Living in the past

As someone who was a teenager during the 80s, I was tickled to read that the original Now That's What I Call Music compilation has been recently rereleased on CD for the first time, to coincide with the 25th anniversary of its initial release.

Here’s the full track listing:

Disc 1
1. Phil Collins - You Can't Hurry Love
2. Duran Duran - Is There Something I Should Know
3. UB40 - Red Red Wine
4. Limahl - Only For Love
5. Heaven 17 - Temptation
6. K.C. & The Sunshine Band - Give It Up
7. Malcolm McClaren - Double Dutch
8. Bonnie Tyler - Total Eclipse Of The Heart
9. Culture Club - Karma Chameleon
10. Men Without Hats - The Safety Dance
11. Kajagoogoo - Too Shy
12. Mike Oldfield - Moonlight Shadow
13. Men At Work - Down Under
14. Rock Steady Crew - Hey You (Rock Steady Crew)
15. Rod Stewart - Baby Jane
16. Paul Young - Wherever I Lay My Hat

Disc 2
1. New Edition - Candy Girl
2. Kajagoogoo - Big Apple
3. Tina Turner - Let's Stay Together
4. Human League - Fascination
5. Howard Jones - New Song
6. UB40 - Please Don't Make Me Cry
7. Peabo Bryson & Roberta Flack - Tonight I Celebrate My Love
8. Tracey Ullman - They Don't Know
9. Will Powers - Kissing With Confidence
10. Genesis - That's All
11. The Cure - The Love Cats
12. Simple Minds - Waterfront
13. Madness - The Sun And The Rain
14. Culture Club - Victims

Now That’s What I Call A Trip Down Memory Lane. Somewhat worryingly, I’ve seen four of the above artists perform live. You can work out for yourselves which ones they are, though. To paraphrase the old Fun Boy Three song: my lips are sealed.

I guess it all makes sense. In recent years, while the parent series has successfully continued, repackaged Now compilations have tapped into a generation’s nostalgia for the decade which gave us New Romanticism, Dallas, Joan Collins’ shoulder pads and, er, David van Day (even the best of times has its darker moments).

I’ve previously commented on the current penchant for TV and film remakes, which has given us everything from the sublime Battlestar Galactica to the ridiculous Knight Rider. Elsewhere, we’ve had 80s reunion tours aplenty (it’s a bit disturbing to realise that the pop idols of yesterday age in exactly the same way you do), and comebacks from the likes of Take That and the Spice Girls. The Pet Shop Boys were given the Outstanding Contribution to Music Award at last week’s Brits. ('West End Girls' is – gulp! – 24 years old this year.) And I noticed a well-known high street fashion retailer has launched a range of T-shirts based on classic properties such as Danger Mouse (yes, of course I bought one).

Is nostalgia a healthy thing, allowing us to relive the happy times of our childhood? Or is it something we use as an excuse to ignore the growing feeling that, as we get inexorably older - and schoolkids and university students appear seemingly younger – we become increasingly out of step with contemporary culture? For while I still listen to modern pop music, am up to speed with Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Twitter, and generally make an effort to keep up to date with popular culture, that’s just the point: it’s an effort.

Deep down, there are some aspects of today’s culture that I just don’t get, and I occasionally catch myself thinking that things were so much better when I was a kid. I'll resist it for as long as I can, but I fear the end result is inevitable: as the father of a small boy, one day he will come to realise his dad is just plain uncool.

That will be a sad day. Still, at least I’ll have all my old Now albums to listen to in my dotage …

Can't get it out of my head

I keep finding myself humming The Locomotion because a colleague had his first baby, a girl, earlier this week, and named her Eva. (Little Eva, geddit?)

Anyhow, that segues nicely into one of my personal highlights of the week.

The Brits

Wednesday's annual music awards was, in many respects, fairly predictable. Duffy cleaned up, winning three awards. A big name - this year it was Coldplay - was nominated in several categories and came away with nothing. At least one of the 'live' acts - ahem, Take That - mimed their performance. There was a bit of a fuss over the fact that Leona Lewis - who notched up number 1 singles on both sides of the Atlantic in 2008 - wasn't even nominated for Best Female Solo Artist. The trendy favourites du jour - or those backed by co-ordinated Facebook campaigns (Iron Maiden) - won the big prizes.

