The stuff you do when you're tired and not thinking straight. I accidentally turned my washing machine off mid cycle. Turned it back on and my clothes are now getting a further sousing. Washing machine looks the cockpit of a fighter plane now - all dials lit up.

"Most jobs in the world were competitive, you had to push someone aside, but writing and art I thought were n't like that. You brought something new into the world without displacing anything else..."

From an interview with John Updike in the Daily Telegraph

This is why people write.

You know, there could be mileage in this, if someone, that is, wanted to take it on - a collection of dreams about Barack Obama. I'm not alone, I know at least two others who have had dreams where they've either hung out with Barack, or idled over coffee in the White House Kitchen.

I had a very strong dream a few days ago where I actually lived there; thing is now, I reckon they want me to leave. That dream has n't come back. Got to be a sign.

On a separate note: John Updike has died; what a sad day for American Literature and for readers everywhere.

I have read so much about Barack Obama this week that last night I dreamed I lived in the White House.

Not in the cellar or the attic either, but as a bona-fide resident, with my own en-suite room, mints on the pillow, fresh bathrobe, that kind of thing.

However, I can't remember actually meeting him. Must have been busy on the economic resuscitation plan.

Paid in chocolate buttons or tap washers, that's what I'll be getting this year. I can see it happening. Company's shares are nearly the same value as a share in any major Bank. Another profit warning this morning from the CEO. Where are my rose coloured glasses when I need them?

If it does become a chocolate button situation, at least make them Green and Blacks

Been giving this some thought recently: am I at that time of life when I need to get a "showbiz" age?

I took on board another year on Thursday, and that means the good ship Archimedes is sailing deeper into the roaring forties. I'm fine with the age I am, just that I'm thinking there might be circumstances when shaving a year or two off might be expedient.

Typical of someone who works in an operational role, I don't know what these circumstances might look like, but you still have to be prepared. You simply never know.

Take off how much? Realistically, I would n't go beyond four or five years. More than that becomes difficult. You start getting all those cultural questions you can't answer and invitations to raves and warehouse parties, and I'm a man who these days likes being in bed the same day I woke up in.

My weather worn exterior does n't help either; it can only stand limited scrutiny, too much, too close,and the gaffe is most definitely blown.

How does it all work then?

Let's say I was, um...45... (...and I'm close...); take a couple of years off, make it... maybe... 41 . And how does that sound? Youthful exuberance, still hip, but with the warmth of maturity around the corner. Just like a fine wine. My Beaujolais Nouveau days.

But as I say, I'd only use my showbiz age when I thought fit

At last, at long last, a counterblast to the doomsters, the Daily Mail leader writers, Robert Peston, David Cameron et al - The Optimists Society

Your country needs you. Join !

There's something about soggy, grey days that brings the ghosts out.

Walking through the tightly wound streets where I live, I came across many of them: ghost outlines of long gone pubs; shop-sized windows in buildings that have n't been shops in decades, and streets that looked to have echoed with footsteps once, but don't now.

When the weather is like this it can seem like wandering the ruins of Pompei at times.

I always wonder what these streets must have been like thirty, or forty years ago. Colourless and barren, or hot with life? I'd love to know. Books can only hint, photos just suggest. Come on, someone create that time machine.

I had to buy a new toothbrush this evening. Something with harder bristles than I'm used to, sturdy enough to scrape out the filaments of the raw meat I'd had for lunch and that had lodged like unwanted house-guests between my bared fangs. Been that kind of day at work, you see, when only raw meat would do me.

Buying it was easy; just a matter of picking something that look liked a miniaturised deck brush, pay the till, then go.

Leaving Boots I noticed one of the Beauticians studiously thumbing her way down a stock list. Tick off this, tick off that. She was very busy.

It's got to be a legacy of her job that she was doing this, quite unselfconsciously, with her face straight on to one of those mirrors that always, but always, explode every skin imperfection a million fold.

