There are reasons why the modern pop star should be encouraged to sing and not to talk. Apart from the fact that the modern variety has depressingly little to say, when they do say something, it tends to be as intelligent and well-considered as something shouted by a drunk staggering out of a chip shop at 3am on a Friday night. Case in point: I saw a BBC news item on the (so far) failed UK Mars mission. Myleene Klass was in there somewhere, apparently as an interested party. She told a reporter that part of her fascination grew not only out of the gosh-wow of we're-going-to-mars, but also out of national pride. I can't quote her verbatim, but it was something like -

"I'm very proud that this time we've set out to land something on Mars, that it's British, rather than, say, the Americans or the Soviets'.

The Soviets?

Well, at least her heart's in the right place ...

I'm back! With a really crappy 56k connection to boot. I'm now living in a new house a mile or two down the road from the old one, on the opposite side of the Clyde.

It's an area which is sort of up and coming, in the sense that a) the BBC are relocating around the corner from the part of the city I used to live in, and apart from their new premises a new road and foot bridge will be built to service it, and b) house prices around here have subsequently been going through the roof.

I'm not quite ready to get back into doing any major blogging just yet - I don't have a desk for the pc yet, which means I'm writing this lying on my stomach across the futon with the monitor and box sitting on the floor. Not the most comfortable position (the books get written on an ancient laptop, thereby circumventing this problem). So once things are fully unpacked and sorted out, things can get a little back on track.

Hope you have a nice christmas, nicer than ours has turned out to be so far - MJ got made redundant. A nice touch, considering it was Christmas. But it was only a crappy part-time stopgap job, so it's not really the greatest loss in the world.

In the meantime, I didn't manage to get the current draft of Against Gravity finished for Christmas - now I'm aiming for the start of New Year. Almost there, almost there ...