One of the more questionable decisions of one of my predecessors at the firm in the Midlands where I work as a system manager was to locate their server infrastructure at a data centre in London, over ninety miles away. Within a few weeks of taking that job I had managed to persuade our managing director that we should relocate our stuff to a state-of-the-art and considerably closer data centre in Northampton. I came up with a plan to move everything with minimal downtime. I’d already moved some of our services to the new place, and by July I had negotiated some downtime with our customers to move the main servers.

On the morning of Friday, July 27th, I set off from my home in Leicestershire to collect the servers from London and take them to Northampton. But it turned out to be a traumatic data centre migration, for me anyway.

I have always been drawn to cheap, second-hand cars. I’ve often spent a couple of thousand pounds on a watch, but it seems like a waste of money to spend more than a few hundred on a car. My priorities are possibly a little skewed in that respect.

My present car, an old Rover 200, had been overheating over the previous few weeks. But it had a radiator leak, and I assumed that was the cause. I was confident that if I kept it topped up, it would get me to London, then Northampton and back. I took two large containers of water with me.

I left Leicestershire early, to give myself plenty of time. It was the day of the London Olympics opening ceremony – not the best day to be driving into London. And it was just as well I did, because there had been a serious accident on the M1 motorway which caused a huge delay. I spent an uncomfortable hour or so crawling along in stop-start traffic in the July heat.

But in the end, I approached London with time to spare. I planned to enter the “congestion charge” zone shortly after 6pm, so I could drive into the centre of the city for free – but I arrived in the outskirts of the city earlier than I intended, so I pulled into a quiet residential road, to park for twenty minutes or so. I perused Twitter and read the news on my Android phone.

It was nice to be in London for the opening of the Olympic Games. I had the radio on and was listening to news and conversation about the Games on Radio Five Live. I switched on the ignition again and the rest of the journey to the data centre was pleasantly uneventful. I entered the congestion charge zone at a few minutes past six. The traffic wasn’t as bad as I’d feared it might be.

I parked outside the London data centre, signed in, then made my way to the rack containing our various servers, equipment rails, power switches, disk storage units, routers and remarkable quantities of power and network cabling – all of which had to be removed, and packed into my car. I started to shut the servers down, then to dismantle everything.

I left the London data centre at about 10:45pm. It took longer to remove some of the equipment from the rack than I’d anticipated, and unfortunately it was a long way to carry all the stuff down to the car, over about five trips – but I wasn’t particularly bothered about that. I had plenty of time. The equipment was stuffed into the boot, the back seat and the passenger seat. I switched on the car radio to listen to news and discussion about the opening ceremony that I’d missed.

But as I made my way up through Islington and toward the A1 heading north, the car started to overheat badly .. I had to stop in a side street and top up the radiator under the cold glow of a street light. I was disturbed by that of course. The engine had had hours to cool down and the air temperature was much cooler now. But I assumed I’d just let the radiator leak out too much water.

However to my profound discomfort, the same thing happened again only a few miles up the A1, on the outskirts of North London. I’d only travelled about seven miles. I had sixty-five miles to go. I pulled into a nice suburban street off the A1 in Hampstead to let it cool for 15 minutes, topped it up thoroughly and burped the cooling system. Happily, it started to run normally for a bit. I steered the car up the A1, onto the M1 motorway and out of London.

I managed to get to the first services on the M1, six miles further on, without overheating. I replenished my supply of water from the gents’ toilets, topped the radiator up again, and let the engine cool for another ten minutes. Clearly, it was going to be a long night.

I’d got another twenty miles or so further up the motorway before the temperature needle started to climb again. I took the next junction off the M1 and topped the radiator up again at a building site a few hundred feet from the motorway. Needless to say, I was more than slightly stressed at this point. But I got back on the M1 and made it to the next services – Toddington I think – and repeated the exercise. I did the same again at Newport Pagnell, another twenty minutes up the road. It was a very uneasy ride along the motorway, glancing at the temperature gauge every few seconds. I’ll never forget the sinking feeling of seeing the needle start to climb on that gauge. I was taking it slow – it seemed less prone to overheating under 50 mph. But that just made the journey more agonising. The temptation to put my foot down a bit to get to the next services was surprisingly strong, yet I knew that would only diminish the probability of making it there.

I had managed to get onto the A45, only a tantalising five miles or so away from the comfort of the new data centre and the satisfaction of a mission accomplished, when the engine died.

It wouldn’t restart. I was in a horrendous position, just off a big roundabout on a main road into Northampton. From the grass verge, I called the AA – that’s the Automobile Association, the people who send a mechanic and a tow truck to your rescue – while watching the occasional huge lorry swerve round my car. But there was no answer. I gave up getting through to them after about ten minutes – they were extremely busy, even at 2:30 in the morning – and in desperation, attempted to restart the car again.

