THE TROUBLES OF HERMIT THE TECHNOPHOBE

Right. Now I can't access my emails.

Well, I can: I just can't open them. I can see them, unopened in my inbox, shiny and new. When I click them, nothing happens.

Nothing.

Is this a conspiracy? My phone remains blank and unusable, facebook's out of the question and my inbox is behaving like a moody teenager, arms folded, unresponsive. Perhaps I'm generating some sort of field that interferes with electronic equipment. Or perhaps someone's trying to tell me something.

I can still tweet. I can still write this blog. Digitally, that's about it. Other than that I'm left with semaphore, the local payphone and next door's homing pigeon.

THE RETURN OF HERMIT THE TECHNOPHOBE

"You lookin' at me?"

Yeah, so my phone has got me back for disabling push notifications. It's turned itself off... and now it won't charge up at all.

"Hey Stubbsy," it might as well say in a classic 1920s New-York-gangster accent, "You wanna turn off push notes? I'm gonna turn off push notes. You wanna not be distoybed? I'm a gonna not-distoyb you till yous take me for an upgrade, you goodfornothin', lousy, two-bit skinflint."

Well OK then, iPhone...

It might do me some good to be without a phone for a while. Jettisoning facebook was a suprisingly good move, disabling push notifications seemed to help boost productivity at work and removing myself from most 'information loops' available to the naturally nosy, has restored a beautiful sense of innocence to my world.

On the other hand, it will be maddening to think of missed calls and text messages stacking up. You know, what with me being so popular and everything.

If you need me, I'll be in my cave.

TIMEZONES AND TELESCOPES

I was thinking about how awesome the world is.

At work, we have a team of laid-back software engineers working in Adelaide (for various historical reasons). They have to stay late at work so that they can conference-call their UK counterparts every day at 8am (GMT). Our guys get in early, the Aussies stay late.

Amazing. We can send a signal all the way round the world to allow a conversation to happen - a video link shows us Adelaide in real-time, glimmering in the glow of an Australian autumn evening. Meanwhile here, the sun shimmers through the morning fog, the blossomed trees shiver in the cool air and the day is just beginning.

I know this is because the world is round and it can't be daytime on both sides at once. It's obvious really, but if you stop and think about it, it's actually kind of cool to see it in action. Right now at 23:49, Emmie (my friend in Toronto) is probably enjoying a Friday afternoon snack or is busy training at the gym. Meanwhile, over in Brisbane, my other far-flung friends, The Saunders, are just waking up and wondering what Saturday might hold. What's more, at every point in Earth's history, somewhere it is sunset, and somewhere else it's sunrise.

My boss's boss sees it as a pain: especially when the Australians disappeared to the pub for a Friday night bevvy instead of chatting to the bleary-eyed Englishmen at the other end of the conference call. While he calmly reiterated to us that it wasn't 'the way things are done' I sat thinking about how cool it is that we live on a spherical planet, suspended in space by gravity and... um... magic.

I've been thinking for a while that I ought to get a telescope. Apparently, even with a simple one you can make out the features of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn and great detail on the surface of the Moon. Alright, you have to fight cloudy nights and terrible light pollution, but it would be worth it maybe, for those rare glimpses of the stars.

EXOTIC TRAVELLERS WITH PAINT BRUSHES

Self-portrait of
Elizabeth Vigee LeBrun

I had a day off today. HR wanted me to use up a 2013-carry-over day before the end of March, so I stuck one on at the end of a busy weekend.

I'm not one for sitting at home, frittering away days-off with Jeremy Kyle and Bargain Hunt, so I decided to get up and go to London. I think I mentioned before that I like doing this around my birthday - visiting the capital, floating anonymously through the grand halls of a museum, learning about the Aztecs, the first hot-air balloon flight or the eating habits of anklyosaurs and dodos.

