Ciaran’s Omnipurpose Blog

I've been growing tomatoes in my garden. Some from seedlings and some germinated from seed. I had about 10 large tomato plants in my garden and another colony at my parents (I couldn't fit all the seedlings in pots in my garden).

Within the past few days, I've lost almost all the plants in my garden to tomato blight, a fungal infestation possibly brought on by the bad run of cloudy, damp weather we've had. My once-proud 8ft plants have turned into a rotten mush.

I spent this afternoon collecting the dead and trying to save the remainder with anti-fungal spray. There was a depressingly large amount of dead stuff to throw out. My garden feels very empty now without the tomatoes in there, so I'm going to have to think of something else to start growing.

Thankfully, Rebecca managed to salvage some of the ripe and unripe fruit from the vines, so we'll see what can be made with them. Rosie also turned up to commiserate (above).

Apparently, this year has been particularly bad in the UK for tomato blight, and farmers are going mad with the sprayers. As if to confirm this, the colony at my parents' house has also died out.

So, in future, I'll be making sure to spray them with anti-fungal chemicals regularly and to look out for the first signs of the rot setting in.

Either that, or emigrate to somewhere with proper summers.

I had an overdose on Tuesday.

Nobody found me at home with a trickle of blood coming from my dead nostrils. I wasn't passed out in the lounge with a belt around my arm and a needle hanging from my shriveled vein.

That's because I overdosed on coffee.

It isn't the first time, you know. I've overdosed on caffeine before. I remember vividly drinking several strong cups of coffee before going to the gym late one night and being unable to sleep for the whole night. I lay in bed until about 4am, before realising that I was desperate for the bathroom. And here began my dilemma: if I get out of bed, I'll have a heart attack, if I stay in bed I'll humiliate myself. I finally reached a compromise of falling out of bed and dragging myself to the bathroom. I thought my heart was about to explode!

Still, it gave me a preview of an average night in the life of the infirm.

So I felt more empathy than sympathy for this Teenager who overdosed on 7 double espressos, a girl who was a bit tired at work in a coffee shop and ended up in hospital with a caffeine overdose. And she and I are not isolated cases – two friends of mine have completely messed up their body clocks through excess habitual caffeine consumption.

But no Ciaran blog post is complete without some whinge or another. My whinge today is about the abysmal spelling that seems to insinuate itself into everyday life, especially in shop signs. A fine example is the one I spotted with my colleague Chris in a cafe today. What the bloody hell is an Expresso anyway? And why do so many people say expresso instead of espresso?

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I finally caved in and bought a Wii this week.

I’ve had a weird relationship with consoles. Ages ago, I wanted to go halves with my cousin on a super hi-tech Atari 2600. The problem with that was that my cousin lived in Germany and I lived in London. Since he was older than me, I’m pretty sure I’d never have seen that console.

I also have some vague memories of walking through Bentalls or John Lewis and overhearing a boy trying to explain to his father that he was after a joystick, not a joss stick, and that he wasn’t trying to buy drugs (for a while in the early ’80s there seemed to be an idea that joss sticks were marijuana).

I haven’t actually owned a console since the early 1990s, when I briefly owned a second-hand Gameboy. I got a bit fed up of it, since I had a PC and preferred to read on the go, rather than play games in pixellated black and white.

So why did I take the plunge and buy the Wii in the first place, given that I spend arguably enough time on the PC as it is? Well, the main reason is that it is incredibly fun and incredibly social. Instead of going head to head with Sony and Microsoft to produce the biggest, most powerful console, Nintendo have put together something very different. The Wii isn’t about having the best graphics, it’s about having fun and making gaming accessible to people who don’t usually get involved with gaming.

The really stand-out thing about the console is the much-talked-about control system, that uses a combination of infrared and accelerometers to work out what movements you are making with your hands. Thus, the little remote becomes a tennis racket, baseball bat, golf club, or your hands in the case of the bowling game or the boxing game (see photo of Rebecca beating the bejesus out of her opponent).

Pretty soon after setting the thing up, Rebecca and I were leaping around the room like crazed apes, playing the included game, Wii Sports. The controls are incredibly simple and accurate – swing the controller like a putter and it putts, swing it like a bat and it bats. It’s very easy to pick up. Anyway, without further ado, here are the results of our first, fairly drunken, fairly epic evening:

• Tennis – Rebecca won
• Baseball - Rebecca won
• Golf – Rebecca won
• Boxing – Rebecca won with a Knock Out
• Bowling – Rebecca won after getting three strikes in a row.

So it’s official – Rebecca is a natural, and I have all the gear but no idea.

I never used to be a morning person, especially as a teenager. I think I’m a lot more of a morning person since starting work, but I always want to go back to sleep when I wake up on a weekday. On the weekends, I can’t have a lie-in. It’s all very odd.

I have to admit that I’m probably not getting enough sleep at the moment, with the evenings being so long and the light piercing the blinds so early in the morning now. I suppose it’s typical human nature to see the bad in the good, so I’ll hold off any implication of a formal complaint about the weather, the sunshine etc and just say that I’m probably not getting enough sleep at the moment.

Anyway – the weather’s warm, but the tubes are sweaty and hot, but I’m working in my company’s very cool office near Borough Market at the moment. I don’t often get a chance to work here, usually I’m posted out to some nasty industrial estate or something, so I make a point of having what I think is probably the best cup of coffee in London.

This isn’t meant to sound like an advert, but Monmouth Coffee on Borough Market absolutely does it for me. Hands-down. 100%. There’s even a Facebook appreciation group for it now! It’s expensive, at £2 for a small cup, but a great treat and loads better than Starbucks. I make a point of buying an almond croissant from the bakery just across from Monmouth, but since the coffee is so rich and creamy, I’m almost too full to devour the croissant after sucking down that coffee goodness.

My friend at work, Tom Hopkins, has some pretty damning things to say about coffee these days. Where many of us just shrug their shoulders about the parlous state of coffee on the go, Tom’s written an entire post about it on his blog, including an analysis of the horrors of “Americano” coffee and “magic box” coffee machines. I can’t disagree.

However, whilst Tom agrees about the best cup of coffee in London, we disagree over which is better: Latte or straight filter with milk.

I’m right, of course.