In other respects, though, it was two hours of anarchic TV that demonstrated an ability to insert tongue firmly into cheek in a way the Grammys never would. From the moment dancing co-hosts James Corden and Mathew Horne joined Kylie Minogue in performing Can't Get You Out Of My Head to the Pet Shop Boys' closing medley (accompanied by the Killers' Brandon Flowers and Lady GaGa, no less.) There was a terrific live performance by double winners Kings of Leon. And the stage set - replete with cardboard cows, giant rubber ducks and a caravan - was, err, distinctly odd.

Somehow I don't think Sunday's Oscars will be quite this surreal.

Heroes

Heroes is back in the UK with volume 4 (the second half of season 3) next week. Even allowing for the fact that there will be two new episodes shown on Monday, this means we will be two full weeks behind the US, which is a shame. Now the BBC showed episodes from the first half of the season just a couple of days after US transmission, so I'm not sure why we have the two week delay this time around. Boo, hiss.

Whatever happened to the killer album?

It's probably partly due to the fact that iTunes has changed the way many people purchase and listen to music - for instance, I now frequently download a couple of singles by an artist I like rather than buy the full album - but when I do buy an album, I am frequently disappointed. More often than not, I will listen to a new album a couple of times, complain about the proliferation of 'filler' tracks, and then never play more than my favourite three or four tracks ever again.

Over the past four years I've bought probably 50 albums, but I can count on my fingers the number which I will still listen to without reaching for the fast forward button: Employment and Yours Truly, Angry Mob by Kaiser Chiefs; Lily Allen's Alright, Still; Rihanna's Good Girl Gone Bad; Eyes Open by Snow Patrol; We'll Live And Die In These Towns by The Enemy, maybe.

I bought three albums last week. The Sugababes' Catfights And Spotlights was hugely disappointing - two decent singles, not much else, 5/10 at best - I was glad I'd only paid £4 for it. I took a punt on Lady GaGa's The Fame off the back of her number 1 single Just Dance, and it's definitely grown on me after a second and third listen, but even though I'd rate it 7/10, I doubt I'll be listening to more than five tracks in more than a month's time. Finally, Lily Allen's It's Not Me It's You is also worth at least a solid 7/10, but if I fast-forward a year from now, I can definitely see myself plumping for Alright, Still in preference the next time I want to kick back to Allen's razor-sharp lyrics for 45 minutes.

That's the thing about killer albums. They don't come along very often - and with increasing rarity the older I get, it seems - and you automatically find yourself reaching for one you have heard a hundred times over one you bought just last week.

A couple of years ago, I listed my top 100 songs of all time. I really must have a go at naming my top 50 albums too; it would be interesting to weigh up how more contemporary albums stack up against, say, Brothers In Arms or Like A Virgin. I'll need a long think about what I want to listen to while I'm compiling the list, though ...

Valentine's Day

My parents were staying with us over the weekend, and kindly agreed to babysit on Saturday night to allow us to go out. We ended up going out for dinner at Carluccio's in Oxford (where we had a lovely meal), after my first attempt to book the local Thai in Newbury had me snorting in disbelief at their £36 a head 'special' menu - normally, a meal there is about £25 each - and their attempts to book us into one of their two sittings at 6.30 or 9.00pm. Who says Valentine's Day isn't a licence to print money? Restaurants, cards, flowers: everything seems to cost a fortune. Money can't buy you love - when it comes to February 14th, it doesn't seem to buy you very much of anything.

Zac update

Zac continues to develop apace. He seems to have put the challenge of walking to one side for the moment in favour of pushing and/or climbing on everything: he's been clambering on top of his toy box for a while now, but in the past few days he has been leaning on the rocking chair in his bedroom saying "Row, row, row" and then two nights ago he managed to climb and stand on top of the rim of the bath all on his own. Scary.

Other than that, he seems to be learning at an ever faster pace. I taught him how to knock on doors earlier this week, and he now waves "bye bye" energetically whenever he is leaving somewhere, or even to announce that he wants to leave. And then there are the seemingly random things that make him laugh: the latest two are burping (which is good for at least five minutes of non-stop cackling) and pausing a TV programme. No, I have no idea why either.

Tweet

It's early days yet, but I'm loving the growing social networking phenomenon that is Twitter.

If you're not familiar with it, Twitter is essentially like a cross between a blog and Facebook's status update. Entries - commonly known as 'tweets' - are restricted to a maximum of 140 characters, but within that constraint you can let people know what you're doing, share news, pictures and links to interesting web pages (utilising web address shrinkers such as TinyURL), or whatever else you feel like sharing with the rest of the world.