To my surprise, it did actually start, albeit it was running like a crippled dog through superglue-enhanced treacle. I limped it forward in third gear, watching the “distance to go” figure on the SatNav slowly ticking down .. three miles .. two and a half .. please just get me there!

It juddered to a halt again, with only one mile to go. This time I decided the game was up. I’d have to admit defeat, get the AA to take me home and borrow the other half’s Volkswagen Polo to take the servers back to Northampton the next day. I called them, and got through to an operator this time. He estimated that they’d have someone with me at 04:55. It was now about 3 AM.

I left the car and walked around in the ghostly light of a nearby industrial estate. I was starting to feel cold now, and vulnerable. I could hear shouting in the distance. After perhaps twenty-five minutes of this, I attempted to fire up the engine once again, more in desperation than expectation.

But to my surprise and delight, with a lot of encouragement from my foot on its accelerator pedal, my old motor coughed into life again. I carefully eased it into gear and delicately propelled it forward, glancing nervously at the SatNav every other second. To my relief I managed to nurse it to the security gate at the data centre, where it hissed oil-scented steam from the sides of the bonnet as I announced my arrival into the intercom.

My old Rover literally went that extra mile for the company. It snatched victory from the jaws of defeat with its dying breath. I’d made it. I was elated, or as elated as anyone can be at that time of the morning.

The security guard who was the only person present helped me to lift the bigger servers out of the car. A very helpful and friendly guy, I must say. I helped myself to some coffee and a packet of Swizzlers from the free sweet bucket to get my caffeine and blood sugar levels up a bit, then set to work bolting and cabling the stuff into the new rack. I decided to take it nice and slowly and make it an all-nighter, to give the AA time to work through their backlog of distressed motorists. The Olympic Games and the accident on the M1 had given them a busy night.

I’d bolted everything in, hooked everything up and checked the servers were all working properly and on the air with their new IP addresses, firewall configs, host files and so on by 06:25 or so. The AA man arrived at about 07:20. After a brief inspection, he confirmed my suspicion; the head gasket had blown. It wasn’t an economic repair. Not on that car, anyway.

He hooked the car up to the back of the tow truck while we exchanged small talk about the Olympics. I climbed into the cab, and we set off for home. I got there about an hour later, thanked the AA operative as he unhooked the dead Rover, then went to bed after dutifully listening to a lecture from my wife on the wisdom of buying cheap cars. A couple of days later I called a local company to come and take away the Rover for scrap. I think they gave me £150 for it.

I do hope I won’t have a day as memorable as that one in 2013. Happy New Year!

It is possible, in one sense, to overstate the importance of Neil Armstrong. He was not responsible for the initiative to land people on the Moon, for which he became a figurehead. It would have happened without him, probably on the same day.

But nonetheless it was he who became, to my mind, the single most important person in human history.

It is impossible to overstate the meaning of that event, forty-three years ago. That second when he descended the ladder to plant his feet on the powdery soil of the Moon is for me the single most significant moment not only in the story of our species but in the timeline of our planet.

He was humble, clever and articulate. I can’t imagine the courage it must take to be prepared to live out of a fragile box on a world with no atmosphere, 240,000 miles from Earth. President Nixon had already had a speech prepared, to be delivered in the event that the Lunar Module’s rocket motor failed, stranding Aldrin and Armstrong on the Moon. Chillingly, it was intended to be delivered while they were still alive, but doomed.

For as long as humanity persists, his name will be remembered.

Thirty-five years ago tonight, I had arrived in Newcastle, roughly a 45 minute journey from my home town, and was about to attend my first rock concert. My two friends and I arrived about an hour before the concert as I recall, and decamped to the City Tavern, a pub along the road from the venue.

I sipped my beer slightly apprehensively with my two chums, in a dark corner. I think this may actually have been the first time I’d drunk alcohol in a pub, and I was a bit nervous about being caught, a few weeks before my 17th birthday. It wouldn’t be legal for me to drink in a pub for another year. But soon enough we wandered along to the venue, through the main doors, and into the foyer. People were milling around there, queuing for badges and programmes – I still have mine, of course – and it all seemed very exciting.

Then when we entered through the big door into the hall, I could barely believe my eyes. The stage was so close .. it was all a lot smaller than I’d expected. I’d somehow formed an impression of concert venues being huge, cavernous places. Which they usually are, now, of course. But this seemed smaller than a cinema. It was in fact a theatre venue with a capacity of about 2,100 seats.

