Thoroughly bloody evil weather today. The wind is so penetratingly cold that the ducks in the local pond have buggered off a month early, icicles hanging off their hastily-departing bums, although that might be something to do with that cheap holiday package deal to Tunisia they found on the internet. The clouds are big, wet, heavy, boisterous things, barrelling across the sky and smacking into each other with great, wet thuds like stratospheric pro wrestlers. The rest of the sky is a sickly, mucous yellow. The scene outside the office window looks like something straight out of the really ominous bits of Tolkien. I'm expecting hordes of mud-encrusted orcs to come pouring out into the customer car park any minute, brandishing steel-plated and heavily-spiked Laptops of Death forged in the fires of Orthanc, and demanding the surrender of all our LAN cabling.

I'm a terrible, terrible person. I am. A colleague of mine returned today from paternity leave, looking suitably knackered but beaming with parental pride and staggering beneath a Sisyphean load of baby photos. After taking the appropriate amount of mickey I found myself looking at the pictures and thinking, yeucchh, that is one shrivelled-up child. Okay, so I'm blatantly biased in favour of my own wee person, who was (of course) never shrivelled, wrinkled, bent, spindled or folded in any way, but even so this is a severely scrunched-looking baby. I'm probably going to go to hell.

In keeping with the grand old tradition of holding a writing competition in honour of significant blog anniversaries, and since it is exactly six months (hurrah!) since my first ever blog entry, you are cordially invited to submit a short piece of humorous fiction for perusal and general appreciation by myself and your fellow readers. Unlike some of the more reputable blogs you may have read, the opportunity to win something of actual value is not available. Not for you the glitzy, diamond-studded, Las Vegas-style prizes of such famous blogs as "Pancake Fetishist" or "Name That Llama", oh no! One lucky winner will be assured of receiving a prize which is both small and cheap (and therefore easily dispatched overseas) and probably found by me in the bottom of a cereal box or, if I'm feeling really generous, hand-crafted from a piece of leftover pizza dough.

The rules are as follows:

1. The piece must be in play/screenplay format, and should describe a single scene.
   
2. The scene should involve exactly three speaking characters, but may include any number of inanimate objects, animals, or other appropriate (or inappropriate) props.
   
3. The scene must include, at some point, at least one salami. The type and usage of the salami I leave to you.
   
4. The scene should include at least one plot twist. Extra points will be awarded for plot twists involving food (but not the salami).
   
5. Extra points will be awarded for characters who completely avoid using the letters "e" and "t".
   
6. Extra points will be awarded for using the word "concupiscence". Incorrect usage of "concupiscence" will still score if it makes me throw up from laughing.
   
7. The total length of the scene, excluding stage/camera directions and character tags, may not exceed 400 words. (e.g. Bob: I'll have mustard on this [indicates mortadella], please. would count as six words.)

The competition will run for two weeks, ending at 10pm GMT on Friday 10th October. The winner(s) will hopefully be announced the following Monday, assuming I've got over my hangover by then.

Get 'em in, folks!

Aren't chocolate chip cookies great? A colleague has brought in a gargantuan pile of them to celebrate the big Four Zero and we've all subsequently stuffed our faces with them. Just that right mixture of solid chewiness and moist gooey-ness. Mmmmm... cookies.

The exorbitantly-priced tea has been rendered a smidgen less controversial by a hasty reduction in prices across the board. A small cup of soi-disant "Sun Tea" (hot black tea with a lemon slice and half a ton of sugar) now costs a more affordable 56p. Another example of people power in action. Long Live the Revolution.

A chill in the bones, today - the first thin, papery patina of frost of the season appeared on my car windscreen this morning, and I've been wearing my sleeves down and my top button up. The trees outside our house are still defiantly green, for the most part, but it can't last; already they're drying out and curling ever so slightly at the edges. An unwelcome cold blast of air causes departing employees to wince and rub their arms as they exit the revolving door. The wee person has been out and about in her denim jacket, which is two sizes too large but very warm, and is also from Gap which is apparently important according to The Missus.

There's something not quite right about early autumn. I can't quite put my finger on it.

