I’m off to a play reading this evening. If all goes according to plan, I shall fulfill a lifelong ambition to be a Wurzel, albeit an ancient Greek one.

I shall be in Auckland from 3 July to 8 July for something called NACCQ, which I am attending in my capacity as a guy who was nearby when one of the intended speakers realised he couldn’t go to NACCQ and Europe at the same time. I shall be giving a powerpoint presentation about Computer Science Unplugged, and likely attending many exciting sessions on the forward-looking and inspirational topic of whatever NACCQ is about. It seems to be something to do with computing qualifications, so I hope they don’t get me started on the NCEA.

I’ll have some free time before and after the conference, so let me know if you’d like to hang out in Auckland during that period.

After ten or twelve years of faithful service, my bed finally fell irrevocably to bits yesterday.

It’s not that it wasn’t a good bed, it’s just that it wasn’t designed for being moved around much. The joints were supported by thin dowels and highly-stressed bolts and… OK, it was never a very good bed. I was just fond of it because I bought it with Nicki shortly before we got married. Actually, I now recall that the central beam splintered and had to be repaired before Nicki died, so it can’t have lasted more than a couple of years before it started to come apart. A couple of years ago I gave up on the dowels and started banging nails into it, and I’m surprised it lasted as long as it has. But now it’s a pile of wood in the corner of my room. Rather nice rimu wood, though, so I’m trying to think whether I can recycle it for some other purpose.

So I went to look at bed shops this afternoon. I wasn’t looking forward to this, as my usual experience of shopping for expensive items runs as follows.

Step One: I think about how I will use the item and formulate a short mental list of general requirements, that I’d expect to be fairly easy to meet.

Step Two: I visit some shops and discover that no manufacturer in the world has ever thought to combine even two of my requirements in an affordable product.

So, for example, when I first set out to buy a cellphone (some years ago now) my two basic requirements were that I could sync its contact list with my computer, and that it didn’t look stupid. My bar for stupidity was not high: if the 5 key was the same shape, size and colour as the 3 key, I was prepared to deem it non-stupid. It turned out that syncing your contacts was universally deemed to be a high-end feature only suitable for phones that cost more than $1000 and were riddled with features I didn’t want. Not looking stupid was not apparently a priority at any price point. After several weeks I gave up and bought the cheapest non-stupid phone I could get. Its user interface is a mess, and it can’t keep time correctly (its clock unaccountably loses about ten minutes a day), but I figured it would have to do until a reasonably-priced syncable non-stupid phone came onto the market. That was four years ago. I have had similar problems with stereos, shoes, furniture, home theatre components… and pretty much everything that costs more than a hundred dollars. This is not a problem with me. It is a problem with the world.

I can think of two cases in which I found it easy to buy an expensive item. The first was my house, for which my requirements were that it have four bedrooms, one with an en-suite bathroom, and be within fifteen minutes’ walk of where I walked. Bill the real estate agent found one just like that and took me straight to it, and it was just what I wanted. We looked at a dozen other places just to make sure, but that really wasn’t necessary.

The second such case occurred today while looking for replacement beds. I found exactly what I was looking for in the first place I walked into, a shop oddly named Not Just Beds that clearly sold Just Beds. It had some beds in the front, and a room in the back where the proprietor made the beds, and he could fulfill all my requirements (made of recycled rimu, no sticking-up bit at the foot end, connected by something more substantial than bolts and dowels). As with the house, I felt obliged to go and look at some other places, but I knew I wouldn’t find anything better.

I’d like to say I ordered my new bed right away, but actually I wandered around looking at beds I wasn’t interested in until after Not Just Beds had closed for the day. So I’ll have to go back another day.

It is perhaps a little late in the day to mention it, but today is Free Comic Book Day at comics shops around the world. A selection of special edition free comics are available from your closest one.

More information here, from the redoubtable Karen Healey.

While listening to the BBC News Quiz, I’ve just learnt via an aside from Jeremy Hardy that Humphrey Lyttelton died a week ago, at 87 years old. Like many others, I know him mostly from I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, but he was also a legendary jazz trumpeter, and sometime cartoonist. His extraordinary comic timing and ability to deliver the most appalling double entendres in a plummy deadpan helped to a surprising degree to get me through some hard years.

Now, as the little grey mouse of Time gnaws through the plastic shielding of Fate, sending the 747 of Destiny plummeting towards the church fête of Eternity, I see that it’s time to say goodbye.