I took my seat and read my concert programme. You’ve probably seen the online version if you’re a Rush fan. It’s the one in which Sounds magazine’s Geoff Barton writes an entertaining little story about the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx, managing to work the band themselves into the plot.

But I kept glancing up at the stage. I couldn’t believe my heroes were going to be right there .. here in the same room as me! They must already be in the building somewhere! It seemed unreal. Neil’s drums were already on the stage, with a little Starman logo on each of those two big ones that sit on the floor!

I’d managed to cultivate a quite unhealthy obsession with Rush by this time. I had nearly worn out my illegal cassette copy of the band’s live album, All The World’s A Stage. I had closed my eyes and immersed myself into that concert in Toronto, recorded for posterity exactly one year earlier, dozens of times.

The support band – Stray – were really good. I was impressed by the light show. And they were LOUD! A lot louder than my parents’ HiFi. Wow!

By the time the lights went down, I was almost sick with excitement. My heart was pounding, and the crowd was roaring.

Then suddenly, my life changed, forever. The stage burst into light, and Alex was there, leaning over a Gibson guitar, his blond locks tumbling forward, cranking out Bastille Day, louder than I’d ever imagined it. It is a moment that is burned into my mental retina for all time. The crowd was going wild around me; everyone was on their feet. Geddy was strutting along the front of the stage, grinning widely, wearing what appeared to be a bed sheet as a cape, coaxing bottom-end loudness from his Rickenbacker bass. And Neil was hitting those drums hard! And already twirling his sticks, something I hadn’t expected at all.

My jaw dropped. It was sensory overload. I probably went into shock, slightly.

The show seemed to pass so quickly. A rip-roaring By-Tor And The Snow Dog gave way to The Necromancer, a tune I confess I’d never heard but was very intrigued by. And “side one from our latest studio album” – 2112, of course – was astonishing; emotional, intense and powerful. There was a new song called Xanadu. With double-neck guitars! Wow.

It was over all too soon, but even after a rowdy and rousing second encore, What You’re Doing, the crowd hadn’t had enough. We shouted, stomped and begged very loudly for what seemed like about half an hour, to be rewarded by Alex walking back on stage, grinning from ear to ear and looking incredulous at the reception he and the band had received. The other two joined him and after a very loud, highly energetic and frankly joyous performance of Best I Can, it really was all over this time.

As we spilled out of the City Hall into the cool of a Newcastle summer evening, my ears were ringing and I felt oddly intoxicated and elated.

Four weeks later I hand over a tenner or so at Boots, and become the proud owner of Fly By Night, Caress Of Steel and 2112, the three most recent Rush albums (and there are only four, in July 1977). And if you’d told me that I’d be looking forward to getting my hands on a new Rush album in 35 years’ time, I think I’d have been quite surprised.

Here’s an odd thought that occurred to me earlier today. I can remember the events of that night 35 years ago quite clearly. 35 years before that, World War Two was just getting into its stride.

Wow.

I imagine that this is one of very many pieces published today as a personal recollection of the events of September 11th, 2001. I’d lost my job at a US investment firm at Canary Wharf in June that year, and in September I was still enjoying what amounted to an extended holiday in London. I was idly surfing the Internet with the TV on behind me in my South London flat, and at the end of the programme a news bulletin appeared. It showed a live image of the World Trade Centre from a camera a few blocks away. The second plane had hit the South Tower a minute or two earlier.

Confusion reigned at this point, of course – but it seemed clear that an act of terrorism had taken place. I was particularly shocked since I’d often worked in New York over the previous few years, and the towers were a familiar sight. I’d been to the top of the South Tower myself, on my first visit to New York in 1987. I still have some photos taken from (and of) the observation platform, and they seem quite surreal now.

I remember phoning my mum to get her to turn on the news, and I said to her that we were watching events that would live in history. I went onto a US messageboard that I frequented, to see what people were saying over there. People were stunned, speculating as to what had happened and reacting to news of the attack on the Pentagon that had just broken.

I sat watching News 24 for another half an hour, then drove to Lordship Lane where I had a brief appointment. While walking from my car I remember hearing a man in his ’60s talking to someone in the street. He was saying that the Americans had thrown their weight around for years, and now someone had done it to them. Ten years later, it remains a more cogent analysis of the events of that day than many I’ve heard.

From there I drove to Sainsbury’s at Dog Kennel Hill, and then came the moment that brought home the enormity of what had happened. I was listening to a special news programme on Radio Four, just as I parked. The presenter announced, with audible emotion in his voice, that the South Tower had collapsed. I couldn’t believe that. I had never imagined that the attack would prove to be so devastating. I drove home and sat in front of News 24 until the early hours of Sept 12th, trying to take in what had happened.

