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Right ho! Then bring me my whangee, my yellowest shoes, and the old green Homburg.

Arthur C Clarke invented the cloud in 1962:

'The business of the future may be run by executives who are scarcely ever in each other's physical presence. It will not even have an address or a central office--only the equivalent of a telephone number. For its files and records will be space rented in the memory units of computers that could be located anywhere on earth.'

I collected four cigarette stubs with lipstick about the shade called 'carmen', a blonde shade. I took them to the bathroom and gave them to the city.

Another use for a towel: 'He dipped a thick towel down in a bucket and folded it and wrung it out and pushed it along the bar holding it by the ends. That made a club about two inches thick and eighteen inches long. You can knock a man into the next county with a club like that if you know how.'

However, unlike the camera and most other modern inventions, the phonograph stands in a class by itself because of its extreme simplicity. It does not detract from Edison's achievement to say that, given the necessary instructions, any competent Greek artificer could have built an instrument that could have saved the voices of Socrates or Demosthenes for us.

When I woke, it was getting on for two o'clock. I breakfasted, with that magnificent telegram propped up against the teapot; had a bath, dressed, and shortly before five was well on my way to Walpole Street.

I think nothing will ever erase from my mind the moment when the central idea of The Girl who Waited came to me.

"Women are not all coquettes," she said, as she took off her bonnet and mantilla, and laid them carefully on a chair. "I won't go into my room, and look in my glass, and make myself smart; you shall take me just as I am."

I felt quite startled for the moment, for, of all the ways in which men have looked at me, no man ever looked at me in that way before. Did you ever see the boa constrictor fed at the Zoological Gardens? They put a live rabbit into his cage, and there is a moment when the two creatures look at each other. I declare Mr Bashwood reminded me of the rabbit.

I've enjoyed all the stories in this collection so far. Just finished William Gibson's brilliant 'The Gernsback Continuum, more like an essay in speculative Jungian psychology than a time travel story.

I was one of those men my mother always warned me against.

Sometimes I wonder if the author might be taking the piss out of the source material.

'They spoke in whispers, their eyes searching the area, their guns in their fists, lethal hunters, yet perfectly able to carry on a bantering conversation as they stalked killers.'

It's the 70s:

'Both Doyle and Bodie turned to enjoy the sight of a luscious female, with a wiggle that could raise a head of steam on an iceberg'

'Both partners could pull birds with a consummate ease they exercised as a God-given privilege.'

Just finished Ursula Le Guin's 'Another Story, or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea'. I intended to express regret that this story is so little-known. But a little searching shows that it's 20 years old (!) and has been reasonably well-distributed. I need to read more Le Guin.

a morbid enterprise, akin to the eccentric behaviour of those priests of Baal who gashed themselves with knives, or of authors who subscribe to press-clipping agencies.

This is one of those books that inspire writers by being so mediocre. I feel that I could make a better and more convincing 1930s spy yarn using a few contemporary travel guides and a few basic rules of prose writing, including: omit most adjectives and all epithets. It's about half as badly written as The Da Vinci Code.

Finished Mostly Harmless.

Finished Young Zaphod Plays It Safe.