PART FIVE - It feels like just days since I walked into Costa only on Saturdays and served 43 people then went home and contemplated sewage or something equally interesting and smelly.


It seems like years ago that Glenda asked me if I’d like to be Assistant Manager in Redditch, a decision I probably on first glance think was wrong, and on second glance think was a good choice because it taught me how to be wrong.

And then on third glance remember is in the past and I am not really into the whole regrets thing, so it was probably a badly informed good choice that went wrong.

It seems like no time at all since Nathan and I set up Simply Associates Limited. It’s exactly a year ago this month, which is just scary.

Sat here now – I am technically unemployed, waiting to be told all about my accommodation at uni and waiting to move to a whole new place.

It’s a radical change, and I am looking forward to it with parts of my body I didn’t realize could either look forward, or exist.

But it’s moving on, big time. And to an extent, I think I am ready to move on before some of my world is ready for me to move on.

Every time I bring it up, people generally want me to come and see them and say goodbye.

PART FOUR - And as if that’s not enough news to me I decided today to go back in time somewhat and listen to a Chris Moyles show from January 2007. I discovered that this was the time that they first started playing the cheesy song. That still sounds like yesterday to me.

But then Rachel announced she was getting engaged. News to me that this was this long ago – she still isn’t married, but at least there’s now a date – I thought that was a lot longer ago.

The mind’s comprehension of time over time is quite – weird. Some things seem short time ago, others seem long. And there are many men who will agree the mind has difficulty in calculating a length from memory.

Already, to use a probably bad example – it’s been two months or so since Michael Jackson died. And I remember that being the first example of when twitter relayed news for me in a faster way than conventional methods.

Not that most of the news was correct. In fact, some of it was downright stupid.

I think that could prove to be interesting if anything as huge as 9/11 were to happen again. Which is another thing – it feels like centuries ago that those two planes crashed into those towers and I came home to watch it on the news.

Coming home to find something like that has happened when you’ve had no idea anything like that even could happen is quite a shock. Probably why it feels such a long time ago – with all in the same subject area that has come to my mind.

PART THREE - Finding out where you are though, can be quite difficult. Back when I started college I remember realizing that moving from school to college meant I would be wearing my own clothes.

Fair enough, you’d think – I’d done this all of my life and I’m fairly confident that given some clothes I can put them on in some form of reasonably composed way – and manage to get out of the house without catching fire, or launching a plague on mankind.

But it’s one of those subtle little things which makes you realize something even bigger.

The only other change I remember is having to look at how I took notes and whether or not I could actually read my own handwriting well enough that I could actually gain some kind of benefit from having handwritten notes of lessons. Turns out, I probably didn’t have handwriting which was legible enough for this, and that’s probably why I didn’t do quite as well as I probably should have done.

Sat here now, moving on to uni – I am slightly worried about my handwriting and what impact it’s going to have. I mean, right now I am sat at my tiny little netbook typing these notes. It has an impressive battery life for such a tiny machine (although I do wish it was longer, if I’m honest) and my typing speed does mean that if I needed to take notes like this I could. I can easily keep up to the speed at which people speak, and look at other things while continuing to type, like some kind of qwerty machine.

But it’s something I’m looking at – I’m even watching videos about how to re-train myself, and apparently my problems are to do with using the wrong muscle. Always the way, isn’t it?

PART TWO - No matter how much choice you don’t have is given to you, you are forced when you consider moving on to take stock of where you actually are. I mean, if you ask for directions from somewhere in Birmingham to somewhere in Cardiff, the directions are better to start in Birmingham than if someone decides to direct you from Norway.

Because then you’d either get lost on the way to your goal, or end up having to find your way to Norway before you could get your journey. And that might take a while.

But actually, when you think about it – as a 16-year-old sat trying to make a decision, knowing where you are is actually quite a scary prospect.

You have spent the last 12 years of your life wearing a uniform which you had no control over, going to places you didn’t chose and thinking, writing, talking and even sometimes wondering about subjects you had no control over.

Even if you did get to chose subjects at GCSE, you really didn’t have much control over them. School is quite crafty at that, too.

You get to pick 8 subjects – but, certainly when I did it, you had to pick a modern foreign language, and you had to pick certain subjects. You couldn’t pick others because of timetabling restrictions and if you were in set 1 for French you had to be in set 1 for History and English too. Because those three subjects had nothing to do with each other – but took place at the same time.