I will admit to feeling nervous later in the evening. It felt as though the world had turned a corner, along a darker and more dangerous path. I had an awful, apprehensive “what now?” feeling.

The media and the public dialogue on the Internet were full of confusion in the following days. I remember one or two ridiculous hoaxes appearing. And unfortunately at this point, an odd psychosis appeared to overwhelm America; one from which, a decade later, I don’t think it has yet recovered. I was surprised at the reaction from Americans on message boards, suddenly immersing themselves in patriotism and flag-waving, some insisting on a massive military response, as though terrorism could be defeated with the application of military force, like a nation state. Sales of guns in the US went through the roof around this time, as I recall – it seemed that Americans were anticipating shooting it out with Al Qaeda operatives in the street.

Some perspective. As dreadful as the attacks were, they did not cause the most catastrophic loss of civilian life in history. Something like three-thousand people were killed in the attacks of September 11th, 2001. Most people have never heard of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, a German ship torpedoed by the Soviets in 1945. More than nine thousand were killed, most of them refugees. And of course, the American military killed more than one hundred thousand civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In September 2004 I wrote that, three years after the attack, the terrorist leaders would be taking a measure of satisfaction from the West’s response to the atrocities of September 11th, 2001, and that the governments of the US and the UK had, sadly, played into their hands beautifully. Seven years later, I have no reason to revise that bleak assessment. The Islamist extremists got exactly what they wanted, and much more. Our governments had been provoked to destroy in subsequent years many times the number of civilian lives taken on 9/11. I doubt that bin Laden and friends could have dared hope that Bush and Blair would turn out to be such dramatically powerful recruiters to their cause.

Live Aid Day was twenty-five years ago today; half a lifetime ago for me, give or take a few days. I meant to type a few words in its memory five years ago, but didn’t get round to it, so I’ll do that now. It was surely one of the seminal moments of post-war British popular culture.

I was very keen to record as much of the BBC’s coverage of the event as possible, so I bought two four-hour VHS tapes. Some time that morning I had the idea of connecting the stereo audio inputs of the family VHS recorder to our HiFi tuner, so I could record BBC Radio One’s stereo ‘simultaneous transmission’ in place of the BBC One (mono) TV audio. I drove round to a little electronic shop in Hartlepool’s unfashionable Murray Street shopping district to buy the necessary plugs and cabling, and I had soldered them together about twenty minutes before Status Quo kicked off proceedings at Wembley Stadium at midday. This worked beautifully, as it turned out. Stereo VCRs were exceedingly rare in those days; indeed they were almost pointless, and I suppose I must be one of very few people to have original video recordings of Live Aid with stereo audio.

My girlfriend at that time, Sara, had come round to share the occasion with me, and Live Aid Day is one of the happiest memories of that relationship. For some reason I can’t recall my parents had gone out for the day until quite late, and we kept ourselves entertained during the less interesting performances by having sex on the carpet or the sofa, about five times in total. She was seventeen years old; I was a dirty old man even then. To this day I feel slightly sore whenever I hear Dylan’s Blowing In The Wind.

And speaking of old men, it’s strange to think that Quo’s Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt, even in 1985 considered middle-aged relics of a bygone musical age, were still in their mid-thirties. In the stagnant popular culture of the 21st century, music careers last much longer before they reach their sell-by date.

Interestingly it’s mostly the established artists from the ’70s who participated that are best remembered. The surviving members of the Who reformed for the day, although the transmission of their set was truncated by a power cut. Phil Collins performed on both stages, at Wembley and at Philadelphia. He took a helicopter from Wembley to Heathrow Airport and was in Philadelphia less than four hours later, something that’s not possible now. Later in the evening he played drums for a reformed incarnation of Led Zeppelin, in a performance rendered shambolic by Jimmy Page’s incoherent guitar playing. Eric Clapton’s set in the US sparked off something of a renaissance of his career.

And by any reasonable assessment, Queen were the day’s winners. Theirs was the performance that was destined to represent the spirit of the day for prosperity. Freddie Mercury projected his considerable presence into every corner of Wembley Stadium, into every corner of every living room with a TV tuned in to the show.

It was the first of a long tradition of high profile, international charity events that continues to this day, but none since has caught the popular imagination the way that Live Aid did. Politically, it had provided a new way to crystallise the public conscience into action, even if it worked partly by the power of self-congratulation. Musically and culturally though, I think it was a sort of high water mark. The colourful, flamboyant, naive charm of the ’80s seemed to ebb away slowly from that moment, as the likes of Duran Duran, Nik Kershaw, Culture Club and Spandau Ballet gradually gave way to soulless artists in double-breasted suits, singing records manufactured by Stock, Aitken and Waterman.

