I'm pretty certain that parents will wonder what their children are up to whether they're with them or not, at home, at work or elsewhere. What about kids themselves though, do they run their fingers idly through their hair speculating what their parents might be up to ? Do they stop just for a bare moment and conjecture what mum or dad are doing right now?

I was thinking about this waiting in the lunchtime queue at the local sandwich shop. It was watching a man close to my own age picking up a couple of very syrupy wafers that led me to this. Were they for him to have with his snatched lunch in a nearby office? Would his kids - guessing, of course that he had some - ever think of him grabbing a sandwich for lunch, or having friends that they are unlikely to ever meet because they're workmates ? Do kids wonder what their parents do or how they might act at work? Do they?

The difference between going to a party when you're in twenties to now you're in your forties? Obvious. People don't drift away in couples to various nooks and crannies. There's no one sat on the staircase weeping. Nor is anyone seriously, incontinently drunk; over-indulged and red-faced yes, but not head down, groaning in to a bathroom fair reeking of vomit.

The music's played at tolerable levels, and there's concern for the neighbours as well !...in fact they've been invited. The floorboards are n't bowing under the pressure of dancing, scraping feet.

The good glassware can come out; the ceramic knick-knacks and souvenirs don't need hiding. The talk swirling around the wine bottles is learned, the terroir's discussed, vintages remarked. You'll never ever be gatecrashed (gatecrash a party of forty-somethings, now that'll be a first). There's even likely to be a couple of people washing up already for you. The kettle will be whistling away. Imagine the kettle going at a party when you were in your twenties. Inconceivable.

No one, but no one will smoke. On this point, there's this, the universal, unspoken injunction: hold your breath, keep your temper, and wait till you get home.

And there'll be no dancing till sun-rise or the first cock crow. Why dance anyway, sitting down is what it's all about now. Around 10 pm, there'll be the first "it's been great, really enjoyed it, but have to go now, child-minder is leaving soon..." conversations. By 11, you're left with 15% of the guests from an hour ago and they'll be gone in half an hour or so.

Parties when you get into your forties...well...they're just so...civilised.

I have to get my hair cut tomorrow. There's not much there, but what is, needs attention.

There's no opportunity for anything fancy, it's a trim on the sides then run the razor over the blasted heath that is the crown of my head. It's bleak up there. The occasional hair like very thin and solitary beanstalks, as venerable and remote from each other as Easter Island statues. No luxurious garden, no thicket, no hedgerow, dense and tangled, but what you have you hold, or at least tidy up to make presentable.

So in the morning, I'll be sitting waiting for my turn in Reno's chair - he's the local barber who I've been going to for several years. There'll be Classic FM playing, freebie newspapers spread around to flick through as I wait, and the low hum of the clippers or the steely snip of the scissors. Then, it'll be the snap of a fresh towel and I'll be summoned to sit in that chair.

All of the barbers I've ever been to, and there have been many - Italian, Greek Cypriot, Turkish, British, American from time to time, have been effortless conversationalists. Staring at the rear of heads day in day out and with what must be the very disorientating effect of seeing another's face in the mirror looking back at you, well that's going to do something to you, so why not talk.

The stalwart topics of a Barbershop conversation are in no order of precedence, nor I would anticipate to no one's particular surprise are: Football (local / national teams inability to find the back of the net, poor management, gallivanting overpaid stars); women (can never be understood, the pain and the pleasure, alone or together, the utter mystery of them); cars (can't afford them, "best car I ever had and why don't they make them like that still?"). Expect to find that Holy Trinity in just about any UK (or I imagine worldwide) barbers, they come with the fittings. Not so Reno. He is a little different.

In my time spent in that swivel chair, and with scissors flying over me cutting arabesques in the air, we've talked about: South American politics; the origin of Orthodox Christianity and the split with Rome; travelling within SE Asia; meteorology (no, not weather as in it's pretty warm / cold today, I mean the science of weather), and I'm betting my last pound sterling that at some point tomorrow he'll be talking learnedly about the harum-scarums of the past week in the financial markets.

Does this kind of conversation, actually dialectics, go on in any other male barbershop? What about ladies hairdressers?

Crisp, fresh, and hot off the grill. That's what we bloggers try to do: come up with something...anything often, does n't matter what it is...that throws light either on our personal condition (there's gigabytes, petabytes, probably of soul-searching and introspection running around the blogosphere); and if it's not that, it's the hope that we can shine a light on a topic in a way that it has n't been lit before. Then there are times, when nothing appears, not an idea, a musing, anything. The dream box is empty. That's me right this very minute. I'm putting this down to plain old tiredness.