Worst of all, you had to do an hour a week of a subject which forced you to wear shorts and enter a room which smelt mainly of teenage boy’s testicles and sweat, and which had fantastic showers which could have easily removed the smell of testicles and sweat, but which you didn’t use for the simple reason that it wasn’t the done thing, because naked boys in the same room are scared of one another.

In all circumstances; it’s a wonder that as a race of human males we can actually cope with the idea of reproduction without falling down in a heap of giggles or calling someone straight and running away from them in case it becomes contagious and we’re all forced to do it.

But then again: breasts.

Of course – you had a choice in all of this.

Your choice was to attend, and it was your own.

PART ONE - It’s at times like this where you’re moving on that all of a sudden you look back into time and realize that you haven’t exactly been keeping up to date with where things are.

Perhaps last time I had this situation was when I left school to move to Cadbury College – slightly more than it might sound to a lot of people, since I went to a school that presumed you’d just move on and into its sixth form.

Not that they’d have had it said out loud because that would have been removing your individual choice. A choice that they insisted you were mature enough to make, until you made it – like I did. They promptly informed me that I probably wasn’t mature enough to make this choice, and I should take advice.

Advice from the people who’d suggest I stayed still and didn’t move in case anything happened. Like it rained.

And rain has been known to melt people; although it was quite rare that it actually happened – the advice was to stay in and not take the risk.

They even went as far as to open Microsoft Word and produce a form where they collected details that they already had about you, in order to put you through the registration process.

Having spoken to Josie and some other people who decided that they would stay on at Waseley, the selection and registration process consisted of throwing pens from a balcony and ordering a take away pizza to the school gates.

A challenge for any 16-year-old.



This post is part 1 of 7 - the rest will be published daily at http://nicparkes.com/blog/ - why not set up RSS or email subscription to the blog to get alerts whenever something new happens? See http://nicparkes.com/blog/ to subscribe.

• You can look at photos related to this post here, or view the next part here. View the whole thing here.

So everything is chugging along nicely - as it does. I've finished work, and here's the big gap in between uni and previous life. It's full of odd things to do, it's full of people wanting to say goodbye and me not wanting to, and it's full of other people who seem to think I'm joking and I'm not going to go really. Which I am.


But the most important milestone for me before I get excited has got to be when I know where I'm going to be living. Now, it's a bit complicated - because different Universities do their accommodation in different ways. Brighton do everything online, and as a result - I'm having to do all the accommodation through something called an 'e-accom' system.

To start us off - the system was late being put on-line because they broke it, essentially, and now due to a "technical problem" they can't tell students who are deferred from last year and students who are from this year apart.

Which is fine, I guess. So at the moment, I have no idea where I'm living - or even if I am living there, actually.

In search of answers, I have sent emails and done many things to which I have essentially been told to "calm down dear" by the people who've emailed me back. Everything written says 2 weeks ago, but emails in answer say - essentially - I'll do it tomorrow.

But last night I made an even better discovery, on the Student Central website this time instead. This piece of information was put there to calm us all down, it would seem - and it's actually quite subtle in what it says.

"If you have not received anything from us by post, we have already assigned you accommodation. You will receive contact about this in late August"

So, obviously, we're done and I have somewhere to live. But I'm not allowed to know where it is yet. Argh. You frustrate me and send me into midnight panics.

Just looking through my web stats, as you do, and I discovered something interesting in the terms that people use in search engines to find me. Number 2 amused me most. I think this has decided my character profile for ever more. I wouldn't disagree.

Stats are for the period 22nd August - 24th August 2009

I really did. Addicted to this song at the moment - although it's not released. Makes me want to go on a rant about how much I am sick of the record companies taking ages to promote songs - and then they're boring by the time I can legally buy them - but heh, I won't, because I cannot be arsed. Enjoy and addict.

People, especially people trying to give advice, should probably make sure that the proof reading is done by someone competent. Just to avoid, well, this.

I've had to do a lot of moving on recently. And to be honest, I'm feeling a little torn between the world of old and the world of new.

And you might not think that the conversations you could have in the - maybe - 40 or so seconds that you might get to interact with someone would be so great and amazing as to make you actually miss it. But it's strange.

As someone working in a place like Costa you get a position within people's lives - you know them by name, and you increasingly give them a personal service the more regular they become.