At the time of my birthday however, swimming to London was just about the best way to get there. Floods had submerged the tracks beyond Maidenhead. Reading Station was filling with sharp-elbowed commuters and short-tempered railwaymen. I gave it a miss, postponing any londinium-adventuring in the Big Smoke, until today.

Smart move. This morning the sun was pleasantly beaming through the glass as the train sped by the fields and factories of east Berkshire. I flipped open my Kindle for a while and very happily switched my phone off.

Today it was the turn of the National Gallery. The Gallery is situated just behind Trafalgar Square. If you stand on its stone steps, you can trace a line right through Nelson's Column, all the way down to Big Ben and the Palace of Westminster, which looms in the background. I stood there for a little while, admiring the view and the antics of some street artists entertaining a crowd below, then I went inside.

There's something about fine art that resonates in a uniquely personal way when you see it. I stood inches from paintings by Cezanne, Constable, Monet, Van Gogh, Renoir, Pissaro, Canaletto, Seurat, Gainsborough, Stubbs, Holbein and many others. I really felt it. It was as though I was wandering through the richest, most sumptuous of grand halls, where old masters called out to me, silently pleading with me to understand, to get what they got, to see what they could see and to feel how they felt as they stood in front of canvas with palette and brushes.

Canaletto for example, has to be seen to be believed. His exquisitely detailed paintings of Venice capture the tiniest, most intricate parasol in a crowd, a gondolier's pole, the swirling energy and life of a great city and the vibrant colours of sixteenth century Italy in full-swing. You can almost hear the voices, the music, the fanfare, the water lapping around the Doge's palace.

Meanwhile, Turner fills a canvas with loose brush strokes, almost smudging and mixing colours on the canvas and an atmosphere emerges that makes you feel it, like you've never felt anything before. It's a mist over the sea, it's a rainy day over the Thames with a steam-train powering through the torrent, it's an old warship being tugged home for the last time against a sunset ocean. Masterful.

Monet, the wizard of Impressionism, swipes his paint-laden brush so obviously, so quickly and so well, that in no time at all, you're joining him on the banks of the Thames, a snowbound Argenteuil, or his Giverny garden where he's showing off that Japanese bridge again. There was even one Monet, a beach-scene, where you could actually see grains of sand trapped in the paint, there since the very day he took his easel to the seaside in 1871.

There were portraits that were so real, so incredibly full of life that it would have been no surprise to hear them speak. One even bore an uncanny resemblance to somebody I know!

I felt eyes searching me for something, for an answer to the human condition perhaps: the wife of a slave-owner sitting with a melancholy expression, boring straight into my soul, a group of partying French aristocrats welcoming me into their wooded enclave, a girl caught in repose with just a silk cloth to cover her modesty who looked surprised (but not afraid) to see me interrupting her bath-time...

I could go on. It's better though, if you go and see what I mean. I got a feel for the size and the scale, the colours and the tone, the light and the shade as I wandered around these great rooms of art. If I'm honest, I felt a little drunk by the richness of it all. You know that feeling when your shoulders start to relax? It was as though I'd imbibed the finest of wines, feasted upon the most luxurious foods and heard tales of old from exotic travellers with paintbrushes. It was quite wonderful.

I should take a day off more often.

NOT TO WORRY

I'm thinking of turning off everything that buzzes at me.

It's funny how the thing you think you control sometimes ends up controlling you. Every time my phone buzzes I automatically reach for it, thinking I've got a text, an email, a tweet. Even if I'm in the middle of something, it still niggles away at the back of my mind until I check it.

The original meaning of the word 'worry' carries this idea. Worry was always a transitive verb, where an agitator (a sheepdog, say) worries at a something  (some sheep).

Because we're quite self-centered little sheepies, over the years of being barked at and hounded by our worries, we've shifted the focus of the verb 'to worry' from the subject (the sheepdog) to the object (us).

That's how I feel whenever my phone buzzes or my email pings or I get a brown envelope through the post: worried.

