see the link for details.

see the link for details.

see the link for details.

If I type this really fast it may just sneak under the wire and count as a March post, thus keeping up my new average of a post a month in 2007. Pretty grim stuff, compared with the several a day I used to manage when writing this thing was fresh and new in late 2002.It's not like I've been writing nothing at all, though - the anthology with my story in creeps ever closer to becoming reality. That's its cover over there, beside these words. Neat, huh?Got an email from the publisher today - they've now got a MySpace page, heaven help us all. For those who are into that sort of thing, it's at myspace.com/norecordpress.In other news there was this, which just felt like one of those things that needed to be done.

So, well, yes, it's been a while since I last posted. Quite a bit's happened, actually.For starters, we're probably only a month or so away from the publication by a small San Francisco press of an anthology of short stories that includes one of mine. More on that when I have more, but right now I'm tremendously excited, because it's the first time in a very long time that any of my fiction will have been published.Also taking a lot of my time is MyBathroomFinder.com, the first step in our fledgling business empire. It's starting to find its feet and generate traffic. Not a lot of income yet, but it's early days.And the other big thing is Perplex City, the £100,000 / $200,000 treasure hunt and alternative reality game that's been running for the last two-and-a-half years. 50,000 players, 92 countries.We won it.If you're used to my usual writing style you're probably waiting for me to qualify it and say something like "well, what I actually mean is that 5000 of us were declared 'winners' but only one person got the prize and it wasn't us".Well, as it turned out it was us.It's been a very weird couple of weeks, with a lot of nice messages of congratulations from people (including some of the ones who came closest to winning it themselves) and some emails and phone calls from friends I'd lost touch with and who saw it in the news.There's an awful lot to say about it, so I built a small website with the story and a link to my Flickr photos. Go explore, Digg it or stick it on del.icio.us or whatever if that's your sort of thing - I'll still be here when you come back. And believe me, no matter how surprised you are at the news it's nothing to how stunned I am, as I look back at it.

Numerous things to write about - Christmas Day on the Cornish cliffs with Beloved Other Half, dashing across Heathrow Airport in the rain to meet Ali before her flight to LA, good books by Gordon Ramsay and Monty Don to review - but they can wait for another day.Instead, here's a really easy way to make a difference to the lives of people in developing countries. It's not charity - all being well, you get your money back - and you can cough up as little as $25, which is not much more than a tenner for those of us on this side of the pond.I came across Kiva on Heck's Kitchen, where Jenny Miller and her housemates have evidently been spreading their dollars around to good effect. What Kiva does is simple: it acts as one central partner for a whole raft of microfinance organisations around the globe, making it easy for the likes of you and me to send small sums of money via PayPal to help fund small businesses in cash-poor parts of the world.You can choose to send your $25 (or more - I've loaned $300) to Ugandan seamstresses, Azeri taxi drivers, Ecuadorean farmers or electricians in the Gaza Strip. Other people around the world also chip in, and when the requested sum is raised the money is passed to the borrower. The microfinance organisation supervises the repayments. You don't get interest, but you do get a warm rosy glow.I've split my fee for a day's work, more or less, between three African businesses:Justina Azamachi in Ghana sells frozen food to an established customer base, but lacks storage facilities to expand.Joseph Onyango in Kenya is a dressmaker with a large family, including a badly disabled son, to support. He has a full order book, but needs to invest in stock and equipment.Denise Tidatoa in Togo supports her family selling basic goods such as canned food and soap. She plans to lease a shop and increase her stock.They seem such small ambitions when you look at the details - help with buying a sewing machine, a deep freezer, or some pasta - but at the same time they're huge. They represent an income, schooling or medical treatment for a family, independence.They also represent an investment in the future of the countries involved. Bulgaria joined the EU a few days ago and the newspapers over here were full of dire predictions about how the UK would be swamped by swarthy economic migrants. Well, through Kiva, you can finance Bulgarian shopkeepers, printers, tradesmen and farmers who are trying to make a go of it in their home country. Repayments from businesses in Gaza have been a bit erratic recently, for obvious reasons, but surely the future in that troubled part of the world must in part depend on the establishment of a viable economy? And so it goes on, around the globe.As schemes go, this one strikes me as a really good investment - of time (it's quick and easy) and of money too.

