A CD reissue of Ivory Cutlery's 'Privilege' arrives in the post. I think the Oldie wants my honest opinion. I know I'll love it.

The op went well, thanks to the expertise of the consultants at the James Paget in Gorleston. Thankfully, they waited until afterwards to explain just how serious my injury had been. My elbow joint had been crushed by the impact, turning it from a nice big sphere to a bag of much smaller marbles. The humerus had snapped like a stick of celery, and the CT scan images were pretty grim. It's all now held together in a very close approximation of its original form with plates, screws, pins and wires. The rest is down to nature and some pretty hardcore physiotherapy, both of which take time. However, I am now pretty confident that I'll be restored to full health eventually. I'm a natural rebel, but I know when orders need to be heeded. Anyway, I won't mope about it here any longer. As you were...

The other day, I did something I haven't done for ages. I read the Guardian. In it was a long article by a Guardian hack about how he had revolutionised his life and electricity bills by switching entirely to low-energy light bulbs over the last six months. Maybe I was in a bad mood when I read the article, but there seemed to be an overwhelming air of "aren't I great?" sanctimony about the whole affair, with this chap clearly regarding himself as some kind of frontiersman.

I am not a journalist for the nation's most environmentally minded newspaper, and yet Schloss Cheeseford has been equipped from basement to attic with low-energy bulbs for the last 13 years (with the last 1996 original only just having come out of service). Given that they cost over a tenner apiece when I began my own energy-saving crusade, I think I'd be able to write a better (and more sanctimonious) article about the wonder of CFLs than some Johnny-come-lately who waited until they were 50p a go, and who seems to have more light sources in his modest townhouse than Pinewood Studios. However, I know that if I'd pitched just such an article, I'd have been lucky to receive a polite rejection note. So, how do these people get these dull, obvious articles commissioned? Compromising negatives of the commissioning editor? Being able to call the commissioning editor Dad? What ever it is, I don't got it.

What I do got is a fractured distal humerus, my Grauniad reading having been something I did to pass the time in hospital. I go back in on Tuesday to have some fairly serious ironmongery inserted into my arm. Cruelly, it was my right arm, so typing is out of the question, and I find myself dictating this painfully slowly into a computer that throws up interesting alternatives for the words that I thought I said. Knowing my luck, I will now be deluged with commissions that I am unable to fulfil. I am now off to buy some incandescent bulbs which am going to leave on all of the time. So there.