I've spent the last few days working on the Tim Rose website. I've created a page where people can leave messages of condolence. Tim had many fans and friends - it was typical of the man that many were both - and there have been plenty of messages left on the board and there are still messages coming in.

I've been trying to keep track of the obituaries. There are not that many - Tim was a great musician, but comparitively little known. His death didn't even make the news pages of any online sites, which is a little sad.

That's the way life gets you, doesn't it? Happy and sad, all in the same day.

We got an e-mail this morning from Susanne's brother in Berlin to say that his girlfriend had given birth to a boy.

Then shortly after that I got a call from a friend to say that Tim Rose, whose website I had designed and maintained, had died this morning.

When you first spoke to Tim, he could seem quite forbidding - he had a rich deep voice (he used to do advertising voice-overs as a sideline) - but he turned out to be a pussy - genuinely sweet and good-natured.

"Hi, Rawdney," he would drawl over the phone - years in London having never eroded his accent - "how are you?" He always remembered to ask after my girlfriend, even if he sometimes got confused as to whether she was a fraulein or a colleen.

He was also an optimist. At the age of 62, having never quite made it big in the music industry, he was hugely hopeful about the success of his latest CD, American Son. It was odd to hear him sing - that deep, angry growl, protesting against so many things at an age when so many are happy to take it easy.

One of his last songs was called Live It To The Brim:
Live it to the brim
Shake it now and then
Live it to the brim
Just be you!

I'll try, Tim, I promise. And thanks.

Look, I don't have any objection to being asked for information.

I don't mind being asked to take part in online surveys. I do object to not being allowed not to take part in a survey.

So when I followed a link to the Washington Post and was confronted with a form asking for information for their records, I chose to pass. I was in a hurry. But it wouldn't let me pass. I had to fill in the form.

So the Washington Post is now aware that they have a reader who is a 100-year old Albanian woman.

(She would have been even older, but their entry form refuses to accept that anyone can be more than 101 years old. )

What exactly was I thinking?

You know the saying, "your belly is bigger than your stomach"?

Well, my belly must have been enormous yesterday because I came home with a tray of figs. There must be about twenty of them there.

In our continuing tour of London's markets, we went to Notting Hill and wandered round Portobello Road. There were lots of little antique shops, and some stalls with excellent clothes at reasonable prices - I bought Susanne a woollen top that she really liked.

On the way to the market, there were lots of street stalls with fruit and vegetables, and fish, meat and other stuff. They had fresh figs, five for £1.

Further up the street, they had six for £1. Eventually I found a place that had a whole tray for £2. I like figs. We bought the tray.

Then we walked back and as we did so we realised that figs can actually be heavy. We also went to Chelsea and wandered down the King's Road. The figs got heavier.

We got the train back from Victoria and I tried tasting a couple. They were okay but not great taste-wise. But I read somewhere that they taste better if they're warm, and you should leave them in the sun for a couple of hours. Which is fine for Sicily, but not London in late September.

So I am going to try baking them. And then forcing everyone to eat them. I can't just throw them away.

Having things in common is usually a good thing in a relationship. Unfortunately, Susanne and I have in common that we are not very good at getting out of bed in the morning, especially at weekends.

Actually, that's not always a problem ...

But I digress. A number of times over the past few months, we've planned to go out to see some of London's market, and in particular to get some plants and flowers for her new flat.

Well, after a bit of research I suggested a trip on Sunday to the East End. There are three markets in fairly close proximity: Petticoat Lane, Brick Lane, and Columbia Road.

Petticoat Lane is probably London's oldest street market, and there were lots of stalls, but nothing especially interesting - rather dull clothes mostly, the sort you would buy in chainstores. We gave up on this after a while.

Brick Lane is nearby and a lot more fun. Actually, Brick Lane is even more famous for its curry houses - it has a large Bangladeshi community - and we had a lot of fun wandering round an Asian food store which had various vegetables we'd never seen before as well as a huge variety of spices, and huge frozen fish.

