Recently my dear wife purchased a new rug to grace our living space. It looks splendid. However, since its arrival about one month ago I am distressed to note the PHENOMENAL increase in fluff in the house! Its unbelievable. I like to sit on the rug and eat cheese whilst dressed in my usual arty-farty uniform of black trousers and black everything else - after 3 slices of cheddar and an episode of Dad’s Army I stand up looking like a snow leopard.

We vacuum clean it every day but to no avail! Its like the magician pulling colour hankies out of a hat- the fluff just keeps coming and coming and coming. Its everywhere. Our cat could be completely bald and we’d never notice because it would still be fully fured in the fluff it picked up off the blessed rug.

Last night during a KK meeting I used a £1 coin I found in my pocket to scrape fluff from small area about 30cm square using a gentle stroking motion over a period of about 30mins. The result can be seen in the photo below - a whole pasta bowl full.

The entire mat is 3m x 2m so I calculate that the total amount of fluff to be easily extracted from the whole rug would be 6666x larger than the mount in the photo- in other words, enough to fill an entire double-decker bus!!! (or something) I mean- whats the point of that? You buy a rug and it produces more than its own area cubed in fluff choking up the vacuum cleaner and making your house look like tumbleweed city!? I give up.

We have a 10ft high cast iron tube outside our house. Its a vent for the sewers that should be 30ft tall but was involved in a car accident.  In the summer it stinks. There’s another one at the other end of the street that is in its full glory and the smell eninates up into the sky…

I have rung numerous people numerous times to try and get the thing fixed and so have the neighbours. About 3 weeks ago there was great celebration as a neighbour managed to get a definite date for its removal. The date came and went and, of course, nothing happened.

Until today, when I noticed that the working pipe at the other end of the street has been removed - and our broken smelly one is still in place.

The British workman, eh? I am sure the Surrey Herald, our local paper, would get a triple page spread with a dozen pictures out of this story on a slow news day!

I’ve been working all hours over Christmas on a great project for Samsung. We photographed and filmed the mobile department’s conference in Brighton before Christmas and have been cutting and editting it inot a movie I am pretty proud of.

But the STRESS!!! Had to install and learn new software, Pinnacle Editon, as our existing kit did not do what I wanted. Its great, but the most complicted bit of software I have ever played with. Then we needed to make more disk space for the video files, some of which had to digitized again for the new software.

But in order to make the vast gigabites of space required we needed to shunt some data onto a backup drive. Although brand new this was not working so I organised a replacement from Maxtor expected it to arrive the next day. 3 days later and no disk so I call Maxtor again to be told it is on is way - but coming from Hungary. Suddenly its Christmas and another week passes. The new disk arrived today and seems to be working (at the moment). it will take about 4 hours to write the data.( *Update- not working- exact same problem as previous one. )

Meanwhile I need a lovely new video monitor so I can be certain of colour balance and preview the film on a TV rather than a computer monitor. After many calls to find a place that is a. open and b. has the stock I hack off to Watford yesterday to purchase what is effectively a 14″ tele for £800. (I think Sony saw me coming)

Connect it all up and it looks fab- for 10 seconds before the graphics card screws up and I realise that there is not enough processing power in my 3gig ram twin Xeon mega machine to render the rather compicated output that has up to 8 channel of video and sound all running at the same time.

So now a need a video accelarator capture card thingy as well to make the TV work. So, of we go to the telephone and after 300 calls to try and find a shop that is open. No joy, so I have another fiddle with my graphics card and low and dehold after 40 mins the whole system is totally screwed and am unable to see anything on the 3 minitors except a small blue square.

Screaming softly its time to turn off and go and do something else instead. Sadly I cannot contain myself and after copious use of ctl-alt-del and windows safe mode, all is nearly back to normal.

So, time to write the DVD of the movie, at which point we discover that the vid software won’t see the DVD burner and will only create a disk image file, which is humungous and we don’t have enough space on our hard drives because the backup system is not ready yet…. etc etc. Further, any attempt to output the file as an .avi (movie file) results 4gigs of garbled rubbish

And so it goes on. I am now white haired with the appearance of a man 4 times my age.

But I do love it really, as you can see from this picture….