I have a favourite seat on the train, it seems. I am in it. The train is warm, the seats are red and I am peeping out from under a hat and scarf. Despite the last one I catch delivering me half an hour late, this one is like the log fire of trains. Before the log fire train, my mobile has died at the station. “What do people do when they wait for trains?” I wonder, without electronic gadgets to distract them. “The world is fantastic if people would stop staring at their phones,” someone has told me once. I never doubted it.

I look at the clock hands large and station-like. “You must wait 20 minutes,” they boom, dark and black on a papery background. It is far too cold to sit and read Nineteen Eighty-Four on metal seats, which is a cold sort of book in itself, analytical, logical and thought out, and will not make me warm. Nineteen Eighty-Four is for warm trains, to sit puffed up in my coat crammed into a window seat, huddled up in the pages and frowning whenever the doors open to deliver me chilly whispers of the cold outside.

I stand infront of the departure boards, humming the Smiths tunelessly under my breath, and bob up and down in cold fits, staring at people. People come and go. I wonder if I’m the only one not moving. I watch everyone and pretend I am Sherlock Holmes.

1. There is a glove dragged across the floor. ‘A kid’s or adult’s?’ I ponder, falling over the first detective hurdle and try to spot a naked hand with another wrapped in the red and pink counterpart. A man with a suitcase tries to drag the glove off under his suitcase. He succeeds and scowls at it jammed under the tiny wheel, shuffling the case awkwardly around it. I loose interest once I know it’s safe.

2. There are two beige-yellow coats who trot about looking like an American Psycho meets a 21st century tailor. Neither looks particularly murderous. I give up on playing any sort of serious detective.

3. There is a man in the long green heavy-set coat and overbearing wine scarf who reeks of a different sort of 80s businessman in a not altogether unpleasant way.

4. There is a man with the sharp-looking but battered Paddington Bear briefcase who trots past, the man with the plastic briefcase built for a budget gangster, and the man with the briefcase that is large enough to be two stuck together. I wonder what large objects he takes to work with him.

5. The glove has disappeared.

6. A woman my Mother’s age trots past unable to walk in her heels. Her friends all wear comfortable shoes with rubber soles that shout “WE ARE VERY GOOD FOR YOUR SPINE”. For once I agree with their logic.

7. There is the obligatory grunge boy with long beautiful hair funneling out of his hood with a girlfriend with feeble fashion biker boots and a punk rucksack hiked up her back. They scuttle through the station looking less rebellious and more cold.

8. My favourite is the man who strolls past with dark hair and a clear sort of face, making eye contact mid-conversation briefly before he turns to his companion. “Yes, but he’s an idiot” he says. It reminds me of someone I know.

It reminds me of something that passed by on Twitter that I love, perhaps from @Rhodri, who’s worth a follow regardless of whether he said it or not. A delicious point. I’ve been carrying it around in my head all week.

“A politician does something idiotic and we’re surprised? We’re all idiots, it’s just that other people haven’t found out yet.”

There are some good things and some bad things about living somewhere on a short-term basis.

Upside:

• I live in an art deco flat by Brighton sea front.

• We also have a tumble dryer. (This is nearly living the dream.)

Downside:

• I haven’t used a wardrobe or drawers properly for two and a half months – my things are flung half in a bag, over a sofa and over a keyboard stand.

• There are cook books in the kitchen here that have been taunting me.

See, my ability to cook is impaired by my ability to refuse to buy the same thing I already own twice. I have a giant bag of herbs and spices, but they’re wrapped up two counties away at home in an effort to keep possessions to a minimum when I come to move again.

Today I peeped into a Jamie Oliver cookbook that was lurking about. For all his slightly smug down-to-earth posing on the front cover, there’s a nice and silly-looking recipe for Cannelloni which involves upright tubes of pasta instead of sideways. “Oh ho!” said I, getting excited and rushed to the shops, throwing caution to the wind as I went to buy unnecessary duplicates of kitcheny bits I already have. It’s silly how much I’ve missed cooking. It’s the first new thing I’ve cooked since August-ish, and I’m very pleased. I want to make more now. And I want to buy ludicrous things for kitchens that I will never want to share.

So, some vertical pasta tubes for your visual perusal, and very exciting they are too. I have put the recipe onto my food blog, full of collected recipes, perhaps rather illegally. Hopefully Mr Oliver will be too busy leaping about in his latest health crusade to notice.

When I am living somewhere more permanently again I will wage war on the kitchen. There will be flour everywhere and syrup on the ceiling. It won’t know what’s hit it.

Whilst I love online, we are all speedily stumbling into a world of perpetual phone use as we idly try not to walk into solid objects. It makes me both laugh and shudder when I spy everyone on the train/bus/street doing it – and now the Tube’s getting involved with wifi, so nowhere’s safe. We’re all going to look like plugged-in twats in the future.