Twitter has fast become a hub for spreading news virally at a pace which traditional media cannot possibly match. For instance, on-the-ground reports and images of last November's terrorist attacks in Mumbai were circulating online via Twitter and Flickr long before the major news outlets had even mobilised - at its peak, eyewitnesses were posting 1,000 tweets every minute. And on a social level, it facilitates the proliferation of information about friends, favourite topics and even celebrities: from my Twitter feed, I follow the activities and recommendations of various cast members from Heroes, Jonathan Ross and the cyclist Lance Armstrong.

Like so many of the best ideas, Twitter is incredibly simple. It makes communication easier and quicker in a way that is accessisble - I can read and write tweets from my mobile - without being intrusive in the way that, say, instant messaging can be.

Anyway, you can find me on Twitter here. Join the club: it's growing fast.

Remakes

I was more excited than I probably should have been when I read today that the BBC are producing a remake of Day of the Triffids, scheduled to air later this year.

Remakes, 're-imaginings' or 'reboots' are nothing new. Indeed, over the past few years they have become something of a staple of TV and box office schedules. The small screen has given us Doctor Who, Survivors, Gladiators, Battlestar Galactica, Knight Rider and 90210, to name but a handful. And in our cinemas we have the revived Batman franchise, Ocean's Eleven, War of the Worlds (more on that in a bit) and the upcoming Star Trek.

But Day of the Triffids - perhaps more than any other - sends a tingle down my spine, half of excitement, half of fear. For while I, like many others of my generation, regularly watched Tom Baker's Doctor Who from behind the sofa, DotT sticks in my mind just as much as any Dalek or Cyberman yarn.

I remember well the original 1981 BBC TV adaptation of the John Wyndham novel - and the subsequent nightmares it gave me. With much of humanity blinded by a freak meteor shower, the triffids - giant, carnivorous and apparently sentient plants - roam Britain freely, killing with their poisonous stings.

It was years before I could look a daffodil in the face again without flinching.

Both the original book and the TV version are widely regarded as seminal science-fiction drama, and I was gutted when I missed a re-run of the serial on BBC Four a few years back. But now I will get the chance to see an updated version later this year, which will no doubt have me hunting down the original on DVD ...

I know I shouldn't be this excited. But I really am.

Much less exciting was the two hours we spent watching the Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise version of War of the Worlds over the weekend.

I can't deny that it is a visually stunning film; really and truly, it is hard to imagine how it could have been fully visualised without 21st century CGI. It was also generally well received by critics and generated significant box office takings (close to $600m worldwide).

However, as a story I found it somewhat vacuous and more than a little confusing. Understandably, many of the original story elements needed to be updated - H G Wells' original book deals in Victorian science and technology - but I was still disappointed by how far the film deviates from the original, and also at Hollywood-ised it had become. You see, WotW is a slightly unusual tale in that, in the book, the unnamed narrator is just that: he is more of an observer - the reader's eyes, ears and enquiring mind - than a traditional hero. The filmed version, however, is replete with set-pieces which are seemingly tacked on to meet audience expectations of the spectacular and Tom-Cruise-as-action-hero, just in case the basic story isn't enough to carry their interest.

One sequence in particular - and if you have seen both films you will know exactly what I mean - had me pinching myself to check I wasn't watching the velociraptors-in-the-lab sequence from Jurassic Park.

To top it all off, the ending of the film is pure Hollywood saccharine: Cruise's character and his daughter (who was so annoying I spent the entire final hour rooting for the alien invaders) are reunited with his ex-wife in Boston, to discover his son - who he thought had perished earlier - had in fact survived and preceded them there.

Oh, puh-lease.

What a terrible, terrible waste. A great book - albeit one which, on reflection, doesn't actually translate particularly easily to the big screen - and two of Hollywood's biggest box office names, but a distinctly mediocre film. And that's putting it kindly.

Still, in the interests of balance, I should say that Morgan Freeman's voiceover narration, which bookends the film, is, as ever, wonderful. That's about it, though.

People can be such idiots

Given that we are the most intelligent species on the planet, human beings all too frequently demonstrate the ability to do the stupidest things, which suggest that our survival instincts have been irrevocably dulled by too much civilised living.

Of course, there are the Darwin Awards, which annually celebrate the achievements of the spectacularly silly in removing themselves from the gene pool.

But over the course of the last few days, a number of stories - all of them resulting in fatalities - have caught my eye which range from the foolhardy to the murderous.

Don't cramp(on) my style

I can see the attraction of scaling the UK's peaks in the midst of the worst winter for nearly 20 years: the views must be spectacular, and the sense of achievement incredibly uplifting.