I should clarify a few things before you imagine I'm about to start a new life as Hermit the Technophobe. I don't mind receiving tweets, mail, chat messages, snapchats or smoke-signals. Don't stop talking to me altogether because you think I'm busy railing against the modern world from my cave in the rocks. No. I just think I'd like to receive messages in my own time, rather than be continually distracted by buzzing, pinging, bleeping, attention-seeking noises that turn out to be not worth being worried by. It's so distracting - I could do with being a bit more focused.

So, push notifications will be turned off while I return to the stone age and get on with some work. Don't panic if I don't get back to you straightaway. I won't be worried about it.

OVERSLEPT

My eyes sprang open. Too light! Awake! Clock? No! Time! In the microsecond between sleep and reality, my mind had been dragged rudely through the wormhole, sucked out of sleep and dumped squarely into Tuesday morning. I was wide awake... and late.

Moments before, on the other side, I'd been at a concert. My friend Christina (whom I haven't seen in a long time) had climbed onto the stage and was singing a capella to a spellbound audience. She was magnificent, rolling through the poignant lyrics with pitch-perfect emotion and style.

Emotion and style of course, are two words you definitely can't use to describe a person getting showered and dressed in under three minutes. My hair was sticking out like springs and I'd put my watch on upside down. With jumper ruckled over yesterday's jeans, I shot out into the cool morning air, slipping into my coat as I sprinted down the road.

The thing about a day that starts abruptly is that it takes the rest of it to recover. Everything is lagging behind. I've tried to stop my head spinning and my heart pumping. I just spent about two minutes rubbing my eyes: glasses perched up on my forehead, fists boring into my eye-sockets, trying to rub out the sleepiness. Everything's gone bright and swirly.

Then there's the 'professional' appearance. I've calmed my hair down a bit but it still feels dry and springy. My skin feels soap-cracked and my eyes are hot and irritated. I feel like a gruesome cartoon of myself, a kind of crazed, dishevelled maniac - an image which was wearily confirmed by the wiry reflection in the gents'... although to be fair, he did have his jumper on backwards.

THE CULTURE OF SELF-INDULGENCE

"Oh go on, you deserve it."

"You know what," says Gok, heading for the fridge and dimming the lights, "We just don't treat ourselves enough."

The hairs on the back of my neck stand up. What's he talking about? We treat ourselves all the time! In every town, on every high street, in every coffee-corner up and down the land. There are sugary cakes, boxes of doughnuts and toxic sweets making their way round most offices, every week! A lot of us have taken to the gym out of a terrible fear of the twin terrors of heart-disease and obesity the telly's always on about.... when it's not trying to sell us stuff.

"You're running around all day... you deserve... a little more 'me' time, a bit of indulgence... now and then," he says. He winks to the camera and pats the back of the plush-looking sofa. He has a sort of lolling style, Gok Wan. His words roll upwards towards the middle of the sentence... he pauses... and then he tumbles them down towards the full stop with a cheeky wink and a perfect smile.

He's flogging yoghurt. Yoghurt. Oh yes, that reminds me: as I was walking round my local Sainsbury's the other day, I noticed that they're now spelling yoghurt without an H. I shook my head despairingly and moved on to the cheeses.

Yoghurt.

Have a little me time, have a little yoghurt. That'll do it. You know what, I appreciate that busy people might need a moment to themselves: young parents, driven professionals, people with difficult situations, technical authors... television fashion presenters. What I object to, Gok, is the culture of self-indulgence that you and your yoghurty masters appear to be pushing on us.

-

Why are they spelling it without an H? I might write to Sainsbury's.

THE MONSTER IN THE GARDEN

I was frozen with horror. It felt like time had slowed down to a dreadful stop.

The spring sunshine still flooded the little pub garden and the air was warm, just as it had been a minute before. Glasses and cutlery clinked and sparkled in the hubbub and friends and colleageus chatted and laughed in a dozen conversations on a handful of wooden tables. Up until that particular moment, it had all been quite pleasant.

