There are few things more damaging to ones self-esteem than your own computer deciding that it no longer wants you to operate it. At about 7pm last night – just as I was about to settle in for a quiet evening in front of the, er, computer – my Powerbook started adopting a surly attitude, refusing to let me check my emails, thinking twice about allowing me administrative access and so on. “Ah, that'll be a damaged keychain,” I said to myself, knowledgably, after having bought a book about Mac OS X just after Christmas. Sadly, however, all the acknowledged remedies for regaining control of unruly, wayward and disobedient keychains refused to bloody work, and I ended up having to erase and reinstall. Which is as satisfying as a good spring clean, but takes a lot longer. I went to bed at 1am. Hang on a sec, this is all about technology, I should save it up and bung it into The Independent on Tuesday afternoon. Do a Max Hastings. “Imagine my horror when my computer crashed! They seem to have a mind of their own, don't they, especially this time of year, what with the cold weather and all.”

Anyway, I awoke at 7.30am to discover that I'm 14st 11lb, representing a decreased loss of just 3lb, compared to the astonishing 7lb loss in the first week. For European readers who are wondering what the blazing hell “lb” is, that's a good question. It's short for the Roman libra which was roughly equivalent to the English pound, a measurement of weight that has been so indescribably vague over the years that it could mean anything between 300 and 600 grams – thus making it an ideal measurement of weight for the weight watcher. We seem to have settled on 454g as being equal to one pound; if you're finding that difficult to remember, just mentally store the rhyme

Two and a quarter pounds of jam
weigh about a kilogram

– although it's actually 2.2026 pounds of jam, but try getting that to scan properly in a rhyme, it's a bitch, let me tell you. While we're on the whole metric / imperial / poetry thing, why not also commit to memory

A litre of water's
A pint and three quarters

although this, again, is grossly over simplified, as it's just a tad over 1.76 pints, but I think I've made my point. I have to confess, though, that if I hadn't had several pints on Friday evening followed up with fish and chips in Mayfair's Red Lion on Friday night, I might be even thinner than I am now, if you can imagine that. But I'm allowed the odd moments of weakness, surely.

In an Addison Lee cab on Friday night, the cabbie dropped some hints that he's had a few famous people in the back of his cab. Jenny foolishly pressed him on this point. “Oh, sorry, I can't tell you that,” he said. “I'm not one to blab about famous people,” he said. He then spent 30 minutes reeling off a list of names, including “all the top models”, which got increasingly hard to believe, and increasingly boring. At one point, Jenny got out of the cab to get some cash out. He leaned over towards me and said “Tell you what though, mate. Kelly Brook – you would not believe the body on that. I thought she was a bit top-heavy on the TV, but in real life – whoo! Extremely well proportioned,” he continued, salivating slightly. I made all the usual bloke-ish noises, like “Phwoargh” and “Ghhoohhh” and then Jenny came back, and everything went a bit quiet.

I am also slightly top heavy, but aim to be “extremely well-proportioned” by June.