"I need it done, it's urgent!"

"Is that standard urgent with 24 hour turnaround? Or Express Urgent with guaranteed four hour response (working hours only)? Or were you looking for the one hour premium urgent?

Just like Starbucks where a tall anything is actually the smallest thing they have, Business has corrupted urgent. Debased it. It's the new standard. Everything is urgent.

If I don't witness anything else in my lifetime, I can at least say I was present at the birth of a cliche.

Let me take the work riff a little further. It's more than simply talking. At different times and with different people, my working day has me switch in and out of being: Psychiatrist; Diplomat; Technical help; Arbitrator; Counsellor; Project manager; sometimes Judge, but more often a member of the Jury; Mob-style enforcer on occasion; and once or twice reluctant leader .

That's me in all my multiple personality glory.

I've talked so much today that I've probably worn my tongue down by half an inch. Yabba, yabba, yabba from sunrise to sunset.

No concrete achievements done during the working day, no widget to hold up that says all my own work.

On the other hand, if you want to experience a metorite shower of polysyllabic fireworks flopping to a few terse words by the close of play, then I'm your man. That's me just doing my job.

Where do all the lonely blogs go ? Where's the home for the forlorn, abandoned blog, cast aside like an old shoe? Today's fashion, tomorrow's charity shop donation.

Don't hold your nose, reader, don't be prissy either, I like this word: the Blogosphere. It's where we live (in a cyber sense obviously). But all roads leading to and through it are littered with the bones of famished blogs.

Bleached and dry; a wasteland of neglect, where weary blogs drag themselves off the road and away from the remorseless glare of an indifferent sun. Carcase heaped upon carcase of good intentions made Blog fading before our eyes, pleading for an entry, yet extinction awaits.

I've spent this evening wandering over this blasted heath. There's a lot to warm the eye, no question, some terrific blogs, but the backdrop is like a moonscape.

Leave it to Shelley, with a little 21st century tweak here and there, to catch this sombre scene better than anyone else could ever hope:

`My name is Blog, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
'Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away

Next steps then. Do we all adopt a blog? Gather up the fallen, save what we can, honour those for whom, perhaps, it is too late.

Should there be a Blogger's licencing scheme: I hereby solemnly promise to cherish, nuture and steward my blog come hell or high water, through the days when I'm bursting with ideas, and the days when the only thing I can see on the screen of the laptop is my wan reflection.

A Blog's not just for Christmas, remember.

There was a question about one of the slower, duller team sports - Cricket - posted on one of my favourite blogs (answergirlnet.blogspot.com). A basic, nevertheless important question: how do you actually play it?

How? What about why? They tell me there's a difference between Cricket and paint drying. There is ? How long has that been there?

I'm English, and I don't understand Cricket... well, not the nuances of it, and this game by the way, thrives on nuance. Imagine settling down to watch chess on grass 'cos that's cricket. Gimme 90 minutes of that high energy contact game we Brits refer to as Football. Such a gentlemanly sport too...

My first job after University was a tough one. I worked as a junior manager for a minor fast food company. It had n’t been my first choice, or second, or even third. If I had been pressed, I could n’t have given any answer as to what it was I actually wanted to do in the World of Work. I just simply did n’t know.

There are two opposing default states when you're young. This statement, incidentally, is culled from being in that state at one time, then, latterly, observations. It's either an almost God-like sense of invulnerability, or good old fashioned introspection. Me? I leaned to the latter; a doubtful self esteem hung alongside me from time to time. There were moments when I’d wonder morbidly whether there really was anything I could do. Did I actually have no skills, no obvious aptitudes for anything ?

How, on the other hand, do you rate conviction? If there were times when I felt utterly aimless, there were longer periods of when I knew exactly what I wanted, just it was n't to work. Something far nobler - I was going to write. That powered my thoughts, coloured my ideas persistently. I was going to be a writer, no matter what. I dined on that daily and threw it out to others whenever someone asked. Whether people simply humoured me, or did believe me, it became my signature. I was Archimedes.... the writer.