I looked down the long wooden bench, scanning the faces of my colleagues. I was wondering whether I had imagined what I had heard, right there in the garden of The Crown, and whether I was alone in feeling so paralysed and appalled... or whether this was just one of those terrible dreams that people have and wake up from in sweat and relief.

We'd gone to The Crown, rather than The Bull today because someone had seen the blue sky through the slatted blinds of the office and had realised that such a glorious Friday lunchtime requires an establishment with an outdoors. Taking a punt on how warm it would actually be, they'd suggested it and we'd all gone along, either to enjoy it, or even better, prove him wrong.

Conversation at these lunchtimes can get quite fruity. Beer loosens tongues and sometimes the language and the jokes drop clumsily into filth with a muddy splash of shock and laughter. I don't like it, but I've come to reason it out as cultural banter or latent schoolboy humour. There's always a sense of affection behind it, in a uniquely British way. You know you're alright when the group start insulting you. If your nickname has four letters, you're in.

There is a line though, to this badinage, and today, unfortunately, it was crossed. It was stampeded over. I wasn't expecting it, I still can't quite believe it happened, and the more I think about it, the more horrified I become. You see, as I sat there enjoying the feel-goods of a Friday lunchtime, one of my colleagues told a racist joke.

It wasn't borderline, on the fence or diluted, this joke; neither was there a question of how you could perceive it! It felt like it had parachuted into the conversation direct from the 1970s and it was unquestionably racist. The joke poked fun at one ethnic group for no apparent humorous reason and relied on the dangerous premise that members of another should be automatically persecuted based on the colour of their skin. It was anything but funny.

After a while, when I had processed what had happened, I was furious. I was furious that my friends thought this acceptable in 2014 and could sit there grinning; I was furious that my colleague had not only judged it appropriate, but had committed the joke to memory and clearly considered it to be hilarious. 

Most of all, I was furious with myself for not doing anything. I wish I'd had the presence of mind to say something, anything to protest, to get up and walk away, to reason, to make a stand, to be a voice for good! I am so annoyed that I didn't! It was a moment and I had failed. 'Evil prevails,' went the quote, rolling around in my head, 'when good men sit back and do nothing.' Evil prevails...

Sometimes this world really sucks. On a pleasant afternoon, with articulate, clever and well-educated men from the 21st Century, an ancient and dangerous beast raises its ugly head over bowls of chips and pints of coke. It growls and it snaps, barking obscenities with old-fashioned hatred and death in its terrible eyes. And what do we do? We laugh and we do nothing, enjoying the sunshine and the beer. But the monster in the garden has seen it all before, this sunshine and beer: in the cotton fields of Alabama, on the sweltering railroads of the Confederate South, in the streets and cities, the ghettos and the townships of South Africa, the beast knows the warm white sunshine and the sweet smell of beer all too well. 

Had all this happened in work-time, I'd have a clear responsibility, but for now, all I can do is vote with my feet. This is why I won't be joining them at the pub next week, or any other week for the foreseeable future.

SOGNI DI SORRENTO

Somewhere at the back of my mind is a little hotel balcony in Sorrento. The sky is a warm September blue and the sounds of car horns and church bells float up from the town and hang in the air. Beyond the tumbling roofs and treelined avenues, the Bay of Naples stretches vast and smooth out into the hazy distance, where Vesuvius looms and fluffy clouds tag along the smoky horizon.

I pull my cap down so that it meets the top of my sunglasses and I breathe. For the first time in a long time, I just breathe. Later there'll be lemons, wine, pasta, the sound of a piano in the lobby; Germans will be happily chatting away in linen shirts and slacks, the ladies in comfortable sun-dresses, while Italian waiters glide effortlessly between them. French bathers, silken-skinned and tanned, will slip almost silently into the smooth waters, swirling the currents, piercing the stillness with elegant ease.

Vorrei una bottiglia di vino rosso, I practice saying confidently, per prendere accanto la piscina per favore signore.

