#oneaday Day 546: Spot the Music

Hi, Americans. I hope you're enjoying Spotify. As you may be aware, we lucky Brits have had it for some time and have been enjoying its considerable charms. It's great to see you lot get the chance now, too.

Of course, you've had plenty of services like that already available, such as Grooveshark and RDIO. You also get to play with Turntable.fm while we don't, which is a bit of a shame. As such, though, this means that Spotify is having to work a bit harder to impress you — it's working in some cases, others not.

I have a Spotify Premium account — £10 a month for ad-free unlimited playback plus the ability to use the mobile app to stream over 3G (risky given the patchy coverage in most of the UK) and/or download playlists directly to the app for offline listening (much better). Since signing up for it, I don't think I've bought a single thing from iTunes. I haven't needed to. Most of the stuff I'd want to listen to — and plenty I don't — is freely available for me to grab, stick in playlists and listen to at my leisure. There's plenty of music to keep a continuous soundtrack spinning while I do my day's work, and more than enough to set up some decent driving playlists for long journeys.

The service and its software isn't without one or two flaws, of course — you can't search playlists on the mobile apps and the interface is inexplicably the opposite way around to the native iPod app on iOS, meaning you'll find yourself bringing up track information a lot when you actually mean to just close the player screen and get back to the menus. The desktop client's habit of just disappearing and updating itself without telling you it's updating is a little unnerving, too, but at least it keeps itself up to date. (I say that — it's currently attempting to download the latest updater manually and claims that a 5MB file is going to take 16 hours to download.)

But all that aside, what Spotify provides for me has many benefits. Firstly, it's a means of listening to music that I know and love without having to root through iTunes libraries or — in many cases — stacks of CDs that are buried in a cardboard box somewhere. Secondly, it's a means of discovering new music — having listened to an album I like, taking a journey through the "Similar Artists" links is often quite eye-opening. Thirdly, and I can't emphasise how nice this is, it makes having to manually sync an iOS device almost unnecessary, software updates notwithstanding. iOS syncs have a habit of taking at least three times as long as you think they will, particularly if you really need to be somewhere and you suddenly realise you don't have any music on your iPod/have the "wrong" music on your iPod. Spotify's offline sync system isn't the quickest in the world, admittedly, but at least you can do it wirelessly without having to faff around with cables and USB ports and computers. Which is nice.

Spotify, then, is very much a Good Thing. And I'm delighted that I can now share links to tracks and albums with my friends in the US, as well as allow people to subscribe to my playlists. I already noticed that my "dungeon crawling" playlist where I just dumped a whole bunch of metal without really paying much attention to what it is has picked up a subscriber in the form of the fine Chris Whittington — guess I better be careful about what I publish from now on if people are watching! (Damn, no more Lazy Town?)

#oneaday Day 545: Tempting Fate

I don't believe in any particular religion, as I believe most of them are, to paraphrase Eddie Izzard says, philosophies with some good ideas and some fucking batshit crazy ones. As such, I have no interest in some omnipresent, omniscient god figure knowing when I'm sleeping and when I'm awake (unless he's Santa Claus, in which case he should come on down and bring presents) — but I do have an idle belief in the concept of Fate. That is, the idea that certain things happen for a "reason", whatever that might be. Said reason might not be anything big or huge — or it may not become clear until much, much later — but there's usually a reason for the seemingly random shit that goes on.

At least, it's nice to believe that when everything goes wrong. As I've repeatedly mentioned, last year was Bad. Thinking that everything going disastrously wrong and me hitting rock bottom had some sort of Grand Purpose made it mildly easier to deal with.

That said, I'm not sure I believe in Fate quite so much as to think that you can tempt it. Consequently, I present to you a probably-not-comprehensive list of Bad Things That Have Never Happened To Me, and I shall report back next week if any of them Do Happen To Me. (If they don't, I'll probably forget this post ever existed.)

