MAY 24

AAARRRGGHH! Takeshi Ramen - where I get my reeking noodle soup - is closing down! And it's going to be replaces by a tofu bar! Tofu?? Bloody tofu?? Who the hell goes out to eat tofu?

MAY 19

ER... I don't know what this is about, but this sign appeared on the stairwell at the office building the other day. We share the stairs with two other firms so it could be aimed at them. Why anyone would want to gob on the stairs when there's a perfectly good pavement outside is beyond me.

MAY 18

MY BRAND-NEW Doc Martens - which I've had for all of three days - are in for repairs already. I bought them mainly because I think I'm getting too old to wear All-Stars, especially in the office, and I liked the walking boots I bought in the UK in March so much I've worn them ever since. But I wanted something better than fifteen-quid "hiking" boots so I shelled out $109 for a pair of Doccos, the 1460 model in dark red. And that $109 means I've spent more on shoes with this one purchase than I have in the past two years.

Anyway, the stitching on the heels has left a small flap of leather on the inside of each boot which is rubbing the hell out of the backs of my ankles. So I've had to take them in to a place near us to get the stitching on the inside smoothed. Looks like it's back to the cheapo boots for the time being.

I FINISHED The Crow Road last night. Well, I say last night, it was more like five this morning. What a fantastic novel, totally different to The Wasp Factory and has easily become one of my favourite books. It's a sort of coming-of-age novel about a teenage Scot from an extended family, but it's more than that. Banks makes extensive use of flashbacks, there's loads of humour (most of it wonderfully dark) and a couple of deaths. Great characters and superb dialogue make this a highly recommended book.

MAY 17

HEY! Free books! Someone dumped a load of novels on the shelves outside our laundry room so I had to go and take a look at what was there.

Unfortunately it was a pile of romantic crap. Come on, there's a dumpster around the corner for this stuff!

But there were two redeeming items - a couple of Hannibal Lecter novels. Unfortunately Silence of the Lambs wasn't in the pile so it looks like I'll have to buy that one after all.

Now rescued, they join the pile of 30 or so unread books that I've promised Ev I'll get through before I buy any more. And it's a promise I've already broken as I just ordered Stig of the Dump from Amazon. I recently bought The Phantom Tollbooth and I'm on the lookout for Emil and the Detectives. I know it may seem odd that a 36-year-old is buying what are basically children's books but they're just so bloody good I want to read them again.

And they'll come as a respite after reading The Wasp Factory, one of the most cruel, vicious, odd, bleak, dark, disturbing and bloody brilliant books I have ever read. Written from the perspective of Frank, a 17-year-old who is (pardon the pun) frankly insane, it's not for everyone - there are a few scenes of animal torture and Frank freely admits to murdering three children when he was a still a child. But it's also one of the most imaginative books I've ever read and as it got me on to reading Banks's stuff (I'm halfway through The Crow Road at the mo) I'm happy with it.

MAY 12

AND the good news is that James Garner is recovering after suffering a stroke last week. Garner, who's now 80, is recovering in hospital. For the three of you who might not know he played Jim Rockford in the late-70s detective show The Rockford Files, a programme I loved when I was a kid.

There were two reasons I liked it. One was the opening credit sequence. For some reason this used photos in a sort of badly-animated way which is pretty crappy and yet sort of cool. Better still they show a Los Angeles that's as vanished as ancient Egypt or Elizabethan London. And don't forget the theme, that classic twangy guitar/synth/mouth-organ masterpiece which won a Grammy.

The other was the Pontiac Rockford drove. OK, so it wasn't up there with Starsky and Hutch's Gran Torino, the 1960s Batmobile or the General Lee, but the bog-standard gold '77 Firebird was still a cool car if you were eight years old, living in Tonteg and your dad owned an orange Austin Maxi. And the fact that an awful lot of any given episode consisted of Rockford driving said Firebird around the streets of LA meant that car got a lot of exposure. Which made recreating the chases with my Matchbox Firebird, Ford Capri, Boss Mustang and Mini Ha-Ha even easier.

Oh, and one other thing: as my eight-year-old self sat in front of the telly in a small house in a small town in South Wales, surrounded by toy cars and watching the opening credits, it never in a million years occurred to me that one day I'd be driving to work on the same freeways Rockford drove on. I'm sure there's a lesson there, but I'm buggered if I can find it.

MAY 11

TONIGHT I broke the habit of a lifetime by watching a musical. Maybe not quite the habit of a lifetime as I've seen Grease and Bugsy Malone and I suppose South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut counts as a musical. But this was different because instead of switching on the telly, we went to the Pantages Theater on Hollywood Boulevard to see Wicked.

Wicked the musical is based on Wicked the novel, which is basically the life story of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West. I actually own the novel but haven't got around to reading it yet (it's in the backlog waiting to be read) so I didn't really know what to expect from the show.

The theater (which Ev's mum's grandfather used to manage) is a beautiful old building which recently had its Art Deco interior refurbished. It was also packed to the rafters which is usually a good sign. When the curtain went up the place erupted in an explosion of applause and cheers and within five minutes of the start it was obvious why - the show is superb. Absolutely superb. I'd heard the performance was good but this was way better than I'd expected. Everything about it - the acting, songs, sets, costumes - was spot on. We thoroughly enjoyed it and are planning on going again. (Once we got home I looked Wicked up on Wikipedia and discovered the LA show made $2,000,000 in one week.) The only letdown was the ripoff prices for merchandise (for example, T-shirts cost $35 and even fridge magnets were $8) and snacks (a glass of Coke was $6 - SIX DOLLARS, for Christ's sake.) Although I have to give credit to the women who were selling ripoff T-shirts right outside the theater's entrance. That takes some cheek.