For now though, I'm left to feel the lightness of the Neapolitan breeze from the warmth of the Hotel Gran Paradiso and the sun-soaked balcony of stanza Due Zero Uno. I close my eyes and smile. Everything about this place, a thousand miles from the real world, seems utterly perfect.

I open my eyes, one at a time.

My computer is flashing some unreadable error message at me and my to-do list is flapping around in the jet of cold air from the air-conditioning vent. I reach out for a swig of cold tea.

"Daydreaming again, Matt?" says a colleague, who'd caught me with my eyes shut. I smile and slop the mug down on a coffee-ringed coaster.

"Yeah, something like that," I say.

SCHOOL REUNION

Some friends of mine are trying to organise a school reunion. I skimmed through the email.

Yada, yada, yada, great to meet up, find out what everyone's been up to, bla, bla, bla, bla,  partners welcome (of course), invite teachers, twenty years since GCSEs, et cetera, et cetera...

WOAH! Hold the phone! Twenty actual years?! Two Zero... Two. Whole. Decades? That can't be right... can it?

Man alive.

There were a lot of replies. Fab idea! yay! count me in! Defo! Great idea! Some, intriguingly, from people I've never heard of, but all wanting to get together to find out how life has treated the other eleven-year-olds who started at Meadway School in the sunny September of 1989.

I'll be honest: I'm not quite so enthusiastic about the idea. I predict it will be an awkward evening of tricky memories, interspersed with a few poignant reminders of how twenty years' worth of time can change people you once knew as children.

I imagine old jealousies and embarrassing anecdotes tumbling from a locker-room you've tried to forget, while terrible characters who tormented you in the playground are suddenly unfeasibly grown-up and polite about it, or worse, horribly dismissive. Friends you wished you'd stayed in touch with because you really adored them, might not remember you at all, and most frighteningly of all, everyone with great jobs, fancy homes and beautiful children will be quietly desperate to show off about their greatest achievements. Shudder.

Yep. And I can imagine me, top of the class in every subject: the front-row, chess-clubbing, Scrabble-outside-the-staffroom-playing, goody-two-shoes, hardworking, all-round boffin-of-boffins... trying to tell people that I live with my parents, never found someone to get married to and struggled through life like an unambitious, deluded, career-hopping dreamer.

Yeah, I don't think it'll be for me, this one.

A CONVERSATION WITH THE STUDENTS

"Do you guys get to learn how to develop iOS apps?" I asked.
The students shuffled about.
"No, not really," said one, "There's all sorts of costs: licenses, software, subscriptions..."
"That's Apple for you!" chipped in the other.
"What about you, Matt? Is that something you're thinking of getting into?"
"Oh me?" I laughed, "Not likely. I did a programming course as part of my degree about fifteen years ago and I came out of it with a measly 36%."
"What degree did you do?"
"Physics."
"Physics?"
"Um, yes. Physics. Well don't look so surprised; it's not that unbelievable!"
"How did you end up doing documentation? What did you do after your degree?"
"Oh, well... I worked with lasers."

The students' eyes widened as they pictured me building my own lightsabre and firing beams of light at the moon.

"It's um, it's not as exciting as it sounds," I reassured them. I explained how I used to angle mirrors around the beam-chamber, how I used to crunch numbers between long and difficult beam-shots, and how that environment made me constantly rake over my inferiority-complex in a room full of competitively nasty scientists.

"In the end," I said, "I realised I enjoyed writing about the experiments a whole lot more than actually doing them."
"Still sounds cool though," said one.

No-one says that about technical documentation, do they?

THE PUZZLING EXHIBITS IN THE MUSEUM OF GEOMETRY

Someone gave me a late birthday present today. It was a puzzle; not a jigsaw puzzle and not a differential equation, but somewhere in the enormous mathematical gap between the two. It's one of those wooden block puzzles, the type you have to dismantle and put back together.

I've got loads of these - all given to me; all presents; all gathering dust on a shelf like objets d'art in a Geometry Museum.

