There's still just under an hour in which something interesting could happen.

I really need to get my glasses adjusted. The paint on the nose bridge has actually been worn away by the number of times I've pushed it up.


Today was one of those days that can only be described as "normal". 50 years from now, when I look back on my life (from atop my golden throne in my giant mansion), I will not remember today. I might recall that I didn't really do much during the summer of 2007 but I won't remember what I did on this day. If I were to recall that my "not doing very much" involved an awful lot of browsing the web and playing Fire Emblem, then I certainly wouldn't remember what sites I browsed or what chapters I beat today.

Should I ever do something famous enough to justify a book about my life, any would-be biographers will ignore today, possibly touching slightly on my teenage years, sandwiched in a single chapter between my early childhood and university days.

Normality is often a concept that people say doesn't exist. Everything and everyone is unique, with many properties, none of which are "normality", they say. There is no such thing as a "normal" person, doing "normal" things. But I look back on my day, filled with familiar things and re-enacted tasks, and I can thing of no better word to sum it up than that non-existent quality of "normal".

And it's such a human thing, too. It's a concept we created, something that I can't imagine an animal understanding. All any other form of life understands is their own life, it is what it is and if it changes, it changes. They must simply adapt and survive, striving for something better but never defining what it has.

But human beings, we look at what others do. We see if they enjoy it and if they do then we try our hardest to follow suit. We make a concious effort to do things differently from time to time and in doing so we define our own normality as simply being what we do when we're not doing "something else".

Does Holly, our family's own little West Highland Terrier, lie in her patch of sunlight on the floor thinking about how great it was last time she was at the beach and thinking that she should go again? I highly doubt it. Though should she, by whim and quirk of events, end up at the beach, if indeed that's somewhere she enjoys, I have no doubt that she shall recognise it and enjoy her time there.

But should I think of the beach all of a sudden, then it is quite within my power to wish to go there. Perhaps I could get there, perhaps I could not. If the beach were not so close or the season not so suitable, I could plan to hop on a plane and arrive at another beach about which I had only heard. And it would be a day at the beach, a holiday, a break from normal life.

Or perhaps I shall remember today. For even if the day itself is nothing special, then the thoughts I make upon it and the analysis I give it may stick with me, dragging along memories of web addresses and character level-ups. By calling it forgettable in such detail, have I made it memorable?

Perhaps normality remains so elusive because by examining it and quantifying it we must make it disappear. We can define it in a dictionary but trying to pin it down via example simply makes the examples inherently abnormal and therefore useless in our human quest to define the absence of certain qualities as a baseline from which to judge those qualities.

Perhaps, should I choose to write that hypothetical book in the far-flung future, I shall focus on today as the perfect example, well-documented as it is, of my life at this time, detailing it more than any other and simply reaffirming that normal day's conclusions.

Or perhaps I'll simply write "Wednesday, 8 August 2007" at the end of the foreword and leave it up to readers to figure out what the hell I'm talking about.

Which, by and large, is my strategy with this blog.