She will be mine. Oh yes. She will be mine.

Big news, everyone; I've fallen head over buttocks in love with singer songwriter KT Tunstall. She was on Later With Jools Holland the other week and thanks to her lovely face, quirky specs and the lubricating effect of a bottle of red wine I was completely smitten.


She's Scottish, you know.

And has been known to wear interesting hats.

Here she is doing the guitar thing. Perhaps now might be an opportune time for me to re-evaluate her musical oeuvre; I wouldn't like to embarrass myself in front of her by admitting that I couldn't name one of her songs if my entire comic collection depended on it.

This is her speaking at Live 8 about the need to be kind to animals and poor people. The woman is an angel. I'm sure if I actually did meet her she'd be nothing but nice to me, and would ask her security people not to mark my face when they dragged me away to give me a quality kicking.

I'd have mentioned this earlier but I've been caught in the grip of post-Christmas malaise for the last couple of weeks. By which I mean I've mostly been staying in, reflecting on my own worthlessness and wanking too much.

Form an orderly queue, ladies.

Life and Death on Teh Internets.

Oh, calm down - it was dead when I found it.

Death: there's a lot of it about. Seven Welsh kids commit suicide and Bebo gets the blame. Heath Ledger swallows enough pills to give Keith Richards pause and promptly shuffles off, his passing marked by ten thousand tasteless Brokeback Mountain jokes. Aged chess champion Bobby Fischer dies of being old and mad and gets the same treatment. All life can be found on the web including, apparently, that uncomfortable bit at the end.

Which I reckon is fair enough. People live their whole lives through the net these days so it makes sense that they'll die there as well. I'm less sure that, as has been stated in the press, the internet can make you spontaneously want to kill yourself but I suppose 'Internet Death Cult' makes for better copy than a sober, reasoned analysis of why seven perfectly normal, perfectly healthy teenagers would decide to take their own lives.

(Incidentally - six boys kill themselves with nary a peep from anyone; one girl joins them and suddenly it's all over the press, a national fucking tragedy. It's almost like society doesn't care what happens to young men. Oh, hang on... it doesn't, unless there's a war going on that we need some corpses for. Sorry about that, the memo has only just reached me.)

The net seems to be to be just another aspect of this huge, gigantic mess we call life, one that reflects stuff that's already there. If you're going to top yourself then you'll have found the reasons and rationalisations elsewhere; the only thing the internet will do is confirm or deny what you're already thinking. Possibly the realisation that, despite Myspace's claims that you have 250 friends, you have not one single person to go to the pub with might do it, although it seems unlikely. But if you are thinking of killing yourself (and, frankly, I'd rather you didn't) then you should read this. It might help.

Paint nothing.

Get thee behind me, Satan.

I've just spent an hour wrestling with colour charts on the Dulux website and I hereby declare it to be one of the most boring ways to waste a perfectly good Sunday afternoon I've yet found. You lose your grip on time and space, lost in endless shades of white and off-white and near-white and anti-white. And the names! Bracken salts. Labrador sands. Volcanic splash. It was a nightmare.

But I'm glad because the moment you start to care about this stuff, the day you find yourself fretting over the miniscule differences between Sundrenched Saffron and Desert Island, the day your stack of colour swatches is bigger than your stack of Batman back issues, is the day that you are officially a lost cause. It's all over. Life has broken you.

Luckily, it bores the arse off me. So I ain't dead yet.