To me there is nothing more ego-depressing than facing up to the harsh truths of the mirror, and in the morning, it's even worse. Less a face, more a cracked paving stone.

But in their line of work, that must go straight of the window. It has to.

To end on a Sex in the City style note: can someone look in the mirror and no longer see them self ? Can you become invisible?

Still sore, still crucified. These fingers of mine are taking time to recover. This is worrying.

Sore and crucified. That's how my fingers feel right now, sore and crucified, especially my right hand. It feels like Captain Hook's claw.

Cease and desist, I know what so many of you are thinking. Not that. I've got finger strain from hammering away from dawn till dusk on a bloody spreadsheet. Got to be an industrial injury.

What's with all this about January being such a dreary month? Indeed a crap, or even the crappest, as a couple of newspaper commentators have sneered. Ok, it's cold and the nights are long and dark, but it's got a lot going for it. Sharp, clear daytime skies, bracing air (cold has an upside if you see what I mean), can't beat toasting your buns in front of an open fire (who's going to do that in August?), and it's my Birthday coming up as well. See, lot going for it.

Today I launch the campaign to rehabilitate January. Time to bring this orphan month out of the cold in a manner of speaking.

Davy-boy has some brass when you think of his political lineage, plus what he must have surely supped up from his ideological wet nurse, Margaret; but then I suppose he's hoping that if it's said enough times, people will actually start to believe it.

Today, he's only gone and declared that he wants a country that's "less materialistic", and more "save, save, save " instead. That's not the Tory mantra, can't be. Their genome has n't got that gene. It's not there. They cannot be beaten for their preoccupation with materialism and it's realisation and (dubious) comforts. They can't, just can't.

They were the ones who revved up the roulette wheel economy we're saddled with now; sanctified the "market"; shredded regulation...red tape...pah !; privatised as much as they could, including the very stuff of life - water; egged on Building societies on to demutualise (has n't that been a success - HBOS, Northern Rock, B & B, and so on).

And then today, a sea change like this? Finding this difficult to believe. Sounds more like their instinctual, and usually ill-thought out, opportunism. They do have a penchant for topical windbaggery.

I spent this afternoon bitterly cold and very, very scared; pressed against frozen rock, inching my way across the desolate north face of the Eiger, and scrambling for meagre toe-holds. Battered by tireless, ever strengthening storm winds.

Furious snowflakes driving into my face. Eyes stinging. Panting and wheezing in the high thin air pummelling this impregnable crag.

A featureless, vertiginous slab of rock ahead, waiting for the inevitable stumble of a weary, exhausted climber. Me.

Obviously I did no such thing directly - I can't climb anything more than the emergency stairs at Holland Park station, and there's the issue of getting to and from the Eiger in an afternoon from London too.

It was the power and the drama of sitting through North Face that fired up these intense emotions so strongly that I actually felt I was there, struggling alongside those two German climbers, desperately wanting to be the first to successfully ascend the Eiger. The last great Alpine problem in the eyes of so many of their contemporaries.

Terry and I fell out of the cinema, shattered by the drama, and dizzied and light-headed by the precipituous, eye-popping camera work. How great does a film have to be if it can wring this out of a film-goer?

I saw something else, even deeper than the ultimate tragedy of the film, and that was the utter implacability of the mountain, of every mountain: their absolute inscrutability, they reveal nothing, they offer nothing. Totally dispassionate.

God, it's so cold. I feel like I should sleep fully clothed tonight (I'll take my boots off - I still have standards). Even with my central heating whacked up to inferno level, it's still bone chilling here in my pocket handkerchief sized flat.

I roamed with no particular purpose in mind this afternoon from Notting Hill on to Richmond, and wandered home through Kensington, and along the most delightful street in London - the stretch of Holland Park Road that hosts Daunt's Bookshop, Maison Blanc, Cyrano's Brasserie, and Tootsies - shops and restaurants that I've idled away countless, enjoyable hours.

Each step was a step through air as dry and as a sharp as mentholated cough sweets. Every intake of breath lifting the roof of my head off.