I told anyone who bothered to listen that not only did it not matter what I did, I also did n’t care. I knew about earnestness but not about presumption. In my scheme of things all I needed was time...and money. The nature of work had no significance

Today, there's bills, a mortgage, tax demands, and yes, work is most definitely significant.

"Money ploughed in to a house is a value multiplier" I breezily told a friend . We were talking about house renovations. Never, ever done one, of course, which was why it was easy to talk so assuredly: "...it´ll get messy, always does, builders never easy to handle. Still stay the course, keep the betablockers locked in the medical cabinet, it's absolutely worth it..." I omitted to either top or tail that piece of glibness with... eventually.

One thing lead to another and I found myself backtracking through my girlfriend catalogue (single page, lots of white space. Font size 36. Double spaced.), and picked out an interesting theme: women like men who build things (I don´t. I can´t. I've tried).

Four of the women who have held my arm at some point in time, have been out with a builder before they met me, or gaduated on to one later. That is n't coincidence. Maybe it's this so called nest building thing. Now, if someone had given me a meccano set when I was a kid.

And it was n't as if I came from a soft handed family either: my father was a steel worker. Ergo, I should be at one with the lathe, saw, or angle grinder. In transcendental unity with all tools. I'm not.

Pleasure, talk to me about it. This Sun...now, this is what you call weather. Hotter than Sicily; forget being in London, the latitude's shifted, it's Palermo on the Thames.

Just like all the neighbours, it's drag a chair out into the backyard, Sunday papers, cool, cool drink, and let the Sun rustle up serontin and endorphin levels to something approaching acceptable, kind of day.

Need a storehouse of the stuff to eke out, something to keep me tuned up during the days I'm stuck in that cock-pit of misery - the office. But that's nearly a whole day away, so who cares.

"Tube, tube, tube....take me home...!" Take me somewhere at least. Long day on the District Line, chugging from Turnham Green to Blackfriars and back.

Turnham Green is Chiswick's local station - the other place in London I occasionally fetch up in and call home.

Usually I trek across the badlands of Notting Hill (there are some - I know. I live in one.) to Holland Park, and there to throw myself on to the mercies of the Central Line and an altogether different journey into work, something, which in the world of Service with a capital S would be defined as another "experience". An express train in comparison to those easing themselves gently out of Turnham Green.

The District Line is for sightseeing, like a tourist train winding gracefully through the Alps: a stop here to absorb the view of the innards of a tunnel; a breather before ambling into the next station; time for lengthy reflection at Earl's Court - trains pull in, pull out, whilst we do nothing so vulgar. Then at an unknown signal, perhaps when the last person has finished flipping through a freebie morning paper, we trot out of the station. Never a gallop, always a gentle trot.

I truly believe tube lines reflect the character of the people who use them, and thus by implication the area and whatever mores or values are endemic to those neighbourhoods. The Central Line, certainly the leg I take is busy, it's buzzy, edgy, animated and in full colour... things could happen... weird, wild, mischievous things. It's like that.

Dear old District Line: silky, pottering, a Grandmother holding her grandson's hand in the park feel. Not in a hurry, don't worry, we'll get there. People in suits, citywear, well-presented. It's a coiffed line. A couture mood. You settle into the carriage.

The antithesis to the Central Line, where native cunning is the key to bagging a perch. How good your wriggling skills are, how slippery you are, can mean the difference between being onboard, or being left standing platformside as the final carriage scorches out of the station. It's a no quarter tubeline. You're on or you're not. Simple.

Never going to grow any taller, this is the height I'm going to stay at; hair long ago packed up it's bags and shuffled away quietly; eyesight, probably my hearing too, are n't going to get any better either. So what's left to watch bloom and flourish? Anything? Normal starting point would be kids, except I don't have any. A garden, then? If I did n't live in a flat, maybe. So, what's left, what is there, to get entranced by?