And sometimes that relationship is not discovered, it's not noticed - like many things - until it is gone.

This kind of struck home to me today when I discovered through the use of a local newspaper (these things are wonderful) and one of my staff, when I visited the store today to drop something off for someone and return some library books, that one of the regular customers who I used to talk to rather a lot had died.

Perhaps I am odd. No, scrap that - I know I am odd, in that I felt quite like this person considered Costa to be a part of their lives - as they came in each day, and their absence was quite noticable.

So yes, having left Costa I have enjoyed not having to talk to a lot of the people I saw each day. I quite enjoy not getting a phone call at 7am telling me that someone was ill and that my day was then going to be horrible and way too long for its own good.

A job does have a huge effect on your life - and there is something I've noticed about myself and about others who work at Costa that strikes me as being a part of it. It smallens your world.

A lot of things in life claim to 'broaden your horizons' but I'm quite confident that Costa in fact does the reverse. Entering the job, you'll imagine the world is your oyster but as you become weighed down in brand standards and doing things the company way you will soon start to think the world extends nowhere beyond the five walls of your store.

(There are five, the brand standards manual says so)

But I want to be most obvious about the fact that I love Costa and that I have enjoyed working there soooooo much that I actually can't put it into words.

Ah well. I'm done talking about this now. Thanks Costa. Thanks people. Moving on, now.

I've had to do a lot of moving on recently. And to be honest, I'm feeling a little torn between the world of old and the world of new.

The biggest part of moving on for me has been saying goodbye to the world of commercial retail coffee production, and with it the 15 people I have refered to as 'my team' over the past few months. As laughable at times as that term might have been.

I have no doubt that I have had a wonderful time and a wealth of experiences which I don't regret, working at Costa - having worked at multiple sites and been given fabulous opportunities to do things that probably were the result of a faith in me which I might have at times said was misplaced.

But it's got me thinking about how Costa is - and those of you reading this who work at Costa will probably agree - there's a certain element of repetition within the job and within each shop.

For example, the things you do within an hour are incredibly repetitive. The things each week, the same. And without wanting to repeat myself, the month and the year are pretty much the same. And having worked there for almost 3 years in every single job (except in name) there is within a store, I think I'm in quite a good position to say that.

But there is one redeming feature it has - as much as anyone who has worked with the public will tell you they are despied - the customers.

Each day, the same people (more or less) come in and order the same things. You make them in the same way, using the same equipment and the same ingredients (although perhaps for hygine reasons not exactly the same ones) and you do the same thing with them - you talk.

But that's where the tedium is releaved. A conversation. Never the same - always interesting and always worth listening to. And this is probably the most important thing that I can say that I have got from Costa is that my ability to interact with people in a way that I'd never normally has improved by about 900%.

I love programmes like The Hotel Inspector because in essence, I'd quite like to do the job that Alex Polizzi is tasked with each week. I kind of like coming in, doing things and going away. And having a TV progamme document it all would be great.

And normally, these programmes are designed to go, "look, viewer, these people are idiots - anyone could do the job, and Alex being an expert just means they listen."

But there was an exception I think this week, when we boarded the African Queen, a london-based floating hotel. There was nothing that you could put your finger on and say "this is bad, fix it."

They had beds, and breakfasts. They provided food when you asked for it, and aside from a few moments - the boat didn't sink.

The only obvious problem, in all fairness, was the couple's inability to self promote. And I think most people can understand that promotion is a little bit of a problem for people who focus on specialist areas.

I'm not afraid to admit that even I struggle in certain areas - and would probably have to ask for help.

But what struck me most about the people on the boat (Andy & Bonny) is that they are really nice people.

Alex didn't have a single argument with them. They listened, agreed and got on with it.

And when they said goodbye to each other, Alex said she'd be around to help whenever - and you could tell that she meant it. What we came across was some nice people who were running an unusual business in exactly the area they should be - hospitality.

And frankly, I want to go and stay on their boat. Christmas anyone? Check out their website at www.african-queen.co.uk and book me a room?

There is one problem with the plan that you MIGHT want to consider though - I don't like boats, or water.

Nicx

OK, so there are some good things about the fact that We Are Klang, a new series of sort-of Sitcom, has managed to make it from the festivals onto TV. I admire the fact that it's now available to watch on TV and I love the fact that the BBC are putting money into things like this.



