No, not an item about babies or their bodily products, familiar a subject though it may be, and dear to my heart; the burning question of the day is, what do you think of Marmite? Is it heavenly flavoursome yeasty goodness, or is it vaguely beery oversalted gunk which has no place at the breakfast table? Have your say in the Great Marmite Debate!

Important note for Antipodeans: Vegemite emphatically does not count. Personally, I think Vegemite is effluent from Satan's own sewage plant, but that's just my opinion.

Recent incomprehensible search engine hits for this blog include:

• coffee machine textures
• porridge beginner instructions
• Chelsea football party crack skunk
• llama ailments and back problems

I'd like to offer my sympathies to the person looking for a cure for his llama, or possibly to the llama itself in the event that it is a techno-literate llama, and suggest the rather excellent Diseases of the Andean Ruminants, available from most reputable hallucinogen book dealers. Alternatively, wander over to Discover Llamas for a quick and handy reference.

The idea of "intriguini" continues to boil away in the furtive recesses of my mind, and I've now started dreaming up some other odd forms of pasta, such as canini, garrottini and lumpini. Off to the supermarket after work, methinks, to get some fresh ingredients and surprise The Missus with a new culinary creation.

When I was younger, and first learning to make the stuff, I did actually manage to create a new kind of pasta, but due to its haphazard appearance I was forced to name it "deformi". It was quite nice, if you closed your eyes while you ate it.

Intriguing concept (link courtesy of Pogo). Try it.

P.S. - when I typed the word "intriguing" in the above paragraph, it came out of my fingers as "intriguini". I wonder if this is some embryonic floating meme of mysterious pasta, trying to insinuate itself into my consciousness in order to be created. You are now entering... the Twilight Zone.

The ordinary home-brewed sludge went down a treat, so I can only assume that the coffee shop has been a bit liberal with the turpentine again. This almost certainly means that I haven't suddenly become allergic to caffeine.

THANKYOU GOD.

Complete and utter disaster. I seem to have developed a disturbing and inexplicable aversion to coffee, hitherto my only saviour of sanity and alertitude in a World Gone Mad. I bought a cup of my usual brew from the coffee shop half an hour ago, and have been unable to take more than the tiniest sip without feeling thoroughly nauseous. Of course, it's entirely possible that the coffee shop have taken to slipping unexpected chemical agents into their produce, but it's far more likely that their milk has gone a bit funny. I'll have to test this when I get home. I'll have some bog-standard Gold Blend or something, with proper fresh milk, and hope like hell that I can digest it with no ill effects; if I truly can't drink coffee any more then I will simply go insane, INSANE I TELL YOU.

I've just bought a flat-screen monitor, whee! It's so pretty! And also it takes up practically no room on my desk, so I can actually do paperwork on it (gasp! He still uses paper?? How déclassé!) It is silver and spiffy and looks as though it could break the speed limit. I'm such a gadget freak.

Just caught myself nodding off during a cataclysmically tedious customer presentation. Not one that I was presenting, obviously, 'cos that would have been just riveting, but still, aargh. Not sure whether they noticed or not. Would like to go and find a nice, comfortable sand pit somewhere and bury my head in it. The long weekend is coming none too soon. Will be downing a soothing pint of absinthe upon my return home this evening.

This week's implausible search engine hits for this blog include:

• old fashioned throat pastille
• pigeon bollocks

Am now very worried indeed about the safety of the nation's pigeons. Suspect there may be some grubby, sweating lunatic lurking in our parks with a slingshot, ready to bring down the ubiquitous feathered rats and perform dire testicular experiments upon them. I dislike pigeons, but not that much.

Heavenly. I'd not been to this particular restaurant for almost a year, as The Missus decided it would be unfair for me to enjoy seafood which she couldn't eat on account of being up the duff (it seemed perfectly reasonable at the time). We had sautéed scallops with ginger, tamarind and spring onion, followed by the infamous Szechuan prawns, which were seven in number, enormous in size and almost unbearably delicious in taste. I am mildly ashamed to say that I stuffed my face until my stomach hurt. I am still unable to talk properly the following day, and have been communicating with my co-workers by gesturing feebly and making small, seal-like mewing noises.