I have never had an illness so serious it required hospitalisation.
Or an operation.
I've never broken a limb, either. (Though I did sprain my ankle once. That fucking hurt.)
As a result, I've never been under the influence of anaesthetic, local or general. (Unless I just don't remember.)
I've never been in a fight. (Obviously I'm counting from my adult life here, otherwise we'd have to take the time I punched one of the school bullies in the face right in front of the headmaster into account, and as awesome as that was, it clearly doesn't count.)
I've never shat myself. (Ditto, only without the bit about the school bully.)
Or pissed myself. (As above.)
Or been sick into/onto somewhere/someone that it is not appropriate to be sick into/onto. (Dustbins totally count as appropriate vomit receptacles, incidentally.)
I've never been fired. (I quit the job in which I was suffering workplace bullying before that would have become a possibility.)
I've never been in a car accident. (There was one time I was in my mum's car and we bumped into another car head-on (it was their fault, nested brackets ftw) at approximately 15mph, but like the school bully incident, this doesn't count.)
I've never been in any kind of transport accident.
I've never seen a horrifically injured or disfigured person.
Or a dead body.
I've never been injured by another person, deliberately or accidentally.
Or killed.
And I've never killed or injured anyone either, apart from one time I whacked someone in the balls not very hard with a LARPing sword, but he was kind of asking for it, and it was an accident anyway.
I've never had anything stuck up my arse that wasn't supposed to be there.
I've never had a sexual-related injury…
…or disease.
I've never run over a wild animal or bird.
Or a child.
Or a fully-grown person.
I've never been a victim of a crime. (I may have had my wallet stolen once, or I may have just left it on the bus. Either way, First Southampton couldn't find it.)
I have never dropped my phone down a toilet. (I dropped a pen down there once, and a flannel, but nothing else.)
I have never been abducted by aliens.
I have never witnessed a zombie apocalypse.
I have never witnessed the end of the world.
I have never been struck down by an angry god who is furious at my lack of belief in Him yet strong belief in a concept as amorphous as "Fate".
Okay, we're getting silly now. Enough. If I'm dead next week, please read out this post at my funeral and add the line "He went up against Fate, and lost," or something similar. Or just make up something cool and say I said it.

#oneaday Day 544: Om Nom Nom

After a delicious meal at sort-of Japanese restaurant chain Wagamama, I find myself inspired to write about food. Food is delicious and, after all, essential to survival, so you may as well enjoy what you eat.

I'm not a fantastic cook, really, despite having spent a memorable period working alongside my friend from university and beyond Mike Porter in a pub kitchen. We made a mean prawn cocktail and only occasionally accidentally deep-fried an Ultimate Combo when no-one had ordered one in order to have something delicious to munch on ourselves. (There was also the memorable time that a bunch of food was being thrown out and Mike ended up with a ridiculous number of rib-eye steaks, finding himself eating them for breakfast, lunch and dinner for some time. And the time we had an apple sauce fight that culminated with the pouring of apple sauce into each others' chefs hats and a strong temptation to pour it down the hairy and perpetually-visible bumcrack of our (female) companion in the kitchen.)

My one redeeming trait in cooking is the fact that I'm willing to experiment and improvise. I've made some delicious spaghetti sauces, curries and chilli con carnes using said talent, and they're never quite the same as each other.

All those foods are staples, of course, and pretty much anyone who's been away to university knows how to prepare all of the above as a means of dining reasonably nutritionally well on a teeny-tiny budget. But over the years, it's become clear that the interpretation of each recipe varies enormously according to each person. I, for example, never put onion in anything because onions are actually little Satan poos, and no-one wants to eat Satan's poo. I may have made that up, but onions still taste like shit (not actual shit) and make me retch if I can taste them, so I avoid them at every opportunity.

I was quite happy with my simple chilli recipe, too — tin of tomatoes, packet of mince, tin of kidney beans, bit of chilli powder — until I went over to a friend's house one evening and he made a chilli that was somehow infinitely, indescribably more delicious than any I'd ever made. His secret? Using twice as many tins of tomatoes as you "need" and then allowing them to reduce over a much longer cooking period. Also, adding bacon and/or chorizo.