But I think there's a certain amount of "why bother at all?" when you don't put ENOUGH money into it. The same is true across a lot of TV as people look to cut money that's flying out of the bank account a lot faster than it's coming in - but with certain things I can understand why.

we are klang

The cast of We Are Klang

With Red Dwarf's return to Dave, for example - the show has always been low budget, and it was a trial to see whether or not a return would work.

We Are Klang is a group of 3 people you might have seen before. They're clearly quite tallented people, and one of them is at least tall enough that you probably shouldn't say anything bad about him. He might just stand on you.

Greg Davies, Steve Hall and Marek Larwood are all very tallented people, quite clearly. And there are some incredibly good ideas behind the series.

The idea is that the three work within the council in a fictional town. There's a mayor, played by Debbie Chazen off of the Smoking Room is out to get them in the first episode for what seems to be anything.

The fire department has been disbanded after he asked something, and one of his staff has a cock tattooed onto his bald head.

In all, they're quite clever at being stupid. And during a song about jews, the show actually had me laughing out loud.

But at other times, the jokes were drawn out seemingly to fill time. The breaking of the 4th wall, and talking to the audience was funny, the first time - but was there a need for a 3rd or 4th? If the jokes had been different, perhaps.

The problem, then, is that the show feels cheap. So watch it, and download it and make it popular. Maybe next time, they'll get some more money and can get a real elephant to burst through the wall of the Council Chamber.

So, urm iPlayer is over there. Off you pop.

Nic x

For anyone using the RSS feed from this blog who has been getting errors, sorry - that was my fault... Remind me, Nucleus doesn't like &s in category titles. Thanks! Nic x

Mmm, I am quite sad - and I am very late in relaying this information to you. But, unfortunately, it happened during what I shall now refer to as "the time when nic said something, and then said little for a while, and then left a pizza in a shop."

I will speak nothing more of this name, or this issue.

However, I was tonight reviewing my archive of twitter stats. That is, what are the statistics about how often I spew mindless unplanned garbage into the world? Well, quite regular. Yes.

It was 4am. I was in Glamorous. For those of you not called Nathan, that's a "show bar" on Hurst Street in Birmingham.

It's a disgusting, horrible place.

But it was where I noticed the time.

And with the fact in my mind that 4am was the only hour during which I had not tweeted becoming apparent in the fronter-most part of my brain, I decided there was only one course of action.

I must tweet. The problem being I had nothing to say. But I must tweet, or the drunken mind would have compelled me into forgetting my geekish antics, and instead forced me to contemplate scaring Nathan with dancing, or chasing a Russian up some stairs as is only rational at 4am.

So I tweeted. About having never tweeted at 4am.

It made me content. And looking at my stats now, I am reminded of the warm fuzzy feeling normally only felt after setting fire to oneself.

Tweeeeeet.

Have you ever been paranoid about something that you think just is absoloutley irrational? I know I have. Today, I sat at my desk and I swear that I was not in the same position as normal.

Now that might seem like a small thing to you, I don't know. Is it a small thing? To me, when I sit at my desk I like to feel a certain way. I like to feel as if I am rather important. Not Sir Alan important. But not unimportant.

I guess this is about getting the right kind of level of importance. I don't want to feel like my desk would be an ideal location for Jeremy Kyle. But I don't want to feel like Gordon Brown either.

I guess I'm aiming for a sort of. Oh I don't know. I'm aiming to be on about the same level of importance as Richard & Judy. Essentially, maybe only to a few middle aged people who don't really matter, but a big enough part of the world that everyone knows who I am.

In an attack on this feeling of importance, though, my desk and my chair had colluded against me in the night.

They had come up with a plan to make me feel like the Nick Griffin of the desk and chair world.

I am against wood, perhaps they think.

Maybe my chair is annoyed because I decided the screw that wouldn't go in when I built it wasn't important. Maybe it lay there feeling me unscrew it from its partially inserted position, place it back into the box and pop in the screw cover.

Hiding what I'd done. Like a murderer might do.

Although probably not with a tiny piece of circular black rubber.

Their plotting must have been quiet, because I sleep near by. Maybe they communicated mainly by text? Or they have Facebook accounts? I do not know.

However this plotting has been done, I am now aware of it. My desk and chair are fighting against me. This is not the last you'll hear from me.

Unless my chair eats me. Which, I think you have to agree, is a huge possibility.