My parents are performing sprog-management duties this evening in order to allow me and The Missus to make a rare pilgrimage to our local Chinese restaurant. Spicy Szechuan prawns are on offer. This is the equivalent of expensive fireworks for my poor deprived tastebuds. I've been drooling uncontrollably in anticipation since about 10 o'clock this morning, forcing those in adjacent office cubicles to wade about in wellies or, for the more ingenious, make small boats out of printer paper and stand gingerly in them. I'll let you know just how astonishingly good they are tomorrow; now please excuse me as I have to go and dry my shirt.

There's an office tradition here of bringing in cookies, doughnuts, toffee, fudge and/or other similarly sticky and sugar-bloated comestibles for general consumption whenever it's your birthday (or anniversary/wedding/engagement/holiday/minor operation/birth of child/purchase of cat). Is this just the UK? Or even just my office? It seems odd to buy presents for other people on such occasions; not that I mind, since I'm currently munching on one of my birthdayous colleague's cookies. Perhaps I should rephrase that. I'm digesting a chocolate-chip biscuit donated by my colleague. Yeah, much better. "Birthdayous" should definitely be a word. I am quite firmly out of my tree today. [mental picture of squirrel looking down at prostrate, sub-tree form in puzzled manner, as if to say, "What a funny-shaped acorn"]

Feeling very peculiar today. Not physically (the recalcitrant chicken has been vanquished at last), but mentally; the Mischief Gnome is running rampant through my poor misused frontal lobes, urging me to do something outrageous, and possibly sackworthy, just to perk myself up. I've got to that point where I'm so pissed off with the amount of work I have to do that I've gone through the other side of annoyance, and am now in the deceptively calm waters of dangerously grinning, manic cheerfulness which lurk between the Scilla of Tension and the Charybdis of Insanity. My colleagues, who know me well, have been speaking in low, soothing voices. Run away, little mousies, run away. A ha ha ha ha.

Sorry for the gap in transmission, I've been laid up in bed for the past few days with a delightfully technicolour case of food poisoning, caused by a rogue piece of chicken which refused to be barbecued quietly on Wednesday evening and which spent the better part of Thursday and Friday encouraging me to foster closer relations with the bathroom.

Anyway, I shall put you all out of your misery, although most of you guessed correctly in any case, so you can stop being miserable and start being insufferably smug: it was indeed Version Three which summed up my origins in brief and idiosyncratic fashion. Well done, folks, I'm clearly more transparent than I thought. I did include a few nearly-true statements in the other versions, just to throw you off (I'm sneaky like that); my mum did teach English once, although not in Botswana; I used to draw cartoons about a spacefaring duck, although I never won prizes for it; I do talk to myself aloud on occasion (when questioned, I generally explain myself by saying that it's the only way I can guarantee an intelligent conversation). So what was it about Version Three that gave me away? Hmmm.

The pervasive inclusion of ballistic cow dung is a reference to the occasional summer we spent on my grandfather's cattle farm in Zimbabwe, where my brother and I amused ourselves by getting covered in dust, pretending to be Clint Eastwood, lobbing bits of dried cow crap at each other, and riding an ancient and legendarily long-suffering horse who went by the unfortunate name of Schmuck. This is actually true.

Word of the day is "lackadaisical", because I don't have any wildflowers in my garden, and would like some.

Inspired by Pogo, I've just taken a quick look at the search-engine referrals for this blog; I don't know what the hell is going on. The obvious ones:

• linguini
• takeaway food survey popularity

...make perfect sense. I'm not even too bothered about the odd but innocuous ones:

• undiscovered tribes
• expression "given up the ghost"
• cranberry juice vodka tongue problems

But these are just plain worrying:

• "I have an axe in my head"
• wildebeest sounds
• exhaust pipe shagging

Bowing to pressure from various sources, I've decided to reveal a little about my background (although only a little; I like to tease and tantalise you). However, I will not be doing it in a straightforward manner, as nothing I do is ever straightforward, because I am mysterious and ineffable (or, as it's pronounced in Lancashire, "pain-in-the-arse"). I will instead provide you all with no less than three possible précis versions of my childhood, from which you will have to select the correct one. Here we go.