Eventually we found the market, which was further up, and there were lots of little shops as well selling quirky items, including some nice trendy designs. There was a flea market selling daft antiques - mainly old junk that it was difficult to imagine anyone buying.

We stopped to eat. You really can't go to Brick Lane without buying a beigel. In the rest of the world, these are known as bagels (rhymes with table), but in Brick Lane they're known as beigels (rhymes with bible). They're famous for it - one shop is even open 24 hours a day.

Finally we got to Columbia Road which is quite small and very narrow but really good - we got a big bunch of sunflowers for £5 and there were lots of bargains in shrubs and pot plants. There are also some shops selling garden stuff such as pots and gardening equipment, and we really wished we had a car and a large budget because we could have bought lots of lovely stuff and brought it back south of the river.

It's just me, isn't it? I am not like other people.

I got a mailing through the post offering me a free bottle of gin. Well, actually if I send them off lots of information about myself I might win a year's supply of gin, which is apparently just 24 bottles.

But in the terms and conditions of the competition, there is one line in bold type: Please drink sensibly.

Any other person would quite reasonably interpret that to mean, please do not over-indulge in drinking gin, please do not drink all 24 bottles in one day.

I on the other hand immediately had a mental image of people standing around with glasses of gin and sort of wobbling them or waving them around and spilling most of the drink on the way to their mouths.

Then today I saw a job advert which said Salary: Neg. Normal people would think that means 'negotiable'. I of course assumed it meant 'negligible'.

Of course in practice it may well amount to the same thing.

I got an e-mail from Jen, who has been sailing in a boat off the coast of Australia, but I gather she's come onshore for a bit, because she asked me to update her weblog. She posted a long entry on Blogger and it wasn't showing up.

She gave me her details - so now I can secretly update her site and you won't know if it was me or her! But I managed to behave myself and I tried and tried to publish the entry she'd written but failed.

Eventually I had the bright idea of trying the Blogger Pro option that allows you to update by e-mail. Which I did, with a test entry.

When I refreshed the page, not only had the test entry appeared, but so had the original one I was trying to publish. So I deleted the test entry.

But now Blogger is claiming to know nothing about the test entry, even though it's still on the page. Damn.

Or rather, Blugger.

UPDATE - I've finally managed to get this sorted out. The problem is something with Blogger Pro2, which is being an arse. It used to do this sort of thing to me, too. I'm so glad I moved over to Movable Type.

So, quite possibly you knew that in the UK you dial 999 in case of an emergency. It's the same number in Ireland. In the US, it's 911.

What about other countries? In Spain, it's 091 for the police, but 061 if you need an ambulance and 080 if you need the fire service. But in France, it's 17 for the police, 15 for an ambulance, and 18 for the firefighters.

Confusing, huh? A real mess if you're in another country and you set your hotel room on fire or you get attacked by an unhinged bishop, er ... to give a couple of highly plausible examples.

But no, actually it's not a problem. As this web page points out, there is actually a single code for the entire EU. It's 112. Anywhere in Europe, even in the UK and Ireland, you can dial 112 and get the emergency services.

Why did no one tell me this? Is it common knowledge, and I just missed it? Isn't it the kind of thing that might be useful to know?

I notice I've been getting a fair few hits from Letter To Slugger O'Toole, a weblog about current events in Northern Ireland.

I don't automatically link to anyone who links to me - partly out of pure laziness - but Slugger, written by Mick Fealty, is an excellent guide to what's happening in Northern Ireland. If you want to read a bit deeper and get behind the clichés and stereotypes, I can heartily recommend the site.

That last entry was about wasps. Honestly.

I just looked at the date on it and realised that - on this day, anyway - beginning an entry with 'they just fall from the sky' was maybe not so clever as it originally seemed ...

They seem to just fall from the sky.

Everywhere I go - well, everywhere in my flat, at least - I keep seeing wasps lying on the floor, with their legs in the air, breathing their last. (Do wasps breathe? Anyway)

I have not done anything ... they just fall down and shake, feebly. It must be the end of the summer, then.