Even within relatively simple foods, then, there is a huge amount of variation. This goes right down to the simplest of the simple dishes. Take two people who enjoy Bovril on toast, for example — one may put a thin film of the beefy, yeasty black stuff on top while the other may enjoy the curious enamel-stripping mouth-burning sensation inflicted by putting slightly too much Bovril on a piece of toast. (Incidentally, try Bovril on toast dipped in Heinz tomato soup. It's amazeballs. Assuming Bovril doesn't make you gag.)

I'd like to cook better, and once I get back into my own place again I have every intention of exploring and trying things out. Cooking can be a pain in the arse, but it's also immensely satisfying when it goes right — to look at, to hear bubbling away in the pot and, eventually, to taste. And if you fuck up, well, you've learned from the experience — plus hey, the Chinese takeaway is only just down the road if the worst comes to the worst.

"Healthy" food can eat a dick, though. At least the interpretation from a lot of people, which is either "undressed, extremely dull garden salad" or "fat free, flavour free bullshit". I'm fully aware that it is, in fact, possible to make delicious and healthy foods — the BBC Good Food magazine have a range of low-cost books with some excellent recipes designed around this very principle for example. But with healthy eating it's all too easy to fall into a bland, boring trap of flavour free nonsense and forget how amazing it is to eat something with a bit of sugar or salt in it.

Food, then? Delicious when prepared correctly, enough to make you wonder if it was worth bothering with if prepared incorrectly. This has been a message from the Ministry of Stating the Obvious.

#oneaday, Day 543: Farewell for Now, Mac

Soooo… I may have killed my Mac. To be fair, it asked for it. It had been grinding to a halt to the degree of unusability to some weeks, necessitating a restart approximately every half an hour. And yes, I'd done all the usual repairing permissions and letting it to its overnight UNIX cleanup routines to no avail.

So today I decided that enough was enough and I was going to reinstall the bastard. This would have been a straightforward process were it not for the fact that my DVD drive had failed a month or two back, getting firstly to the stage where the only means of getting a disc out of the slot was to use gravity, and finally to the point where if a disc went in, it sure as hell wasn't coming out again. I nearly lost my Deathsmiles soundtrack CD to that — fortunately, the nice people at the Apple Store helped me retrieve it.

This is the third major fault my iMac's had in the space of about four years. My hard drive failed once, my graphics card failed once, and now my DVD drive along with whatever was causing it to be incredibly slow.

Have you ever attempted to reinstall a DVD-based operating system onto a computer with no optical drive? I don't recommend it, because it, well, doesn't work. I tried every possible approach to it — I tried Apple's own Remote Install software which it turns out only works on certain models of Mac, mine not being one of them, apparently. I tried cloning the OSX install DVD on to a USB flash drive, but that also didn't work, failing at the verification stage and thereby failing to create a bootable flash drive. I tried installing with my iMac in target disk mode, and that went well for a while until the Mac that was running the installer decided that in order to finish the installation it needed to restart, failing to take into account the fact that it wasn't actually installing OSX onto itself. Then I tried installing with the other Mac in target disk mode in order to use it as an external DVD drive. This worked for a little while, too, until the dummy Mac decided that it didn't feel like doing work any more and ejected the DVD in the middle of the install process, causing the whole thing to fail. (You'd think there'd be some sort of failsafe in there for if something like that happened, really. But no.)

So I'm now left with an iMac that won't boot that I can't install OSX onto without lugging it to my nearest Apple Store (12 miles away) and forking over at least £100 then waiting however long it takes them to replace the SuperDrive.

Looks like I'm going to be a Windows user for a while — I have my gaming PC and my netbook for now, so they're going to have to do. This is also the reason for the recent lack of comics, incidentally — the software was just so excruciatingly slow on the Mac that I really couldn't be arsed to faff around with it.

Oh well. If I've learned one thing from this whole experience it's that everything I learned during training for my job at the Apple Store (Macs don't break! Macs don't slow down like PCs do! Even if there is a problem, it can be resolved easily! I like to touch Steve Jobs on his gnarled old willy! Forget that last one.) was, in fact, as I suspected slightly at the time, complete and utter bollocks.