However ...

Since the beginning of last week, five walkers have been killed on Snowdon and in the Lake District in four separate incidents. In at least one of these cases, the unfortunate victim was thought to have set out without an ice axe or crampons, which strikes me as a tad ... Darwinian.

Sure, even the most experienced and fully equipped of walkers can be caught out by a sudden change in conditions or just plain misfortune. But to take to the mountains without the most basic of cold weather gear, well, there really is no excuse for that.

Very sad. But, you would think, all too preventable.

Defence? What defence?

Jorge Nogueira da Silva has denied six counts of death by dangerous driving. Based on the evidence which has already been reported, it is hard to see how he has any credible defence.

You will probably remember the story. Da Silva killed David and Michelle Statham and their four children - the oldest, 13; the youngest, just 10 weeks - when his 40-tonne lorry hit their stationary vehicle in a crash on the M6 last October.

The Stathams' car had been at the back of a queue caused by an earlier accident on the motorway. It's alleged that da Silva was distracted because he was using a laptop - found by police in the lorry's cab by the driver's seat with its screen turned towards the driver - to look for an alternative route to circumvent the tailback.

The prosecutor has said, "If he had looked he would have seen the queuing traffic for himself because the road was straight for over a mile before the queue started. He had plenty of time to see the queue because the trucks in front had been there for between one and two minutes before he arrived. For over a mile before the point of impact the defendant was not paying proper attention to the road - it was gross inattention."

The case continues.

Now, dying on a snow-bound mountain is foolhardy, but places only the individuals involved at risk. This is an entirely different kettle of fish.

Burn them at the stake

At the time of writing, the bush fires in the Australian state of Victoria had claimed 181 lives, injured at least 500, and destroyed over 1,000 homes, wiping out a number of small rural towns.

That's bad enough. But police are treating a number of the fire sites as potential crime scenes, and have vowed to try any suspected arsonists for murder.

Bush fires are hard to fully comprehend. They bear about as much resemblance to what we traditionally think of as a fire as a Formula 1 machine does to a toy car. Extreme drought and heatwave conditions, as have been experienced in the state in recent weeks, create tinder-dry conditions. So when a fire does start it can spread at astonishing speed - potentially faster than humans can run - as feather-light burning ashes are scattered great distances, starting fresh blazes which multiply exponentially. Add in unpredictable, swirling winds, and firefighters' attempts to create containment lines - typically they bulldoze or 'back-burn' swathes of bush to remove all combustible material from the path of the fire - have been rendered ineffective as the fires have changed direction.

They are, however, a natural phenomenon: bush fires are actually just part of nature's cycle of renewal. What is not natural, however, is the strange copycat phenomenon of arsonists starting their own fires under the guise of a bush fire. The Australian Institute of Criminology estimates that as many as half of the nation's annual 20-30,000 bush fires are the result of arson.

What possesses someone to do this is beyond the comprehension of most rational people; it's certainly beyond mine. Dying on a snowy mountain is foolhardy; using a laptop (allegedly) at the wheel is criminally negligent. Bush fire arson is a whole different ball game.

Being convicted for murder seems like a comparatively light punishment for people like this. In olden times, they used to burn witches at the stake. Somehow, this would be altogether more fitting for the bush fire arsonists.

White-out

This week, a certain four-letter word has never been far from people's lips. Yes: snow. (You were expecting something else?!?)

Spinning in a winter blunderland

It was fun for the first day or so, but it's been a pain in the arse ever since.

Monday wasn't too bad. The snow was a novelty and I had taken the day as holiday anyway. The plan had been to have a lie-in and then drive up to Oxford to do some clothes shopping unencumbered by a screaming one-year old. That unravelled pretty quickly, as it became obvious that the weather and the roads weren't going to co-operate, and Heather returned home with Zac having discovered the nursery was closed.

On Tuesday I managed the drive to work in just 40 minutes, instead of the usual 45. After a couple of heavy snow blizzards in Bracknell, I decided to head home mid-afternoon, only to discover that rain had fallen in Thatcham, melting most of the snow.

Knowing I had no meetings on Wednesday, I opted to stay at home and had the opportunity to do the nursery run with Zac on my own for the first time, which was good.

As for yesterday (Thursday), well, you can read about my (mis)adventures here.

And today, we had a couple more inches of snow overnight, followed by persistent light snowfall for most of the morning. Given that and the blanket severe weather warnings from the Met Office I opted once again to stay at home and follow the deteriorating travel conditions - one hour delays on the A4, apparently - from the warmth of my own house.