Found something - words.

I like language, I like words particularly, grammar is good, can't ignore it, after all it's the Highway Code of the Communications road. It's the traffic this road carries I relish. Really, other than the previous candidates, there's nothing that can grow as quickly and deep root itself, nor can be as unruly and unpredictable, charming or, alternatively as clamorous, as a language's word store. It's unstoppable

Simply the fact that every language renews itself constantly, that there's change happening day in, day out; that it is constantly growing, stretching and flexing; that it takes advantages of all manner of twists and turns - technological, sociological, kid speak, sports, and so on, appeals to me. It's throwing up words the way magma is launched out of a volcano.

In some cases, I collect these words, log them. That's me: Archimedes the Word Collector, the Jargon Connoisseur, the Bon Mot (or not) Gourmand.

Rare a day goes by when I've not caught something. I collect them because they baffle me - what does that actually mean; at times, it's the sheer wackiness of it all; now and again, because of the word combinations; often, simply because they make sense, or give another illumination on a topic or concept.

This is a recent lava flow I slide into. Picked up during a few day's worth of conference calls, lifted from e-mail threads, or in a few instances, snippets from overheard conversations.

Methodology
Intimate enough with their operation
System freezes
Profile changes
Communication around the ticket
Sought relaxation
The edge cases
Forced manual process
Pinch point
Sensitive to the resources
What's the pain threshold?
Profile history
Leverage (if there's ever a word that should be forcibly retired from the business lexicon, then here it is. Loath it)
Shrinkage
One truth dashboard
Quick fix (another for Room 101)
Deep Dive
Glide path data
Strategic tool kit
Development environment
MLQ - most likely query
The happy path (in business? This ?)

My weakness is that I'll use these the way you'd toss confetti outside a Church, recklessly and wantonly, and probably with some uncertainty in a couple of cases. Not sure what they mean, but the beauty, the sheer novelty is captivating.

I maintain, and will do till I drop, that it is perfectly possible, in fact it's actually part of what being a human is all about, that just as eggs lie in a carton, we can hold complex and contradictory thoughts side by side.

I was told once that I'm culturally motivated; I cannot disagree, be churlish to. It's almost my factory settings. If I had a system restore then that's what I'd go back to. Literature, Art, Music, Good Food, attractive houses, heart-stopping sunsets, I love them, dearly.

Nevertheless, there's a secret part of me, deep in the rough, where I hide one or two guilty pleasures, the place where I warm my hands thinking about some things I would n't mind doing. Come a bit closer...that's it...you see... I've done one today. It's a quasi petrol head moment too. I went for a drive in a Porsche.

A colleague in the office has one (and before jumping to any conclusions, we're modestly paid where I work. Yes it's above the threshold for tax credits, not enough though to for pay high end sports cars on a cash down basis. He has saved hard for this, like a Trojan.)

A magnificent piece of engineering - a beautiful teardrop, washed and polished by the waves. It is a beast, an animal of a car, completely. Snorting, sniffing like a prize fighting bull. Foot-stamping, muscle sinews straining. A thrumming engine. Horsepower really is there, beating under the bonnet, frisking, steaming, hooves pounding. Fine Arab stallions let loose.

Look at me - I wanted to be the Montaigne of Blogging, and instead I'm gushing like the poor man's Jeremy Clarkson. Forgive me. Anyway, did n't I say right at the beginning, to pin it all down to being a fragile human, cursed to hold more than one competing thought or belief at the same time.

A warm sun is scratching it's fingers across the rooftops; carving out places for shadows to linger, and slow-baking flagstones, where the neighbourhood's cats can languidly swish their tails.

More sober, less excitable colours are being chosen and mixed from the night-time palette: a softer, evening blue for the sky, a rose-peach for a setting Sun. Even the orchestra of garden birds has started to pack away it's instruments.

