Last weekend, I went to Tesco's. Unusual for me, as it's some way off, although the food range is better than the local Asda, which is enourmous, but full of rubbish.

Supermarket shopping on saturday is strangely relaxing — the environment and general experience is so horrible that they only way I can cope is to let my brain switch off as much as possible and wander around in a meditative daze.

I spent 15 minutes trying to find soap — I'd assumed it was with detergent, but actually it was next to the dental floss. I also noticed that the pasta isle has been renamed to "Italian Meal Solutions". Very strange.

This weekend, one of my oldest (or should I say longest) friends, Phil, came up. In the end, we watched some vids and drank some beer. Actually, I watched the vids and Phil dozed off. I wonder how a man who is clearly so desparately in need of sleep is going to cope; he's going to become a father in a few weeks time.

I'm being let out of teaching for a few days to go to a meeting entitled "Ontogenesis", which is about ontology building as far as I can see.

I'm greatly looking forward to it, although being stuffed up in buffet car of an overpacked, overheated London train is not ideal. I'm going to talk about what appear to be the differences between neuroscience and biology in terms of ontology building — I'm basing the talk on ignorance and supposition as I hadn't been doing this for long enough to know better.

I trialled the talk on Friday. It wasn't very good. I should be working on it now, but the train is too horrible to concentrate on anything serious.