Does anyone remember the Star Wars Holiday Special 1978? George Lucas apparently said of this godawful piece of painfully cheesy sanitised pap that "If I had the time and a sledgehammer, I would track down every bootlegged copy of that program and smash it". I remember it well, and I wish he had. (Link via Shelley)

Jazz seems to have gone away for a bit. Hope she's OK. Give us a shout if you're out there.

...are now, hopefully, working again. I've been wrestling with the poxy stubborn little bastards for days, and have finally beaten them into submission (pun intended, please insert laugh here) by threatening to come round to their houses and set fire to their active participles. You may once again say stuff. Or not, as you please.

We're due to have a flying visit to the cube farm shortly from a couple of red-tied and Armani-suited customer representatives, just brimming over with gormless questions, and as per regular office practice some poor sap from each of the support sections will be giving them a brief and buttock-clenchingly boring tour of their team (fixed smiles and glazed expressions at the ready, lads), plus the machine room (fleece hats, thermal underwear and ice goggles mandatory) for those unlucky enough to be in charge of one or more servers, such as myself. Fortunately, in the grand scheme of the office pecking order I've not attained the giddy heights of the top rungs, probably due to my deliberate and persistent lack of skills in the field of nasal-anal interfacing, so with any luck I won't be asked to perform this particularly soul-destroying duty.

Or so I thought.

A couple of minutes ago, I suddenly noticed that everyone else in the team, including our redoubtable leader, has either (a) quietly sloped off for a quick coffee, or even, God forbid, to spend a small fortune on a thimbleful of arcane tea, (b) started frowning, swearing and banging away furiously on their keyboard in an attempt to look vitally (and therefore of course uninterruptably) busy, or as a last desperate resort (c) disappeared under their desk mumbling something technical about network cabling. This leaves two people in the team: a chap who started last week and therefore quite understandably knows vast amounts of bugger all about the systems, and me.

I'm detecting a subtle new fragrance in the air which I have provisionally named Hint Of Rodent.

Can I just say three things:

Pirates of the Caribbean. Keira Knightley. Yum.

The office coffee bar has just undergone a week's worth of renovation and has today emerged, after days of heavy banging, muttering and swearing from legions of hairy-armed men in boiler suits, from its cocoon of scaffolding and gaffer tape to reveal the sparkling new butterfly beneath. It is a luridly bright blue and yellow butterfly which gives you a godawful thumping headache just looking at it, and apart from this paint job of dubious wisdom the practical differences are hard to spot. The major addition is that half of the bar has been converted into a Lipton's Tea area, by the ingenious expedient of putting a big blue-and-yellow sign above it saying "Lipton's Tea". Hey presto! So we now have half a coffee bar and half a tea bar, apparently. But wait! It's not just any old tea, oh no! Not your bourgeois bowler-hat-wearing English cuppa with gold-top and two sugars, thankyou, matron! The latest flavours from the Orient are available, each variety hand-picked by gentle, wise old men in saffron robes from the foothills of the Himalayas and then flown in one leaf at a time by specially-trained, environmentally-friendly, karmically-enhanced Nepalese glider pilots. I assume this is the case, as it's the only way I can imagine for them to be able to justify the price of the aforesaid tea, the purchase of a day's worth of which would comfortably bankrupt a small industrialised nation.

I viewed all this, and the lengthy queue forming in front of it, with an increasing sense of alarm as I sat munching my bemarmited toast this morning; but never let it be said that I shunned the opportunity to sample something a bit different. As the great Byron is reputed to have said, I'll try anything once, except buggery and parachute-free skydiving. Thus, setting my trepidation aside I strode fearlessly up to the bar, armed with a lifetime's experience of Oriental-cha-drinking, a particular love of jasmine tea, and a small yellow 50%-off voucher which had been pressed into my hands by a feverishly enthusiastic member of staff not a minute previously. "Try our green tea," he'd said, panting like a dog in a sauna, "it's really wonderful!!!!" Dodging the hail of exclamation marks I proceeded to the counter, scanned the shiny new wall-mounted neon menu advertising "a wide range of speciality teas", and presented myself to the gangly, bored-looking bloke with the Lipton's uniform and the enormous Adam's apple. The conversation went something like this.