Can you say that again? Are you sure? That's like a telephone number you've read out....Tell me again, but slowly this time. No, that can't be right. There's too many digits. It is right ! Jesus, they should name a school after me...! That's not a tax demand, it's bloody ransom note. I'm speechless....

January is the cruelest month; no money, sepulchral weather, and above it all the looming tax payment deadline. The friend who works out my accounts told me mine yesterday. Hey ho, here we go...

You can't keep me away from cliches. I love 'em. The stale, shopworn phrase, that tattered hackney carpet, the careworn, trite saying, oh, they're like catnip to me. My ears pick up, heart beats faster, pupils widen; it's all go when me and my cliches meet up. Believe me.

Laugh... snigger if you want, or go to another blog if you feel like it...but these banal pieces of corn are still useful. Sometimes there's just nothing better to sum a situation up or get to the heart of the matter than to run one of those old horses out and let it do it's thing.

A tale of two cities, not much to think about there, is there; pretty obvious shorthand for the difference between...well....two cities. Find me something as straightforward as these five words that can do the same job. Not that easy... not for me it is n't. Then should we struggle to do so anyway ? Would it be worthwhile ? All that energy expended, and for what ? Lot of truth in that if it ain't broke don't fix it maxim after all.

These five words still have a living, breathing purpose. They flew into my mind earlier this week when I spent a few days in Paris. Perfect for the contrast between where I live - London, and where I was temporarily staying. Because they are two different places. London never seems to be anything less than full on, a challenge to live in, edgy, and almost insomniac. Never, ever quiet. We are awash with noise in this city. Construction work, endless traffic, leakage from another straphanger's ipod on the tube. It just does n't stop.

Paris, like an elderly dowager, glittering, steady on her feet, and civilised. Always coordinated, always elegant, that shoes, bag and scarf matching thing. And it feels safe, a bit dreamy, even sleepy. It's a tonic for frayed Londoners I'm sure. And that's more or less why Paris is one of my favourite cities....oh that and it's great galleries, coffee, literary ghosts on every street corner, that smell of slightly burnt rubber in the metro stations coming of the rubber wheeled trains, the jaw-dropping views from the top of Notre Dame and Arc de Troimphe...

Sometimes I actually have days when I think I might even be popular. Today's been one of those; phone calls do I want to do this, texts do I want to do that, chance meetings with friends on Turnham Green platform (not strictly someone seeking me out, nevertheless it fits the vibe of the day), and a great afternoon spent with another friend at the Millais exhibition. Tempting to end this post with some half-baked homily on the virtue of friendship, what it means etc, but I am not. We could all do with days like this and that's all that needs to be said.

My job requires an inordinate amount of time on the phone. I'm an old schooler here and have resisted handsets, preferring to cradle the receiver and scrunch my shoulder. Persevered like that for years, until it became an agony of contorted muscles and twitching, throbbing nerves, to the point where it even started to hurt when I carried something. Enough. No more.

Now I've gone the way of nearly everyone I know who spends their life oddly wedded to a phone - taken up a headset. The difference is instant: two hands free, ergo more can be done (surfing, gesturing with my hands while I'm talking); whilst shoulder discomfort is fading away quicker than my January pay packet.

Does n't every reaction, however, have an equal and opposite reaction? That's probably the only fragment I can remember from long ago physics lessons, but it's true. It really is. It's as if karmic balance is playing out. So, yes, my agility is returning and I can swivel my neck up and down without grimacing, but my hearing, oh boy.... I take the thing off and it's as if I've just freed myself from two hours being stuck in the bass drum at a Punk Rock concert. My ears hum, they whistle, they pop like hands gripping a roll of bubble wrap.

Ever resourceful though, I've found some mitigation which is to stick the headphones just below my ears. Still pick everything that's been said, but without any discomfort. It does look like I've had two electrodes fitted at either side of my head, but what do I care if it looks like I've just risen from Dr Frankenstein's operating table. It's being able to hear that matters.

Overworked French people often say their lives are nothing more than an endless cycle of Metro Boulot Dodo (Tube. Work. Sleep.).

I like the juxtaposition of these three words, the sound they make as they rattle off the tongue; they're hard, cold, crisp. Short and pointy. Like cans dropping off a production line, one after the other after the other... Drudgery's rhythm.

But with my tin ear, I can't hear all the words properly. I'm picking up the tube bit ok, the sleep thing, very familiar with, know all about that, it's whatever it is in the middle...what's that again ? Someone shout it out...Louder...LOUDER !

