So it's 2009 and temperatures are in the high millions. I'm sitting at my computer, minding  my own business, watching a clip about evolution on youtube...You can see this clip in the  'atheism blues' section under the sub-heading 'Darwin is a Twat'. It's at the bottom and I  liked it. Anyway, I digress. I'm sitting minding my own business watching this clip and  suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I notice a blob. My wife's away on a residential  course so I know it can't be her. What can it be? It's a blob on my left arm. I'd made a  coffee earlier so maybe, I reasoned, I blobbed myself with early morning coffee-making  clumsiness. I wiped off the blob with my finger and carried on watching the youtube clip  about evolution. Then, to my surprise, I realised that the blob was back. It wasn't bigger  or smaller. It was identical in every way. With the curtains closed to the bright sunlight I  hadn't noticed that it was a red blob. 'Ohmigod!' (And I say that ironically). 'Ohmigod!' I'm  bleeding a blob! And I was. I went into the kitchen and every time I removed the blob with a  piece of kitchen roll it came back again. I was pumping up the blob with my own human blood  supply. What could be going on? My theory - and I don't say this in the Darwinian sense but  merely in the conventional one - is that an insect came up and bit me. I didn't see it. I  hadn't been spiteful to it or participated in some sociopathic etymological family feud in  which I'd somehow offended its mum or ruined its life without realising. Why did it hate me?  What was it thinking? But how can we know the ways of insects? I didn't even see it. That  doesn't mean I don't have a blob, spreading like a flood of darkness beneath the pad of this  round plaster on my arm. It doesn't mean that the lumbering footsteps of some drunken bully  of a mosquito don't resonate through the hall as it makes its way to the garden, my life's  juices running down its hairy chin as it chuckles and slobbers in satisfaction. I may become  an insect myself, having now been injected by this Kafka with multifaceted compound eyes.  People will wonder why Quake 3 has been running in my room for days and enter to find me  sitting on the ceiling licking the final flecks of meat from the skeleton of the dog. It  seems quite unfair and certainly a disproportionate retaliation by insect-kind for any  inadvertent crushings or swattings I may have inflicted on it over the years. Indeed, there  are times when I can be most scrupulously humane to insects. Spiders, not insects but close  enough for the purpose of this babble, sometimes abseil or bungee jump their way toward  destruction in the loo when I wee. Do I just wash them to their doom with wee rays? I do  not. I catch them and release them in to the garden where, in the freedom and safety of the  lawn and hedges, they can evolve into communities of carnivores and come back to get me in  my old age. I'll be going to the loo and a six-foot arachnid will pounce out from behind the  door. I'll try to fight it off but it'll have a gun. 'Take that!' I'll cry, kicking it in  the spidery nuts. 'Bang! Bang!' it will say and, in the moments of surprise that follow such  an unusual outburst, it will then pull out the gun and shoot me. I'll stagger back with a  look of horror on my face, clutching at whichever part of me it hit... unless it's my hand,  I suppose... sliding down the wall with the gurgled question, 'Why?' rasping from my dying  throat. When did it bite me, this blob-making creature of vampiristic opportunism? Was it as  I slept? Did I think I was safe and warm beneath the sheets when really I was being carried  about the house like a dead Viking, held aloft on a sea of red ants, being taken to the  queen, a foxy minx with prominent front teeth? Or was it when I was taking the dog out for a  walk in the blazing radiation of morning and, hooking its lead on a fence, took the  opportunity to do five or six martial arts patterns? I expect that might have been it. Some  double-hard mosquitoes were probably lolling against a fence, smoking cigarettes and chewing  the ends off beer cans, when they saw me making provocative ninja moves as the dog sniffed  clumps of grass. Without me realising, I expect the bigger of the two mosquitoes trod out  his cigarette, necked the remains of his warm beer, and sallied over to me. I was probably  in a trance of simulated violence, whipping my arms and legs around like a demented Korean  dictator flailing around trying to fit his colostomy bag, and the mosquito may well have  nipped me as I went by. Now I dare not remove the plaster. To do so might unleash a mighty  flood, a torrent, a rolling sea of my own blood, across the floor of my music room, down the  hall, through the kitchen, out across the patio, past the two double-hard mosquitoes,  splashing through gardens, along roads, down gutters to the sea, there to mingle with  millions of fish, eager to participate in the feast and drink to my demise. The blob may  have been the entry point for poison. I could die of Malaria or Hypochondria or something  equally exotic. Rabies maybe. Still, the plaster is holding so far and I feel no dizziness  as yet so perhaps time may prove me guilty of hyperbole though - if you'd seen the spreading  crimson tide of my blob - I doubt it. 'Out damn'd Spot?' I said, and the dog left. Odd...  that's not his name. That's not his name. They call him Hendrix. That is his name. That is  his name. Catchy...                   Anyway....                  Thanks - as ever - for  dropping by and checking out my site. I sometimes wonder, ten years on, if there's any need  for it in a Facebook world of MySpace Twitterers. When I started it there was only me on the  Internet so it made a lot more sense. These days everyone is giving it some LOL and some  ROFLMAO in one liners. Maybe I'm like this online dinosaur, speaking my mind in sentences  and paragraphs like some kind of Hardyesque anachronism? It may be that I have no function  or place in the textspeak, rap, jungle, gangster, jive-ass, tiddler-sucking world of  modernity where communication need contain nothing at all and still take place more and  more? Well, when this blob takes over my body, my room, my house and wobbles down the street  like an avenging red jelly, you can text each other and call me names. 'Corpuscle Face' or  'Haemoglobin Bum' spring to mind. I hope you all enjoy your summer and that the hot weather  continues. Feel free to say 'hi' - perhaps via youtube... (I think I may have stripped out  my address from this site due to some malicious and spiteful incoming unnecessariness). I  leave you, at the time of writing, six days short of going into various fights at a TKD  tournament in Windsor which is preying on my mind. Will I be mashed and battered? Will I  spring around like a rubber chicken, laying everyone low? If I get knocked out, I shall  plead BLOB.

We are all Neda