And so it's time to do my annual round-up of the year's highlights in this journal, just like in 2004 and 2005. Except, this year I've written so little that I'm not sure there are any.Obviously, there was all that kerfuffle at the beginning of the year, during which I wrote a lot about the Liberal Democrat leadership election and achieved a small amount of notoriety, especially for a post entitled "Chris Huhne - just say 'no'". Ultimately, I ended up taking part in the first-ever unmoderated Q&A session between bloggers and the leader of a British political party. But after that, I wrote no more about politics - the compulsion had faded and there were no words left. And if you're interested in that sort of stuff, you can find a round-up of it here, not here.So why am I writing less? Well, there have been other projects taking time that I would otherwise have used - MyBathroomFinder chief among them. But a big, big part of it is that I now have four versions of this blog running, and that makes it such a bloody effort to update that it doesn't seem worth it most of the time. Which is a shame.Next year I hope to find a way of concentrating on the version hosted at www.andthenhesaid.com, while still not losing touch with friends on DeadJournal, LiveJournal and JournalSpace. And after I've worked out how to do that, for an encore I plan to discover a cure for cancer, achieve world peace, and add 15 per cent to the Liberal Democrats' opinion poll ratings.Anyway, here are a few bits and pieces worth remembering:April 14: The house of discipline, and other photosI can remember when products were built to last and didn't stop working just because they'd been thrown across the room in a cold fury a few times. I say this because my phone finally started malfunctioning beyond a level I was prepared to tolerate, so I had to replace it.April 19: Fairey storyLife is full of strange moments: today I was followed in a traffic jam by a Fairey Swordfish.May 21: A snog for EuropeNever let it be said that elections don't produce representative results. The voting in our household last night exactly reflected the UK Eurovision voting, in that the British 12 points went to the latex-covered Finnish rock Gods Lordi - Beloved Other Half's choice - and the 10 points went to my selection, the besuited and terribly direct Lithuanians whose song repeatedly chorused "We are the winners of Eurovision". May 24: ShahbazalangadingdongThis year's Big Brother is, to all intents and purposes, already over - despite only six days of its 13-week run having passed.May 27: Something going down on Upper StreetMy vague potterings were interrupted last lunchtime by a cat's cradle of blue tape across the road in my path, cordoning off (among other things) the scene of a shooting the night before and the restaurant where I'd been planning on eating.May 28: Who do you think you are?There's still time - just - to get over the Passport Office's website and renew your passport before the end of the month. I did mine a couple of days ago.May 31: DNA of LondonIn my household we tend towards the view that Douglas Adams wasn't, in fact, a novellist but instead a philosopher and a researcher of the infinite who chose to present his theories and conclusions in the form of radio scripts and sci-fi novels. He was also - despite most of his work being set on other planets - one of the most observant chroniclers of London since Dickens.August 6: The Romans in BritainA couple of weekends ago we combined two of our favourite interests - good books and archaeology - in one visit to the excavations at Silchester Roman Town. Every year, Reading University holds a dig for its students and stages a couple of open days - this year they did something extra: a visit from one of our favourite authors, Lindsey Davis, who gave a talk, read from one of her Falco novels, answered questions and signed autographs. A second, overlapping, post that's more about the author and less about the archaeology appears on MyWeeklyBook here.October 4: Vegetable loveFor anyone motivated by a passion for vegetable growing, Rosemoor - the RHS gardens near Torrington in Devon - are a 'must see' at this time of year. I said I'd write more about our recent weekend spent camping, but frankly I'm inclined to let the photos do the talking.October 6: Oh Brother where art thou?The third and final batch of photos from our camping weekend (a dim and distant memory now, I fear) comes from Cleeve Abbey, which was strictly second division in the pre-dissolution abbeys and monasteries league, but which now boasts some remarkably complete ruins and is therefore well worth a visit.15 November: Viva la razaMonday was the first anniversary of the death by heart failure of the wrestler Eddie Guerrero - and, to judge from the fresh set of comments that have appeared on YouTube tribute videos, his memory has lost none of its power to affect people.19 November: Lions and tigers and bears, oh yesSaturday saw us belatedly celebrating Beloved Other Half's birthday with a trip to Whipsnade Wild Animal Park, which I must surely have visited as a child, if only I could remember. Won't forget today in a hurry, though.December 4: In search of the English RoswellSo, yesterday we went to have a potter around some woodland where, 26 years ago this month, an alien spaceship was seen to land. Possibly.December 22: ClarityThis is nice. I'm sat with a cup of tea in the bright, airy garden room of a National Trust holiday cottage in the far south west of Cornwall, free from most of the cares of normal life and about as far as you can get from the barrage of Christmas commercialism.

This is nice.I'm sat with a cup of tea in the bright, airy garden room of a National Trust holiday cottage in the far south west of Cornwall, free from most of the cares of normal life and about as far as you can get from the barrage of Christmas commercialism. Hopefully we'll make it back to the Smoke in time for me to meet Ali before she returns to LA, but apart from that - goodbye world!We're frequent visitors here and know the area well so Beloved Other Half has gone out exploring, to reacquaint herself with the coastal footpaths and sights here. I haven't joined her - instead I'm having a lazy few hours recovering from the aches and stiffness caused by nearly eight hours in the car yesterday getting here.We're gloriously fog-free here at the moment - you can see for miles from our hill-top retreat - but most of yesterday was spent crawling through thick, freezing banks of the stuff, all the way from London to Bodmin. There we abruptly broke out of it and, in the space of a couple of yards, went from zero visibility to being able to see the Milky Way with the clarity of a planetarium display.At one point, somewhere beyond Salisbury, we spent some 90 minutes in static traffic backed up from what appears to have been a very nasty accident about a mile ahead. We were on a dual carriageway, and we saw a procession of emergency vehicles come up the opposite site past us then, about five minutes later, force their way up from behind us through the immobile traffic on our side of the road.Two fire engines came first, followed by a pair of ambulances a couple of minutes later. The police turned up maybe five minutes later, by which time the two lanes of traffic on our side of the road had long since arranged itself neatly on the verge and against the central reservation to create a clear lane between them.While all this was going on, some of the cars stuck in the traffic jam were doing three-point turns and driving back against the traffic flow down the clear lane, braving evil looks from the rest of us, then diving down a side road to villages with names suspiciously like Royston Vasey. On at least one occasion, a car found itself nose-to-nose with an emergency vehicle. Serves the impatient bastard right, we all thought.Finally, an hour later, five flatbed rescue trucks came through to clear away the wreckage, followed by one last police car, which made a big - and completely unnecessary - show of flashing its lights to clear a path that was already clear. We figured the driver was just throwing his weight around to cover up the fact that his role was going to be nothing more than standing there in a tall hat, directing traffic. The traffic started moving again and by the time we got to the accident scene most of the emergency vehicles had gone, leaving just a line of wrecks by the side of the road, some appallingly bent and some just slightly dented and two of them on the back of flatbeds, plus a couple of depressed-looking policemen waving us past.We finally arrived at the cottage at a time not unadjacent to midnight, lit a fire in the new stove, and sank into the lumpy armchairs with a glass of wine.Bliss.

