What a lovely morning! The sun is shining, the drunks are sleeping it off in police cells, and the library has resumed a quiet mood as we all sit down and log on to pursue our various browsing needs. Logging on first thing in the morning isn't a hassle any more either. AM has vanished... what? Has he actually gone South Africa? Or has he succumbed to old age?... I actually miss his verbal presence even if he was a complete scoundrel.

Not like yesterday of course. IHaving left some time unused I popped back in the aftermnoon to finish off with some research on World War two aircraft - That's another hobby of mine and one dating back to my childhood. Like many others the catalogue of Airfix plastic kits was the gateway to my youthful imagination as I flew these little aeroplanes complete with scale lumps of badly applied glue in my mind. Of course my imaginary war was nothing like close to reality, but I didn't know that then.

Anyway, the booking screen was offline. Oh that's a good start. The lady on the helpdesk apologised over the phone to someone else about the lack of facility whilst I pateiently waited for the same reason. Once her phone call had terminated with a final apology, she enquired what I wanted then apologised to me for the same reason. Nonetheless, she did manage to book me a PC on her administrator system. Middle floor, at the far end, a place of busy teenage interaction that I had avoided up until now.

I would like to thank the young boy sat on my right the other side of the partition. His constant commentary on his progress through the computer game he was playing certainly grabbed my attention. He was only about seven or eight years old, but showed his experience and appreciation of the computer game genre when he said "This game should be boring but I find it strangely appealing".

Personally, I think his parents should buy him a baseball cap and teach him to wear it at a strange angle before he grows up to be a geek. He is, after all, very annoying already. The rest of the teenage crowd was also annoying. One lad performed a monotonous drum solo on his desk, a couple of girls were doing girly things with mobile phones, and one lad was giving the world the benefit of his experience of street survival. I've got another twenty minutes of this.... I'm in Hell....

Virtual Fun of the Week

Okay, I admit it, I occaisionally play computer games. Yesterday was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, a sort of surreal simulation of gangs in 90's LA. Despite the ammoral game content (Stealing cars, shooting policemen, spraying graffiti everywhere, and racking up crime statistics the Kray Brothers could only dream of - and yes, you can also pull prostitutes if you... I'll stop there) it really is good fun.

However, I decided to pop in to the Ten Green Bottles bar up the road from my virtual home, and made for the pool table, a game within a game. Over the course of the contest, I won twenty six thousand dollars from some street hoodlum. Did LA gangsters really have that sort of cash in their pockets of an evening? Or is this computer game not quite true to life?