“All the buttons on this computer keyboard are in capitals. How do I get lowercase letters?”

I was tempted to tell them they’d have to requisition a lowercase keyboard from the stationery department.

Then again, this was from the same person who, when I demonstrated cutting and pasting of text in Word, turned to me with eyes widened and jaw slackened to exclaim “That’s amazing!“, as if I’d pulled a live tuxedo-clad porcupine from my nose.

I didn’t even try to introduce them to the web, in case the culture shock caused them to lapse into a coma on the spot.

A brand new Toyota Yaris will be mine in but a few weeks. Expect news stories of terrorised pedestrians to emanate from across Essex for the next six months. It’s bright red, so I’m a little worried I’ll get it confused with my boss’s Ferrari.

Ahhh, red…cheapest of all the colours. I can use the saving to pay for approximately two teaspoonfuls of petrol at current prices.

2) Camping

With old friends in a small field in the Kentish townstead of Bearsted which, though it is spelt like an ursine’s cuddly toy, is pronounced like a drinks order to a man named Theodore. Too tenuous? Maybe, but I’m in that sort of mood.

Sunny day, rainy night – which was just about perfect really, giving us a whole day for chatting, reclining, frisbeeing and barbecueing followed by the restful patter of rain on ersatz canvas from about one in the morning.

3) Watching films

In Bruges
Brendan Gleason is a world-weary and affable hitman. Ralph Fiennes is a cockney and despicable hitman. Colin Farrell is channelling Dougal from Father Ted, if Dougal were to leave the priesthood and take up swearing, drinking, drugs and hitmanning. Brilliant, brilliant film - you can tell it comes from the pen of someone more used to writing for the stage, but its self-contained nature is all the better for it. Impressive performances from the cast, particularly Farrell who I’m not normally a fan of, and a subtle, cyclical structure.

Very much recommended, plus it makes the city of Bruges look absolutely amazing.

Doomsday
An absolute mess of ideas taken from a whole slew of post-apocalyptic movies - such as Mad Max, Escape From New York, 28 Days Later – and shoehorned into a Scottish setting (but actually filmed for the most part in South Africa). A modern day B-movie which makes no apologies, or indeed realistic justification, for mixing a sexy high-tech soldier with mounted knights and car chases. Fun though, in that same guilty way as eating a whole box of Jaffa Cakes in one sitting, then giving in and opening the second box too.

4) Failing to blog

Whoops. Must do better.

You’d only need, say, fifty metres of bubble-wrap make the sending of a modestly sized cupcake to a long-distance birthday-endowed chum absolutely free.

I’ll take that million in Zimbabwean dollars please.

One of my regular haunts is Photoshop Disasters which documents catastrophic examples of inept image editing. This recent post is one of my favourites – either the housing crisis in America has meant people are moving into doll’s houses, or Godzilla has let his pet dog out to play.

I’ve seen my fair share of badly edited property photos, typically when someone’s added a lovely blue sky but forgotten to fill in the gaps where it shows through the branches of trees resulting in a horrible white halo like a severe case of arboreal dandruff.

The worst I’ve personally seen far transcends that though. Some years ago a client advertising in the magazine I work for sent through a scan of a photo that they’d obviously decided needed a little touching up. And by touching up, I mean cutting – with scissors and the trembling hands of a long-term alcohol abuser – a giant picture of a deer from another photo, and physically sellotaping it to the lawn in front of the house.

Imagine a collage made by an excessively hyperactive five-year-old in remedial class; a massive stag looming over a puny farmhouse, held back from the brink of a destructive rampage only by the wodge of tape clearly sticking it to the picture.

I don’t think the property sold - giant deer phobia is more common than you’d think.

I need to buy a car.

We’ve run out of space in the office where I work, to the point that we could only squeeze more people in if we divided a floor horizontally in two and solely employed dwarves. So it looks like a move is in order, and it’s unlikely to be within the 15-minute walk I currently enjoy.

Plus, while I’ve managed to get away without a car up till now, I’m now playing badminton twice a week at halls a fair distance from my home, and it’s also probably time I stopped relying on friends to taxi me around the country.

The thing is, though, since I passed my test over ten years ago, I haven’t driven at all. Unless you count Grand Theft Auto, but I’m pretty sure that mounting the kerb at 93mph, scattering pedestrians like bowling pins and then somersaulting into a taxi hasn’t yet been added to the Highway Code.

