I know, I know, a hundred dozen hippies have asked the same, but with the various posts I've been reading on the issues surrounding the replacement of the British nuclear deterrent, it suddenly occurred to me that I'd never really considered this particular alternate universe.

I can't really see it. I try to consider what life might be like if Hiroshima and Nagasaki had never happened, but I don't really get very far.

I get to the mental vision of a pilot in a cockpit peering down through... whatever the window bit in a cockpit is called. I get to crackling radio and various explosions making loud noises and shocking light.

I can sort of hear a voice, "Oh, crap, nothing happened." But in an American accent, which for some reason my aural imagination just can't reach to without introducing Ben Affleck. I point blank refuse to bring Ben Affleck into this, so "Oh, crap, nothing happened" will have to stay in a slightly out-of-place accent.

Later, I can maybe see a bunch of scientists getting fired.

Other than that there's nothing. Possibly, the human race is extinguished by something a bit icky due to resources being redirected to biological weaponry. Maybe we, like, unite and colonise space and learn to communicate with sweater monsters. Maybe we sit around in kimonos all day and smoke an endless supply of marijuana.

Not that anybody needs reminding, but they're called alternate universes because they didn't happen, and in this particular case my head isn't filling in any blanks for me.

So. What's next?

But this is not how my laptop came back to life. It did not make it to the repair shop but instead came back by magic. Magic, I tell thee.

That thing that defies explanation. One minute broken, the next... million or so (during which nothing happened) minutes later... fixed!

It's amusing because I named the computer Persephone for no other reason than I like the phonetics of the name and it shows up in Firefly. Must have been a particularly auspicious day for the naming of technology, though, because this isn't actually the first time that this laptop has risen from the dead.

Serious dead. Not just a little dead, not just Missiedith-is-a-bit-incompetent dead. People wot know what they're talking about have spoken to me of doom.

Tinkering and prodding has proved inarguably ineffectual. The only thing capable, it would appear, of fixing my computer is magic. The letters should sparkle before your eyes, and not just from sitting in front of a computer for too long.

It only remains to quote the words of Alice from The Vicar of Dibley:

I remember the first time my budgie Carrot died. He came back to life, you know. A bit like Jesus but with feathers.

The glorious Indian I was so looking forward to only yesterday was tasty and glorious, just as I anticipated.

Until about 2-4 in the morning, during which period I got to enjoy it all over again in reverse, praying devoutly to the toilet bowl.

It's possible I'm being a little unfair, as I suppose my upset stomach might have been a result of exam stress. Other than that, however, I've been feeling perfectly unstressed, a serene picture of calm and tranquility. So I've decided to sideline the stress diagnosis and instead curse the takeaway.

The Chim-chim kids just got scolded by the librarian, and have, to all intents and purposes, completely ignored her. I'm mildly disappointed that she didn't catch them singing.

Are there any musicals out there featuring librarians as particularly prominent characters? I feel the need for a rousing chorus led by a lady in horn-rimmed glasses, preferably involving the swivelling-wheely footstool-stand things that help you reach the top shelf.

If anyone ever writes a Harry Potter musical that absolutely must be a feature.

Ooh, she's on a rampage now, for the printer paper must be refilled. Ooh-ah ooh. Bring on the high kicks and flying leaps.

And there will not be any damned alternative hypothesis.

Deleted: Long-winded blather and wangst on the degenerate state of my relationship with Statistics. Frustration over my inability to correctly input and output numbers, no matter how well I know what I'm doing. Joy and anticipation over leaving the topic behind for the rest of forever at the exam I have tomorrow.

Being thus cleansed, I will instead extol the virtues of the local Indian takeaway.

It's good. Damn good. I'm going to get up off my arse and get some food from there any minute now. They give you free salad with everything, which just seems so goodwilled of them. They're trying to help, you see? They want me to eat good food, but they'll help me to be healthy as much as they can too.

This day's been quite good, actually. It started quite slow, with a flavour of exam terror, and then moved on to a reassuring few past papers. And then I had a mini fit when I realised half my answers were wrong (but only just) and now I'm feeling ok again. After tomorrow, it will be over.

