Making a murderer

They say that we’ve all got a murderer inside us. And also a novel. And also possibly several spiders a year that crawl into our mouths while we sleep. I’m starting to feel like the old woman who swallowed a fly. Perhaps the Grimm version finishes with her swallowing Harold Shipman, who wriggles and jiggles and wiggles inside her before surreptitiously administering a lethal dose of pethidine.

I’m not sure about all of that. At least I wasn’t this morning, but now I’m starting to think it might have some merit. You see, I’ve been driving Audi’s glorious RS3 about the place (see below). Not in that particularly obnoxious shade of green, but in a marginally more tasteful white that shows up road grime beautifully. Driving it because I drive cars for work and write about them, I must hasten to add, not because I’ve bought one and wish to show off my credentials as a pilot of the highest order.

Normally I drive an electric car (the one that I don’t have to write about for work, the one that takes me to the shops and does all the boring things), because I’m too old and too sensible to glue myself to a piece of prominent tarmac but still wish to virtue signal my efforts to improve the planet. But what I particularly like about driving an electric car is how it makes you a better driver.

Not better in the harder, faster, stronger sense you Daft Punk, but in the way it forces to you be strategic on the move, plan well ahead and take it easy in order to eke out as many miles as you can before you’re forced off the road to find a plug that the app on your phone is trying to gaslight you into thinking is precisely where you’re standing.

Driving a fast Audi turns you into an absolute arse. I’m sorry to have to admit that all those people who offend us on the roads simply can’t help it, it’s a condition that comes over you as soon as you get behind the wheel and fire up the engine. I was on the motorway earlier and I even – I’m loathe to admit this on a public platform – flashed my lights at someone who was dawdling in the outside lane. We might not have a murderer lurking beneath the skin, but the inner twat is 30 seconds and a premium German performance car away. Consider yourself warned.

When blogs used to be cool

Blogs used to be all the rage. I had one back in 2006 when they were cool. We used to meet up in shifty looking abandoned warehouses in East London with the drinks sponsored by tech companies that would barely make it to an age old enough to start looking for nurseries. These shindigs were mostly populated by odd misfits such as myself and esteemed journalists and communication specialists who already knew each other. It was a very social media.

I would write all sorts of terrible things on my blog, just farting my thoughts onto the screen without any thought for the consequence or consideration that anyone would be reading. Mostly no one did, in fact. Occasionally I got myself in trouble. But it was useful to go through all of that before it became a bigger issue in the age of Twitter – I’m just the sort of person who would make an ill-advised joke and jump on a plane while it rattled about the fibre cables of the world gathering a massively increasing ball of misinterpretation behind it.

Somehow we’ve come full circle from those heady days of exploring the expanding opportunities of the information superhighway. When I first had a website people called it the ‘world wide web’ and they gave out URLs on the telly with a miasma of colons and forward slashes that hip young things would act out, like a sort of techy macarena. And now blogs are socially acceptable again. So I’m writing one. Hello.