It's not supposed to get any better over the next few days, and many local authorities are already running out of salt. Apparently the Highways Agency reckons it needs 25,000 tons of salt a day, and the largest of the three mines used in the UK only produces 30,000 tons a year. Uh oh.

Super Bowl

Super Bowl XLIII was worth staying up for in the end, featuring a stirring comeback and two lead changes inside the final three minutes.

This was the 20th time in the past 21 years I've watched the Super Bowl live. I missed it in 2000 because we were on holiday in Hong Kong, but we managed to watch a delayed transmission of the full game - complete with Chinese commentary - in our hotel room the day after. (Incidentally, the Chinese do not appear to have a word for American football's various technical terms, so the commentary was regularly punctuated with words like "quarterback sneak", "sack" and "tight end". Hilarious.)

Sadly, this year I was on my own. Heather, quite sensibly, decided one of us needed to be awake enough to take Zac to nursery (a futile gesture, as it turned out), so it was a pretty lonely affair as I settled in to watch former American Idol finalist and Dreamgirls star Jennifer Hudson sing the national anthem - while on our road trip in 2004, we actually saw her perform live in Hollywood the week after she was eliminated from Idol - and tuck into my traditional half-time hot dogs. (Super Bowl night is all about the traditions for me.)

I'm really looking forward to the day when Zac is big enough to come out to the park and throw a football around. Some things just need to be passed on from father to son.

Zac update

Speaking of Zac, one of the upsides of being snowed in is that I've seen a lot more of him this week. He's becoming a very chatty boy, often chuntering quite happily to himself - I'd love to know what it is he's saying - and he continues to discover new words, adding "star" and "toes" to an already impressive vocabulary which includes daddy, cheese, keys, toast, bye-bye, night-night and wishy-mishy (washing machine). Bath-time has become an opportunity to play a variety of new games rather than a nightly chore. And it's wonderfully heart-warming when I walk into the room and he sprint-crawls over to me with a big beaming smile on his face, pointing to me and shouting "Da-ee! Da-ee! Da-ee!"

He's a lot of fun at the moment, and hopefully it's only going to get better as he learns to walk with confidence and continues to improve his co-ordination. But, my God, he's growing up fast!

Holding out for Heroes

Heroes kicked off the second half of season 3 in the US this week, although it looks like we will have to wait another couple of weeks before it is shown in the UK.

In the meantime, I've been rediscovering the earlier work of Wendy & Lisa, former members of Prince's band, The Revolution, who are responsible for creating all of the show's original music. Post-Prince, they released 3 albums (which I have buried away in a box of cassettes in the loft) and a series of singles between 1987 and 1990, with a distinctive sound reminiscent of both Prince and The Bangles. I'd forgotten how good they were.

Using your celebrity status for Good(y)

Life never ceases to surprise me.

I never thought I'd write a blog defending Jade Goody, but four months ago I did exactly that. And today I feel compelled to do it a second time.

Having been diagnosed with cervical cancer, doctors had given the (in)famous serial reality TV star a 40% chance of survival. After the discovery that the cancer had spread to her liver, bowel and groin, doctors have now withdrawn that prognosis and said they will focus on efforts to prolong her life.

Now, I have previously described Goody as an exceptionable person, an assessment I stand by. But nonetheless, and I am in no way regressing to a state of mawkishness here, this latest news is very sad. In particular, the way some people have questioned her seeking to make money from her plight - in the time-honoured tradition of Z-list celebs - by selling her story to the tabloids is kind of missing the point. It's a bit like tutting at someone's decision to get uproariously drunk in the event of an impending nuclear attack: it's all about the context, not the individual act.

Yet again, Caitlin Moran sums it up beautifully in her Celebrity Watch column in today's Times:

Why should she retreat from public view? Why shouldn't she keep giving interviews? After all, when the Times columnist John Diamond - Nigella Lawson's first husband - had cancer diagnosed, he did not retreat from public view; he wrote a weekly column, for which he was paid, in which he discussed his illness and, eventually, approaching death. It was deemed an informative, courageous act.

Goody's career, her main source of income, is as a reality TV personality. If she chooses to continue working - which is to say, continue being paid to reveal her life to the public - isn't the difference essentially that she is a working-class woman, talking to the mass media, whereas Diamond was middle class, and writing for a broadsheet?

Quite aside from the fact that people's reaction to news of their own terminal illness is different, is it so unfathomable that Goody would wish to earn as much as she could, and as quickly as possible, to give her children security?

