Oh, and on a brighter note, it was my birthday on Thursday (13th March.) A nice quiet day, just how I like it. A long lunch with Sallie, some gourmet pizza and good comedies at home (finances too tight to really go out.) Good fun all the way. Sallie made me a beautiful photo album depicting our time together, Mum and Dad sent a great fruit cake and some money that I’ve already used to get William Gibson’s latest novel – Pattern Recognition (more on that later), and a non-fiction work on teenage “hackers”. And Wayne got me a DVD that I’ll check out later.

The world isn’t all doom and gloom