MAY 5

I HAVE to admit that I watch very little TV. I'd pretty much given up on it before I left the UK and to be honest the 150 channels of utter shit dished out by our cable company have done nothing to rekindle my interest in what's on the box. The few shows I do watch are mostly documentary-type ones like The First 48, Seconds From Disaster and Cold Case Files. Personally I'm far happier with a book or, failing that, maybe a nice relaxing hour of blowing things up on the PC. Ev is the real telly addict in our flat and her choice of shows, which are mainly of the "reality" type, frequently draws my derision (although we have struck a deal - if she keeps the cats away from the new PC, I'll stop ripping the piss out of her favourite programmes).

Since we added BBC America to our cable line-up last year Ev has discovered a whole new range of shows to record on the DVR. One of these, You Are What You Eat, has recently started showing over here, although it was originally broadcast in Britain between 2004 and 2007. The star of the show is "Dr" Gillian McKeith "PhD" (there's a reason for the quote marks) who's on a mission to get Britons off junk food and onto a healthier diet. Every show follows the same format:

- We're introduced to that week's subject (sometimes it's a couple, and on one occasion a mother and her 12-year-old daughter) who are filmed in their undies to hammer home how fat they are;

- McKeith turns up, has a go at them, goes through their fridge and cupboards, and generally slags them and their choice of foods off;

- The subject is told to keep a food diary for a week. At the end of the week they're shown a table with everything they ate on it. On the one hand this is the highlight of the show to me. How the Christ these people find the time to eat all this is unbelievable. (Then again at one point in my life I was smoking 40 fags a day, meaning in a 12-hour day I was smoking on average one ciggie every 18 minutes.) On the other hand it's also repulsive as the person frequently breaks down with shame at how much they eat. I don't mean it's repulsive because you're watching a fat person cry, I mean it's repulsive because McKeith has pretty much gone out of her way to embarrass and humiliate them on TV. In one show she even has a vicar in tears. A vicar, for Christ's sake.

- McKeith gives her orders in the form of an almost all-veg and fruit diet, with some fish or white meat. She's a big believer in the power of tofu which even I won't eat and I'll happily shovel kidneys, black pudding and squid down my face. The subject is then filmed buying the ingredients and trying to make the dishes.

- McKeith makes flying emergency visits in case there's any deviation from her plan. Oddly enough many of these emergencies are brought on by flat refusals to eat tofu.

- We return to the person eight weeks on to see how much they've lost and what they look like.

To be honest the results are usually incredible. The average weight loss in two months is around two stones, which for the American(s) reading this is about 28 pounds. One guy lost a total of 56 pounds after another two months on the diet. But let's face it, taking someone off a 3500-calorie-a-day diet consisting of burgers, fizzy drinks, takeaways, chips and booze and putting them on a 2000 calorie diet with tons of fresh fruit and veg is bound to have that effect. And lots - if not all - of the advice she gives is bloody obvious and also available from a myriad of other TV shows, books, websites and so on. But I do wonder how many people told her to shove her tofu up her arse while the show was being filmed.

Continues after the gratuitous photo of Iestyn which is only there to break up the text. Bless him.

Anyway, both Ev and me have become pretty much addicted to watching our recorded episodes for a couple of reasons. First off it's a pretty decent show and it's always good when one of the fatties either revolts or treats McKeith with the derision some of her ideas demand. Secondly we're both overweight and to be honest the diets these people are put on look pretty good - no processed foods, no sugar, alcohol, choccy, lots and lots of fresh fruit and veg - and pretty straightforward to copy.

So we were a bit shocked when we discovered that a lot of what McKeith is telling these people (and the people who've bought her books and read her website) is unmitigated shite.

One of the problems with her programme is that she frequently shows the participants meals they're going to be eating. These meals look pretty good and we wanted to try them but she rarely gives the recipe on screen and when she does she rattles through it too fast. So we got hold of one of her books only to discover there were only about four recipes in the bloody thing. Then I remembered about this new-fangled invention called the Interweb and tried that. What I came across wasn't what I thought I'd find.

First off I came across a forum full of posts discussing how bad the diets McKeith uses are. Other posters wondered about her professional qualifications and even if she had any. And one guy posted a couple of links that made for even more interesting reading.

It seems that Dr McKeith isn't really a doctor at all. She "got her PhD from a non-accredited correspondence school in America and has never published any properly evaluated scientific research," according to one article. Because of this she is no longer allowed to refer to herself as "doctor" (we in the UK like our medical industry to be regulated). In a different article the same writer calls her "a menace to the public understanding of science". She's also a certified member of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants. So is this bloke's dead cat. And a lot of her ideas seem to be bloody odd, to say the least. For example she believes in eating the darker green leaves of vegetables because they contain more chlorophyll and when digested will oxygenate your blood. I failed my GCSE biology exam back in 1988 but I still know that's utter crap. Another thing she believes in is DNA having anti-aging properties. Given that everything I eat has DNA in it I should, according to "Dr" McKeith, look younger. I don't; I look like an overweight 36-year-old, which is what I am. Maybe I've been eating the wrong kind of DNA.

Reading this I was glad we'd bought her book half-price on eBay until Ev reminded me we'd actually bought it full-price on Amazon. Shit. Anyway, as McKeith seems to be pretty litigious I'm going to stop here. I don't mean that to sound big-headed but she's already had a pop at a couple of other blogs who wrote about her. She's also threatened to sue a real academic who questioned her research and testing methods, which is yet another victory for Britain's dated and Draconian libel laws. Will we stop watching the show? Probably not as it's entertaining. Will we give her diet plan a go, or at least one similar to it? More than likely. Will we eat the darker leaves to get more chlorophyll? Er... no. Will we stop buying her books? Oh yes.