I’m not saying that the battle is won
But on Saturday night all those kids in the sun
Wrested technology’s sword from the hand of the war lord
Oh, oh, oh, the tide is turning

– Roger Waters, The Tide Is Turning (After Live Aid)

It’s the last day of my forties, and I thought I might mark their passing by attempting to summarise my last ten years here.

Of course, these decade labels depend on quite arbitrary boundaries, don’t they? The idea that, by virtue of the first digit of his or her age, a 32-year old somehow shares some meaningful attribute with a 39-year old that he or she doesn’t with a 29 year old is really quite bogus. Nonetheless, they help us to carve our experience up into manageable slices when trying to make sense of them, so here goes.

Ten years ago I was living and working in London, but I woke up on the morning of 9th July 2000 at my house in Derby, which I was keeping as a sort of weekend retreat. I felt ill, vulnerable and debilitated. I’d been quite uncomfortable at the idea of being forty years old for some time, and now the actual experience seemed to bear out my worst fears. Then I remembered that I’d drunk quite heavily the night before, in the company of my dear old pal Shaun Appleby, and I realised that my new-found debilitation really had nothing to do with being a day older, and everything to do with the ill effects of alcohol. I felt a bit better after that.

In July 2000 I lived in East Dulwich, South London. I was attached to a charming Hong-Kong Chinese girl called Polly, who had just moved back to Hong Kong after studying and working in London for a few years. I’d met her at the end of 1998. I was working on the top floor of One Canada Square, also known as the ‘Canary Wharf Tower’ – still the highest building in London. I think the department I worked for had moved into that building in March or April. I was growing disillusioned and dissatisfied with working in that company, an American investment firm.

But I stayed there until April 2001, when along with several hundred other employees, they asked me to leave. The firm had invested heavily in the dot-com bubble, and now that it had burst, it was hemorrhaging cash in industrial quantities. I’d already given notice that I wanted to do something else, so I was an obvious candidate for redundancy. They gave me a generous “separation package” – in other words, a large sum of money – and allowed me to stay at home doing nothing for another two months on full pay, after which I became officially unemployed.

I stayed in London, basically enjoying a long holiday there, until I decided in February 2002 that I couldn’t continue to pay a mortgage in Derby and rent in London simultaneously any longer. I very reluctantly packed the last of my belongings into my car, and vacated my flat for the last time, for what I over-optimistically hoped would be a “tactical retreat” to my house in Derby. I drove north through London up to the M1 very sadly, taking in the surroundings as a resident of London for the last time on the 14th of February.

The one consolation about returning to the East Midlands was that I’d see more of my best friend, Shaun. But he died, from complications following an operation, in July 2002. And quite honestly, I already felt as if I’d beaten him to it. I used to say that if you could still drink beer and use the Internet when you were dead, then death would indistinguishable from living in Derby.

The first year or two there were fairly awful, really; beyond depressing. For someone used to the vibrancy of living and working in the capital city, waking up each morning on an anonymous housing estate on the outskirts of what’s really a provincial town, with no particularly good reason to get out of bed is fairly soul-destroying.

But I made the best of it. I’d walk the three miles or so into Derby’s so-called city centre on some days, and get a bus back, or I’d just sit at home in my study, listening to Radio 5 Live, tinkering with my PC, and surfing the Internet.

I suppose the Internet was something of a lifeline. I’d been a keen participant in discussions on Internet mailing lists and message boards for years, but now I became far more prolific, arguing at length about politics, about the perennial, corrosive ignorance of religious faith, surely something of a defining stupidity for humankind at its present stage of naivety – and about music. The Iraq war in 2003 was an absorbing diversion, provoking huge quantities of argument on various political fora, and I saw my position on that handsomely vindicated in the following years.

I punctuated my time in Derby with occasional day visits to London, usually on the train and usually on Saturdays. These were more than merely coming up for air. I would emerge from Charing Cross station into the bright light of the Strand and the West End, just as I used to each Saturday when I lived there. And within minutes I could feel my body absorbing my identity again, a dead man coming back to life.

I must mention my forty-second birthday, eight years ago tomorrow. I’d decided to spend it in London. As I was driving down there I switched on the car radio and found a documentary about Douglas Adams on Radio 4. A short while after I’d tuned in, contributors to the programme discussed the significance of the number 42, famously representing the “meaning of life” in Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. Adams had chosen it because it was an “ordinary, smallish number”. Later that day I realised that I was wearing my IWC ‘Gadebusch’ MK XV Fliegeruhr wristwatch, number forty-two of a limited edition of fifty. And a few hours later as I drove home, the Radio 2 show I was listening to played a selection of numbers from the musical 42nd Street.