Exactly. As a parent, if I had a terminal illness and had the opportunity to generate a large volume of cash to give my son a more secure future, would I do so? Of course I would. Wouldn't you?

Yes, we all remember the "Shilpa Poppadum" comment which sparked the Celebrity Big Brother race row. Yes, it was a terribly distasteful thing to say, knowingly, on national TV. Yes, I - like many others - despised her for doing so.

But let's put it into context. As Boris Becker once famously said after losing a match: "Nobody died." As a member of an ethnic minority, I've been called worse in my time. Prince Harry referred to an Army colleague as "Paki", and the fuss over that has died down pretty quickly. Nobody demanded Prince Phillip's allowance to be curtailed in the wake of his "slitty eyes" comment made on a visit to China. And, most recently, has Carol Thatcher's use of the word "golliwog" in the green room at the One Show (in reference to French tennis star Jo-Wilfried Tsonga) - a comment she refused to apologise for and resulted in her sacking from the programme - caused more than the merest ripple in a teacup? (Indeed, it has been referred to by more than one commentator as being an over-reaction by the BBC.)

What's the difference? Well, on the one hand, you have the third in line to the throne, the husband of the current monarch, and the daughter of Britain's only female Prime Minister. And on the other you have a chav of below-average intelligence from a deprived background, who in most people's eyes has done nothing to earn her money or celebrity status. Unlike the aforementioned three, of course.

Double standards, people?

Don't get me wrong. I totally subscribe to the view that Jade Goody had far outlived her allotted 15 minutes of fame long before the Celebrity Big Brother scandal. I too am bemused at the seven-figure earnings she has gained from Big Brother, the likes of OK! magazine and Living TV creating reality shows around the launch of her new perfume or her hunt for a PA. But, given the nature of her chosen 'career', I have no problem with her doing whatever she does to provide financial security for her family, because it's clearly not all about prolonging the fame thing any more.

And if the tabloid coverage of Jade's cancer story does something to raise awareness of - and potentially funding for - this most terrible of diseases, then maybe her celebrity status may be put to good use after all.

Now why is that such a bad thing?

Snow laughing matter

Since the beginning of the week, everyone has been full of the usual mutterings about how the country grinds to a halt the moment we see a couple of flakes of snow - although, according to news reports this is the worst snow the South East has seen since 1991.

Monday was bad enough, with all manner of travel problems: school closures, accident-laden roads, major disruptions to public transport, and the chaos at Heathrow - one runway was closed all day, the other for over an hour - which led to nearly 800 flight being cancelled. All in all, I was quite relieved to have already booked the day off as holiday, even if my planned post-Super Bowl lie-in and shopping trip had to be abandoned.

But after things had started to get back to normal over the past two days, we had another snowfall overnight - about two inches' worth in Thatcham - and, having spent yesterday at home, I thought I'd try to get into work, a drive of nearly 25 miles which involves a combination of sloping, untreated roads to get out of our estate, the A4, the M4 and then some smaller roads to get to the office.

I should have known better.

I encountered my first problem within 50 yards. To get out of our road, you have to negotiate a small roundabout, the approach to which is on a mild incline. With my rear-wheel drive car, I couldn't generate enough traction from a standing start to climb the slope, and eventually had to back up and take a run-up at it which owed more to blind faith than judgement. I had to use the same technique to escape the T-junction to get out onto the main road, and after much slow-motion sliding through the grey, icy slush, I opted for discretion as the better part of valour and decided to terminate my non-essential drive to work there and then.

However, that wasn't the end of it. Having made it back to our close, you have to turn right and negotiate a moderately steep slope to return to our driveway. I executed the turn with due caution, and promptly ground to a tractionless halt, rear wheels spinning hopelessly on the icy, compacted snow, a mere 30 yards from home. It took the help of a couple of neighbours, much shovelling and five stop-start attempts - all but the last ending with my rear wheels attempting a pirouette - to climb the slope before the car finally returned to its resting place, from which I now realise it should never have left.

Idiot.

And there we have it: the perfect example of why deciding not to attempt a non-essential journey in such adverse conditions is more sensible than pathetic. Chances are I would probably have made it into work OK - although that's by no means certain given that the M4 is apparently snow-covered in places between here and Bracknell - but with the temperature forecast to remain close to freezing for the rest of the day, there's no knowing how treacherous the roads might be by the end of the day. This is how people end up sleeping in their cars overnight.

Work's important - but it's not that important.