Version One

• Born in Guernsey, of Norwegian/Scottish extraction
• Moved to Malaysia at the age of two
• Parents ran a small dairy outside Kuala Lumpur
• Lost part of a finger when stepped on by a bull
• Had an Italian nanny who taught me to cook
• Won a school prize drawing cartoons about a spacefaring duck
• Speak fluent Mandarin, reasonable Tagalog and poor Cantonese
• Have an unreasoning hatred of frogs
• Have a bad habit of scratching my hands when nervous
• Used to throw cow dung at my younger brother

Version Two

• Born in Botswana, in the back of a Land Rover
• Had a pet dog called Cat
• Father farmed cattle and horses
• Mother taught English to local children
• Never learned to ride a bicycle
• Was bitten by a snake at age eight
• Hold the Botswana junior record for shouting
• Am a concert-standard violinist, but very stage-shy
• Talk to myself more often than is healthy
• Used to throw cow dung at my younger brother

Version Three

• Mixed heritage - Welsh/Zimbabwean/Jewish
• Born within sight of London's Wembley Stadium
• Had a Womble fixation at an early age
• Moved to Hong Kong at the age of four
• Father was a judge and part-time opera tenor
• Mother ran a tennis club for geriatric expatriates
• Play six musical instruments, all badly
• Have freakily sensitive tastebuds
• Dislike anything greasy being put on my face
• Can swear in 17 languages
• Used to throw cow dung at my younger brother

Go on, guess. I expect to hear reasons for your guesses, too.

P.S. One or two of you may know the correct answer already - let's not spoil the fun!

You've just gotta love Arnie (link via Shelley). Well, okay, you don't, particularly if you have grave doubts about the political sanity of the U.S. Republican party, but I can't help but feel that the entertainment value of this whole saga is going to be vast and enjoyable. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to have anything so crass and mundane as actual policies, and this may have an effect on real people's lives, but hey - it's Arnie, and everybody loves Arnie! (Including me, I'm quite conflicted about the situation.) I just wonder who's going to be pulling his strings...

Word of the day is "marionette".

Sweltering quietly. Drinking buckets of fruit juice, and trying not to pass out. The air temperature today would not be entirely out of place in one of the lower circles of Hell. Most of my clothing has been liberally doused in baby sick, as the hot weather is making Sarah extra-thirsty and she is consequently guzzling Herculean quantities of milk at every opportunity, only to decide five minutes later that that last half-pint really was too much, and would probably look far better decorating her father's shirt than the inside of her stomach.

Word of the day is "desiccated".

On a normal Friday I would probably, right about now, be juggling multiple problems with mail servers, virus infestations, corrupt databases, and people with the attention spans of retarded goldfish who can't remember their passwords.

But this is not a normal Friday.

I am, instead, sitting in the garden at my mum's house on Cannock Chase, sipping an iced lemon tea and eating strawberries and cream, whilst enjoying the afternoon sunshine in comfortable splendour, having spent the morning snowboarding with my brother. Later, I will be having a barbecue, and will most likely spend the evening admiring the sunset and listening to the forest breeze through the pines. I have taken the day off, and it is good.

My dad, who is reading this entry over my shoulder, has insisted (with some degree of petulance) that the house is in fact in his name, and that I should therefore have referred to it in the previous paragraph as 'my dad's house'. He's probably right, although I doubt very much that this will induce me in any way to alter the statement. He is singularly displeased.

I've decided to try putting titles on my posts. It may work, it may not. I may decided to keep them, I may decide to ditch them. I may decide to leap onto my desk, foaming at the mouth, and shout "Who's for tennis?" just to shit everybody up at the end of a long day. The latter option is the most appealing, by some considerable distance.