I have lots to smile about. As my girlfriend pointed out earlier (and as I, er, forgot) we've now been together for an intimidating 15 months. It's a complicated relationship, I suppose, seeing as there's also a mutual boyfriend included in it, but it works.

I am slightly interested, however, as to why an advert for County Estates (an approved letting agency) appears on my main page when I try to rebuild the stylesheet for this place. Fortunately it seems to disappear when I rebuild the main page, but still. Mystery mystery.

Apparently, there is nothing like weeks of fairly incessant math revision to make me crave full sentences. I miss them. I pine for the grammatical structure, and reminisce fondly over the innocent and unperverted use of apostrophes, commas and colons. I languish in my hunger for sentences that begin with capital letters. At this point I think I'd even settle for sentences that begin with actual words.

The arrows and logical quantifiers are determined to give me cancer of the puppy. Don't even get me started on the greek letters. It's a poisonous black malice that spider-scrawls from my pen these days.

Also? The students sitting at the table behind me just started singing Chim-chiminy Chim-chim Cheree Chim-cheroo. I swear. My brain isn't making this shit up. They really are singing. They were singing. I really hope they were singing, or else I have a whole new set of problems to try to manoeuvre about.

In other news, I booked my ticket to New Zealand yesterday. New Zealand: land of full sentences and large hill things. Could it sound any better?

Darlings, the bitch is back. This new year's resolution is to write at least one full sentence a day, even if it's only a descriptive fantasy on the death of entirely gratuitous i-s and j-s.

The left hand side is fine, I suppose, if you ignore the fact that they forgot to mention what they were integrating with respect to, but the right hand side...?

What does f(u)ⁿ even mean? f(uⁿ) - ok. (f(u))ⁿ - also bearable. fⁿ(u) - just about. What they have? Means nothing to me. Why would you even define a function with those variables if you were relating it to e^x? Why would you write anything even slightly convoluted for what is probably the easiest function to integrate of them all? I spent a long time being worried that it was all supposed to mean something to me before I thought to read the expression rather than try to solve it.

Ah. Then came the kooky message. Sex is fun. It took me this long to work that out.

I hate it when people do this. I get the same urge to stab people when letters from the cyrillic alphabet are used to spell out words in a language they were not intended for. The back-to-front N is not an 'n' sound. The back-to-fron R isn't even a consonant. I hate that people think they're being so incredibly cool and in touch when in actual fact they're just being hideously ignorant. If they had any genuine interest in Russian, or Mathematics, then maybe they would have made the effort to learn a little about either of the two, and in which case they'd know they were walking around with nonsense on their shirt/tatooed on their arse.

It's like the people that walk around with Chinese all over their clothing and skin, acting like it has a zen meaning for them or something. For most people, it's nothing but fashion, and it could just as well say something like "please anally rape me with a pick-axe" for all they're aware.

You know what I think I hate most about this design on CafePress? It's in the nerd section. This particular design came from proudnerd.com which has the slogan BE PROUD TO BE A NERD. WE'LL HELP YOU SHOW IT OFF.

I think I must take this oppurtunity to deplore any nerd wearing this design. The site's slogan on the basis of this design should be rather BE PROUD TO BE AN IGNORANT WANNABE SHEEP PERSON. WE'LL HELP YOU SHOW IT OFF. To top it off, the title of the design is "Integral Fun". It's supposed to be fun to watch the notation of my chosen subject get twisted and emptied of meaning just so some very stupid people can think they look a little cooler? Really? Fuck off.

Why would anyone be proud to be a nerd? Well, my view is that they can be proud to know what they're talking about on certain topics. The idea that fashion could do anything to further that is nothing but ridiculous to me.

But alcoholism is a disease, and to be honest, I have very little patience with anybody that says otherwise. Science says it's a disease, and unless you're a religious nut that still insists that it's turtles all the way down (in which case you're excused) you're not allowed to ignore science. So when you're calling someone an alcoholic, try not to make it sound like they're dirty in some way. They're ill. Some may be complete bastards as well as being alcoholics, but the two are not necessarily tied together in any way. The fact that a person's a bastard makes them so; the fact that they're an alcoholic just makes them ill.

