Steph and I have decided to change our writing schedule. For months, we've been getting up at 6:15 to go into Starbucks and write before work. It worked pretty well, although we were tired more often than not for the rest of the day, but Starbucks isn't cheap, and we've decided that we just can't afford it. Our new routine is getting up at 7:30 on Mondays and Fridays, heading straight for work, then when Steph finishes in the library at 11:30, we go to a University cafe for an hour of writing. The other days we'll go into Starbucks as usual. Overall, it'll save us £2.50 a week, which isn't a massive amount, but look after the pennies, etc. Today was the first day of it. I didn't get as much written as I normally would, but on the up side, I'm not exhausted today.

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I came across an interesting article today. It's the first journalist's account from inside the Iraqi "resistance" movement that I've come across it. It's comical, in a tragic way, and depressing. If it shows one thing it's the reason why the US and its allies will never defeat the so-called "insurgents". The article is here. From The Guardian newspaper.

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People have been getting excited about the private "space ship" that did something or the other a few days ago. Or, at least, science fictioney people have been.

Me, I find myself strangely unmoved. Private spaceship gets up not very high. Whoopee. I'm not sure why this is. Perhaps it's because, so many years after men walked on the moon for the first time, piddling around on the edge of our fairly thin atmosphere doesn't seem so impressive. Where's the progress? Perhaps it's because I read too much science fiction when I was younger and I believed it. These plastic toys struggling up a few miles like a decrepit grandmother trying to get upstairs don't match those promises of glistening spaceships zipping around the galaxy. Or perhaps it's because, seeing as the only novelty here is that the spaceship is privately financed and seeing as I lack capitalist genes, I don't particularly look forward to the day when space exploration is the preserve of private companies chasing down profit. Whatever the reason, I am not a convert.

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As I seem to be in the process of being grouchy about people's deeply-felt passions, I'll say one more thing to make myself unpopular:

I'm glad England have been knocked out of the Euro 2004 football tournament (that's soccer to those of you in America). It's not that I don't tend to support England in sports, because I do. It's not that I don't like the England football team (although I think Wayne Rooney is an irritating little twerp). It's that the legions of drunken, boorish thugs who follow England around make me ashamed to be English. Now that England have lost, the thugs can return home and the rest of Europe can get on with enjoying the tournament without having to worry about riots breaking out.