Make that a cold one, I'm floating away.

I know I've hit the doldrums when I look in my wardrobe and think out loud, "That's too bloody bright."

Last year, I took pretentious fashion to a new level amongst my friends. It was probably a subconscious sign that I was game, up for it, and just waiting to catch somebody's eye with my floral humdinger of a Next twenty five pounder.

But with the longest day of the year a distant memory (and thank God 'cause XFM were milking that cow in to a stiff cheese), I find myself contemplating just what I'm trying to prove. You know when you reach the point where the beer is warm, your stomach is bloating and the depressants are kicking in with little in the way of a positive chemical reaction? I feel like I'm just south of that. Hoping for something to spark inside me, but happy to scrape by unharmed.

God, it's this kind of metaphorical bullshit which I vowed never to publish online. I'll cut to the story which made my evening on Saturday, and which I've actually researched to confirm in the knowledge that you should never trust a farmer. It's about a man named Larry who won a Darwin Award in the 1980's.

Darwin Awards are slightly misleading in the sense that they conjure expectations of immaculate biology grades and precise maths. 

Well, this guy thought he'd done his homework when he calculated that attaching 60 helium balloons to a garden deck chair would counter-balance his own weight and help him to level out at 30 feet in the air.

So he gathered some sandwiches and a six pack of beer, expecting to be floating pleasantly above his street before shooting the balloons and lowering back to the ground. I can only assume he had a crowd handy to witness this spectacle.

Regardless, Larry sat back in the chair and waited on as they released the balloons, causing him - and I use the exact wording from the article - to "shoot like a cannon" in to the sky at an unstoppable rate.

He shot above the houses, shot above the trees...in fact he miscalculated so badly that instead of leveling out at rooftop height, he reached 16,000 feet in the sky. This, while sitting in a garden deck chair with nothing but balloons and a picnic sandwich for company.

Now at what point in that ascent do you think he realized just how badly his maths teacher had betrayed him? That a calm dreamy day in the sun was about to become, err, a calm dreamy day in the clouds. 16,000 FEET! That's one jet pack battery from the final frontier! It's just a bloody good job that he did all this before 9/11 or the sensationalists would have been touting the world's first balloon bomber.

Anyway, it took him several hours to pluck up the courage to shoot the balloons and start a gradual descent. Unfortunately for Larry, he managed to trespass in to LAX airspace leading to a military scale arrest. Not what he had in mind, but it beats waiting for the bus.

This reminds me, did anybody get a peek at The Sun's headline story today? "Army Spot UFOs Over Shropshire". I actually found myself stood at the newspaper rack in W.H Smiths wondering whether I'd picked up an April 1st back-issue. You might as well replace it with "Finch Spots Floater, Won't Flush" and you'll have a headline of more national relevance.

What do they expect to prove with journalism like that? The fact that every other newspaper was leading with a different story immediately settled my fears. The fear that Holy Shit, the apocalypse is now and I came to work commando.

Just a note, to those who are - or were - regular readers of this blog: changes are afoot and my ongoing one-man epidemic of rambling dyslexia will take on a slightly different shape over the next week.

I'm about to launch a website which will integrate these posts with a personal homepage. Now, I'm not going to be silly about it. I haven't had a genuinely personal website since those all-too-distant Year 8 days when we battled for hits on Geocities with our Bravenet stat counters. You know? Nothing says TechCrunch like hosting your cyber laundry on Freeserve.

Anyway, the site is registered. It will be called Minor Disturbance and it will feature more of this, more of me, and presumably by those maths - less of you.

Competitions and domestics, a healthy balance.

I took my girlfriend bowling on Monday night, and what should have been a celebration of alpha male sporting dominance - almost became a crushing defeat that John Terry would have been proud of.

I'm sure all guys can relate to the burning issue of how easy to go on a girlfriend when it comes to sport. There's the consensus that a good chap should big up the spirit of the competition, give his girl a chance and then narrowly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. All in the name of what? Sexual favours in the bedroom? I'd rather not lower myself to such antics.

Alas, I took her bowling with the intention of pummeling her score in to oblivion. And things started positively on that note. While I was serving up a half decent first game, she was striving not to gutter her every go. This brought out the compassionate "let's make sure she doesn't abandon all hope and storm off in a huff" side of me - and I offered her a little encouragement where I could.

Then the second game arrived and, well...she beat me.

I'd like to point out that while I lost on points, I won on style. Never in my life have I seen a girl bowl a ball and have time to re-arrange her hair and powder her nose - all before the ball gets to the bloody pins. I refuse to believe she knocked them down. They were simply bored off their feet. In to a shootout we went and my excuses were frothing in the pot.

"Well, I have to let you win something."

"It's not my fault the score isn't registering properly."

"You sabotaged my bowling finger in the ice cream freezer, you psychopathic wench."

As the future of our relationship flashed before my eyes - through gritted teeth and spectacular nerve - I managed to sneak a one point victory in the deciding game. Fairy tale endings prevailed, a smug grin returned and my condescending offers of a rematch after she'd "practiced a little more" emerged through the Heathrow night.

I may lack integrity, but I still wear the bowling shoes in this relationship, god damn it.

On the subject of sporting achievement, did anybody hear about Usain Bolt?

He's a 21 year old Jamaican athlete in the 100 meters who happens to be a little bit nippy. Just this past weekend, he set a new world record with a time of 9.72 seconds. Did anybody see the giant photograph in the newspapers?

It had a beaming Bolt, hands pointing at a trackside clock with "Fastest Man on Earth" and the time on display. Now I'm thinking, is that really something to brag about? 9.72 seconds? I expected more from a big black man.

It got me thinking though. Just what athletics event is your sex life? I'll settle for being a "Done in Sixty Seconds" 400 meter hurdle wonder. Always rising to the challenge, but occasionally getting my balls in a twist. 

It's all a bit pointless, really. Everybody knows I'd only take up athletics if it meant I could wear spandex. Bright pink spandex.