Nic x

I know it was a stupid decision but being newly unemployed, I had been foolish and had forgotten that the old people take over supermarkets on a Friday, and it being the summer holidays they were joined by an army of toddlers carrying random pieces of cake, and teenagers buying 0.01% alcohol shandy and hoping they didn't get ID'd.

So I'd ventured into Morrisons and had walked into 34 children, trodden on 4 tracksuit-clad alcoholics stuck in the drinks aisle confused over the concept of Shloer, and had 27 pensioners with 6 loaves of bread each push their trolleys into me and then shout at me for walking in front of them. I'd made it to the part of the shop I wanted.

I wanted cans of Pepsi Max.

They'd been moved.

So I went with the logical as the items around me still appeared to be liquid-can-based items, and assumed they'd be on the next aisle. So off I went, 3 more people walked into me and I had to endure a small operation after a French stick got popped in the wrong place.

I found them. Popped them upon my hip, and walked to the till where there used to be a "nine items or fewer" checkout. Gone was this promise of faster service which ended up being slower than a normal till.

Why slower? I have a theory that the slowest till operators got put on those tills, seemingly providing a service which is faster while actually just maintaining the average transaction time of a normal till.

Do not think I don't know what you're doing, Mr Morrison.

But I have wondered off into the pharmacy here. Back to the checkouts. Morrisons now has "self service" checkouts - a wondrous idea, where the customer (you or I) do all the work. It's nice, for me, because the customer service provided is far better. Especially if you were to mute the computer telling you what to do.

The concept of a self service till is not that complex. But undoubtedly, the general public will manage to misuse these things and will not understand even the simplest of instructions given to them.

"Has it scanned, Dave.... Put it in that bag, no not that bag - put it in that bag" ... The woman was screaming at her clearly confused husband. An alarm started to sound and the attendant, looking stressed came over and reset the problem.

The woman, presumably called Maureen or June or some other name appropriate for a confused old woman in a supermarket, moved onto the next item. Nothing other than a single piece of Haddock in a little plastic tray, and covered in cling film. She scanned this, and Dave put it into the correct bag. An alarm sounded.

The attendant came over, looked more stressed, breathed deeply, and reset the problem.

The woman next withdrew - now wait for it - a pre-packed bag of potatoes. She placed these where the scanning and weighing machine is and pressed "search,". Dave suggested she scanned the items, but she hit his hand out of the way and proceeded to weigh the item as carrots.

The attendant noticed this, and pointed out "you need to scan those, they're pre-packed."

She ignored him, and continued. Upon placing the item into the bagging area, an alarm went off and the attendant came over and sorted the problem.

The man opposite took the items he was scanning and placed them directly into his own bag. Very eco. Admirable, if we're honest. He scanned an item. An alarm went off, the attendant came over and reset the machine.

A woman the other side was struggling to insert her credit card into the note machine - as this failed, she proceeded to insert cash into the receipt printer.

As I approached the machine which had become free as June and Dave had moved on from their escapades, scanned my items, inserted my card, typed my PIN and took my receipt the attendant looked very confused.

"Only 5 hours left, mate." he said, as I walked past, and an alarm went off.

Nic x

Scott mills has been talking about the fact that despite the fact that we invite cats into our homes and give them food, there is little given back to us by them.

They dislike people, frankly and they tollerate us only because we have a pouch of Whisker's best Duck & Lamb flavoured chunks in either gravy or jelly.

You might have noticed this if you've got a cat.

You get up in the morning and open the kitchen door - the cat is there, seemingly waiting for you to get up to smother you with love and adoration as is fitting of its feline variety.

But no, instead, the cat is actually sat there because they know you have opposable thumbs which have the mystical power of tearing the foil on the top of the pouch, or of opening the can, depending on what it is you chose to purchase.

They're there when you get back from work. Again, you think "aww, he's waited for me to get home."

The cat, has, infact not waited for you to get home, but has instead waited because he knows you have a hand which can cradle the cupboard door far better than their paw.

You can open the can, wash the bowl, pop the food in and add some dry mixer. You can fill up the water bowl with the magic tube of metal over the metal hole by the window.

You have the power, as far as the cat is concerned. And it is with this power that you keep your cat in control. Occasionally, you may get a gift of a dead Western Tanager delivered to you and left somewhere nice. Like the hall.

You know, so you can find it easily.