I split up with Polly some time in the middle of 2003. We’d seen each other a couple of times since she’d moved back to Hong Kong, but my future was uncertain and it was the best thing for both of us. She remained a dear friend. I started dating another Chinese girl in September; a university lecturer. That didn’t last very long but again, we remained friends for a long time. She was called Xiaohong. I’d had a penchant for women of Far-Eastern ancestry since I worked for a Japanese bank in the ’90s, but Xiaohong was the last one, as it turned out.

I don’t remember much about the early part of 2004 other than that I studied for a computer networking professional certification, I had broadband installed and I bought a WiFi router. I started this journal in May that year. I’m sure I spent most of 2004 sitting in front of a computer, listening to 5 Live and feeling vaguely lost and numb. But in November I met up with some other Rush fans that I’d got to know from a fan community on the Internet, on the occasion of a visit to Manchester of Rush, my time-honoured Favourite Band Ever, on their 30th anniversary tour.

One of those fellow Rush devotees was a lovely Finnish girl called Sari. She lived in Helsinki, yet the novelty of meeting each other face to face somehow inspired us to embark upon a long-distance romance. I visited her in Helsinki twice, and she came to Derby twice, most memorably over Christmas 2004. That relationship had run its course by the summer of 2005, and we split up. Long-distance relationships really have to be able to focus on a discernible non-long-distance future to survive any length of time, I think.

And shortly after that, things started to change, finally. My long sabbatical from gainful employment came to an end in August 2005, when I accepted a fairly mundane job as a technical support operative at a company with a large office in Derby. I hated that job though, and to my relief quite honestly, the Derby office was closed down at the end of that year and I was made redundant again. My final day there was 31st December 2005, and I returned to my former sedentary, 5 Live-listening, Internet-inhabiting, wilfully numb existence on 1st January 2006 as if nothing had happened.

But not for long, fortunately. In February I had a call from the managing director of a small web-hosting firm in Beeston, on the outskirts of Nottingham. I’d seen a job for a technical support role advertised in the Nottingham Evening Post, and had applied for it. After a brief telephone interview, I was asked to come in for a “technical test”. I was offered the job shortly after that and started in April. I very much enjoyed working there, in a team of friendly and professional people. I felt as though I’d finally climbed out of the deep hole of uncertainty I’d been trapped in for years. At around about the same time I met the woman I was destined to marry, Sue. She lived in Coalville, in Leicestershire, a half-hour drive from Derby, and we started to see each other every weekend. We became engaged in September 2006.

On 1st August 2007 we were married on an unusually dry, sunny day in what was otherwise a miserable, rainy summer, at a hotel in Quorn. We honeymooned in Sorrento. I’d gained not only a wife (for the first time, at the age of 47), but two teenage stepdaughters.

And I changed jobs again. Just before we’d left for Italy I’d corresponded by email with a research laboratory at Nottingham University, with a view to replacing their system administrator, who was returning to Canada. They asked me to come in for an interview on my return from Italy. I did, and they offered me the job shortly thereafter. This turned out to be a wonderful opportunity. I was working with brilliant people in a stimulating environment at one of the best research Universities in the world, and best of all they trusted me to just get on with running their technology myself. I was more or less autonomous. Their technology infrastructure become a sort of personal train set, and I took great satisfaction in developing it, and making it run as smoothly, as efficiently and reliably as possible. And if I asked if I could buy a new server, a new RAID array or whatever, the answer was always “yes”, even if once or two it was qualified with “but try not to spend too much”!

Sue and I didn’t actually live together for the first two years of our marriage. Sue’s younger daughter, Darcie, was still at school in Coalville, so we’d determined that we were going to live there when we did buy a place together. But I’d decided that getting married, changing jobs and moving house all at the same time was just too much upheaval, so I put off selling my house. For the time being we spent weekends together, usually in Derby. I found this to be quite an ideal arrangement in some respects quite honestly, but Sue didn’t quite see eye to eye with me on that.

Sue sold her house in February 2009, and she and Darcie stayed with my mother-in-law until I sold mine, in September. We’d hoped to buy a rather charming semi-detached house in a leafy avenue with a long, secluded garden and had agreed on a price – but that fell through when the sellers were unable to arrange a mortgage to buy a new property, and took it off the market.

For the time being, while we looked for our dream home, we rented a three-bedroom detached house in Coalville. I hired a van, and took a few days off work to pack my belongings into cardboard boxes in Derby, and drive them to our rented accomodation twenty-five miles away.

It was quite an unreal and emotional moment to leave my house for the last time. I’d owned it for eighteen years, although I’d spent seven of those years in a rented flat in South London. It held many memories for me. When the last of my things had been loaded in the van on the last day, I took a few minutes to sit on the floor of my empty living room, and reflect on the times I’d spent there since 1991, good and bad.

