h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm feeling guilty about drinking again. I drank enough Perrier before I went to bed and during the night not to suffer, but I should not have had a double gin and tonic and half a bottle of wine the night before. It hasn't taken] long for an old routine to find its way back into my life.

For the first time in a long time I was loath to get up. 6.15 and I had to make a move to take a bath, have breakfast and drive to Cheltenham. Zozo was up and had to be settled in front of the TV. No time for sandwiches but I wanted to get the rubbish out. One of my jobs. With no time to spare I find the car covered in frost. This has to be dealt with before I set off. Can't ever remember a frost this side of 5th November since leaving Newcastle 20 years ago.

Panic all the way to Cheltenham. See how hopeless my situation is as I go through Cheltenham town centre. Each time Radio 4 tells me the time a traffic light goes red, a lorry pulls out in front of me or a pedestrian decides to activate a level crossing. see no train on pulling into the car park so get a ticket and join everyone on the platform. The train is running 8 minutes late. I would have missed it. Thanks Virgin for being reliably late. .

This is where I fill my journey. I wanted to stay put through to Plymouth.

K2is back in the office. Still full of 'flu, but back anyway.

My day? Not a busy one. I keep myself busy though doing this sort of thing and trying out different websites. Huggy Bear is off to Ohio. hat is the weather like? I plunge straight in, via UK Met Office to linked sites, a few false start to a US Host, then eventually to the Ohio University Met site which gives the kind of detail which would have an A' Level Geography student wetting their knickers.

Posted some dreams. These were ready to run. Took a while to convert to intelligible English. Have a book back home with 50 or more dreams. I had to give up the dream diary. I found I could recall 3, or 4, or more dreams a day and some of these unfold into such complex adventures, and then take hours to interpret that they were reaching out across my waking hours to meet with my dreamworld as I nodded off.

With some reluctance I took off for Bristol Broadmeads for a break. This diary thing has become as addictive as a computer game. A stiff coffee with a shot of vanilla woke me up. A parakeet was on the loose. I bought the Fishman a birthday card and got that and £10 posted off to him. Will have to get Poppy's gift wrapped and sent too.

Finally took a call from Manchester Man on a promotional video for Media Training. I don't believe in it. But what else have I to do? I long to be run of my feet, to be flying the world over collecting stories, to be exploiting the skills they have here. Dare I test how likely this is to happen before getting moved into a new home? Then what? Bristol has a few production companies but it isn't London.

At the other end of the day I find myself preparing diary entries 20 years older than this. I get so wrapped up in it I decide to place one more entry from 1979 before catching the train. I must put it all into the present tense, I must correct the spelling and grammar and I must ditch some of he tiresome navel gazing that my earlier diaries typically contain. On top of this I have to get the narrative straight. too often i refer to events that happen years later. These events can wait.

Making an entry read well in this way is a lesson in its self. My worst fault as a wrier is to go back once I've written something perfectly well off the top of my head and muck it about. Not any more.

Being confronted by a copy of the Daily Mail on the delayed train to Cheltenham is about the best thing that could have happened to me. It is piffle, playground abuse at its worst. No wonder oiks who read this nof thing are encouraged, after a few drinks too many, to be abusive. All that journalists appear to do in this bog-paper rag is hurl abuse. They slag each other off, nothing else. Still, caught a bit about randy adults committing adultery on flights abroad and women who felt compelled to pack in their weddings days before the big event. This, if nothing else, could help me turn diary truths into trashy fiction. Like, where could my relationship with Suzi Bean have gone? A baby boy in France born September 27th 1985? He'd be 14. He comes to find me. Then what? That fling with Christine in Rochefort in 1978. A girl called Sandrine now 21! Better still a friend of my niece Dancing Girl who will be 21 in February 2000. What other dirt can I create from reading the Mail?

You see, good things come from wrecking one's usual routine, good things come from buggering up one's routine, from doing things differently. It isn't just change for changes sake, it's like being a fly trapped in a car - you end up bouncing off so many different surface you don't know who you are or where you are coming from.