Dan McNeil's Blog

I don't dislike flying.  I don't actively enjoy it.  I guess I just find it a bit boring and quite quickly descend into staring out of the window in the hope that something interesting happens.  Although about the greatest chance of seeing excitement out of the window is if an engine catches fire or something.  Which I don't really want to see. And so yesterday, I flew across the Atlantic. To here.  Vancouver. The journey over went quite quickly.  I actually got talking to my seat neighbours on the plane. Well talked at by one of them.  She was drinking a lot of Baileys.  She put it in her tea (yes tea, not coffee) and over the icecream they bring you in the middle of the flight. Over the years, I've morphed from one of those people who try to take everything onto the plane to avoid the baggage wait into someone who checks in as much as humanly possible.  I didn't even take a coat onto the plane.  Just a few books.  And a copy of the Guardian for the crossword

I was at a cashpoint at Canary Wharf today.  I went there specifically, because there's a cashpoint there where you can get USD and it's easier than bothering to leave time at Heathrow or faff around at the airport at the other end. I just wanted a bit of cash to get me from the airport to the hotel when I get to Seattle. Anyway, that's not the point.  The point is that the cashpoint was referring to itself as "I".  When did that start to happen?  "Please wait whilst I am counting your money".  It really said that on the screen. I mean it's one thing that people attribute human emotions and thoughts to animals, but a cashpoint?  It's bad enough that Innocent Smoothies say "I contain twenty bananas" or whatever but I can do without a cashpoint referring to itself in the first person. That's all.

It's been a while since I wrote in here.  It's simply that I've not really had anything that exciting happening.  I've been struck by coincidence recently.  Made it's the new series of Jonathan Creek has set my mind into "lateral thinking" mode. Quite often, I'll have a song come to mind which I don't have on my phone, and thanks to the wonder that is Amazon MP3 download, I can have it on my phone within seconds.  I do that with some utter crap - I admit it.  But only a week or two after I downloaded "I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper" it was featured on the Graham Norton show on Radio 2 of a Saturday morning.  "That's weird" I thought to myself.  It's a great song - three minutes of space-themed innuendo set to a disco beat - but odd that I should download it on a whim only for it to feature on Radio 2 not long after. It's the same with crossword clues.  I do the Guardian crossword rather than The Times.  On