Me: Have you got any Chinese tea?
Bloke: Sorry? [squints in puzzlement]
Me: Chinese tea. From China. Have you got any?
Bloke: Uh... what d'you mean? Like, what you get in a Chinese restaurant?
Me: Yes! Exactly!
Bloke: No. Sorry. [picks spots with dirty fingernail]
Me: Er... jasmine tea, perhaps?
Bloke: Oh! Yeah, well, yeah, well, we have some green tea.
Me: Does it have jasmine in it, noticeably?
Bloke: I think so. Well, it might do. Lemme check. [turns to manager] Here, Susan, does this stuff [indicates solid silver 18th-century tea chest hand-crafted by Kashmiri nomads] have jasmine in it? Only it just says "green tea" on the label. This guy [indicates me with disparaging wave of thumb] wants to know if it has jasmine in it.
Manager: [regards me over top of spectacles as though examining a particularly choice dog turd] I believe so. It's fragrant Japanese green cha with jasmine extract.
Bloke: [turns back] Yeah, it's got jasmine.
Me: Good, I will have one large cup of it, please. Here's my voucher.
Bloke: Right. That'll be three pound twenty, please.
Me: What??
Bloke: Oh no, hang on, you've got a voucher so that's... [pimply forehead creases in ferocious concentration] um... er... [works kindergarten-level problem out on calculator] one pound sixty.
Me: Oh. Alright. Here you go. Shall I bend over and drop my pants now, or shall we make an appointment for later this evening?
Bloke: Huh?
Me: Never mind.

It was like drinking a pint of boiled urine. Japanese, my left bollock; any self-respecting Japanese tea producer would commit seppuku rather than export this shite. There might conceivably have been jasmine in it, although if there was it was most likely of the variety usually found in industrial bathroom fresheners. I'm off to the coffee machine; at least you know in advance that the stuff tastes like petrol and will strip the enamel off your teeth.

The breathing apparatus has been giving me gyp again, with the usual concomitant lack of blog activity, for which I apologise (again). I've been expelling interesting things from my lungs, which, in the interests of not making anyone keel over with overpowering nausea, I will refrain from describing in detail. Suffice to say that I've generated enough material to keep the producers of the Alien series in business in the special effects department for several decades. A swift kick in the metaphorical pants from a couple of heavy-duty inhalers seems to have nipped this particular lurgy in the bud; so I'm back in the saddle for the moment, although if anyone has an uncontrollable urge to send me large bunches of grapes anyway, please feel free.

This is twisted.

As I'm apparently the last person in the known universe not to have played the Interview Game yet, Treefen has kindly provided me with some questions. Michael Parkinson is not involved in any way.

First, the rules:

1. Leave a comment or send me an email, saying that you want to be interviewed.
2. I will respond; I'll ask you five questions.
3. You'll update your website with my five questions, and your five answers.
4. You'll include this explanation.
5. You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

In the unlikely event that anyone didn't know the rules already, well, now you do.

Okay, here goes:

1. What has changed the most about you since you became a father recently?
I've thought about this one a lot, and have surprised myself with the answer: I don't think I've changed much, in myself at least. My life, i.e. what I do on a daily basis, has changed dramatically; I'm affected significantly when I don't get enough sleep, when I used to be a proper night-owl; I've become a more cautious driver, which my parents will be delighted to hear; I loathe leaving for work in the morning (okay, so that's nothing new). You know how some people have a vocation, in the literal sense of a calling? Like being born to be a teacher, or a musician, or a priest. Well, I've felt for many, many years that I have a vocation to be a dad, and now that I am, it's really just confirmed it. I'm in my element.

2. What is your favourite recipe, and would you share it with your readers?
So many to choose from! After careful consideration, it's going to have to be Chicken Adobo, which is a deceptively simple Filipino dish which knocks me flat with its scrumptiousness every time. A fair approximation to the recipe I use can be found here; I usually accompany it with honey-glazed snap peas and baby sweetcorn. On the other hand, if we're talking about favourite dishes whose recipes I wouldn't share, I'd have to go for the infamous Granny's Chicken Soup, which is a closely guarded family secret...