I'm not too pissed though — as I say, I've still got two other computers that I can use for now, and if and when I do get the SuperDrive fixed the Mac, when it's working, does make for an excellent workhorse. Another example of Apple's advertising being bollocks, though — remember the "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" adverts that implied Macs were more fun while PCs did all the boring office shit? Yeah, I totally do all my work on Mac then play on the PC. Nice one.

Ah well. Have a rest, Mac. Lord knows you've earned it. I'll help you get better soon.

#oneaday Day 542: Irritating Creatures

Everyone has some kind of flying, buzzing, biting, stinging thing that they find particularly annoying. In fact, most flying, buzzing, biting, stinging things are particularly annoying. Spiders skitter around and hide, jumping out when you're in the middle of something and causing you to spill staining drinks all over the place. Wasps buzz around your face repeatedly, muttering "shall I sting you, shall I sting you, shall I sting you?" and then fuck off out of the window. And mosquitoes are completely invisible but you can always hear them.

There are two creatures, though, that are so immensely pointless that their already annoying natures are amplified a billion bajillionfold. They have elements in common, but they're also quite different. They fly, they don't bite or sting and they don't really make much of a noise. But they're infuriating.

I am, of course, talking about the daddy long-legs and the moth. Both follow the immensely annoying pattern of "Ooh! Light! I must fly towards this! Ouch, shit, it's hot! Ooh, light! Ouch! I'm on fire a bit. Maybe I should fly around and bump into things some more. Hey, a TV! That's a light. Maybe I'll sit on it. No, I think I'll fly around and bump into things a bit more."

I mean come on. Seriously. It doesn't help that having a daddy long-legs or a moth fly into your ear when all the lights are off and you're not expecting it is one of the most terrifying things in the world — good luck sleeping after that happens — but really, what is the point of these creatures? Daddy long-legses (well, you tell me a better plural) supposedly possess an incredibly lethal venom but have absolutely no means of administering said venom, making them absolutely completely and utterly pointless. (My evidence for this factoid is, I admit, a Ricky Gervais stand-up show, so I do take this supposed knowledge with something of a pinch of salt. But still.) Unless their big purpose in life is just to repeatedly headbutt television sets and fly into people's ears. If that's not an argument strongly against the concept of intelligent design, I don't know what is.

Now, I'm sure there's a reason for them existing in the whole food chain and whatnot. But if that's the case, can't they please just for one night not fly in through my window and be irritating? That'd be just lovely. I'm pretty sure that the whole food web that Nature has worked out involving these creatures doesn't involve a Hoover as the primary predator.

Or perhaps it does. That'd be weird.

#oneaday Day 540: Googlopoly

It's strange how the dominance of some companies (Facebook, Activision and, occasionally, Apple) is seen as a negative influence, yet in other cases (Google, Valve and, occasionally, Apple) their prevalence is seen as very much a Good Thing. This is particularly apparent when it comes to looking at Google and what it offers to the denizens of the Web.

Up until a while back, I'd flitted between various email addresses on a semi-regular basis thanks to moving house a lot and getting a new broadband connection in every house. New connection from whichever company had the best deal at the time meant new email address, and it became a running joke between my brother and I that I would eventually get to the point where I'd have an email address for every day of the week.

Fortunately, I managed to nip that in the bud, first with a Yahoo account and then with a MobileMe (formerly .mac) account which, I hasten to add, I got for free during the time I worked at Apple (and a little while afterwards due to them apparently not figuring out I didn't work for them any more until almost a year later — wish they'd carried on paying me, too, that would have been nice). Anyway. I ditched the Yahoo account because of the ridiculous amount of spam it attracted, and Yahoo's spam filters are beyond awful. I used MobileMe and was quite happy with it for a while, as I hadn't used an IMAP account before and it proved to be very useful, particularly when the iPhone came along.

But then I discovered GMail, and since then, I find it very difficult to understand a couple of things: firstly, why people are resistant to Google when it offers a usability experience of such an order of magnitude better than everything else on the market; and secondly, why more people haven't just ripped off Google's ideas wholesale.