Here goes.

I'm not an alcoholic. A few I've lived with would tell you otherwise. If I knew I had a rough day coming up I would have more than a shot of vodka with breakfast, and when the morning inevitably went disastrously I would come home and drink myself silly over lunch. My binges would never last more than 3-4 days, and I never developed a physical dependence. I did end up with a bit of an inconvenient tolerance and I was not fully in control. But alcoholism was not my problem, it was only ever a symptom of other problems, and when it got to the point that I felt I needed an alternative I found one with relative ease. It was equally as unhealthy and solved possibly even less than the alcohol, but at least I am now able to drink socially.

Not an alcoholic. But it scares me that I took those few steps along that path, or parallel to that path, and it was, as others have said before me, an unimaginable hell. Alcoholism isn't even a recognised diagnosis anymore. I've been writing about it like it is, but the problems relating to alcohol are really far more complicated than that. Correspondingly, it should be more complicated than just pinning a label to someone, but that's what I'm seeing everywhere George Best is getting mentioned.

Sexist remarks, racist remarks, homophobic remarks - we all get up in arms. Prejudiced, ignorant, and abusive remarks about alcoholics – and I'm left to worry that I'm the only one sitting here feeling uncomfortable.

Please, no more Asshole just wasted another liver.

Rather, Damn, alcoholism just got another one. Poor bastard.

I redesigned this blog at some point in the middle of the summer, and then failed terribly to implement my haphazard attempt at aesthetics. MT threw a bit of a fit at me, caomhin got whined at extensively, and then, fairly predictably, I gave up. I'd had my chance to do the fun bit, the mucking about with glue and paper and whatever random art materials I found easily to hand, and I was fairly happy to let the blog die in its second only-inches-away-from-default incarnation.

Now we're back to the point in the year at which I feel the need to rant excessively and frequently on the degenerate state of the stinking weather, and I find that the people I talk to in person are getting a little, shall we say, weary of the topic. Most of the personal blogs I used to read have gone the same way as this one, which I find sad.

Defunct. It's a brilliant word. The sound of it. De-funct. Funked.

The combination of these factors and fair level of boredom has resulted in me fiddling about with this place again. I figured, if I messed it all up and the page ended up looking like a Picasso with leprosy then it didn't really matter because - defunct. But I think it's turned out rather well, at least in terms of what I set out to do...

Shame about the sidebar. It hangs by a thread, a casualty of the surgery. I hereby attach a "fix me" label to it.

Edit: So apparently it only looks relatively half-way decent if you have a freaky widescreen resolution. Blah.

The mistake began, as mistakes often do, with excuses.

Dom had two excuses. The first was that he was very drunk. Arguably, this wasn’t a very good excuse, as it was entirely his own fault that he was this drunk; he was the one who drank the beverages that got him this drunk even if he didn't quite pay for them all himself. Hiding behind a self-inflicted chemical toxicant is generally a really stupid thing to do, but then Dom was really stupidly drunk, so that fitted remarkably well. A fair few particularly unkind people might (almost-certainly-would) say that Dom managed to be pretty stupid the rest of the time too, but the fact remained that alcohol was at this juncture a rather convenient excuse.

The second excuse was that he was right. Of course, this is routinely appreciated far less often than most people, in this case Billy and Elijah, are comfortable admitting. This makes being right a very weak excuse and one which is only very rarely accepted.

Dom was drunk. Dom was really stupidly drunk. But he was nowhere near drunk enough for the second excuse to sound like a good idea, so he kept quiet about being right and stuck to being drunk.

Which, as he actually was drunk, was a very easy thing to do, and it wasn’t entirely his own fault. Elijah was the one who suggested going out. And… that’s about as far as apportioning blame elsewhere could be stretched.

