Kitsch 'n' sink

Hello again. It's been a while, hasn't it? I can tell by the length of your hair.

I am almost entirely out the other side of a very busy period, and 20 pages of script from my HOLIDAY. Having not been real for months and months, I'm now getting rather excited. I've not been south of the equator before (or, I think, any further down the planet than Egypt), so 10 nights in Australia and three in Johannesburg is really An Adventure. Connections depending, I shall keep you up to date with my movements.

I am bashing out these words on my funky new MSI PR210 notebook, which I bought specially for the trip. It's a sleek and disturbingly unheavy lovely, though I find I keep missing occasional keys. The compromise was between something small and light for trekking about, but with a keyboard that still fitted my fingers.

After much fangling about, I've also got the wireless wossnames to work. (The technique seems to be to restart your computer continually for two hours until all the wossnames have loaded.) And I'd thought the laptop would latch on to the wireless thing itself, but it needs drivers and a ZyXEL router thing that looks like a USB memory stick.

This means I'm now sat in our rooftop kitchen, the unexpected sunshine rather nice on my back. As well as what remains of the as-yet-unannounced script, I've also had a chance to look over the novel that I'm intending to write while I'm away. Or at least, to break the back of.

It's a thriller that's not a tie-in to anything else, and I gamble that if I mention it here, people will ask me about it. And that pressure will mean that rather than just thinking through the clever plot mechanations, I might actually get the thing done.

Along with the wireless wossname, I've also signed us up to Virgin Media, which has all been going swimmingly. The Dr and I took great delight in watching Ashes to Ashes last night via the Telly On Demand gizmo. Laughed like fool - and was terrified by the clown! What with Torchwood and that Dot episode of EastEnders last fortnight, didn't telly get all good?

We then continued the retro 80s vibe by watching the first episode of Survival. "Weird," concluded the Dr. Though she thought the scraggy black cat (that some friends of mine till insist is called Shomi) was so like our own that I must have chosen him on purpose. Honestly, no. But we do seem to have the only cat ever who really likes having his fur brushed in the wrong direction.

If Shomi is Shaggy, asked m'colleague Scott Andrews, "Does that make Sophie Aldred Velma or Daphne?"

I think Sylvester McCoy would be Velma.