Well, the Best British Blog Competition is under way, and both Meg and Tom have wished the entrants good luck. Not just some of them - all of them.

The problem is, that's a complete waste of time.

Obviously, success in a competition shouldn't be a result of luck, but it usually is. That's not my point. My problem is this:

Why wish everyone good luck? It's pointless.

I know this, and yet I've done it myself: sold raffle tickets and wished everyone who bought one good luck. You even find yourself saying, "Good luck, everybody!"

It sounds nice, and positive. But then so does the Reader's Digest competition where they give you not one but five entries. And yet, if everyone has five entries, they have exactly as much chance as if they had only one.

It's the same with 'good luck'. Only the person who wins will have had good luck. Everyone else won't. So if you wish everyone good luck, it's completely pointless. It only works if you wish some people good luck, and not others. It's the whole point of luck - it can't work for everyone.

Of course, that sounds like favouritism, which is why we try to avoid it. But you're actually better favouring some people than favouring everyone equally, and ineffectually.

Then again, it only matters if wishing people good luck actually helps them, which clearly it doesn't.

I know I shouldn't fret over stuff like this, but I can't help it.

Okay, I think I need to go and lie down. Sleep well, everyone ...

So we went to Surrey Quays shopping centre, which is fairly handy by bus, and when we were there we discovered that German coffee-and-bathroom stuff shop Tchibo has a branch there. And pretty good it is, too. Not as good as the German version, which has about 30 types of breads and pastries, but still good.

My only concern is that, among the stuff on sale is The Talking Toilet Ghost. Horror of horrors! This is exactly the same item I noticed in Berlin - a device that lurks under your toilet seat and harangues men to persuade them to pee sitting down.

Guys, we've got to stick together and reject this intrusion on our precious freedoms.

Will we take it sitting down? No!

The first screen kiss between members of the same sex came in a 1922 film by Cecil B DeMille called Manslaughter.

Kissing is still banned in films made in Iran and Turkey.

Yum yum.

I know the above facts because I read them on a sweet - Fantales (A Chewy Caramel With A Rich Choc Coating) which Jen very kindly sent me. Actually she sent me a whole packet, and they survived the trip from Australia remarkably well.

Each sweet has Movie Trivia on the wrapper, which means you can chew and wonder at the same time. Hence the facts (unchecked, but entertaining) I reported above. Yum yum.

Unfortunately, as with the last sweets given to me by Jen, they're made by Nestlé, who kill babies. Damn.

I think I dreamt of long wooden benches.

Today was Philipp's first day in school. I mean, until June he was in school in Ireland, where he was in the Higher Infants class - universally known as High Babies.

But today he's in London, in Year 3, and we had to go out and wander into the playground and find his class teacher and hand him over. We left him there where they were doing Assembly, which is this strange English thing where all the kids in the school sit around on the floor and the headmaster talks to them.

I had heard about this, but never saw it done before. I went to school in Ireland and they never bother with that sort of behaviour.

Anyway, last night I was reminiscing - the way you do - and I remember there were about 42 kids in my school, all boys. We used to sit in long benches with about 8 kids in each, facing the blackboard.

And suddenly, there I was in the corridor, waiting in the queue to buy copies (copybooks) and pencils from the little school shop. And the tiny motes of dust dancing and shining in the sun that streamed through the windows.

I think I dreamt of long benches and copybooks.

What do you remember from school? Was it good or bad? And has it changed?

I feel a bit like the guy in the play who was told he was talking prose, and he said:

"Prose? You mean I've been speaking prose all my life? Cool!"

I ... I may be paraphrasing there slightly.

Anyway, I've been reading about RSS feeds and stuff, and I remembered that Movable Type creates a feed for you. If you go
here you can read it.

Don't ask me what it is though. I've been reading about it on Troubled Diva and I figured, "Sure, that's what all the kids are doing these days. I too must have one of those things".