Take something as simple as the way you manage your inbox. It's very easy for one's inbox to become completely flooded with bullshit, with unread counts tumbling (err, upwards) into the thousands, particularly if you're subscribed to any mailing lists or get sent endless press releases. It's tempting to select all and delete everything, but you just know that if you do that, you'll really need one of those emails at some point in the near future. You could file it, too, but then you run into the problem of getting increasingly obsessive-compulsive about your filing systems, wondering if a "Friends" folder is good enough or whether you'd rather subdivide it into individual friends… and so on. But no — in GMail, we have the wonder that is the Archive button, which makes the email go away but doesn't delete it. That way, you can find it by searching, but it doesn't clutter up your inbox any more. Genius.

And talking of searching, the most frustrating thing about MobileMe Mail's otherwise pretty good web interface is the fact that you can only search one folder at a time. This is absolutely useless if you want to use it for the purpose of finding out which fucking folder you put that really important email in. In GMail, it's a snap.

You can download all attachments at once. You can preview files in your web browser. You can set up your browser to redirect mailto: links to GMail rather than your soon-to-be-defunct mail client. And the fact it's web-based means that you can get at it from anywhere.

And this, of course, is just GMail. I have to confess that I haven't used some of Google's other services such as Google Calendar a great deal, but I have been spending some time with both Google+ and Google Docs, and frankly we're at a stage now where, for the average user, standalone productivity software is nigh-on irrelevant. Assuming you have an Internet connection — and with broadband and 3G adapters so affordable now, chances are you do — then you have access to all your stuff from anywhere.

The downside, of course, is if your Internet connection fails, or if Google's servers fall over (like they did the other night when they ran out of disk space on the server which stored G+ notification emails) then you could have a problem. But in my time using Google's various services so far, I've never had a problem so serious it compromised my productivity — and most of the time, it's fixed within a matter of minutes or even seconds at times.

Most importantly, though, I don't feel like Google wants to be my sole window onto the Web, which is where I think it differs from Facebook in quite a key way. Zuckerberg's Facebook wants to be the only destination that people will ever need on the Web — hence all the apps, brand pages, games and other bollocks that clutters up the once-clean and simple service. Google, on the other hand, wants to help me out with things I need to do, and then set me loose on the rest of the Web — perhaps sharing some of the cool things I find via G+. It facilitates rather than dictates, and for that reason, barring them doing something really, really stupid I predict that Google services will be a big part of my online life for some time to come.

#oneaday Day 538: New Scientific Discovery

Just a few days after I bemoaned the fact television is generally awful, today I discovered Brainiac. I had heard the name before, but I had never watched it before. Now I'm hooked, already.

For the uninitiated, Brainiac is essentially a kids' science show for adults. This means that it undertakes thoroughly silly experiments, such as attempting to see which pieces of hospital equipment make the most practical vehicles when propelled by carbon dioxide fire extinguishers, and infuses them with a layer of good old-fashioned British innuendo, such as a leather-clad scientist lady asking "how hard is your thing?" before inviting a selection of nerdy-looking men to display their hard objects to her, which she then drops a ton of bricks on, angle grinds and sets fire to.

Hosted initially by Richard Hammond of Top Gear fame and later Vic Reeves of, err, Vic Reeves fame, it's a thoroughly silly show that doesn't try to be anything more than it is — a bunch of grown men and women performing throughly silly yet visually entertaining exercises under the tenuous pretence that they're "doing Science". GLaDOS would be proud.

I suppose thinking about it, it's perhaps, ironically, not the most cerebral show in the world — the last one I watched featured an experiment to determine which foodstuffs produce the smelliest farts, judged by a member of the crew who'd been on holiday recently rating them out of ten and memorably describing the smell of a fart from a man who'd been eating nothing but Brussels sprouts as "like a hermit's earmuff". But then there are genuinely interesting scientific titbits, too, such as the revelation that custard is a non-Newtonian liquid, which means when impacted it has the properties of a solid and otherwise has the properties of a liquid. This means, as the team (including Jon Tickle of Big Brother fame) demonstrates, that it's possible to walk across a swimming pool filled with custard, so long as you keep moving. If you stop, you'll sink into it like quicksand.