Is the point made? Is it thoroughly clear yet quite how drunk Dom was? Very drunk. Really stupidly drunk. It’s important to get that established.

If Dom hadn’t been quite so unwisely inebriated, he would never ever have said what, unfortunately, he did in fact say. He had been very thoughtfully not saying these things for quite some time, despite periodic bouts of drunken revelry, and now, having said what should undoubtedly have never been uttered out loud, all Dom had to add was that he was really stupidly drunk.

“I’m really stupidly drunk,” he said, and gave up on making the situation any worse than it already was. He cocked his head slightly to one side and wondered if he dared add anything further, escaping Billy’s narrowed gaze only to fall into Elijah’s threateningly impassive mask.

Elijah didn’t often look scary. Once Dom got over the slight feeling of alarm he initially felt at being presented with irises that were in all likelihood brilliant enough to be radioactive in their colour, he had failed to find Elijah in the least bit scary. Sean would never have let them walk around with a radioactive health hazard in their midst in any case.

Oh, shit, Dom thought as he realised he really was saying everything out loud tonight.

“Oh, shit,” he said, and was unsure as to whether the words came out before or after he had thought them. Friends. Far from amused. Dom took a last look at Billy silently passing him another drink before picking up somebody else’s tobacco pouch, still muttering about being very drunk.

Time to learn how to roll cigarettes for people, and what better place to practice than underneath the table? In a bar with bad music. And a 2-for-1 offer. Dom unceremoniously slid under the table onto the sticky floor, and thanked deities of merriment that there wasn’t any broken glass to be sat on.

*

Dom was gone, Elijah realised, and his leg promptly reacted with violent spasm, resulting in the abrupt connection of his toe with a limb of unspecified identity. It could very well have been an arm, or possibly even a right-calf, but the relevant detail was that it was an unspecified limb belonging to Dom, and that as unlikely as it was that Dom would actually notice any of the pain received courtesy of Elijah’s violent leg spasm at the current time, there was a slim possibility.

Possibility enough for the effort to feel less than a total waste, slim enough for the action to be generally unsatisfactory; leaving Elijah completely lacking in the attainment of either retribution or closure.

So, Dom was gone and Elijah was left in the shit.

But this was Billy, so hopefully dramatics could be avoided. Elijah swallowed and smiled, façade to façade in breaks and waves, and the only reason he was at all comfortable with this was because Billy was friend. And friend was Billy.

Elijah went to take another sip of his drink, as that was undoubtedly a part of the general code of behaviour for young males experiencing an anticipatory awkward silence in which to contemplate the more purposeful and intense awkward silence yet to inevitably come.

He stopped to glance at his drink with his lip on the glass. Thought of Dom, as one is wont to do when a body is taking up all of the legroom. Drunk Dom, far-gone Dom, and Billy sat opposite Elijah, folding, or more accurately bending with intent, a beer mat. Elijah put his drink down and thought of something to say.

It took him a while. He got a bit stuck. Elijah found himself struggling to produce what he could view as adequate and appropriate words, a predicament understandable and far from simple.

“Well, yeah,” Elijah agreed with nothing in particular but probably too much. His nails felt chewy and he wondered if now would be an ok time to cough. As much as the uncomfortably necessitated honesty felt like it should stick in his throat, it really didn’t, and Elijah glanced around nervously again. He had acquired over the years a false sense of security, a degree of surety that this specific awkward silence would never have to be endured.

“I agree. This…it’s good. And it’s better…that we’re friends,” Elijah said.

*

Oftentimes Billy would choose to give as little away as he could. When there was something he really wanted to hear he would sit quietly, for a while, until something struck him as amusing or he’d heard enough to know roughly what he wanted to say in return.

At that moment, however, that would obviously have been really quite a cruel position in which Billy might place his friend Elijah. The situation was already far from pleasant, and he also was of the view that this conversation was not one that ever needed to be spoken. But in the spirit of charity, Billy contributed his fair share to the rescue of the evening, and unlike Elijah his voice did indeed stick a little. Maybe he’d been drinking beverages of a less smooth nature.