But it seems that cats can go to extremes. After presumably not providing enough food or water for his cat, one man has found himself in a massive amount of trouble after his cat hopped on to the Internet and downloaded some of the illegal child-related pornography. Or so he says, anyway.

Griffin told police he had been downloading music, and that his cat jumped on the keyboard when he left the room. He said "strange things" appeared on the computer when he returned.

See the full story here.

So there's the truth - your cat doesn't love you, and if you don't provide it with what it demands you'll find yourself in prison. Right evil things.

Nic x

Thanks to the addition of a right Bitch called Annie to my little pack of creatures at home, without too much planning my house has become something of an interesting experience for any visitors.

Without wanting to go too much into detail, particulally because I have absoloutely no understanding of the process at all, we got a new dog and it turned out she was about to go into season.

I'm not quite sure what this means other than all the male dogs in the area suddenly get out of breath, excited and start saying "Oh yes," like Churchill does every time she walks past; Annie herself walks around anything remotely male backwards wiggling her arse in an attempt to sollicit some hot action, and we all look around in dispair.

Aside from one person, that is, and that one person is my mother.

My mother, being quite happy to oblige an on season bitch in her necessaries, has been in her element and wondered around Pets@Home with glee looking for a pair of pants for Annie.

So our house has turned into a horny dog party. My mother wonders around making sure Annie has got her pants on and that she has a panty liner with wings attached at all times, Annie walks around backwards, trying to pull off her pants, while wiggling her arse - not unlike the inhabitants of Birmingham on a Friday night at about 1am - while Male dog premier Alfie looks confused, depressed and aggitated, much like a man forced to live with his wife and 3 daughters.

Couple with this a diagram of a cervix that's been on the living room coffee table for the past three weeks and you have the perfect opportunity to invite friends around and embarass them.

Oh the joys.

I have a BlackBerry. I’m not saying that to show off, like some kind of RIM-freak who just loves RIM.

In fact, I’m saying it more because I want to talk about a ‘feature’ of my phone which despite having had the thought to write about on here, I have forgotten to disable.

The feature may be present on other phones. I am not sure, for I only have one phone and one number. One number that has been mine for years. Because apparently this makes me reliable.

I could just have the same number and ignore calls from everyone but the ones I’m scamming at the moment

I mean, to be honest, with the advent of caller display I could even ignore the whole scammer thing, and focus on my proper business interests.

Or I could just ignore all calls and speak to only my partners in international organized crime, who of course are probably completely funded by pirate DVDs.

Yes they are.

But I have become distracted. I don’t know if any other phone has been coded by evil people who have created features like this one.

Features which are incredibly attractive until you actually realize that they do things that you don’t like. But you like the fact that your phone is magical and does these wonderous things that have been gifted on you by the phone angels.

The feature of which I speak, is, of course, the auto off feature.

It’s wonderful. Your phone will switch itself off at night for you, so you are not woken by phone calls. Quite important when you have lots of friends who feel the need to call you at 3am.

You know the kind of call. They’re stood in a field wearing a pair of shorts through one leg hole, and they’ve found a goat that claims to be your cousin.

More often than not, I am still awake and probably texting or on the phone at 1.30am. Depending on the two, the phone will either tell me “I’m trying to turn off, please stop using me” or … “I’m turning off now, goodnight.”

And despite the fact that I TOLD it to switch off at 1.30am, and can just as easily press a key and stop it from turning off, I am felt absolutely compelled to obey to it.

I just stand there and go “oh okay then, of course…. I’ll just go to bed too then.”

I mean, if my phone is going to bed. I should be going to. That makes sense doesn’t it?

Then, all of a sudden it makes me realize I AM OBEYING SOMETHING I SET UP MYSELF.

I can CHANGE the time it turns off.

I can tell it NOT TO TURN OFF AT ALL.

I would no longer be left with this overbearing sense of having to obey my phone. Like my phone is ruling me. I don’t like being ruled.

WHY DON’T I TURN IT OFF? I still do not know, and I better go because my netbook wants to switch off.

9-year-old Brandon lives with his brother, mother and step-father in a 2 bedroom flat on a council estate in Brighton and in the second episode of the series, Nic talks about how the programme came across for him. Coming soon.

I've always known about the theory that you should keep a notepad by your bed, because when you're in the little gap between conciousness and sleep you are at your most creative, or open minded, or something, but never before have I actually experienced an idea that comes to you when you're in that little gap.