The office canteen has just rendered me speechless with astonishment by serving up some really quite good food. It was a hot chicken and bean sprout salad, with ginger and Thai herbs and soy sauce, and it had that whole sweet-chilli-and-lemongrass thing going on, and that really gets my juices flowing pretty much every time. Yes indeedy.

In the interests, to paraphrase Iago the Parrot, of not having a heart attack from surprise, I'm now going to go and lie down in a cool, dark room.

Normal blogging service has been restored, by the judicious cobbling-together of sundry parts of a backup copy of my template, which I had luckily secreted on my person after the last incident of this type. Still, it shouldn't have happened in the first place; I don't see how a template can suddenly chop its lower half off out of sheer cussedness, unless it has some form of electronic dysmorphia, which I doubt. This evil cannot go unpunished. A curse upon Blogspot and all its works, yea, verily, even unto the seventh generation. I will shortly be making an excursion to the culprits' secret and heavily-defended jungle lair, which I will infiltrate, clad in camouflage gear and wielding several chunky automatic rifles and an unfeasibly large knife between my teeth; then I will disable and horribly maim the scurrying hordes of luckless uniformed henchmen with laughable ease, grinning menacingly and throwing out predictable yet snappy one-liners all the while, before wreaking terrible, bloody, cinematic and 18-rated vengeance upon the evil perpetrators and blowing up the entire compound. I will then announce my intention to run for Governor of California.

Word of the day is "spittoon", because that is what I'd like to use the template server for.

Silly buggers is once again being played by the Blogger template server. I'm trying to edit the bloody thing but only half of the HTML is being displayed in the editor window. I'm getting heartily sick of it. If this post disappears, you have my apologies.

The ridiculous heat continues, with some parts of Europe even more seriously affected. I'm getting stickyback syndrome while driving (ick! ICK!) and have had to cut most of my hair off to improve heat loss from my feverish brain. It's just hot and muggy and steamy and I feel like I'm trapped inside a giant kettle. Soon I will explode, messily, and some poor cleaner is going to have to sponge up the bits.

Word of the day is "nictitating", because I'd really love to have a set of those cool transparent inner eyelids that keep out all the dust and gunk and stop your eyes getting all itchy.

Heatwave!!! The temperature is soaring, and all the wee delicate English petals are wilting in the unaccustomed sunshine. (The same delicate petals, it should be added, who complain about the constant rain which makes up the remaining 96% of the climate). Everyone is lolling about in lethargic fashion, sweating buckets and generally being very grumpy and irritable. The amount of actual work being done around here is roughly zero, unless you count me writing this entry, which you probably don't. No, I don't either.

Word of the day is 'ineffable', because it cannot be effed.

There's a small black-and-white cutout of Tony Blair sitting cheekily on my desk. I've no idea who put it there, nor why anyone would feel that I need a paper effigy of our Glorious Leader on my desk (except perhaps for sacrificial purposes, when the mail servers aren't behaving). It's just about the right size to fit in my shirt pocket, though. I might take him down to the canteen for lunch tomorrow, and see if anyone notices.

Word of the day is 'mellifluous', because it sounds smooth and mellow, which is how I would like to be feeling (but amn't).

I'd just like to offer hearty congratulations to Treefen, for tying down a monkey. (All will become clear, trust me.)

The trip to the comedy club was great fun (the Glee Club in Chinatown, Birmingham - check it out, folks). I took a train into the city, for the first time in several years, and was mildly astonished that it was both on time and reasonably cheap (for those not in the know, the British rail system is generally a stinking nightmare of long delays, extravagant prices and ridiculous excuses). The club ticket included a buffet meal, which was very tasty (I'll recommend the chef to our office canteen, who could learn a lesson or two). We had to leave before the end in order to catch the last train home, which was a shame, but I dare say I'll be going again.

The thing that's bothering me i