“Well, of course, we could have had something.” Billy was torn between requiring greater beverages quickly and soon, and the undoubtedly wise view that there had been more than enough drinking this night. “But it never would have worked out between us. We would have been an annoying tragedy, and clearly quite predictable.”

Elijah nodded slowly. “I saw it. You saw it. And we were filming, and there was all that mess with… yeah.”

“Even Dom saw it,” Billy continued, and the silence became less awkward. “We both know he’s right.”

Which just goes to show that even Dom occasionally underestimated his friends, and that no easily available excuse should ever be discarded.

“Murgh,” said Dom, which probably meant ‘I am happy that my wisdom and insight are appreciated.’ The noise travelled up from beneath the table, but unfortunately the product of the cigarette rolling session was a very abstract interpretation of the concept. It could never be smoked. Very abstract.

“We maybe could have. Just after filming. Just tried.” Billy voiced all their thoughts, or what would have been all their thoughts had Dom been sober enough to concentrate on any one thing for more than a handful of seconds.

“But what’s the point of trying something when you already know it won’t work?”

Too young. Too old. Too pretty. Too somewhere else. Too compromising. Too busy. Too messy. Too tired. Too needy. Too clueless. Too insecure. Too slutty. Too complicated.

“And we wouldn’t have been friends once we were done.”

Wanted kisses and smooth skin and warmth. Cleverness and fingers with surrender. Eyes and need, more kisses. Sweaty sheets for night after night, and the difference between Billy and Elijah right then was that Billy considered how much laundry that would create.

Didn’t care, of course.

Naked Elijah spread out and wanting, and laundry wasn’t the thing that made Billy think, no.

Not a good idea.

They wouldn’t have been friends once they were done, and being sensible hobbits of varying age they both knew well to value friends.

“Bleurgh,” said Dom, which probably meant ‘It is a good thing that you never bothered putting yourselves through that and I am very drunk.’ Or possibly, ‘There is an imminent risk of my throwing up over your shoes.’

Luckily, that is the kind of distasteful happening that friendships survive.

[whispering hissy voice] My blog... it is void. It is empty and deformed. Things are in bad places on the page. It is wrong and awful.

[hysterical sniffly voice] Never bothered me before, I know, but I look at it now and it hurts! It burns! It pains me in imaginative ways that I cannot articulate. Warren Ellis type specified pain. The kind you look at sideways and wonder whether that's really physically possible with a chemically unfavoured hot poker, and then, ow, yes it is, because it bloody well hurts and it bloody well is happening.

[incoherent screaming causing inordinate pain to voicebox]

[moans of a non-sexual nature]

Damn them. Damn them all to hell.

I was doing so well ignoring this repository. Then came the comment-spammers, and I don't know what possessed me. I clicked, and suddenly I beheld the extra special crap factor.

In other news, I won't be late for work again, because I quit my job. Drama drama drama.

My name is "not fucking Warren". But I do work here. And if you don't get the reference then you haven't spent enough time watching and rewatching the scene in which Arwen's dress is all see-through.

The world should spend more time looking up Mary Poppins' crinoline.

Thread of continuity? It's one of those magic invisible ones.

Need a shower. Going to be late. Skin crawling. Cherry pudding in the kitchen. That's breakfast. Mmmm.

And the water hits me, not too hot, not too cold. Refreshing, and if I had the time I'd make it cold, colder, as cold as I can bear, just to stop my skin from trying to fold in on me. But no time. Quick. Stingy with the shampoo, never works, back for more.

Towel on my head and run naked through the kitchen? Could do. Nobody in the house. Meh. Go with modesty after all, and let the water drip down my neck, down my back, carry the shower with me and keep it running as long as I can.

Pause for more pudding. Mmmm.

Sit on bed. Write a blog entry. Because obviously, if I lack even the time to have breakfast, I still have more than enough moments to throw down words for a blog entry.

Splat, splat. Words hit the page and I half expect them to drip.

Going to be late for work.

People kept reading the newspapers in the shop where I work. The only thing I could think of to do was to keep turning the radio up. But they kept on and on reading the newspapers.