The blunter realities of marriage – the usual sort of marriage where you live in the same house, not the alternative version to which I’d become comfortably accustomed – required a period of adjustment. Still, I was happy to have opened a new chapter, to have started a new life, and I quite enjoyed our time in the rented place. But in October, only a few weeks after we’d moved in there, we found a suitable house for sale in a village just outside Coalville, a few miles away. This time our purchase went smoothly, and we moved into our new home, a spacious and modern three-storey house overlooking a village green, at the end of November.

We’re still in the process of settling in of course, even seven months later. Cardboard boxes remain in the garage, still packed. We still have to redecorate some of the rooms, and buy new furniture for others. But we’ve enjoyed getting used to our new tranquil surroundings, and we love it here.

And that, pretty much, brings me up to the present day, on the precipice of my fifties! Let’s do this again in ten years’ time.

I notice that, as I type, I haven’t written an entry since June 25th, yet the last few months have easily been the most eventful for me since I started this journal.

I finally sold my house in Derby, and moved to Leicestershire, where I’m happily co-habiting with my wife for the first time since we got married in 2007.

What to write about, then?

I could write about the experience of stepping out of my front door for the very last time, in September. I’d spent the previous twenty minutes sitting on the carpet in my empty living room, recalling the key memories from the years that I lived there, all of them concerning women, as it happens.

Perhaps I could write something about the process of looking for a new house – the disappointments, the disagreements, the stress, the anticipation, then the elation when it’s all gone through and an estate agent hands you the keys. Or a few words about our new home – a charming, modern three storey house overlooking a village green.

Or I could write about how nice it is to finally be living with my other half, or less positively, perhaps a paragraph or two on the challenge of adjusting to the endless compromises, the sudden scarcity of solitude, and a 17-yr old stepdaughter with a short fuse and an unusually self-centric worldview.

Or maybe, on the penultimate day of the decade, I should post a sentimental retrospective of the last ten years? For me, the noughties, and of course the current millennium, began in a flat in South London. I was with my girlfriend, Polly. I spent the next two years in London, then moved back, highly reluctantly, to Derby in 2002.

Tell you what, I’ll write about something useful instead. Here’s how to make a vodka martini, without a cocktail shaker. For this, you will need:

• A freezer
• A decent brand of vodka
• Vermouth
• A cocktail glass
• Bottled water
• A lemon, or lime, or olives

Now I grant you, the time-honoured methods of preparing a martini involve ice in some way. But whether you shake it or stir it, the ice has two purposes – to reduce the temperature of the vodka, and to dilute it. These can be achieved by other means.

First, make sure you’ve got a cocktail glass in the freezer. It’s best to keep a couple in there at all times, I find. Depending on the mass of the glass, I think it needs at least 15 minutes in there.

Next, pour roughly 90ml of vodka, and 20ml of water into a container. I like to use Smirnoff Black Label or Absolut combined with Buxton spring water in a small glass jug. You can vary the quantities to taste, of course. If you keep the vodka and the water in the fridge as I do, it will be ready in about 20-25 minutes. If you leave it much longer, it will turn into a sort of vodka slush puppy. You don’t want that.

Other acceptable brands are Russian Standard and Finlandia. The latter in particular is very smooth while the former has a pleasing peppery bite. There’s an English brand called Chase which is made from potatoes and is phenomenal, but it’s about £40 a bottle.

When glass and vodka/water mix are adequately chilled, remove the glass from the freezer.

Now prepare a lemon twist. You do this by peeling a length off the lemon peel, as though you were peeling an apple, with a sharp knife. You want about 60mm, though that’s not critical. Try not to descend into the flesh of the lemon, though it’s not a showstopper if you do. Trim the sides so it’s nice and straight, and twist it. This is not merely an aesthetic exercise – twisting it will coax some of the lemon oil out of the peel, onto the surface. You can use a lime instead of a lemon if you prefer (as indeed I do, but I think my taste is unusual in that respect). Throw it into the glass.

Alternatively, if olives are your preference, skewer up to three of them with a cocktail stick and place in the glass.

Dribble a small quantity of vermouth into the glass. Half a capful is too much. Really, the easiest way to ruin a martini is by pouring too much vermouth in it, and overpowering the taste of the vodka. One way to make sure you don’t do that is to swirl a little around the glass and pour it down the sink. Honestly, what’s left clinging to the side of the glass is enough.

Finally, pour the vodka/water mix into the glass. If you’re using olives, you might try half a teaspoonful of the brine from the jar, for a ‘dirty’ martini. But that’s an acquired taste. Keep the olive jar in the fridge if you’re going to do that.

