Guten abend,

I'm trying to keep my blog up-to-date, honest. Not much to report, really. I'm off to see Jo at Warwick this weekend, so I'll get to see my old university haunts and worry how young the first years look.

Tonight, am going to the cinema in Didsbury. Probably seeing Punch Drunk Love. Review to follow...

Oh, and I've been spending too much time working on my portfolio on Celebdaq. Good old Les Denis is making me money at the mo, but Charlotte Church is going down! (phnar phnar) And I can't understand why Tony Blackburn is rock bottom. It's a disgrace!

Finally, have installed Opera. It's a web browser. It's Norwegian. It's good. It's not Internet Explorer.

Mantra for the day.. keep the blog up-to-date... keep the blog up-to-date... keep the blog up-to-date...

Have had a busy few weeks, I shall go into further detail later...

Good news: I've bought a digital camera. It's a Canon IXUS v2 for the geeks out there. I bought it from internet cameras direct, which is a very good website with cheap digital cameras. Expect random photos of my day very soon.

Bad news: my computer's broke. Am going to give it a nice clean install of everything. I think the power supply is going - it randomly reset itself the other day, and managed to corrupt something important in windows.

Other news: I flew to Berlin on Tuesday, and came back on Wednesday. It was for work, so didn't see much of Berlin, but I can thoroughly reccomend the BA Business lounge in Manchester and Heathrow. There was a shocking lack of Socialist Worker newspapers available, though. They barely had any Guardians!

With that, I shall say Auf Wiedersehen for now. Tchus!

It's going to be a long post today, I've got a couple of things to share with you...

Firstly, Jo came up to visit me this weekend, so I've now got updated pictures from New Year's Eve. Now with higher resolution large images if you click on the small thumbnail images..

Secondly, a few days ago my local MP felt the need to write to me (and every other "young person" in the area - I'm insulted!). Living in the Tatton constituency - one of the safest Conservative seats in the UK - my local MP is George Osborne. Apparently no relation to Ozzy, shame.

His letter read as follows:

"Dear Nicholas
What do you think about paying student fees? Do you think the laws on drugs work? Should we be helping Third World countries pay off their huge debts? Probably no one has ever really asked what your views are on these issues. That is why I am asking now. As your Member of Parliament, I want to know what you think we should be doing about some of the problems in our society. It's only by letting me know what your views are that I can do my job of making sure that your voice is heard by those who run our country.
I am writing to you especially because of the opinions of young people on things liek politics are often ignored. As the youngest Conservative MP in the country, I think that is so wrong. What you think about education, for example, matters at least much as anyone else thinks. So let me know.
I have enclosed a special questionnaire for you to fill in, as well as a pre-paid envelope so that you can send it back to me free of charge. Please take just a few minutes to fill it in. Your views matter, so don't keep them to yourself!
Yours sincerely
George Osborne MP

My favourite sentence is "As the youngest Conservative MP in the country, I think that is so wrong". He is so right. And the over-use of so is so hip and youth and trendy.

Also the signature is not from a high quality fountain pen, nor is it even a nice Parker biro. No, it looked like it was poorly scanned from a fax sent 10 years ago. Shame on you George. Shame on you the Conservative Party.

The mentioned questionnaire was all very interesting - multi-choice thing. I particularly like the leading question "Should there be tougher controls against those who abuse the asylum system?".

All very exciting, I assure you.