I haven't sat down and genuinely watched kids' TV for quite some time — I've had no real reason to, as I've not had a hangover for quite a while — so I'm not sure if kids have an equivalent "YAY SCIENCE!" programme available for them to watch. I remember there being quite a few programmes involving "YAY SCIENCE!" and "YAY MATHS!" when I was little — mostly involving Johnny Ball, as I recall — but I have to admit I'd be surprised if the same sort of thing still existed today.

Still, there's nothing stopping the kids from watching Brainiac, of course — it appears to air on Sunday mornings, so what's to stop them wondering why the men with the objects look so uncomfortable when the nice lady in the tight suit asks them how hard is their thing?

Here's a clip for you to enjoy if you've never had the pleasure.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkJdaU92Ln8]

#oneaday Day 537: Apocalypse Shopping

Generally speaking, shops are designed to cater to a specific audience. Clothes shops have their own market, food shops appeal to different socioeconomic groups and you can supposedly tell a lot about a girl from where she buys her underwear.

There's a few shops out there, though, that defy classification altogether, and I like to think of these as "apocalypse shops". The kind of place that stocks boxes of slug pellets next to boxes of gummy sweets; dodgy knock-off cereal next to laundry baskets; dog food next to binbags. These places are fascinating, simply because you can find pretty much anything you can think of without too much difficulty.

One shop back in Southampton fell under this umbrella. It was the kind of place where you could get everything you'd need to survive in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. There was dried, tinned food; gardening implements and seeds; blankets and camping equipment; all manner of other things. Of course, the value of the shop depends entirely upon its ability to withstand the apocalypse process.

If anything, apocalypse shops are the closest we get to the RPG concept of the "item shop", where you can buy everything from potions to weaponry. Guns and banjos. Broccoli and toilet paper. Condoms and boiled sweets.

I highly recommend going out to find your local apocalypse shop as soon as you possibly can. Because after all, you never know when you might need its services.

#oneaday Day 536: IdiotBox

TV is rubbish. TV is so rubbish that I generally avoid the act of watching it whenever possible, usually preferring to catch the few things I do actually think are worth watching via video on demand services or purchasing a DVD.

It's difficult to pin down exactly what the most rubbish thing about TV is, though. Is it the asinine programming, in which the nation still doesn't seem to have noticed that The X-Factor, Britain's Got Talent, Over the Rainbow, Shitbag Maria and literally (okay, maybe not literally) tens of thousands of other shows are all actually exactly the same thing? Yes.

Is it the stations' inability to record more than one promo reel for an upcoming show and then bombard you with the same 15 clips every 5 minutes until the show actually starts and you find yourself actively wanting to avoid it? Yes.

Is it the fact that the BBC1 announcer sounds like he's extremely uncomfortable when announcing programmed? Yes.

Is it the fact that Dave, despite having about 15 years worth of Top Gear repeats to draw on, insists on playing the same episode at least twice in one day, so that you can watch half of it at lunchtime and randomly turn on the TV around dinnertime to find yourself picking up exactly where you left off? Yes.

Or is it the fact that advertisers treat you like idiots? "We're real lawyers," say InjuryLawyers4U (pro-tip: if you have to make your main selling point the fact that your law firm employs "real lawyers", you're not exactly filling me with confidence). "I got the money I needed with QuickQuidDotCoDotYouKay," says a woman with an unconvincing mouth and all the sincerity of a jam sponge. "Special K is only for women with body image issues!" implies a cereal advert. "Only women may shop in Boots!" suggests Boots, having now used the same piece of music for so long that even fans of the Sugababes want to throw things at the TV every time the ads come on. "All men are bellends who only care about sticking their cock in things and drinking, possibly at the same time!" imply 95% of adverts. "If you smell nice, slutty women will fall at your feet and get their baps out!" screams the Lynx advert, thereby condemning the entire country to continually smelling like a gypsy's jockstrap. YES.

