I've just had a full blown, head-in-the-hands, hide-under-the-duvet-and-cry sort of mid life crisis. It didn't last long, but while it did, I lost all sense of perspective and felt worse than I have in years.

As you can imagine, this is a deeply personal experience that I wouldn't even feel comfortable talking to my best friends about. So I thought it would make sense to share it with the entire online world. This piece had been deleted because I had an attack of the jitters after I posted it. Anyway, due to public demand it's all here now.

A Fruit Bat stopping for a spot of lunch.

I've been playing with the Jay Word poem. I wondered what might happen when I fed it through the Google Translate service, and now I know. What strikes me as particularly interesting is the little changes which then become big shifts in meaning through later translations. If I were very clever I might even be tempted to express that as a graph. But I'm not, so I won't.

Just so you know, the poem was mashed up through Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Greek and Russian translation engines.

Corpse of an Oystercatcher

Hanging under a barn roof, outside a remote farm, somewhere in Wharfedale.

I woke up this morning with a brilliant idea.

It was a world beater. It was the best idea I'd ever had. It was probably going to revolutionise the future of home entertainment as we knew it, and it was something that would work. After all those years of wondering how I was going to make my fortune, this big idea had splashed into my dream with all the clarity of a message from the angels...

A poem about sex and chocolate...