London in April. I like it, and I like it regardless of the month. So it nags; so it whines; so it'll tap you on the shoulder when you least want it; so it uplifts as much it wearies; so it galvanises; so it can certainly frustate; so it can be painful; and yet in the same space of time, it can give the most intense pleasure.

I've been here for nearly twenty-five years - almost a quarter of a century's worth of sights, sounds and sensations, I'm carrying around. I'm going use this blog to spread the load a little.

There's never been any precise theme to this blog, and there will not be - what's the point of being confined to say writing about politics, or football teams, or favourite paints. Doubtless, the dedicated truffle hound with time on their hands could probably sniff out broad themes here and there. Nevertheless, I am going to put the semblance of a superstructure in, and that's going to be the occasional posting taken straight from the twenty five year archive I'm carrying around. It'll be the stuff I've experienced, overheard, witnessed, been amused and bemused by, or that has simply stuck in my mind and just refuses to budge.

" ... I feeeeel goooood, and I know that I should..." I do, Mister Brown, I certainly do. Not that I'm in any serious recovery programme here, but it's exactly two weeks since I waited for a sweetshop on the corner of Fleet Street and Blackfriars to empty itself of all customers before slipping in, furtively, a victim of lust and shame, to swap even more hard earned folding for a five minute love affair with yet another bar of chocolate.

Two whole weeks. Fourteen days, umpteen hours, however many minutes, and I'll pass over how many seconds, from when my Doctor placed a cease and desist order on me, and I stopped my industrial, possibly insane, consumption of chocolate.

I'm too tired to explore the pathology of how I got into this state. I did and that's that; it's reversing out with minimal damage, preferably none at all, that I'm more concerned about. This boy's not keen at all on encouraging some sugar driven health problem.

Have I got the willpower? Surprisingly, yes I have. Barely a crumb of cocoa has beaten the embargo. God, it sounds like an echo from the Prohibition days - there should be some schooner on a run from Canada freighted to the gunnels with the vin ordinaire of chocolate - Cadburys, Mars, the stuff that I used to thrive on, bouncing on the waves just outside the territorial limits.

Except it's not like that. I don't miss it at all. It's like I've been able to turn the light off, leave the room, and have no compulsion to go back in there. I've not had to seek out substitutes; none of this craving for something, anything, to fill the gap that seems to pursue ex-smokers in their early days of giving up.

James Brown was right; you can "...get up offa that thing and try to release that pressure".

This is beyond ironic, in fact, it spins irony on it's head and leaves it facing the opposite direction it started from. Why is it that I encounter more wildlife in Central London than I ever did growing up in the wilderness of the South Yorkshire countryside? Most days are like being on Safari... well, let's get some reason in here, some lightness of touch perhaps; I'm not talking about being stalked across the sweating savanna of Hyde Park by say, a Cheetah, or a Panther silently uncoiling itself as it picks me out wandering through the more remote, leafier parts of Holland Park.

It's the UK's own milder wildlife, red in tooth and claw nonetheless (try telling a chicken that a fox is really misunderstood and conflicted, and just needs some impulse control), that I seem to be bumping into day after day. Foxes principally: snuffling through the bins; or jauntily trotting on the pavement as if they're en route to some liaison; or loudly mating...please, hurry up or at least stop faking it...the noise, the screeching...and always at night. Humans sleep at night, it's what we do. Remember that, some consideration please.

I never saw a single fox all the time I was growing up in mining country. Not one, living or otherwise. These days, we're crossing the road together.

No different when it comes to Bird life, either. All the birds, that by rights form part of the country backdrop, therefore those I should have seen as a youngster, and which if I actually ever did, were usually no more than pinheads flapping hazily on some distant washed out horizon, are popping like mushrooms after the rain in London.

