Tonight:
5°c
No sooner have we trundled onto the internet superhighway than we realise that there is always something revving up in the fast lane waiting to overtake us.
At the turn of the year, our household finally embraced iTunes, eMusic and all that Podworld offers. Better late than never, we became the Nanotastic family - squabbling over who had mislaid the charger. As the person who still keeps a square television and a cast-iron fax machine on the grounds that they work just fine, I could declare that I had joined the 21st century - assuming someone was unplugged from the Pod at full volume to hear me say so.
The 21st century has already moved on. "You need Spotify," says a young colleague. Not of the Clearasil variety: Spotify is the New New Thing that lets you download albums free for the (smallish) inconvenience of putting up with an ad every now and then.
Twittering - short instant messages of up to 140 characters, like composing a cyber-haiku - has replaced blogging as the up-to-date activity. Don't drink and tweet though. A friend emails (how retro) to say she had got carried away on pinot noir and tweeted to say how much she missed her ex - until she realised his new wife was more likely to read it than he was.
It's like the beginning of Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire, where we hear the internal chatter of dozens of minds in the plane as it descends on Berlin. Still, I relish the new world of instant interactivity - the great leap for mankind of our times. My only perverse thought is that it's worth sitting out a couple of developments seeing as the next one will be along soon. Tweet along, meantime.
* ALAN Bennett's Enjoy at the Gielgud has its querulous cast living under the eye of spooky observers sent to record their transition from slum to council flat. I once visited a new housing development on the campaign trail with Tony Blair. As he sipped tea from a china cup and the groomed family sat ramrod straight in the freshly vacuumed living room, granny turned to me in the kitchen: "It's very nice," she said, "But it's not real life is it?" Alison Steadman gets the biggest laugh of the night when discussing Lloyds. "Ooh that's one of the better banks." No longer.
* Red hair gets the praise it deserves in a new exhibition devoted to gingerism. I am unsure as to what qualifies, having faded to something you might politely call strawberry blonde, or what my son described as "dirty light brown", down the years. But you never really forget early years' membership of the ginger club with the pleasure of standing out in a crowd. Or the pain of being too strikingly visible to teachers looking for someone to blame. Catherine Tate, Simon Heffer, Mick Hucknall and Tilda Swinton, you know what I mean. But can we yet envisage a ginger Prime Minister?
