It's hard to describe what ultimate happiness feels like. There are several things which come close. The way the milk dances around the Sultanas and Bran Flakes, especially when taken from the top of a new fresh box - especially as this is closely followed by the cruchy sound as the first spoonful enters my mouth. The smell of a fresh packet of "Blue" Extra chewing gum after the top has been unwrapped also comes close. As does hearing that a scouser has been arrested.

They come close but nothing beats the first cup of coffee in a morning. At first, I don't allow myself a drink. I steal a wiff of it. Like Pavlov's dogs, or a grown man watching ITV's Holly Willoughby, I begin to salivate. CUP ONE. The coffee hits my lips and life seems worth living.

***

"Do you want a drink?" says semi important work colleague, who I am in a meeting with. "Oh yeah, Black Coffee would be nice." CUP TWO. I dunno why I said that. I'm not thirsty. It just seems polite. He begins to tell me how I should be doing my job and fetches his laptop. I lift my coffee mug, catching it on some weighty management tome sitting on his desk.

The coffee splashes on his desk. I quickly put my cup down to cover it up. He returns from his filing cabinet. I have to get this off his desk somehow. I run through my list of options:

• Sleeve of suit jacket, that has just come back from Johnsons - No
• Big pile of important looking papers - Tempting but No
• I have no tissues - damn seasonal hayfever. Why can't I have it all year round

He turns to get the power supply and using my hand like a big Vileda Rapid Attractive, I push it to the floor.

***

"Hey, since it's pay day I feel like a treat!" says slightly less important work colleague. "I think it's time to end my detox. Did you know I haven't had a coffee all year. Oooh, I think I'll do a squashy one too. MB do you want one?".

"Not really, I've just had one and fancy some water." I reply as I sit back and read Holy Moly and munch on a Rich Tea.

CUP THREE.

"Oh you've made me one? I didn't really feel like it but thanks."

"Well you never normally say no so I thought you were joking. And we've got that new strong one from Tesco. Y'know, the one that made all those Geordies turn into were-wolves?"

***

CUP FOUR. Never try and pick a coffee cup up by it's handle, straight after moisturising your hands. Unless you are part of a Leslie Nielsen movie.

***

You cannot have a post tea, Mint Green and Black's without coffee. CUP FIVE (and a top up). It's the law. If you don't obey, Chuck Norris will come to your gaff and roundhouse kick you. "I've got a bit of coffee left over - I'll throw it all in" my Canadian Friend shouts from the kitchen.

I take a sip of the coffee. Everything suddenly moves slowly. I feel like I'm in the Matrix. The coffee is so strong, my spoon would stand up in it but "there is no spoon". I can see space-time moving and can feel the fabric of existence being created. While enjoying my new found super-power, I miss out on the last piece of chocolate.

***

2:30AM. I think I may be able to get some sleep soon.

I arrive home to find a note on someone's car. Previous to this, the "Parking wars" seemed to have been dying down. The introduction of two giant black gates with large spikey things on top seem to have stopped visitors parking on the compound.

The gates are operated by a little zappy thing, which is very powerful. The other day when Matt came to visit, I managed to zap the gate open while stood in the kitchen. This is good news as the kitchen is further away than the toilet. Now I have peace of mind knowing that I am able to point Percy at the porcelain while I am waiting for guests to arrive.

I check to see if anyone is looking. I pick the note off the windscreen and read it. I momentarily consider what an incredible breach of privacy this could be and that I am fast becoming the world's biggest gossip.

Hi the letter starts in a promisingly friendly way. I notice you are parked in my car parking space. I am assuming this means you have moved into my spare room. Rent is £500 (If you are female there will be ten pounds knocked off for each point you score on the classic 1-10 hotness meter). It is payable on the first of each month. There is a £500 deposit and a £75 administration fee.

You will be required to do the washing up on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. I will do it the other three days and Sunday is a day of rest. There will be no smoking, no pets and no Sado-Masochism (unless I'm invited to join in). Friday night is quiet night. Especially during "My Name is Earl".

