Everyone knows that any commercial building that people sleep in must be fitted with a fire alarm system that is a little bit nosy.


A little bit like the woman down the road who watches for any goings on and is always first on the scene when anything happens, armed with a complete record of all movements of people in the road within the previous twenty four hours, the alarm is there ready and waiting all the time for you to mess up and end up being harassed by men who arrived with a vehicle and a blue flashing light.

Yet, despite this knowledge of the increased sensitivity of the lovely little detector systems that are everywhere now - people still have the belief that they can cover the fire alarm detector with anything that they happen to come by in the room and that their problems would be over.

They find the nearest sock condom or cling film and smoke away, hoping that nothing will happen.

Aside from anything about the factual side of how the devices work, hiding smoke from a smoke detector almost seems as mean as holding a bacon sandwich under the nose of a recently reformed vegan.

What I want to know, though, is how come the sock-over-the-detector thing works through basically having a bonfire in your bed, and yet when you have a hot shower and walk out, opening the door, you suddenly find yourself being rugby tackled to the ground by a fire marshall and carried, completely naked, into the court yard outside?

"So I don't know how I'm supposed to get my five a day," she said as she was having the early morning conversation with me as we walked to breakfast. She was trying to book a doctor's appointment for the weird reason of having had an allergic reaction to an Apple.

Aside from the grammatical interest that just developed as I typed the word "Doctor's Appointment" - and wondered whether or not the doctor actually owns the appointment - the interesting part of this, to me at least, is the concept that you can be allergic to fruit.

The questions, of course, were plenty. The answers not so.

"Can you eat an apple?"
"No"
"Can you eat an Orange?"
"I tried that, and nothing happened."
"So you could eat a lemon then, right?"
"Well, I haven't tried that so I don't know"
"But you could because it's a citrus fruit like Orange, right?"
"I think so. I don't know. I don't want to eat lemons"
"What about tomatoes though?"
"I don't know. I suppose not - they are fruit"
"Yer"
"Oh, and so are cucumbers. I really like cucumbers"
"Yer, because they grow on a bush don't they? And vegetables are what grow underground?"
"Well, you could be allergic to vegetables?"
"I don't know"


Having had that brief conversation and walked the very long way around the fruit juice machine, just to be sure, we sat down and ate breakfast; we continued to discuss whether or not vegetables grew exclusively underground.

Does anyone know? Must we quiz a farmer immediately? I don't know. I'm not sure I ever will.

I was reading a blog on the BBC's website the other day which I now obviously unable to find - although my instincts tell me it was discussing Scotland and other such foreign places which I haven't visited, in the context of the UK - and was particulally interested in its topic for a number of reasons.

The post was looking at a load of shops in a high street, and noticing that they'd closed. After noticing they'd closed, the post then wondered as to why; and then - most importantly - it urged you to do the same. Look at some shops that are closed, and then - 12 months later - come back and see if the properites are still empty.



It seemed like a good idea to me, before I remembered what happened. Just don't do it. People will hate you, and you'll end up not getting a pizza that you've paid for because of it. You might get threatened, and have the term 'arses' listed in your search results for years to come. You might end up getting two or three new subscribers to your blog because they want to watch what you're saying. Or you might be forced to just destroy what web following you had. Who knows?

Graffiti isn't particularly pretty, unless it has been agreed by a committee of the local council and released to the local media as some kind of 'get down with the youth scheme' by the 10 or so middle aged to elderly people who have joined the Street Scene committee at the local council, in which case it is a joyful exhibition of young people's creativity.


In recent times, there's been an explosion in the number of items of "street furniture" that grace our pavements to contain the various boxes of technology that provide us with various pieces of information via coxial cable.




In fact, it it weren't for all this street furniture - it would have taken you at least 3 weeks to have downloaded this blog post onto your computer, and even longer for you to have watched Kill it, Cook it, Eat it, as I urged you to days ago.

Most recently, though, something has been getting on my nerves whenever I have walked past the Virgin Media box which graces the corner of my road at home in Birmingham.

For those of you who don't know, Virgin Media realised they had a problem with graffiti on these boxes and picked up one or two of the letters off their door mat from a moaning resident complaining that they needed re-painting. Simultaneously, an executive to be in a meeting with the very same person who had made this realisation was watching a television advert.

The advert, harmless to a normal, non-executive such as yourself was about dogs who have been abandoned by their owners and are now too old to be re-homed. The nice way, of course, of saying that two of their legs are missing and they dribble, so they are kept in the back room whenever people visit.

It was offering the chance to 'adopt' one of the animals. In return for £2 a week the adoptee would receive a piece of paper signed by someone unimportant, declaring them to have adopted Derek the deranged chocolate-coloured Labrador as their own. They could visit him whenever they wanted. The executive got up, and went to work. He thought nothing of the advert, since as we all know people in business are cold-blooded bastards who do not care for organic matter which is not part of the production process of money, or direct debit mandates.

Upon being confronted with the situation regarding the Graffiti, the executive had a revelation. He would launch a scheme called "adopt a box" where complaining people could have the rage they normally spent writing letters to the Daily Mail and the Express and use it to save Virgin Media some money.

Undoubtedly, a fantastic idea which gives people real ownership of problems and removes the 'facelessness' face of an organisation, only to replace it with one that's branded "Duleux Cuddley" . This is, of course, all true. Where it's done well.

Researching this very post, I have found pictures of people who have adopted a box doing an incredibly good job of painting the box. They've got every nook and cranny of it, and done their community some good.

But unfortunately, that doesn't seem to always be the case. The box at the end of my road has been adopted, and painted. It looks lovely - it has no graffiti on it at all. But, sadly, the person who painted it was obviously afraid of touching anything other than a flat surface with their brush.

And, unfortunately, since this box was one of Telewest's older boxes, the paint supplied was a completely different colour to the original the box was painted in.

As a result, the box looks worse than when it had "wanker" written on it in an attractive, yet completley incomprehensible, set of markings. And despite the efforts of the painter, the box still serves as an ideal meeting point for youths who do not care about decoration.

I think over the summer, I may have to adopt the box and paint it properly. I will keep you posted.