Sorry about the thin posting at PooterGeek lately. The crossed keyboards and trousers rampant are flying again over PooterGeek Towers because I am now back in residence, having spent a few days scouting around Brighton for a new place to live, meeting up with collaborators on my next big thing, music making, and generally socialising with my lovely (married) friends Richard and Kate.

Whilst lodging with them in their new home in the pretty little town of Lewes (alternative therapy and white witch capital of the south coast) I discussed with them my plan to invent a wife, one who, like “Maris” (fictional spouse of Niles Crane in Frasier) is never seen. As well as being a source of much lazy, Sunday supplement-style “isn’t family life hilarious?” ‘Blogging material she would bring several advantages:

  1. People would no longer have to waste time and energy speculating about my sexual orientation or the date of my finally “settling down”.
  2. I would have a ready-made excuse to leave boring gatherings (especially if I put her in a virtual wheelchair).
  3. The many women who prefer their men pre-approved would find me attractive.
  4. I could sign over a proportion of my diamond mining holdings in Sierra Leone to her for tax purposes.
  5. She would bear me virtual children whose photos I could carry in my wallet and bore strangers with. [I always feel a bit of a fraud using my niece for this purpose.]
  6. Not only that, but my non-existent kids would bring with them a whole range of work benefits, should I ever find myself a proper job again.
  7. I would have an excuse to wear jewelry (see 1).
  8. Holidays and food would seem to be much cheaper—until I remembered that my wife was a figment of my imagination.
  9. Nigella Lawson would hide in my bath with a kitchen knife, hoping to stab the woman who stole me away from her forever.
  10. Women who like their men pre-approved and tragically bereft would rush to comfort me when my one true love “died” in a horrible line dancing accident—all the while admitting to themselves that they could never replace her.

Anyway, talking of Frasier, this is interesting:

“I have just watched Frasier for the first time on this 100hz set. It looked dreadful. It lost the smooth feel American television has (because most televisions in the US are about 15 years behind European and Asian TVs in technical terms) and looked like a dreadfully cheap pilot. It looked like raw DV, from a modern camcorder. Dolly and pan movements are clear – you can see every jerk and jog on the way across the dolly track and every shake of the human hand – something I have never spotted on Frasier. It’s very strange.

“How can an improvement in technology ruin the way technology works in an emotive sense?”

I wonder.