So in short, TV is shite and the few genuinely good things that do get made either get buried in the schedules and forgotten (Firefly) or repeated so often you can watch them with the sound off and do the dialogue yourself without any difficulty (Friends).

Thank God for whoever decided that video on demand might actually be a good idea. Because although you still occasionally get shitty adverts, you can easily avoid all the crap with the added bonus that you don't have to fit your schedule around an inanimate object — it fits its schedule around you. And that's the way it should stay.

At least until the machine uprising, of course.

#oneaday Day 535: Updated My Journal

As I sit here on my friend Tim's spare bed (which just a few short moments ago had the entirety of Helm's Deep atop it) typing this entry using a piece of software that runs on a computer several thousand miles away from the tiny computer that I'm actually pressing the keys on which has no physical connection to this thing we call "the Internet", I'm reminded, as I often am, of how much things have changed.

I'm not that old — I'm thirty and, if not proud then certainly "grudgingly accepting" — but I still find the amount of progress since I was a kid to be fairly astonishing when you think about it. Take what I'm doing right now — writing a blog post — and rewind it some fifteen-plus years. I vividly recall as a youngling, early-ish in my secondary school career, writing a secret diary, inspired by Adrian Mole. Said diary was in a really nice part leather-bound volume that said "journal" on the spine and had nice paper. My first entry was about my family's visit to the National Stone Centre, in retrospect possibly the dullest way I could have possibly started a secret diary.

Over time, though, my writing evolved. I wasn't writing for anyone in particular, but more just to get thoughts out of my head when there wasn't anyone handy to share and discuss them with — or if they were thoughts that I didn't particularly want to share and discuss with people. In some senses it was like a form of therapy, where I could discuss anything I wanted with someone who wouldn't judge what I was saying, and would simply respond with an unspoken "tell me more" for as long as it had empty pages. My journal became less about "Today I went to the National Stone Centre and we saw lots of stones" and more about "I've been thinking about [girls/school/bullies/life] and this is what I feel about it".

I took to scripting fantasy conversations for a while, particularly when it came to talking to girls, because at least in the pages of my diary I stood a chance with Nikki, the girl with the finest boobs and legs in the whole school orchestra. In reality — well, I never quite found out whether or not I stood a chance with her, but given the general standard of guys she went out with, I'm not sure my greasy-and-crap-haired zit-faced teenage self would have stood up particularly well, however much better at playing the clarinet I was than her other boyfriends.

On one memorable occasion, I recall doing a lengthy post-mortem of an encounter with a girl I liked when my friends pretty much forced me to tell her that I liked her. She turned me down, of course, but the fact I'd actually gone through with it was immensely satisfying — so much so that I recall drawing diagrams of how the event had actually gone — where I was, where my friends were (doubtless watching and laughing at me making a tit of myself) and where she was.

In retrospect, it was perhaps a bit creepy, which is probably why one day I took a look at everything I had written, became hideously embarrassed by the whole thing and discreetly threw the by then half-full book out into the trash, never to be seen again. I often wonder what happened to it, and occasionally wondered if a bin man might have come across it and had a good giggle at my teenage lameness.

The world's different now, though, and the closest people come to a "secret" these days is posting passive-aggressive tweets and Facebook statuses. I still write — every day, as you've doubtless noticed. Sometimes the things I write are still therapeutic and a way of getting thoughts out of my head that are difficult to vocalise, and sometimes it's just stupid shit that I feel like rambling on about.

The difference now is that after 535 days, I'm not ashamed of a bit of it. Sure, some of it probably only has any meaning to me and me alone, but everything I've written here has some sort of meaning and memory attached to it. Which is why you won't find me ever throwing this blog out in the trash like my teenage secret diary. We are the sum of our memories and experiences, for better or worse, and sometimes it's good to look back and see how you got to where you are now — and where you might be headed in the future.

The future's not yet written, as everyone knows. But day by day it'll reveal itself, leading us ever onward to the end of one chapter and the start of the next.