The idea behind it, of course, is that in this little bit of semi-conciousness you're able to think up, for example, a fruit bowl that floats whenever you knock it off the counter, just so you don't have to sweep up the little pieces of fruit bowl.

Last night I did.

No, I didn't invent a floating fruit bowl, don't be silly. That idea is absurd.

I was in bed, texting as I do, because I have friends, and because I am surgically attached to my BlackBerry, when an idea for an absolutely GREAT blog came to me.

The idea was actually amazing. It made me go "oh that would work so well, and then I could say ... and that would be wonderful."

It was almost so wonderful as to make me move my leg slightly to the left as a physical recognition of my idea.

The next thought I had was that I should probably get up, write a few words down that would remind me of my idea. But no, I decided that - instead - I would not.

I would remember. My brain cells would come together, and store this vital piece of information for future reference when I was sat here staring at a blank piece of canvas.

Well not so much canvas as a blank box, that kind of looks a bit like it could be for writing in.

Sat here, right now, I have absolutely no frigging idea what that post was, other than it was absolutely amazing and incredibly hilarious.

That's right. It's not the fruit bowl that's floating. Instead, my ideas are floating off down the road.

What road? I do not know.

And I am very annoyed that I've forgotten exactly what it is I was going to write.

Anyone?

So, I don't want to say too much about all of this really, but I can't make a return to blogging (serious or not) without explaining exactly what happened to the Daily Nixx, and why it happened; what I've learnt from it and where I can make things better.

I don't think anyone will disagree with the fact that looking at certain things I've written is offensive. You come back from the posts thinking "well, that was all a bit nasty." And while that isn't exactly my intention, how I was using my blog was to give my opinion. As the site quite often points out, I have rather strong opinions about things and I tend to like to give them to people. There's nothing to say that they're right, or that I won't take into account and agree with your opinion either, though.

In fact, some people's opinions are almost as good as my own, I would sometimes be inclined to agree.

One of the other places I know I made a mistake, and can feel myself doing now, is slipping into my alter-ego character voice. A lot of you who know me for real, rather than just having read something I've written completely out of context and not understanding what it is I do, will know that I quite often am not very serious. I come across, a lot of the time, as arrogant. And that's because arrogance is good.

There are two ways that I believe arrogance has positive side effects.

In short little bursts, arrogance gives people the belief that you are incredibly confident doing what you're doing. You're doing it well, and you know it. And as someone who works with other people, a bit of arrogance is a bit healthy. All to often in the world of instructing people, I feel as if I have to state every single little bit of the job I want doing, exactly as I want it doing, along with a demonstration and a health and safety lesson, just to get it done even moderately well. Whether this is through fear of getting things wrong, or whether these people really don't have the confidence to do things without support at every single point I don't know.

The other time when arrogance is good is when trying to come across as arrogant in order to extract humour. Quite a lot of people will know that this works quite well a lot of the time, but comes with the risk of going badly wrong. Apparently, depending on how you read things, things can go badly wrong, and go right at the same time.

Then again, arrogance also has side effects. And that is, it offends the people who are the subject of your criticism.

The penultimate place where I went wrong and caused lots of problems for myself is that at no point did I actually say "The Daily Nixx is a blog, and everything on it is just what I say and do".

While I did have the disclaimer printed on every single page that I published on the site (even those which contained factual content) to say that everything was my opinion and not intended to be fact, this was not enough and was not clear enough. This blog, however, is a blog - and other sections of it are separated out into their individual component parts. All the reviews, for example, are now at http://nicparkes.com/reviews/.

I have also revised the disclaimer as part of my new footer - and introduced offence@nicparkes.com for anyone who is offended by anything I write. I will always be willing to talk to you if you are offended by anything I say or do, as it's almost NEVER my intention.

The final place where I went wrong? Writing about people other than myself. In future, I shall keep this to a minimum, but I can't promise anything because frankly I am going to do things that make me interact with other people. Where it is possible for me to, I will talk to the people and have pre-clearance from them on what the blog says.

These are unfortunate steps I didn't want to take - and I dislike not being free to write what I like, how I like, but in order to stop people from being offended and causing me problems - it's easier to just do as people want.

To those of you who might have liked my previous style of blogging, I'm sorry. It can't carry on, simply.

Nic x