Unclean

Sniffling, coughing, sneezing and shaking: I’m down with a cold. It’s why I’ve been quiet for the last few days. Although it’s a sickness of relatively minor proportions, it has joined forces with my general ‘feeling bad for myself’ and forced me to my bed. The only good to come of it is that I’m reading Arthur Conan-Doyle’s ‘The Lost World’, with half a dozen other books lined up after it. I’m working on ‘Eye of the Storm 2’ on Tuesday and Wednesday but hope to have something more interesting to tell you then.

I should have known the week would end up like this. I spent two days up in Manchester, a fascinating city that's undergoing something of a renaissance but is currently full of people coughing and sneezing.

It's always fascinating to go back and see how the city has changed and continues to change. Some of the new architecture is just stunning, though my day back up north was marred by a moment on my way home when we left the station and passed the university and the 'arnes Wallace Building'. Well, that's what the large sigh described it as. For the sake of a missing 'B', my visit to Manchester would have been full of good memories of some simply stunning design. Instead, I've been disappointed that people still don't cherish a man much after my own heart: a truly independent thinker whose garden shed gave birth to many of this country's most important weapons. I suppose it shocked me to see his name treated with so little respect. Wallace and I are men whose careers have followed very similar paths. Both considered a little eccentric, we have only been recognised as geniuses after years of hard work. Where he invented the bouncing bomb, I've got detailed designs for my so called 'jauntily skipping' bomb whose lethal cargo is delivered with a spring in the step. Barnes Wallace designed the Wellington bomber whereas my designs for the stealth bomber I like to call 'The Slipper' are locked away deep inside the Ministry of Defence. I came up with the idea when Judy kicked off her slippers after a particularly tiring day. We're talking about a weapons delivery system that puts it deadly cargo right beneath your nose before it goes off. Moreover, we've both been played by Michael Redgrave in film versions of our lives (respectively, in 'The Dambusters' [1955] and 'They Call Me Genius' [1982]).

Before I climb back into my sick bed, I just want to say a final thing about Vanessa Feltz. It's really quite regrettable that my previous post -- written at the height of mental exhaustion -- became an excuse for jokes about bald midgets. What were you thinking? Where the notion that two bald midgets resemble Vanessa Feltz's bosom comes from, I really don't know. In my experience, the two things have very little in common. For example, even the smallest and baldest of midgets has two nipples which is a 100% more than you'll find on your average breast. I suggest that you familiarise yourselves with either more breasts or more midgets.