Procrastination, my dad used to say, is the thief of time. Wise words; yet words I cannot get to grips with however much I steel myself to buckle down and get something done. I've been slowly, glacially slowly in fact, piecing together a CV for a job that's been advertised internally. Four days to the deadline and the CV remains a hovering mirage.

Back to the Saturday morning yoga mat after a two week break. And I know I've been away: I ache all over, especially in the hind quarters. I feel like I've been riding a bucking bronco or been trotting bareback on some untrained Mongolian pony over the more inaccessible bits of the Gobi. Ow...ouch...hobble...

Now, if everyone is claiming politically incorrect status as a badge of honour on the one hand, and the mark of a rebellious, dissenting minority on the other, then, surely it's inverted itself ? It has to, think about it, on the numbers alone... there are too many. Everyone's loud and proud just how un-PC they are. It's the fashion, the New Dior look, this year's hula-hoop.

So, if political incorrectness has become the norm, or, in other words, the new political correctness, then in this world turned inside out, original, vanilla political correctness is now the new political incorrectness. Follow me, here?

...Hey, I've just twigged something...God... I've finally done it. I'm a rebel....

What do I know will happen this year ? What can I say confidently, with 100% certitude and on a stack of Bibles, or on oath before Judge and Jury, will take place ? What events, what things, will be in Churchill's word,"...the dreary steeples..." that will punctuate this year as much as they did last year and as they are fated to do until the end of time ?

Prophecy is futile, after all, it only ever suggests possibility; these are decreed events as if by a Higher Authority. They cannot be mitigated. They will take place.

And they are ?

Firstly, the Daily Mail will be as choleric and as red in the face as it always is. It's front page puce with rage, bellowing in the boldest font, with headlines full of emotion and trigger words, on what it pronounces to be Government pusillanimity or gutlessness; or when its neither of those, then the arrogance and contempt they forever accuse the Government of displaying. There'll be denunciations about Europe; tirades flung at the EU, and Brussels - their metaphor for all that is evil and unconstitutional. Angry statements on how our liberties will be subsumed and disappear.

Oh, The Daily Mail loves to pronounce on our Ancient Liberties. I'd like to know exactly what they were. I somehow don't think my peasant forebears were graced with fruits of universal suffrage, a notion I believe usually accompanies the concept of liberty. And unconstitutional the EU? That's exactly what we lack in the land of liberty - a constitution. But, I'm straying from my topic now, what else do I know is in store for us this year ?

If one steeple is the Daily Mail, then the other is the chorus of fruitcake conservative Middle Englanders chirping away manically on the BBC bulletin boards, that their country has been stolen from them by guess who....yes the EU, and they want it back NOW. There can't be a lower case font on the PCs or laptops these people use, everything is screaming upper case. There's no other caste of people as hard done by or as victimised as they claim to be. Rest up, people, there are other ways to make a point.

Just as the Sun rises in the East and settles later the same day in the West, then so to will the two events I've described appear. And that's how I can bear out my claim of the first paragraph. Some things never change.

I've spent most of this afternoon patiently listing items on to eBay. I've been selling books sporadically this way for three or four years. I concentrate on selling modern fiction, first editions and ideally signed by the author. Never going to be my main income stream, but as someone said to me only a few days ago: you have to speculate to accumulate.

There's been a pile of books laying around my flat for months which I've been stepping over daily, promising myself that, yes, tonight, I'll dutifully get them all on the eBay auction block. Words speak louder than actions for me, so nothings happened, other than the dust laying on the books has got thicker.

Could be it's connected to today being day one of a brand spanking new year and the chirp of people everywhere vowing to change, but I plugged my laptop in early and got to work. So, it's been a steady sequence of scan the book dust jacket, author's signature if there is one; background research on the web for those interesting authorial quotes that I like to drop into my sales blurb; cobble together a punchy description of the plot: "...a subtle exploration of the challenges and it has to be said, the sometimes contradictions inherent in friendship. All life's, be they ordinary or extraordinary, are complex..." (got to hook the punters anyhow you can), then faithfully describe the book's condition, warts and all. If I've only learnt one thing from decades in industry, it's that a wart is no more than an ugly duckling, it has a good side, it can be spun: this is an excellent opportunity for either the serious collector or those readers who relish great modern literature".

After all this, it's upload and trust to the market; are they going walk by and stop, or go elsewhere ? Are my blurbs the sticky honey-pots I hope ? I feel more and more like an online marriage broker: come over here, over here, I have the perfect partner for you, faithful, loyal, interesting...