Unfortunately, since life doesn’t have save-game points to cater for bad driving, this means that all the money I saved in the past by not owning a car is now being used to pay for refresher lessons. And I now feel like I’m seventeen again, which in normal circumstances would be pleasant but in this case serves only to remind me how much about driving I’ve forgotten. My first session demonstrated that my driving is as rusty as I imagine the car in which I first learned is now. That mirror, signal, manoeuvre mantra is now repeating itself in my sleep.

Once all this is over, I’ll be in the enviable position of being to sink a significant proportion of my earnings into a tin box with wheels for the main purpose of transporting me to the place where I earn that very money. It’s all a bit cyclical really.

So in the meantime, imagine if every film director in the world was an inveterate alcoholic, plagued with visions of the demon drink wherever he or she went. I’d like to think that it would result in the following great canon of movies. And yes, we did get a bit carried away.

The Man with the Iron Flask
Miller’s Crossing
Lush Hour
Special Brewster’s Millions
Finding Wino
Air Budweiser
The House of Flying Lagers
Summer Alcoholiday
Summer of Sambuca
James and the Giant Peach Schnappes
Hot Fizz
Bar Trek
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Firewater
Glenmorangie Glen Ross
The Thin Red Wine
Rosemary’s Babycham
Blackthorn Down
Rum Lola Rum
Dr Pernod
Meths in Venice
Snakebite on a Plane
Mr & Mrs John Smiths
The Thomas Corona Affair
The Secret Hoegaarden
Blame it on the Bells Boy
Becks, Lies & Videotape
Bacaardi to the Future
Eternal Moonshine of the Spotless Mind
Whisky Business 
Schindler’s Pissed
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Cobra
Liver Let Die
Educating Margarita
Turner & Hooch
Driving Pissed Daisy
Dude, Where’s My Carling?
The Silence of the Lambruscos
Hock, Stock and Two Empty Barrels
Falling Down
Midnight Rum
21 Drams
The Bourbon Supremacy
There’s Something About Sherry
Mead in Manhattan
Divorcing Jack Daniels
The Buckfast Club
Cognac Air
American History 4X
Tequila Mocking Bird
Days of Thunderbird
The Bottle Collector
Top Gin

Feel free to contribute additions to this eminently pointless list…

You’d have to be a bit subtle though, which is not always the advertising industry’s strong point. I’m not talking about slapping a big can of Stella in the lager entry; that’s so obvious it’d be ripped down by the community in the time it takes to drink twelve of the aforementioned cans, start a fight, and copiously vomit kebab-meat down your shirt. I’m not even talking about a history professor sneakily adding his own book into the ‘Further reading’ appendix on the Battle of Agincourt.

For example, take a look at the ‘Battery‘ entry. That’s just itching for a good quality cutaway diagram of a domestic battery. Now, there wouldn’t be any suggestion of a logo or a brand name but, should the battery in that drawing just happen to be coloured black at the bottom and copper at the top like a certain well-known make, there’s arguably at the very least a low-level psychological tweak going to happen.

Some products are easier than others - Guinness and St Patrick’s Day are already intertwined so it’s easy to get away with mentioning the black stuff in the relevant entry. But did you know that in Japan, Kentucky Fried Chicken is associated with Christmas, to the extent that some families apparently make advance reservations to guarantee their bucket of miscellaneous bird bits? I’m sure there’s someone at chicken-central with the responsibility to ensure that particular nugget of information doesn’t get removed from KFC’s Wikipedia entry.

Sport is an easy one - have a look at how detailed the equipment lists are for the top tennis players. I’d be surprised if those weren’t carefully massaged by marketing departments. But they’re missing a trick on the generic sport pages; an artfully not-too-professional-looking photo of an attractive sportsperson clad in Nike might well slip through the net to influence those looking up their chosen activity.

There’s opportunity for some carefully orchestrated and underhand counter-marketing too. Car manufacturers - is your competitor’s well-built but ugly car selling rather more than you’d hoped? How about uploading a picture of that car on their entry, making sure that your own better-looking smug-wagon is clearly visible in the background for comparison. Fashion labels could dig out photos of their rivals’ occasional disastrous mistakes to sabotage the relevant pages. It’d be like the effect Jeremy Clarkson had on the sales of denim.

Eventually the situation will degenerate into a cold war of marketing, as PR firms retain a host of scattered agents to perform surgical strikes of secretly inserted information which conspire to promote ally companies and undermine the opposition. Or maybe that hidden conflict is already upon us and there’s a reason why Wikipedia’s Renault page is stuffed full of terrible pictures of ugly cars or that the handbag/purse entry is headed up by Burberry.