Excuse me, miss, I bought this Jedi here last week, and it doesn’t work
This was written in August 2010, shortly after the broadcast of the first series of Sherlock and at a time when Cycle Superhighways were starting to appear on the streets of London and Thames Water was obsessed with replacing Victorian pipework. But it was mostly an apology for not having updated the blog.
Those of you with a decent grasp of chronology and a basic working knowledge of the Western calendrical system might be tempted to point out that since this blog was last updated the moon has orbited the Earth more times than can be counted on the fingers of five mittens. Hmm. Well, yes. And I could try to explain to you why this is, perhaps invoking some rudimentary Newtonian physics and the inverse square law of gravitation, but you’d quite rightly tell me I was deliberately misunderstanding a clearly whimsical figure of speech. So let’s just say I’ve been otherwise engaged, and leave it to you and your imagination to decide what vital and fascinating things I might have been doing. Maybe, for instance, I’ve been painting all London’s bike lanes with shiny blue paint to make them extra slippery in wet weather. Or maybe I’ve been replacing some particularly tenacious Victorian water mains. Or maybe – just maybe – I reinvented myself as a modern-day Sherlock Holmes sometime around Easter, and have been busy ever since trying to find a suitably knowing hat and a good lawyer.
Who can possibly say? Other than me? The good news, though, is that whatever it was that was distracting me – and, no, it wasn’t the dragons again – is no longer doing so, and I was actually about to write something new this very weekend just gone when, as luck would have it, something quite extraordinary happened the like of which you wouldn’t believe (no, really – absolutely NO dragons).
So you’re going to have to give me a few more days. Just a few though. Honest.
And, that being the case… you’re probably now wondering why I’m wasting time writing this little placeholder, and why you’re wasting time reading it.
Well… the thing is, later today I have to go up to BBC London to do quite a big interview about Smoke, and it’s just occurred to me that this may well result in people looking at the Smoke website to find out what all the fuss is about, and then clicking on this blog to find out even more, and then thinking that they’ve gone back in time like in Life on Mars and getting scared. Or – and this is probably more likely – thinking that I’m completely rubbish, and that Smoke must also therefore be rubbish, and then deciding not to order the complete set of thirteen back issues after all, despite them being a complete bargain. Sorry, I was just trying to put a brave face on it with the Life on Mars thing.
So, these words are basically aimed at anyone reading this blog for the very first time. And to these people I’d like to say simply this: hello. And would you mind coming back later in the week, as I’m not quite ready?
Thank you. Oh, and it’s twenty-five quid for the set. As I say, a bargain.