Of course there is a chance you have not moved in and you could just be inconsiderateate visitor who has parked in my spot. If so, please can you move your car.

Thanks
xx

A lot of people ask me - which is blogger speak for nobody ever talks to me but I'm an opinionated bastard and I'm gonna tell you anyway - where I get all my funny material from. And I reply, I dunno, I just see funny stuff, remember it and write about it. A lot of people also ask me why I chose "Dan Brown" as a pen name.

Like for instance, I have noticed that we are increasingly becoming a nanny state I am warned against do anything anywhere. This is bad news for Libertarians but good news for people who print signs.

I often wonder about how long after a national tragedy you have to wait before you can start telling jokes about it. Being a naturally funny and charming man, my wit is well known. I spend most days partaking in Wilde-like satire with cutting Paul-Merton-style jibes.

So as soon as I'd heard that someone had alerted authorities when they'd spotted a 19st mass of wobbling blubber and lard by the Houses of Parliament - I started to think of jokes. Of course, once the authorities turned up and recognised Gordon Brown, they turned round and spotted a whale in the Thames.

Now I know Michelle McManus' career had taken a nose dive but I didn't think she'd get to the point where she'd throw herself off Tower Bridge.

Argh! Now I've started I don't think I'll be able to stop. So, I'll leave you with this little tit bit. Not only did the Pizza Hut in Manchester make the wrong pizza last Friday, for me and My Canadian Friend, they had run out of Deep Pan Pizza bases. Which is exactly what you'd expect from a busy branch of a National Pizza Chain on a Friday night.

He shoots he scores!
GOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAALLLLL!!!!!!
(Although I before you start celebrating, I should point out that I was the goalkeeper they scored past)

I play football every other week at the Reebok Stadium, home of Bolton Wanderers.

After five minutes I notice one of our players is struggling with some kind of knee injury. It is custom that when someone is injured they go in goal for a bit. I do not like this because when it comes to playing outfield, I'm more Aled Jones than Vinne Jones. So I decide to give him a few minutes to run it off.

And then our injured player comes and gets a pass off me. I cannot be totally sure but it seems that he has a false leg. Maybe it was just the light. He has a bandage around his left thigh - maybe he tore his quad earlier and is limping because of that. I mean I don't want to be prejudice, some of my best friends are black - wait no that's something different. I don't want to be prejudice but can someone with a wooden leg be playing football? This thought occupies my mind while we concede another three goals.

I keep a close eye our 'injured' player. I watch the way he moves, the way he always kicks everything right footed and the way he tackles. I am 75% sure that he does have an artificial leg, if only there was some way I could tell for sure.

"I'm just going to sort my leg out!" he calls as he walks off behind my goal. He sits and unbuckles his leg. He re-wraps the bandage around his thigh and puts his leg back on.

I do not know which upsets me more.

• That I was so discriminatory, thinking a one legged man couldn't play football
• Or - that he was a better player than I'll ever be

It is not easy being a metrosexual. It's not all wearing pink shirts, knowing the calorie count of a Chicken, Tomato and Basil salad, moisturising, accessorising and buying cushions. Occasionally it's hard work. Gone are the "Men Behaving Badly" days when not doing the washing up could be the centre piece to thirty minutes of comedy. Us metrosexual men now have standards.

I ponder how things have changed as I choose the Orange Mr Muscle to clean the toilet.

Later on, I begin to wonder... When does a toilet become dirty? As soon as I have finished rubbing my toilet with a cloth - it is clean. So does it become dirty once it has been used once? It doesn't take a genius to know that as soon as you can see stains on the bowl - it is dirty. But is there an in betwee stage where it can officially be called dirty? Surely this is something the EU should issue a directive on.

That Toilet Duck documentary has shown us that there are Little Green Aliens living under the rim of my toilet and that cleaning kills them. But if I have cultivated a life-form under my toilet rim, then surely I should be getting a Nobel prize rather than killing the little bastards with a blue liquid.