I held the newest one aloft in its plastic box. It's like a Mayan Pyramid. I'm not ungrateful, just curious. In fact I'm really curious...

I have never told anyone that I like these polygonal puzzlers, not once in my life. Somehow though, something about me makes it evident to people around me, that I enjoy an evening fiddling with brain-twisting wooden blocks or inseparable aluminium rings. Oh for such a vacuous evening!

Here's my thought: dinner parties. Perfect, right? Instead of looking round blankly, hoping your guests (or better still, you) have a bolt of inspiration for a conversation starter, simply place puzzles in centre of table. Before long, friends will be fiddling between courses, whiling away the social awkwardness with every click and turn of these elegant gimcracks.

So, I've been keeping them (rather than confounding the local charity shop) since I was about fifteen, hoping that one day I'll have my own house and my own dining room table... oh and friends who want to hang out with a nerd who brings his toys to a grown-up dinner party. I'll admit, all of that's taken longer than I expected.

I should reiterate - I'm really not ungrateful. I love a puzzle and I adore anything that gets people thinking. I believe in thinking - one of the most powerful things you can do, and some people don't do enough of it. I just think maybe I've got enough of these things now.

Incidentally, my favourite piece in the 'museum' is my favourite because of who gave it to me, rather than anything to do with its complexity or my ability to solve it. Love wins, you see.

That's not a tricky puzzle to work out.

IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE A PIECE OF CAKE

This is not it.

I made a cake. It doesn't look anything like the picture next to the recipe. It looks like it's about to fall apart. It's astonishing that you can combine eggs, crumbly flour, loose sugar and the rest of the bits together to make a cake. A lovely soft spongey cushion of sweet-baked succulence emerges from the oven, filling the kitchen with a deliciously warm aroma. I always think it should be accompanied by the sound of harps and distant choirs.

I say always... I could count the number of times I've made a cake on the fingers of one sticky hand. I'm not the world's most adept baker, and I'm pretty sure the angels won't be inspired to accompany my saggy baking with their ethereal harmonies any time soon.

"It's just like science though right?" I said to my friend the other day. She nodded with a wry smile, "I mean, you just follow the recipe... exactly... and it'll turn out OK... won't it?"

"Good luck, Matt," she said, a bit enigmatically.

I'll tell you what it looks like: it looks like a whole load of crumbs have got together to try their best to recreate a cake, like a sort of microscopic acrobatic display team. Someone's told them what a cake ought to look like and they've really gone for it; their hearts are in it and they're just about holding it together, stuck by gravity and sugar.

I'll let you know what it tastes like. If it doesn't collapse, that is.

PANCAKES AND GIVING UP STUFF

Pancake Day. Isn't it supposed to be about giving up stuff? It seems to be a celebration of pancakes. Don't get me wrong, pancakes are great - who doesn't love a pancake? - it's just that I thought you were supposed to use up your eggs, flour, sugar and other luxuries so that you didn't have to be tempted by them during Lent, the liturgical season of fasting, which starts tomorrow.

"Yep, Hash Wednesday tomorrow," said my Dad, with a little sparkle. His favourite jokes are the ones he thinks up himself. "Better have corned-beef hash tomorrow then!" he said... hilariously.

I groaned while he laughed out loud. I didn't tell him that the word 'hash' has more than one definition these days. It was embarrassing enough for us when we had to point out that he'd accidentally grown a cannabis plant from budgie-feed.

The idea of this Fat Tuesday, was that you did some proper 'shriving'. Shriving is doing a sort of internal audit and then changing those things that are throwing the books out of balance - things like eating too much of the delicious foods that make you look like a sweaty round pig. Once you had 'shrove', 'shriven'... 'shrived', or whatever, and the larder was stripped of its decadence, you could begin the holy season with a renewed sense of piety and peace.

