I like the idea of the Royal Wedding so much I'm going to celebrate by going to another country.

The crowds, the nonsense, the tabloids in frothy nuptial overdrive, the fear of the street being taken over by a street party (there's already a flag pole with the English flag in a back garden a few doors away from where I'm staying). The lachrymosity, the dreary sentimentalism, the spurious nostalgia. All of it makes my heart sink like a stone. I could n't, I can't face any of it.

Hello Dublin, see you on Thursday...

What makes a translated classic shine even more than the plot or the themes is the quality of the translation itself. That, I'm convinced, strips away the intimidating sense that we have about any classic, and especially any foreign classic. Remember, authors' in the main write because they want to be read, it's about accessibility, and not deterrence; your name is on the list, and you can come in.

I've bailed out of innumerable classics simply because the translation was opaque or fussy; impenetrable, even impossible to understand; or just dry, bone dry, starved of any love, the writer's intent sucked off the bone, indigestible.

However, when the translation is light, modern, but not estuary English, and stream-lined, then a foreign classic is pure joy, as it is right now, with this superb translation of Dostoyevsky's "The House of the Dead" I'm reading, or more to the point doling myself a portion every day to prolong the joy.

It's a fabulous - so starkly illuminating it's as if someone has flipped a switch and turned on the purest strip lighting - lightly fictionalised account of the author's four years in a Siberian prison camp in the early 1850s. Contemporaneous and yet universal, I've not come across anything that depicts the existential drudgery of imprisonment better than this.

Last night's apprehensions that I'd be kept awake by the carousing kiwis next door came to naught; I slept like a top and woke up bouncing, they clearly slept, but bounced awake? No, I'd say no.

The drunker you are, the deeper the trough the following morning, so saith Doctor Archimedes.

But I know simply from experience that I'll not have been alone fretting about the hullabooloo that the first faint of breath of barbeque smoke seems to evoke. Across London, across the South-east, it'll have been the same.

This mad, crazy, complicated city state that I live in and love immeasurably has a toll to pay sometimes. I accept it. I could n't live anywhere else.

I'm at my unofficial second home, listening to the Kiwi neighbours having a barbie; they're young, they're drinking, they're right outside my window...

Is it bad if I hope there's a repeat of last night's near monsoon?

Someone I know let out a metaphorical cheer on Facebook in celebration that they were able to slide in to a dress they'd dreamed of wearing for several months.

It's obvious they're delighted; every word they've written is starburst of joy. A plan, when it comes off is an intoxicant all of it's own that defies proper articulation. It's a sense thing, an intangible asset of indefinable value.

I've been in a similar frame of mind. Something inexplicable prompted me to listen to a Roxy Music's Greatest Hits album that I'd stumbled on when I was fishing around for background music to cook lunch to.

How to tumble backwards through time. Just the faintest breath of a melody, the murmur of a line, and it's sometime in the small hours of a Winter's day in the early '80s, and I'm laying in bed with Julia, the two of us talking softly, or perhaps not at all, wrapped up in our private cocoon, Roxy humming quietly around us.

I might have forgotten I'd ever had that life if not for randomly excavating Roxy Music today.

One of my early adopter friends gave me a tour of his iPad 2. It is a design masterpiece, nothing more, nothing less; an utterly beautiful union of elegance, sophistication, simplicity, and no more weight than that of a snowflake. I am in awe. Yes, don't ask, I do want one...

My unconscious is unruly from time to time. Always been that way. I've had some extraordinary memorable dreams over the years. Nothing surprising there, we're all like that, if, of course, we remember the bizarre, baffling film strips that run through our sleep.

Mine usually have some sort of soundtrack accompaniment, and always in colour. Editing, well that's another matter, there is n't any. It's jumpcuts, time lapses, slow-mo, sometimes auteur led, sometimes I'm not featuring, but still there watching.

All of this though is another story. What's the very unexpected fallout from my nocturnal cinema is that I'm literally dreaming up new words.

Happened to me once, and I thought nothing more, other than the sheer randomness of the unconscious, after all why would a word that sounds like a French verb - Rorgner - come to me in a dream and refuse to leave?

No idea. And by the way, there is no such verb, no such word in fact.

Is twice a developing a pattern, or just coincidence? Because the new word coining machine stamped something else out last night - hyperkinaesthetics. Again. no such word exists (or not in Google at least)

I know broadly where the origins of this lie, or probably, you never can be too sure what's going on whilst you're supposedly asleep. It must be related to the talk on David Foster Wallace I went to last night at Foyles with a friend.

David Foster Wallace's was an unknown force to me until yesterday. I left the talk with the intention to read whatever I could get hold of. It's his style that rugby tackled me: fast, meticulous, highly, highly detailed, frantic, tumultuous , baroque, flamboyant, up to the minute. The style that looks as easy as it is magnetic to readers and tyro writers, but deep down, it only comes with monumental effort, discipline, and patience.

That, all of it, every vowel, consonant, verb, noun, soaked into me and the reward bizarrely: hyperkinaesthetics. My mind must have been slaving in it's workshop all night to come up with something to encompass the effect Wallace has had on me.

The unconscious. Got to love it.

It's the weather. Consecutive days of sheer sun and soft blue skies, how can anyone stay in? I can't and don't. All my non working time has been with my rear firmly parked on a seat in Holland Park, nose down in Oblomov, a fabulous nineteenth century Russian novel, which I can't get enough of.

Someone was telling me they worry they put things off. Don't. Embrace it. I do, with the tenderness of an orchid grower, slow, nurturing, no rush. Let it breath. Always have, always will.

Doing tomorrow what should be really done today, is that such an existential threat as some claim? In my eyes, no.

Viva procrastination!

Amazing, eleven years in the internet business, and until about 15 minutes ago, I was a coffee shop, internet surfing virgin.

Today is the first time I've ever taken my laptop outside and let it play in the open air, and see what the other wi-fi networks are up to.

So far, so good. Connection's a good 'un