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.