nice morning, the sort of morning you’d go out and wander around the countryside. Around 14:00, the skies darkened, and the heavens opened. A torrent of rain fell for about five minutes, which managed to catch my mother and sister on the way back from town (and countless others I’d expect). This was accompanied by some flashes of lightning, and loud rumbles of thunder. The kitchen floor was soaked as I’d left the back door open, and the garden was full of puddles.

An hour or so later, the skies were clear again, and the rain had dried up almost.

Its amazing how the weather can switch around like that, and so unexpectedly; I don’t think there was any major forecast for rain, not like that anyway. It never ceases to amaze me .

About five weeks or so ago, I was doing some stuff in one of the server cabinets at work. I was crouched down behind the rack, and being the ‘well-set’ individual I am, I was a tad stuck. To get myself out, I put my hand up on the top of a nearby partition and pulled myself up. We carried on moving servers and all sorts of other stupidly heavy things and I didn’t think much more of it.

It would seem, in doing that I managed to pull a muscle in my lower abdomen/hip, and its been giving me gyp for a few weeks now. Every few days, it would heal enough that I’d forget about it, and start moving things about. It came to a head last Friday when I didn’t sleep too well Thursday night (owing to the rain waking me up) and I was like death warmed up all day. The previous night I’d moved my old 19″ monitor off my desk and I think that knocked my side out again. I eventually came home from work and spent the weekend sitting around doing as little as possible, and generally not feeling too good.

Honestly, I think I panicked myself a little and started to think it could have been something a little more serious – I’d lost my appetite, and I just wasn’t feeling good at all. It wasn’t much fun at all. On Monday I spoke to the doctor and he seemed pretty non-plussed about it. His suggestion was that it was a cumulative thing – I was just stressed and generally off, so I just needed to rest. So here I am, sitting at home watching lots of the Discovery Channel and random shows I usually don’t watch.

I’ve decided to take this whole week, and make sure this is sorted out for good. Its actually feeling better, although I have to be careful how I sit or I can be pulling the muscles again. Its in exactly the place where you use the muscles a lot, and my god you notice it when it aches when you sit funny!

Anyway, it’ll heal. It better do!

It was about 22:50. I’d just finished reading Zygote in Computer Shopper. I placed the magazine down, turned off my light, and settled down to sleep.

Outside, I heard a strange sound. It sounded something like air-brakes on a bus, as a large vehicle slowly edged up. I heard a few voices not far away chatting about something. I then heard somebody say ‘We’ll have to get these cars moved. Who owns them?’ I opened an eye and noticed a faint blue flashing around the edge of my roller blind, then a sudden burst of “NEEENAWWNEEENAWW” from the siren from a fire appliance outside.

It turned out, some enterprising individual had decided to set fire to some trees over the back of the houses near where I live. A fire appliance had arrived, but they were unable to get close enough without moving some cars, so random people were being dragged out of their houses to move them.

As I lay there, I realised how glad I was that earlier that day I’d moved my car anyway, as when I’d arrived home the parking was atrocious, so I ended up parked in a really silly place. When some cars moved, I moved into their spaces, luckily out of the way of where this fire engine was going.

Needless to say, I was a bit narked. Its tradition down our road that if anything happens, half of the neighbours suddenly pop out and stand outside yakking away like demented parrots for the next hour or so, the yakking punctuated by the occasional loud guffaw from somebody. I’m then left laying there desperately trying to get back to sleep.

In a strange twist, the fire was out in no time, and the neighbours got bored and went in straight away. It was all over in about fifteen minutes and I dozed off at pretty much my normal time.

I’m still tired though. Ho hum.

I followed somebody home today. Not in a creepy, wierdo way, but it was a neighbours daughter driving from the same town I work in, and I just so happened ended up following her most the way home. In the back of her car, she has one of those ‘Caution: Little People On Board’ signs, which I think is meant to alert people behind to not ram her car, or something like that.

The thing I found funniest, was the fact she was all over the road, and quite obviously speeding in many places – I was driving along a 40mph limit doing 40 myself, and she was most definately getting further away from me as we went down the road. It makes you wonder quite what the point of that little sign is. Maybe it acts as a warning to other drivers that this driver is liable to be erratic, and possibly cause YOU to have an accident.

Just remember though – there will be little people involved.