This week I'll be mostly pressing pause

I'm ... pressing ... play.

"Come in, sit down and shut up" was what my Grandad used to say. We'd go round on a Saturday evening and Kojak would be on the telly, or Hawaii Five-O, or whatever. This was before the days of video recorders; VHS and Betamax were just a twinkle in the eye of some electronics engineers. So when it was on, it was on. If you were watching the telly, you would come in, sit down and shut up.

A decade later we had video. Of course you still had all that mucking about with setting the timer and making sure you wound the tape back to the right place, and remembering to switch the thing off - because it would only record if it was off - doh! And then when it was recording you couldn't watch anything else. So videos were really for taping things that you were going to miss while you were out; You could go down to Hammersmith Palais on a Saturday night, nip over to Leicester Square for the midnight showing of RoboCop, come back on the N279 from Trafalgar Square, get home at 3am, watch a bit of Night Network, and still be able to rewind the tape and catch up with Ben Elton and Harry Enfield on Saturday Live before going to bed.

This week I'll be mostly drinking Italian coffee

That's a bit of a small cup.
Pass the half-pint mug please.

Coffee, I've always thought, is bad for you.

I guess it started when I was a kid, when the kind of coffee my mum made - comprising a saucepan of boiling milk poured into a mug over Nescafe granules - would leave me feeling a bit ill. It was quite a few years later before it really properly dawned on me that I was lactose intolerant. Doh!

And then there was that time in 91 when we'd just moved office and I was so close to the drinks vending machine that I didn't even have to leave my seat for a brew. I was getting through more plastic cups of machine coffee than you could shake a stick at. It was only a few weeks later that the doctor sent me to Bart's hospital for a bunch of tests that resulted in some periods of unconsciousness, large quantities of blood being taken, a handful of x-rays, and an inconclusive diagnosis that had something to do with my 'lifestyle'.

This week I'll be mostly eradicating ants

Sing along (to the tune of the
Pink Panther) 'Dead ant, dead ant,
dead ant dead ant dead ant
dead ant dead annnt'

Maybe Bill Bailey has a point when he suggests "the creatures of this earth will rise up and take what is rightfully theirs", and then goes on to sing "Human slaves, In an insect nation!" (If you don't have the faintest idea what I'm talking about, see here.)

I've been a bit paranoid about insects invading the house ever since The Terrible Incident of The Donut In the Bin In the Front Room That the Ants Discovered. Although the fear probably stems back to childhood memories of staying in a holiday home (in the Isle of Wight, I think) where me and Steve spent what seemed like a whole week, pouring boiling water down ants nests outside the back door. Personally, I wonder if it actually is all a result of those Killer Ants and Killer Bees movies in the 70s. That's got to have some kind of psychological effect. That, and the Doctor Who Planet of the Spiders episodes from 1974.