My birthday has come and gone and for the first time that I can recall, someone has placed me younger than I am. I got an SMS from my brother who told me that I was no longer a spring chicken, the big 32. A year younger than I am. So what should I do? Lie down and wait to die? It's all a matter of perception, since my boss told me that I was exactly that, a spring chicken. I'll go with the boss on this one.

I think culture shock is kicking in as I can't sleep. This has been going on for nearly two weeks. My dreams are more like nightmares and of the broken record variety. They get stuck in a meaningless loop and I'm aware of it. I'm asleep enough not to be able to get up and try to clear my mind and I'm awake enough to know I'm stuck in a loop and that I'm not really asleep.

I listen to the hurdly-gurdly of Swiss German around me, everything I see makes sense and it's all easy enough to traverse. I think moving on is easy, it's what you leave behind that's hard. The process of forgetting, not forever, but the little habits and trivial nuances that were once steadily part of our lives, are gone and are slowly being replaced by new ones.

I like new, I love it, it's refreshing. But that doesn't mean I can't wait to get up in the morning and get on with it. It'll pass, I'll adjust, we're animals and that's what we do, we survive. Besides, it's not like I've landed in dangerous territory, this place is the benchmark of civilization.

I bought myself a present, a nice big laptop. This way I can keep up the writing, capture these thoughts and process them, channel them into something else even. Although things are going to heat up at work and keep me busy, I don't see myself doing things like spending dedicated time with the idiot box. I don't understand any of it. Although this can be entertaining enough sometimes when you can indulge in a bit of making up your own dialogue. There is only so much time one can spend mindlessly flicking through crap. When I've got my apartment I'll be able to get the BBC channels, my umbilical chord to the Anglicised world.

Books are good, even the bad ones. I bought a pile of books at the corporate book sale, 5 Francs for 3 books so if the title read in English it went in the bag. I can report on the worst book I've ever read, other than 'The Celestine Prophecy' - who's readers should be rounded up and publicly flogged. The bad book in mention is called 'Bikini Planet'. It's about a cop in Las Vegas circa 1969 who is criogenically frozen by the mob for 300 years. When he emerges from his antique pod all this time later, much to his surprise everything has changed. And so he embarks on the worst space journey ever. I bought it for the blurb on the front of the book that said 'A billion monkeys working on a billion typewriters for a billion years couldn't have come up with this one' (Paul J. McAuley, remind me to skin him with sandpaper and paint stripper later) - it didn't take me long to discover that this was true. All those monkeys on all those typewriters, given a lot less time would in fact come up with something much better.

I think there should be an investigation into who writes these comments on the front of books. My bet is that they are false, made up by the drunk janitor in publishing houses. They forgot that in the evolutionary scheme of things we are those monkeys after millions of years and that any one of us could do better. So David Garnett, if you're reading this, your book is the worst I've ever read. To tell you how bad it is, I'm proud to say that I put it down and left it to gather dust some five pages before the end. I am ashamed of myself for having made it that far. You sir need to evolve as a writer or leave the fucking typewriter alone. Your work is not fit
for monkeys. To Mr Paul J. McAuley who wrote the blurb and who appears to be a writer himself, shame on you for having to stoop so low for payment. I shall make a point of never reading any of your books for fear of them being equally primitive. Paul J. McAuley should be publicly flogged as well.

I left a review of the book on Amazon, perhaps this is my new calling, perhaps this is one way I can make a difference, If I can stop at least one person from reading such crap, I will have saved a life. Apparently I was not the only one who thought it was a total waste of time, I'm the in the majority. One other review muskateer called it Froth. You have to love that.

I feel much better now.