We’re going to look ridiculous: no one will ever be away from their mobile, and I’ll find I’m thirty (or at least, older than I am now) and can’t stop talking about how my first mobile was when I was thirteen and not when I was five, and how the world has changed into a sinful darker hellhole of technology. I will sit at bus stops talking to the young.

“There was none of this,” I will bleat in a voice weary before my time. “And none of this ‘adverts on bus stop tops‘ either. The world’s gone mad. I miss newspapers.”

“What’s a newspaper?” the berated children will ask, because it is 2019 and newspapers no longer exist.

And then I shall put a paper bag on my head and sit in a dark room. I don’t really care though. It’s sort of lovely this fantastically mad advancement, and it’s sort of not. It’s always a shock to notice quite how immersed we’re getting in all this but at the same time it’s just incredibly, well, smart. When done right. The type of smart that makes you think “this is the future! where is my dinner in pill form?”

As long as I keep doing traditional things, reading books, making things and doing new stuff, whether online or off, I’ll be pretty happy. So, here’s an irrelevant picture of me painting.

It’s sort of lovely wondering where technology’s going to be in twenty years. For now, I really like that Microsoft advert.

I’m on a train to see Temper Trap and I’m excited for the gig. The previous week I’ve attended Spotify/Three’s ‘Now Playing’ launch event with bands such as White Lies and I Am Arrows. At Three/Spotify’s gig at Shoreditch Town Hall, it’s nothing I’ve been craving for weeks to see but they are bands I’m still interested in seeing live. We prepare to have budget-sized fun.

It’s one of the first events I’ve attended in London as an official blogger (well, as far as this notion stretches). I’m pretty pleased really. The bands sound okay in advance after some listens on Spotify. They throw some drinks tokens at us on the door and there’s a free cloakroom. None of this is overwhelming but when not expected, it’s nice that they’ve taken quite a few introductory steps to make it nice.

The entire event is geared at competition winners and bloggers and it’s good they’ve geared it to everyone having a fun time for free. It’s flattering that they’ve put it on but as they lob free extra bits at us, and as I stroll down the tall hallway, a feeling I’m probably meant to feel more wowed. It’s almost like a mass-marketing exercise. Well, that’s what it is. It’s probably impossible to say that without sounding like a dick, but there’s reasons.

The acoustics are dreadful. And this is where it’s really obvious that the attention is in entertaining people with bits and bobs and PR fluff rather than the quality of music and sound.

The Brighton blogging scene is pretty different, for me at least. I suspect it’s more like that of a critic than launch-event orientated. A lot of the things I’ve been to have been regular events that I’m able to review – some design shows and some fantastic nights like Hammer & Tongue, Johnny Flynn, Beth Jeans Houghton, and Toro Y Moi.

It’s not about the paraphernalia that comes with an event – it should be about the event quality rather than heaping people with free stuff and a second rate quality production. (I’d be much more swayed by an event if it was better quality, and I had to pay for my own drinks. It sounds petty, but to pay for half a press night out is a big thing for me right now.) Perhaps nothing insightful, but nothing I’ve experienced before.

Though, if the biggest complaint around at the moment about PR/blogger relations is that people aren’t treated personally enough, disrespected, or treated as an after-thought, then sound quality might not be the biggest thing on the agenda. I’m not too sure. I think a gig should be gig quality – about the event and not just the hype.

Let’s hope their music service comes out with better quality than the ‘Now Playing’ events. One big aspect is that I come away forced to talk about the event in terms of brands rather than music. No videos, no bands reviews, and better coverage all round. (This is all meant in a truly unbitter sort of way. It was a nice enough night.)

Baking Week, regardless of whether it’s a made-up-internet-thing or not is awesome. It essentially gives you an excuse to try new things and force them on your work colleagues with a handy excuse of “It’s baking week!” if they taste bad. As if partaking in silly weeks allows you to poison your co-workers.

It is Baking Week. “Bake me cake!” demanded some people on the Internet. And so I made cake.

I could be found in the kitchen with food dye all over my hands, ladling cake mix about in some effort to make marbled rainbow cake. Then I put them in boxes and sent them to some people on Twitter (@untitledlondon, @nicholasrgill and @imjustmike) because they demanded so, and internet law dictates that silly Internet whims cannot be ignored. Or, I had time on my hands and like making people smile with stupid things.

The cakes in boxes in the post survived the Royal Mail (mostly), and everyone was able to see my inability to use writing icing. At work, we all had big slices and then had giddy sugar highs, after which we were forced to drink copious amounts of water. Chairs with wheels get pretty exploited during these moments.

A dodgy mix of good quality and HTC-struggles-with-camera photos. Future note: make the colours more awesome, like this. Et voila, my cake that looks like an inept child has been in the kitchen: