I’ve been on the bus one day (because of this damned foot thing) and I’m already fed up and want to be back on my bike. Crammed full of sweaty, miserable commuters and noisy chavs listening to shitty R&B on their stolen mobile phones, going barely above walking pace because of the amount of traffic in Manchester, bouncing around corners on the pothole-ridden roads and throwing passengers around like they’re on a waltzer before braking suddenly two centimetres away from the bus in front. Bah, give me my bike any day of the week.

Veteran jazz musician and radio host Humphrey Lyttelton has died aged 86.

I am very sad about this. I had the privelege of attending several recordings of I’m Sorry, I Haven’t A Clue, and he was a genial, warm, wonderful – if somewhat bewildered, at times – host, as well as a fantastically talented trumpeter and jazz musician. He will be greatly, greatly missed.

So, Plantar Fasciitis is really quite painful. I appear to have damaged my foot whilst skiing and then well and truly cemented that damage by going for a run the other day. Nurse says to not run, cycle or walk long distances for a few weeks. I guess I’m not doing the Great Manchester Run this year, then. Bum.

As I was walking down Deansgate to the cinema this evening (Son of Rambow; very good, go and see it, you’ll like it), I saw a pigeon very nearly fly into a young lady’s face. She was naturally a little shocked and taken aback by this, but by the time she had recovered sufficiently to remonstrate with the beast, it had flown off and disappeared. And so, fuming but without a target for her anger, she instead located the nearest other pigeon to her on the pavement and shouted a torrent of unfocused abuse at it instead, presumably on the understanding that it could maybe pass on her complaints to the offending bird should they happen upon each other later in the day. Then, satisfied, she adjusted her coat and proceeded on down Deansgate, as if nothing had ever happened.

Somewhat inexplicably, Microsoft decided to arbitrarily change the coordinate system from left-handed in Managed DirectX to right-handed in XNA. I’ve just spent the last three hours wondering why everything was mirrored in weird ways. Having symmetrical geometry didn’t help, either. I’ve now got to go through all my code and rework all of my assumptions. Bah.

So, Play have this amazing new service for not buying music. What you do, right, is you go to the “Play Digital” section, pick an album or some songs that you don’t want, add them to your shopping basket, enter your credit card details, and magically, they take the money off you and don’t give you the music that you picked.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and this didn’t seem entirely right to me either, but I’ve since phoned them twice and twice been assured that the content would be available for download “in an hour or so”, and both times, on returning to their download site, the music has still been unavailable for download, so I can only assume that taking your money for nothing in return is in fact the desired functionality of the service.

So, if you fancy pissing all your money away into a big pit in exchange for absolutely jack shit, feel free to go and try Play Digital. Or, alternatively, use a download service that actually works.

So, apparently, right, if you get a tiny 1cm long seabass bone lodged in the back of your throat, this is a serious medical emergency and entails a trip to A&E, X-rays, cameras stuck up your nose, various metal things shoved in your mouth, threats of theatre and general anaesthetic, and lots and lots of retching whilst a weary looking ENT specialist pokes the back of your throat with what look like a pair of forceps (except smaller, but – I swear – not that much smaller).

Fortunately, we got the bone out – and then promptly lost it again, but I definitely saw it, and he stuck the endoscope up my nose again (without anaesthetic, I noted – someone wanted to go home) and checked, so we’re reasonably sure it’s gone.

Anyway, it’s annoying and frustrating that something so tiny can throw an evening out of kilter, and I didn’t even get beyond the first mouthful of my martini. I hope our second married valentine’s day goes somewhat better than the first did.

Naomi did get to read a good chunk of the book she got for Christmas, though, so it’s not all bad.

My friend and former flatmate Jeremy has finally made good on his threats to jack it all in and go touring on his bike – it’s taken a few years, but he’s finally done it! He and his colleague Keith have got themselves a couple of 2005 KTM 640 Adventures and are heading down the west coast of Africa to South Africa. They’re blogging the whole thing here and it looks like it’s already shaping up to be an incredible journey. I am dead, dead jealous.

Two quick things:

• The ever wonderful Dave Walker has collected a few very thoughtful and reasoned responses to the whole sorry deal here. Read those, they summarise the situation better than I or the media could.
• Or, you could just read what he actually said, which unsurprisingly turns out to be a lot less dramatic and a lot more nuanced and complex than the media have made out.

I think Paul Vallely over at the Independent puts it well. I’m not so keen to lay the blame at the feet of the Archbishop for the press’s sensationalism over this, but he’s right that it sounds very different went coming from the head of a church as opposed to “just” an academic. It’s sad that has to be so, though.