I’ve been practising for this gig I’m doing next Thursday at Wimbledon Library; this consists of sitting in a room, banging away at a Nord Electro 2 and trying to sing with heartfelt passion while looking at a piece of half-eaten toast. I’m hoping that the audience next week will consist of more than a piece of half-eaten toast – even an uneaten piece of toast would be OK, providing it had some Marmite on it and applauded reasonably loudly in between numbers.

Yesterday I was supposed to go to a small village near Southampton and stay overnight in the house of a young lady, for a feature I’m writing. She had consented to this, but sadly when I texted her in the morning to tell her what train I’d be getting, she replied saying that she had been vomiting everywhere and was unable to keep the appointment. This isn’t the first time someone has vomited everywhere when they’ve been about to meet me for the first time; I’m what you call an emetic. Anyway, she resisted the temptation to quip “you make me sick”, for which I’m grateful. I’m hoping she’ll consider rescheduling our appointment and face up to a second round of puking.

So, in the afternoon I went to BBC Television Centre to appear, ironically, on the radio, on Phil Williams’ Radio 5 show. This slot is normally done by Simon Mayo, but clearly someone had said “Hold The Mayo” this week, oh my, what an exceptional stab at humour. I had been booked to discuss MySpace with 2 other chaps, and as we sat waiting to go into the studio the other two starting chatting intensively about, um, MySpace. I was thinking “save it for the show, save it for the show”, but they didn’t, and they carried on for about 20 minutes, so by the time we went in there I felt the topic had been pretty well covered already. Anyway, I acquitted myself fairly well, although I offered a pretty pathetic explanation as to why I’m referred to by The Independent as Cyberman, and listening back to the show it’s clear that I use the words “y’know” more often than even The Modfather himself, Paul Weller. Which isn’t good news for someone vaguely interesting in broadcasting. I must excise it from my vocabulary, along with the words “I don’t know” and “Can I go to the toilet, please.”

Yesterday evening, a Digital Plumber – whose company I wrote a feature on a couple of weeks ago – turned up at my door with an enormous bunch of flowers for me. Which was an extremely lovely gesture, and much appreciated, but I’m not sure what to do with them. I don’t really enjoy the smell of flowers – I prefer stuff like, y’know, unwashed bed linen, that kind of thing – and I told Jenny that I’d been given them by a Digital Plumber, so I can’t really give them to her without getting slapped. I’m thinking of taking them to the hospital that I live next to, and asking them to give them to someone who would appreciate them. Would that be a nice thing to do? Would I go to heaven?