Yesterday, it was a very elegant Grey Heron, poised, dapper, like a member of some minor Royal Household almost, standing proprietorially on the fringe of the Japanese garden pond in Holland Park. No more than ten feet away from me and scores of others, and entirely oblivious of us. Aloof, maybe even disdainful: "two arms, two legs, funny shaped heads, and that plumage, just look at that...no way is that intelligent design"

Never a more apt term than urban jungle: the skies of Chiswick, where I sometimes stay, are dominated by squadrons of shrieking, hollering lurid green Parakeets. Surely there must be the ornithological equivalent of an ASBO available.

I spent a few days in Paris recently. I don't know how wild the City of Lights is when it comes to what I've just been writing about in London, but I got some clues nature is n't daunted. Mid-afternoon, I saw an imperious looking Crow had fixed itself on to the top of a set of traffic lights on the corner of the Rue St Honore and Rue de Roule, and was cawing away in the manner of a bell being tolled for a funeral. A crack of thunder, a muttering, wild-haired old man, pacing the streets and it could have been straight out of Edgar Allen Poe.

It's what the urban jungle could end up looking like, if we are unable, or indeed unwilling, to square up to the consequences of climate change. The thought of something snake like, slithering along the U-bend, getting closer and closer to breaking the surface of the water, before popping open the toilet lid like the hatch on submarine. Imagine that.

Luxe, Calme, et Volupté. The new neighbour...my new neighbour, if you want to know. Virtually next door. Almost touching each other, it's that close. And glamorous...oh yes, very glamourous...

Never seen one like this before. Piqued my interest the moment I saw them. So, I got be honest, ok...candid...they intrigue me if you want to know. I'm curious, even a little excited deep down. I want to get know them. What they're about, why they're here... that kind of thing. Is that a problem? Come on, we're neighbours...

I like to watch them in the morning getting ready, it's quieter then, no one's around, no one's wondering what I'm doing.

Don't do it at night, though, too dark for one thing...ok, maybe sometimes, depends if they've got their lights on. I don't want people to think I'm staring. Not that fussed if they did, anyway, after all what's it to them, what I do?

Noticed something straight away: they take care of themselves. Attention to detail. Very obvious. Something European in there. Understated and elegant. They've got flair, something, soon sensed that. A little State-side seasoning in there too.

But not trashy, no, not at all. Sophisticated, clean lines, proportioned. Yeah, this neighbour has style. A lot of it, just from what I've been able to glimpse, I can feel it.

How we're going to meet? That's the problem. So difficult. Can't think how to do that yet. Why does it have to be like this. Hell, I don't even know when we're going to meet! I just can't work out their timetable.

Their name? Forget it, no idea. Not a clue. Yeah, frustrated.

All I do know is that this neighbour is giving us a face-lift. Need one desperately. So, it's over the other side of the A40 from me, and in Shepherd's Bush. And it's going to be a shopping centre. Does any of this really matter?

There's got to be some positive fallout when they fling back the doors and open the place. This'll be the Mother of all Shopping Malls when it's finished. There's acres of it. God only knows how many shops.

The way it's talked about, it's like the developers are air-freighting South Molton Street, Sloane Square, and Bond Street into Shepherd's Bush. Shepherd's Bush! The spiritual home of the Kebab shop and 24 hour mini-supermarket could end up having a makeover. Forget Shepherd's Bush, it'll be Bienvenue, Chez Boo! once this supertanker shopping mall finally drops anchor and pops the doors open.

I hope, and my fingers are crossed tightly here, is that the existing shopping Eco-system keeps going - the mini-supermarkets, coffee shops, the paper shop that seems to be able to lay it's hands on just about every newspaper published in Europe. They've kept me going over the years. Particularly in my early days in London; how many times did I ask the cab driver taking me home from the late night shift in whatever restaurant it was I was working in, to pull over so I could dive in to the all night doughnut shop.

There's got to be room for two shopping experiences - the traditional along with the flash and pizazz of Chez Boo. There's room for the lion and lamb to lay down together.

By the way, you did n't think I was writing about... you know... an actual person, did you?