I cogitate further. But so what if the toilet version of Al Qaeda is living under the rim? Does it matter if my toilet has germs in it? I can categorically state now, and I don't think I will shock anyone with this, that I do not wipe my bagel under the toilet rim before I eat it. And since none of my body actually comes into contact with the toilet bowl, it could be filled with Sulfuric Acid as far as I'm concerned.

So if it becomes dirty after one use and I don't care about the germs under the rim. Is there any point cleaning it at all?

Ah, that was a very intellectual "thought experiment", which helped pass a couple of minutes....

Let me grab some paper and then flush.

"I cannot believe it!!!" I whine. "Look at what they've done. This is terrible!" In utter disgust, I slide down into my chair and open my Big Issue.

"It's only a coffee." replies My Canadian Friend in her usual calming manner. "Give me the cup, I'll go and get them to fill it up to the brim."

"Don't worry about it, I'll just nick the cup. That'll teach 'em." (I really must stop stealing Starbucks mugs, it is getting out of hand, I will soon have to build a new kitchen cupboard to house them. Not even the years I spent playing Tetris can help me pack them all in.)

We begin our intellectual discussions. We talk about the controversy over an MP being in Big Brother, the fact that house prices rising at slowest rate in ten years, the fluctuations in the FTSE and what Angelina Jolie will look like when she's nine months pregnant.

And then some Chavs spoil our middle class utopia.

"Look at them!!!" I protest, interrupting My Canadian Friend in the the middle of a sentence. "There are undesirables sitting in our Coffee Shop!" One of them has a black scarf covering his nose and his mouth, one puts his feet up on the table and the girl, resplendant in her bright white tracksuit, slumps in the brown over-sized lounge chair.

Now I'm all for being inclusive but the order of society today dictates a sort of unwritten separation between real people and chavs. I do not go and sit in bus stops and drink Diamond White; they do not come into Starbucks. That's the way it is.

One of them begins to tear up the informative menu like leaflet on the table. "Look now they're destroying Starbucks' property!!!" I exclaim "If they carry on doing this, they could put 'Bucks out of business". (If they had taken the time to read the leaflet, they would have learnt about the coffee growers of Peru and seen details of a Charity Bike Ride through the Andes to raise money for some dying kids.) This is the last straw.

"I'm going to go over there and say something." I say in a brave manly like way.

"Please don't, you'll only embarss yourself." replies My Candadian Friend. I assume she meant to say I would embarass her, and that is not something I want to do. The barrista comes over and saves us both from doing anything and evicts them.

I tut silently and shake my head at the declining standards of todays youth. I take a sip from my over-priced coffee and pick up the conversation where we left off. "Sorry about that, where were we? You were saying something about how you may get deported?"

I don't seem to do many interesting things and certainly nothing interesting ever happens to me. Which really doesn't help when you are trying to keep an amuzing and entertaining on-line diary, or weblog as the young people of today are calling it. They say the skill of a good writer is that they can write about nothing and make it seem interesting, which explains why when I have nothing to write about, I tend to write nothing. When I feel myself getting desparate, it is a real strain to find something funny.

Take last night for example, after drifting off to sleep just after 22:00, nothing funny happened to me at all between then and when I got up. Sure my temporary clothes rail, purchased for a tenner from Argos, collapsed under its own volition at twenty past midnight and scared the shit out of me. But that wasn't funny. And then my alarm decided to turn itself off making me oversleep by half an hour.

Even passing my mate Matt on the Busy Road today on my to work wasn't funny:
"You're late!!" he yelled over the traffic.
"I'll still be in half an hour before everyone else and anyway, you're not my boss so fuck off." I called back in a friendly don't-mess-with-me-today-or-I'll-kill-you way.

Nothing funny happened on the tram. Sure there was a girl, who must've finished 11th in Blackwell's worst-dressed women's list, wearing a hiddeous leopard skin coat and a pink muppet fur hat. Poor Miss Piggy. And there was an older guy in a Gore-Tex jacket. Now if only he'd spontaneously combust or pull a midget out of his pocket - that would be funny.