3. You have described yourself as being of Welsh/Zimbabwean/Jewish heritage. What do you like least/most about being of such diverse cultural makeup?
Well, to be honest, that's just a précis of my heritage. There are quite a few more heritages thrown in, to the point where I usually just describe my nationality as "mongrel" to save time. The things I like about that are that I can identify with a lot of different people and feel at home in many places, that I'm pretty broad-minded about culture/religion and have absolutely no patience with bigotry of any type, that I'm pre-disposed to look at things from multiple viewpoints. I dislike that I've occasionally been subject to bigotry myself, and that I don't really have any roots; I used to feel like a wanderer of the world. I'm starting to grow my own roots now, though, and it's marvellous.

4. You can swear in 17 languages. What is your favourite language to swear in, and why?
Tricky. Italian is so expressive, particularly once you factor in the obligatory hand gestures. Cantonese is great for really explosive swearing. French and Portuguese are flowing, liquid languages and are better for raised-eyebrow cutting remarks than crude ones. I'm afraid, though, at the risk of being boring, that English probably takes the top prize; being a bastardised language it combines the best of several worlds. Plus, it's my only really fluent language, and therefore the only one in which I can confidently describe someone as a slugfucking poltroon and get away with it (provided that I can run quickly enough).

5. If you could enslave one major Hollywood/pop star to clean your toilet and change dirty nappies, who would it be, and why?
Ha! Good one. I find myself forced to pick Jennifer Lopez, because she strikes me as the person most likely to consider herself to be above such things. A little humility is good for all of us now and again.

All of the mail servers - and I do mean all - decided to pack up their kit bags and shuffle off to the Great Server Room In The Sky yesterday; hence the dearth of blog postage. I've therefore been obliged to spend the last 36 hours trying to resurrect them, pox-ridden bastard warthog-buggerers that they are, to some semblance of useful functionality. Luckily I had at my disposal the assistance, and I use the term in its loosest sense, of several so-called 'customer engineers', whose depth of technical knowledge would not cause a great deal of difficulty for any passing non-swimmers. Nevertheless, the last of the bloody machines finally decided to heave itself up by its bootstraps about half an hour ago. Apart from a lingering desire to perform a spot of impromptu facial surgery on the engineers with the aid of a blunt machete, I'm now making a resonably successful attempt to relax. A steaming pint of Crazy Gino's Ludicrous Strength Espresso is helping a lot. Now please excuse me while I go and take out a day's worth of stress on some hapless pigeons. [fx: wields baseball bat with expression of demented glee]

Office life continues to score an all-time low in the Give A Shit sweepstakes. Am maintaining a semblance of professional decorum with the aid of triple espresso shots, Marathon bars and the odd peanut found under my desk.

Have fired off a query to the nice chaps at Enetation about my account. Hopefully they'll reply that all is going to be well in the Comment province of Pastaland. In the meantime, please excuse any untoward interruptions of service, unexpected obscene popups, rains of eels, or yellow hopping blobs on your desk (don't ask).

Today I really just cannot be bothere

Looks like the Enetation server is up the spout once again.

GRRRRRR.

Awoken at 2:45 this morning by the baby suddenly giving off a godawful noise at eardrum-perforating volume, as of a cat trying to defecate through a sewn-up bum. Leapt out of bed with the agility and grace of a soggy loaf of bread to check if she was too hot / too cold / covered in poo / being set upon by enormous bees, at which she gave a delicate and petulant sigh, stretched sleepily and started snoring. I can only assume she was dreaming of something exciting, such as the prospect of getting daddy to spring out of bed again at 4:00.

Nail-bitingly important decision to be made this week: whether to move the cot into her nursery, or leave her in our bedroom for the time being. She's just about got the hang of sleeping through the night (okay, 8pm to 5am, and subject of course to the odd random screech, but close enough) so now I would like my bedroom back. Is this selfish? Maybe. I'm rationalising away the nagging sense of guilt by telling myself that the sooner we do it, the sooner she'll get used to it, and this is probably true. Plus, I spent at least three weeks throwing paint at the nursery walls in order for it to look like a tropical beach, with sand and palm trees and seashells and small wiggly octopi and so on, and I feel that my artistic efforts, if not talents, have been somewhat underappreciated. It looks less like the Caribbean than Blackpool, but it was fun. It still looks like a place I'd want to visit, stretch out a towel on and drink a piña colada to the health of.