Of course, you could use gin instead of vodka – in which case you can use slightly more vermouth, because the flavour is a fair bit less delicate.

Now drink it while it’s cold.

On 5th March 1984 began one of the most important, pivotal episodes in the 20th century UK political timeline – the 1984-1985 Miner’s Strike.

This was a bitter, year-long dispute, pitting Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers against the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher. Ostensibly a dispute over the closing of uneconomic mines, in reality far more was at stake. This was the rule of the mob against the rule of law; militant trade unionism against the primacy of democracy. The government had been elected by a huge majority only a few months previously; in contrast the Union which tried to overcome it had not even balloted its own members to seek a mandate for its action.

The union barons had grown accustomed to wielding the power of veto over the democratic franchise, bringing down government after government by inflicting power cuts and industrial disruption until the electors had had enough.

But they had picked a fight too far, this time. Scargill had underestimated the reserves of coal in the power stations, had underestimated the reluctance of key sections of the mining industry to strike without a ballot, and perhaps most critically, had underestimated the resolve of Margaret Thatcher’s government to defeat him. She knew that this was a contest the British People could not afford to lose.

A year later, we had won, and the political landscape was transformed. The hard left unions had been neutered. Their corrosive capacity to disrupt British industry and send jobs abroad, as they had done to such devastating effect in the ’60s and ’70s, was greatly diminished. And they had forever lost their power to superimpose their own hard left agenda over the people’s choice of government.

Spare a thought today for David Wilkie, a Welsh taxi driver killed by striking miners for taking one of their colleagues to work.

Some time in the summer of 1973, or possibly 1974, I was surprised to be awoken from my slumbers late one night by my mother, who, in a surprising and highly unprecedented gesture, invited my little brother and me to get up and watch a TV programme of which I’d never heard, called M*A*S*H. I loved it, and watched it whenever it was shown after that.

Some twelve years later, after the series had finally come to an end, the BBC started a long run of M*A*S*H repeats from the very first episode. I recorded as many of them as I could, onto VHS tapes.

Eventually I had a large collection of VHS recordings of M*A*S*H. I kept them for many years; until the series was released on DVD in fact, two or three years ago. But I never watched them. Somehow, even after I had every single episode on DVD, the mood to watch one of them just never took me.

It vaguely bothered me for years that I could never get round to watching this programme I loved so much as a young person. And it irritated me especially that for about 20 years a large stash of video recordings had taken up space in my various homes, never to be watched.

Well, in February this year, I finally mustered the resolve to watch them. I decided that I would watch every single episode, in sequential order, in 2008. I started my M*A*S*H marathon at the end of February with the pilot episode, originally broadcast in 1972, with the intention of sitting down some time on or before December 31st to watch the final episode, Goodbye, Farewell and Amen, first shown in 1983.

In fact, my journey came to an end tonight. I have watched every one of the two-hundred and fifty-one episodes of M*A*S*H in the last eighty-two days; an average of three per day. There hasn’t been a single day in that time when I haven’t seen at least one episode. On most days I have watched two or three, and on some days I have watched four or five. I have watched M*A*S*H on the train to and from work on my Nokia handheld, I have watched M*A*S*H on my computer at work at lunchtime, I have watched M*A*S*H on the TV in my bedroom and in my living room. The Korean War lasted eleven years for TV viewers in the 1970s and early 1980s. It lasted three years in reality, but for me it lasted twelve intense weeks. I honestly had tears in my eyes when the joyous news came tonight that the war was at an end.

Incidentally I discovered a few days after starting my epic journey through M*A*S*H that I had commenced it twenty-five years to the day after the series came to an end. Goodbye, Farewell and Amen was broadcast originally on February 28th 1983, to a record US television audience.

Earlier this year, Theos, a UK-based “public theology think tank”, as if that wasn’t a contradiction in terms, commissioned a poll to measure public opinion on religious matters in the UK.

The results are interesting. 58% of those polled consider that “Christianity has an important role to play in public life”, but more promisingly, 42% agree with Professor Richard Dawkins’ assertion that “faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate”.

I view religious faith as possibly the most demeaning of all superstitions, a process of wilful non-thinking intended to allow the believer to adhere to any comforting fantasy they wish despite any and all reason and evidence to the contrary, and I am delighted to know that so many in the UK generally agree. Of course, 42% is not really enough, but it’s a very encouraging figure nonetheless, and I think that the numbers of people hostile to these ignorant, backward myths can only grow. The survey results are published here.

Incidentally, I bought Professor Dawkins’ excellent The God Delusion in London a few weeks ago, and would recommend it to anyone still seeking enlightened help with the “God” question.