Harold Wilson

The net is truly taking over my life. I can only wait for the day when we are all full of nanobots and wires, forever plugged into the VR world, interfacing in real-time with the world's finest minds, flying over pixel-perfect models of the world's natural wonders, but mostly, and without doubt the mainstay of the future cyberconomy, having hot cyber-sex across three continents. The internet was, after all, first designed and built by a heady mix of soldiers and computer students and no girls.

Went to the doctors today, for the first time in ten years. Well, I'm a taxpayer. Also, I have a verruca. Lovely, just what you all want to read. Anyway, my doctor gave me a prescription for some stuff, and off I went to the chemists. Six pounds fifty! I thought the NHS was supposed to be free! Bastard successive governments from 1951 to 2006... No, but still. It was a shock, and I'm not used to dealing with the health service. I suppose I am in rude health. Hale and hearty. But I could do with losing a stone. As you can see from my avatar (a word no-one used at all until about five years ago except e-nerds and the likes of Tony Parsons) I have a rugby player's frame, but also the sporting instincts of a sea anemone. I have blood pressure of 115 over 76, whatever that might mean, but for how long?

Now, at the moment, the TV has an advert for Activia yoghurts, where women of a certain age (fifty-odd, then) all talk about how bloated they might be feeling, filmed on digital camcorders in order to give it a groovy, Big Brothery, fly-on-the-wall documentary look. They're fooling no-one there. But that's not the thing, the thing is that these women then wax live-bacterial about how eating a couple of pots of these hideously expensive and vile tasting milk products a day have left them unbloated, free from gaseous embarrasment and generally feeling like a million dollars. Might it have something to do with eating yoghurt instead of cakes? Also, I read that the only reason the Atkins diet worked was that it made you so sick of eating nothing but chicken that you just stopped eating altogether. The bad breath and pounding headaches were just bonus extras, to make you feel like you were really suffering.

So we are a nation obsessed with health and looking just... so. Men, it has been reported by the Department of Stating The Painfully Obvious, have just the same problems with body image and media pressure as women. Apparently, where women all want to look like Jessica Alba, all men want to look like David Beckham. The beer belly is no longer to be worn as a badge of masculine pride. Really? Well, slap my thigh. I was just working on how to make mine truly huge, like a mating display.

I am probably a bit unfit, a bit overweight and a bit too stressed. This is because I reside in Britain and am alive. I have a reasonably well-paid job, a credit card I can pay for and some good friends. In world terms I am truly blessed, so blessed that I hardly notice it. It can't really be that bad, then. For all the worrying done in newspapers about changing societal roles and mores, we are all basically as well off as we can be. I will eat more fruit and ride my bike more. I will try not to put myself through the psychological wringer quite so much (after my lengthy pontificating about talking to girls a little while ago, I got a series of replies from women saying basically "Don't worry, we're as fucked up as you are". This was truly appreciated). My blood pressure will not be my first concern.

So now we've established a low-stress method, I'll also not have to worry too much about making the beginning of my blogs be relevant to the end. I have re-read this one a couple of times now, and I am not sure it makes too much sense. And I can't think now what Harold Wilson has to do with any of it. Oh well. Never mind. I'll worry about keeping my nanobots happy, instead. Maybe something nice from Thornton's?

Good night, and good luck
Dougal