We had pancakes tonight. I made a mess of mine, trying to turn it over - which struck me as a good metaphor for my life, I suppose. Oh well. Maybe I'll try again tomorrow.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CAMERA

"... like the pantheon of the gods"

I went to see a film tonight: not done that in a long time. I know it's a Monday night, but I was really shocked by the emptiness of the cinema. As I pushed open the glass doors, I thought I'd wandered onto an abandoned building site. The escalator was cordoned off and some of the ticket machines were covered in plastic. The lobby was empty and a flimsy signboard pointed me up the steps you usually come down chatting with your pals about the film you've just seen.

The cinema was so exciting when we were teenagers. There were two in Reading town centre: the ABC, where the Ibis hotel now looms above Friar Street, and the second, the Odeon, which was in Cheapside, opposite what's now the back of Primark. We'd queue up all the way down the chilly street so that we could watch great classics like Clueless, Crimson Tide and Independence Day. There were no multiplexes, no enormous digital screens or seat-selection. The world where you could somehow beam films into your house and watch them without a tape, may as well have been Star Trek technology at the time.

Sad then to be in a cavernous empty cinema tonight with just six other people. In front, row upon row of empty seats were flickering in silhouette against the oversized screen.

I think there's something odd happening to this strange industry. This morning, as Hollywood took an alka-seltzer and stumbled bleary-eyed into the post-Oscars sunshine, the most retweeted selfie of all time was zipping round Twitter like a signed postcard from Mount Rushmore. The photo is packed with A listers: Meryl Streep, Jared Leto, Jennifer Lawrence, Brad and Angelina, Kevin Spacey, beaming perfect smiles like the pantheon of the gods. This world is quite a juxtaposition to an empty cinema in Reading on a rainy Monday night.

Once you get past the sweaty baseball caps and hyperinflated snackery, the screening experience itself has changed a lot, even since the last time I went to the movies. I was struck by how interactive they've tried to make it. You can play along with quizzes on your smartphone, win prizes by downloading an app and let your phone tell you where the boring bits are. There's even a thing now, my cousin was telling me, which can send you a message summarising what you've missed while you were in the toilet! And you thought 3d was a gimmick?

And that's the terrible, transparent truth I suppose - this great and noble old artform has to resort to gimmicks these days: these days, when you can watch enormous high-definition screens in the comfort of your own home, complete with reasonable popcorn and unlimited access to the work of those selfie-taking-Hollywood-A-listers on your sofa, in your beanbag, under your duvet.

Ah but they're not bothered I suppose, these happy Nephilim of our times, so long as the cheques roll in. Well, Spacey might be, he seems the type, but the rest of them are probably having a great time over on the other side of the camera. Good for you, chaps.

If ever the day comes when the latest films are available straight to download, you can guarantee that the day of the multiplex will be over, just as the days of the independent high street cinema were, long before them.

By the way, I saw The Lego Movie, which I loved, loved, loved, like everyone else seems to have. It's the nostalgia what does it. I'm a sucker for a bit of nostalgia, clearly.

THE DEAL-OR-NO-DEAL METAPHOR

This is not my friend.

A friend of mine just got back from filming Deal or No Deal. He's not allowed to say how he got on until August the 4th, so I made sure I asked him all the other questions I could think of.

If you've not seen it, the show is a hyped-up mix of luck, calculated gambling, psychology and cheesy superstition. A suspiciously enthusiastic audience cheers on a plucky contestant who sits in a furniture warehouse deciding how to open 21 cardboard boxes (each containing various amounts of money - from loose change to a small fortune) in turn. The contestant hopes that his or her own sealed box has a greater amount in it (though randomly selected) than all the others. Meanwhile, at the end of a glowing telephone, the antagonist, an invisible 'banker' attempts to buy that box from our chosen hero at various points, offering a perfectly-poised amount, based on which boxes have already been eliminated. Deal or no Deal. Narrating it all and ramping up the dramatic tension like a flowery storyteller is a bearded gnome who flips between compassion and derision as though directed by the enchanted voices in his head.