Just to clear up any ambiguity caused by this post on Northern Irish uber-blog Slugger O'Toole, let me state clearly that I have no inside knowledge of whose hands have been delving into Lembit Opik's underpants, or for how long.A few days ago, when the news broke that the Lib Dem MP had split up with fiancee Sian Lloyd and was now shagging a Cheeky Girl, I remembered a souvenir I still have of my days in student politics - one of Lembit's election leaflets for his unsuccessful run for President of the National Union of Students. Headlined Like it? You'll Lembit, it features a photo of him sitting in a rubbish skip, with the caption "I'll never be too proud to take a tip". I thought, "I could give you a tip or two right now, matey".What I forgot, though, was a comment I'd posted on Paul Staines' / Guido Fawkes' blog, back in June, when he ran a caption competition with a photo of the Lib Dem candidate in the Bromley by-election surrounded by Cheeky Girls.My entry? I'm just looking after them for Lembit.Slugger O'Toole blogger Belfast Gonzo tries to spin this into a suggestion that I might have had insider knowledge that the Opik-Irimia relationship had been going on longer than anyone had officially admitted. He (she?) does quote the bit on my blog where I say I'm an ex journalist and former politician, which ought to suggest I'm no sort of insider at all, but seems to decide it means exactly the opposite - presumably on the grounds that all politicians and journos are lying bastards anyway, aren't they?Actually, I was just making a vague allusion to the Popbitch rumour about the un-named high-flying MP who was generously rewarded for driving two female party colleagues to conference, and had no idea what was in the stars for the asteroid-fearing, gravitationally-challenged Parliamentarian.But now a horrible thought has gripped me.What if he saw the caption?What if it was me who put the idea in his head?I may give up this blogging business - it's obviously too dangerous...

So, yesterday we went to have a potter around some woodland where, 26 years ago this month, an alien spaceship was seen to land.Possibly.The Rendlesham Forest Incident, in which a group of American airmen rushed out to what they thought was a crashed aircraft, is sometimes known as the"English Roswell". Some, including a fairly senior officer, still believe with total sincerity that they encountered an alien craft that night. Naturally, a lot of people who can't be doing with that sort of thing have developed perfectly sensible arguments explaining why they didn't.Our view? Just because an object flies and can't be explained, that doesn't make it an alien spacecraft. Equally, it's perfectly reasonable to assume there are some things in the sky - particularly the sky around two military airbases - that the average person has insufficient knowledge to explain. You can dismiss the suggestion that the airmen actually saw Orford Lighthouse (a tiny winking dot on the horizon when we were there yesterday) without having to accept they must therefore have had a close encounter.These days the forest is rather different from that night in 1980. A combination of the Great Storm and regular Forestry Commission logging has radically changed the tree cover, the Americans have left the nearest base and, last year, the 25th anniversary of the incident was marked by the establishment of a three-mile marked "UFO trail" that takes a walker around the key locations involved.Since the site is near the Suffolk coast, and we are on the west of London, it took us a while to get there. With the short winter days a factor, we tried to walk fast. We failed. By the time we reached the little clearing where the landing is supposed to have happened, it was pretty dark. Not as dark as the photos suggest, but plenty dark enough to reduce the visible detail and dramatically ramp up the atmosphere.Do we think we stood in the shadow of where aliens once trod? Pffft - I seriously doubt it. Did we stand on the site of a mystery that, so far, has defied convincing explanation? No question.The start of the UFO trail, in the Rendlesham Forest Centre car parkEasy, well-signposted broad paths make up most of the trailEasy paths were helpful - because soon we started to lose the lightThis object in the sky was easy enough to identify...Landing lights near the gate of RAF Woodbridge - why are so many 'sightings' by military bases?It just got darker......and darker......until, by the time we got to the landing site, we could barely see a thing.Which didn't stop us trying.Photos 1, 3, 6, 7, and (obviously) 9 by Beloved Other Half.