Instead I will recount the journey that got me here. Travel writer. That's me. Probably the most disastrous ever, due to the fact that my travel never goes as planned, and I generally forget to bring along something to write with.

To begin with I wasn't going because I had no money. Then I got paid. Which was very nice. Then I wasn't going because I had to work. Then I got the day off. Then I wasn't going because there weren't any guests I was particularly interested in.

For reasons that are still not quite clear to me, I found myself in Milton Keynes alighting from a coach. Things were going well up until that point. I've determined that much. Then, I started walking down a road, and that seemed to go well enough as well. I looked up how to get from the bus station to the hotel beforehand online and felt, if not confident, then at least carefree.

I walked through a village and swore never to leave the cities again. I walked down country paths and anticipated getting attacked by drug dealers. I circumnavigated a tree that had been blown down. I tried not to think of anyone losing their virginity in the field I was traipsing through.

I pitter-pattered over a cattle grid.

I got directions, and things seemed to be looking up. Then suddenly I was in the middle of a field, but there was no path. I made for the noisy road. I detoured around a bog. I realised the only gap in the fence was directly before me.

On the other side of the bog.

I crossed the bog, ended up having to climb the fence anyway, and after a little more stomping in miscellaneous directions, I found myself in a lorry park.

It occurred to me at this point that I had slightly less clue than any clue whatsoever as to my location, that it was getting dark, that my boots were no longer as foot-loving as they once were, and that Milton Keynes is an evil evil place. Somehow I doubt that I will be presented with the oppurtunity to kill the city planners horribly, as I strongly suspect that many others before me have partaken of this pastime. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for some remains I can desecrate.

Mobile phones are a great advantage. I phoned the person I was supposed to be meeting (or rather she phoned me to find out where the hell I had got to and whether she was likely to get food in the next decade) and she came out to find me.

Long story short, we each stood at roundabouts and described them to the other, only to come to the realisation that

1. Milton Keynes is made up entirely of roundabouts.
2. Said roundabouts all look identical.
3. I should have got a taxi.

After going through 3 or 4 roundabouts between us, we eventually found each other and lived happily ever after. With taxis.

And then I spent lots of money that I didn't have.

It's curled up in bed with me.

It makes all the right noises and keeps going until I'm finished, until I'm flat on my back and blinking.

Baby, it knows how hot it is so well that it comes with an inbuilt fan.

Not that I'm basking or anything.

Laptop. New laptop. My laptop. I feel like I've regained a limb, like there's a whole neglected part of me that's stirring, flexing, ready to start directing and empowering me once again... I'm online. I'm plugged in. I'm hooked up. I'm like a junkie that just got handed a business supplying.

This may not be healthy. I really don't give a shit.

This hotass is mine.

My laptop broke. After the del key fell of the power cable started to look a bit dodgy. Then wire started poking out from under the cable covering bit. Then it stopped working. Then I wiggled it. Then that stopped working. Then I attached tape-plaster stuff, then a cable tie, and then I wiggled it some more. And then the end was nigh, because the above mentioned methods ceased to be effective.

So, really, it was a rather drawn out process and a situation that developed over a matter of weeks, if not months. Calling a short entry fitting is a product of me maintaining my comfortable state of lazy arse. But this is all I'm writing, because, er, it was an incredibly emotional sundering of a girl and her lifeline to fake realities...

(Translate: I'm still a lazy arse.)

...and I do not wish to dwell on the last 50 minutes I spent typing before the battery went dead.

(Translate: My hands are cold and I still need to shower before work. Which I will be late for. Again.)

My laptop lies dusty underneath my bed. Occasionally I talk to it in my sleep. We have fulfilling conversations on the matter of how to rescue Princess Leia from Lord Sauron, and exactly how much pizza will be required to distract the orcs. How much longer we'll have to wait until Flash Gordon shows up.

I type on somebody else's laptop, listening to somebody else's music, eating somebody else's chocolate. I'm supposed to be buying myself a new laptop, but I keep running scared.