I don't make a habit of watching it. However, I was intrigued by my friend's experience. I asked him whether he spoke to the banker, what the other contenstants were like, what you get under the little shelf when it's your turn to open the boxes, how many awful shirts the gnome got through in a filming day, and whether the set was smaller in real-life than it looks on the telly.

"It's kind of... 3d..." he said.
"What, as opposed to seeing it on a screen?" I asked with a raised eyebrow.
"Yeah! Exactly!" he replied, enthusiastically.

I think the format fits well into the subconscious reality of a lot of people every tea-time. Here's how it works:

Opportunity spreads before you, vast and unknown. You choose what you want to do - you might end up trading your awful one-penny situation for thousands of pounds; you might just jump at the wrong moment and lose it all. There are supporters and detractors - people who urge you to cling on to what you've got, others who think you should let it all go and shoot for the moon. There are antagonists, willing to flirt with you, to wine and dine you and to offer you a calculated risk that minimises risk and maximises their own gain when it suits them. There are turncoat narrators who are with you all the way to the mountain top, but turn and laugh when you topple.

You can see how it appeals, this show. It's a microcosm of something unspoken that all of us kind of know about.

What occurred to me though, while I was thinking about it, is that there's something critical about that most pivotal factor of all: the contents of your own box. In the world of Deal or No Deal, this number is the most important number, defining the course of your game and dictating the outcome by its sheer unknowability. It's selected for you, like the great hand of fate plucking it at random. Right until the last minute, this number remains unknown by everyone, especially yourself, until the big-reveal turns you into a champion or a fool.

Well that's not like life at all is it? You can know your number, you can find out your value, your worth, your hand, your bargaining power. What's more you can change it if you want to. You can grow it, learn new skills, develop yourself and give yourself far more opportunity than you knew was possible. As a Christian, I reckon I know the best way to do this - go straight to the Box-Maker, but you can at least figure some of it out! You don't have to tell the world what you've got either, but you can find out for yourself and seek to become the best version of you that you can be!

That I think, is how you win Deal or No Deal, or perhaps Life or No Life, in the real world outside the 2d-telly-warehouse.

It turns out that my friend got chosen for the show in the first place, because he very sensibly told them that he wanted to invest any money he won, putting it towards a business and a deposit for a house. Most people his age would be less grown-up about it.

RATCHETING UP THE RUNNING

I went for a run today. I do this periodically, usually when the sun pops out and things feel a little brighter and warmer. I slip on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, dig out my trainers and pop on a baseball cap, ready for the jog around the village, the pumping of adrenaline, and the subsequent collapse of muscles that's inevitable when I puff back some time later.

Today I ran a magnificent 6% of a half-marathon. I was running for less than ten minutes and I was shattered, which just goes to show how out of shape I am. While a whole load of people I know will be running the actual 13.1 miles of the Reading Half Marathon tomorrow, I'll be moving stiffly around like an old man, with my spectacular lack of fitness. From my three-quarter of a mile ordeal today, I am in total awe of those people who can run for hours without giving up, and for great causes. Thirteen miles is a long way.

I got interrupted by a dog, growling at me on the pavement. We had a standoff - me trying to use soothing tones like some sort of sweaty dog-whisperer, him snarling and yelping at my bright white trainers. His owner was inside the house yelling at him to be quiet. I wondered whether running off down the road would encourage the dog to chase after me. In the end, he shuffled indoors and I ran away.

The last time I took up running, I twisted my ankle in a pothole. I hobbled home and wondered why I ever considered this a good idea. I had similar thoughts today; leaning exhausted against the fence, I coughed and spluttered as my breathing slowed and my heart pumped. This is horrible, I thought. What was I thinking?

Then I looked down at the roundness of my belly, unhidden by the stretched fabric of an old t-shirt. No pain, no gain I suppose. I jabbed an index finger into the soft fat. You're going down, fella, I said to it in between breaths. You are going down.