Yesterday, I succumbed to the start of a cold. Or something.

Sore throat, aching joints, feeling shit.

I was in bed by 10pm, and slept ’til 9.30am. Snoring like a fucker all the way through, apparently. I dunno, I was asleep.

So anyway, it’s all going to be a bit quiet this weekend. Except for attending the village quiz this evening. Just call me Typhoid Mary. Heh.

It’s fairly well known that I’m already deeply cynical about the entire Madeleine McCann thing – I’ve whittled on about it before now, and will probably do so again.

Anyway, is it just me who thinks it’s even stranger to now have an ‘artist’s impression’ of someone supposedly abducting her where

“The artist’s sketches show a man with dark, greasy collar-length hair and wearing a purple or maroon top with beige trousers, carrying a child.
The images were drawn by an FBI-trained forensic artist using details from a friend of the McCanns.
The friend saw the man but did not link him to the disappearance at the time.”

Quote from the BBC story

Maybe I’m assuming too much (again) but to (supposedly) spot someone carrying a child- a child that was dressed in the same pyjamas as the missing girl – and ‘not link it to the disappearance’ is just bollocks, and smells like someone lying an alibi…

The redesign of the business site is still continuing, amazingly. The “About Me” profile/bio section has been just about completed now, and I’m actually fairly pleased with the way it worked out. There’s still plenty of room for tweaking, but it’s getting there.

I’m now just starting on entirely reworking the ‘clients’ section, which is another big old job. I could leave it ’til I’ve put in a database back-end, and I still might, but at least now I’ve got the site structure that I want.

Other than that, the letterhead stuff that I ordered a couple of weeks ago from Vistaprint arrived last night (as well as a letterhead for the photography side of things, which also matches the business cards) and looks damn good. So over the course of the next week, I’ll most likely be starting to use it to send out some letters.

It’s all actually quite a fun process, and it’s making me think a lot about the business, where it’s been, where it’s going, and a whole bundle of other things too – which is all good, and none of it is negative at all. Happy day.

As I’ve observed before, I’m normally a pretty voracious reader – I get through (on average) two or three books a week, and normally have at least two on the go at once. Actually, that’s an improvement from (to some perceptions) on how I used to be, where I’d have four or five on the go – when I worked in Oldham it wasn’t unknown for me to have one book upstairs, one downstairs, one for the bus/train, and even (on occasion) one that got left in the office for me to read at lunchtime.

As it is, I now tend to “just” have one at home and one for work and travelling to work. (depending on my mood on the train, and how crammed it is – a laptop isn’t always the most convenient thing to use) I’ve also got a whole library of eBooks I could/should be reading, but just can’t be arsed to get round to ’til I actually need them.

This week, though, has been a bit odd. While I was away, I started on the new Peter Hamilton novel doorstop, and that’s something I just can’t be arsed with lugging about on a daily basis. I didn’t have anything else on Tuesday, and I forgot to put a new one in my bag for Wednesday.

And I’ve actually missed having something to read – particularly at lunch time, when I normally go out, grab a sandwich, then sit somewhere in the sun (or at least in fresh(ish) air) and read for half an hour before heading back to the fray. As it is, I need to go into the garage this weekend and open up one of the boxes of stored books – I want something “new” to read, and it’ll be fun to rediscover some of the bits that’ve been packed away for a while. In the meantime, I’ve got something from the current bookshelves so everything is back to normal, but it’s definitely been weird over the last couple of days, not having that reading matter available when I want to read it.

File under: Bizarre and “Eh?”

A Tyneside father is trying to get a hospital to allow him to cut the umbilical cord when his child is born. Fair enough – although the local NHS trust has a policy that doesn’t allow people to do this, and has done since 1997.

But the bizarre bit is the reason for this policy to have been brought into being. From the news story…

“In 1997 South Tyneside NHS Trust banned relatives from cutting cords after a baby’s toe was accidentally cut off.”

What?!?

Maybe I’m missing something – not having been present at the birth of anyone, for example – but how the fuck can you cut off a toe “by accident” while cutting the umbilical cord? Even on a really small baby, there’s still a fair bit of distance between the two, surely?

Or the last couple of days, I’ve been thinking (again) about the way my body and brain work in the mornings. It’s interesting to me because the way I work just doesn’t appear to be the way most other people do when it comes to this early morning guff.

First of all, I know that my body-clock is deeply screwed. ‘Twas always thus. The main part of it seems to be that I actualy get proper sleep between the hours of 7am and 9am – which is obviously fairly unfeasible with regard to work, for obvious reasons. If I get to sleep between 7 and 9, I’m pretty good for the rest of the day. On the other hand, if I’m woken up in that time, I’m like a bear with a sore head for the rest of the day.

As a result, I tend to get up earlier than 7am. About 5.30, for the most part. In many ways it actually suits me – I get the 7am train to work, I’m in just after 8am, I leave at about 3.45pm, get home for about six, and all’s good. In some ways I would say I’m on autopilot for the first few hours, but that’s not really true. Admittedly when I’m getting up I do use/need some form of routine, so I can do stuff while gradually waking up.

But the thing is, the alarm goes off, and bang, I’m awake and moving. I don’t do this thing of lying in bed, I just get moving. I’ve always been like that to some degree – even at school age I would get up ad go, rather than trying t stay in bed. It’s just the way I’m wired. It shifted up a gear when I was running shops, pubs and hotels, because of having to be able to deal with alarms in the middle of the night, and all that joy.

I’ve never really lost that ability. I’m sat on the train while writing this, going to work. It’s 7am, and a good 80-85% of the other passengers are asleep while I’m writing stuff for D4D™, and also doing other stuff for clients, writing web pages, database migration bits and the like.

I was thinking about this yesterday morning too, while driving to work. I’d woken up at half five, and was on the road by six. Not tired at all – although God knows, I should’ve been- and absolutely fine to drive. Admittedly, I stopped off for a quick break at about eight, just for breakfast, but that was it – no tiredness and no hassle.

I don’t know why I’m wired this way, but given the choice of sleeping an extra hour on the train, or getting work and writing done, I know which I prefer.