As I walked through town, I wished and wished that the walkin' talkin' Barbie Doll in the pointy-toed stilletto-heeled over the knee boots would get one of the heels caught in the tram track causing her to trip over and then be squashed by a tram. Even finding Mrs. A. Brown's Switch Card on the floor only caused temporary amusement when I tried to decide if I should hand it in or empty my Amazon wishlist.

And you certainly wouldn't be interested in hearing about the two new bumpy bits I noticed on my six pack, would you?

But none of this is funny and it certainly wasn't worth writing about.

It's been a quiet day in Lake Wobegon.....

"If these clippers are going to cost £20 and a haircut costs £10 then I'll need to get at least two cuts out of them." I think. "But if I really cock up the cut then I'll have to go to a professional AND I'll be so ashamed I'll never use the again. They'll be as useless to me as Shaun Wright-Phillips is to Chelsea."

I smirk to myself at making such an intelligent pop-culture reference.

I am still unsure. I don't like wasting money but I do want my hair looking good for the "Manchester Blogger's Meet". I search for inspiration. I take a small piece of paper out of my pocket with the words MB's Action Plan and read from it. "Deliverable: Buy Clippers to save time and money on haircuts. Timeline: Before January Sales end. Resources: £20." The next one is "Write Book", I decide that buying clippers will be more of an "Easy Win".

Once I finally make up my mind on something, there is nothing that will get in my way. I set off to the till, armed with My Canadian Friend's Boots Advantage Card. "She just started bleeding and I hate blood. Can you deal with it?" said a shop assistant to her manager. I am not even derailed by the possibility of a much moamusinging story taking place in this store. I dodge in and out of the tight bastard shoppers who are buying next years Christmas presents in the sales and head to the checkout.

I get them home just in time for me to sit down and listen to the football - wasn't it great how the part timers of Manchester United humbled the mighty Burton Albion and hung on for long enough to bravely secure a replay?

At half time I get my new clippers out and begin. I get a quick buzz. I finish and put the clippers neatly back in their box. I get them out again because I have missed a spot. I put them away again; less neatly this time. At full time, I get my kitchen scissors to trim one extra long clump I missed. I awake the next morning and get the scissors out again when I find another spot I missed.

Since my hair cutting skills seem to be similar to my decorating skills, I imagine I'll be doing this for a while.

If the cosmos really does apportion karma dependent on how one behaves - then I must have done something very naughty. I don't think I have been sinful enough to come back in the next life as a disabled person or Glenn Hoddle but I seem to have had a year's worth of bad luck in the last few days.

Take yesterday for example where every silver lining seems to have a dirty big grey cloud attached to it. I wake up and, as is my want, I turn the computer on and the shower on and decide to rest my eyes again while the shower warms up. By the time I had woken up again and got into the shower - not only had it warmed up but it had also cooled down and used up all the hot water.

I also had problems with my iPod. I haven't been able to update any of the songs on the iPod because my new computer crashes every time I plug my iPod in. This is very annoying.

I also pulled the handle off my fridge door.

I had tram problems too. I waited 12 minutes for the first tram to arrive, which was packed tighter than a Yorkshire pub selling beer at half price. And then the next one arrived and that is packed. And then the next one came and went. I got on the fourth tram after waiting more than 30 minutes on the freezing cold platform. I remembered to mind the gap at Trafford Bar when I stepped off the Tram.

After playing "Empty Cans" by the Streets, my iPod stops. I look down and it's frozen so I reboot it. And then the worst possible thing happens. My iPod seems to have wiped all my songs! (For my older readers, this is the "New World" equivalent of losing your ration book)

I also have other problems. Due to the increased amount of driving I have had to do over the holiday period and after slipping on some laminate flooring, my hip is playing up. So it came as no surprise that I got into work, stubbed my toe and sent a shockwave up through my hip, causing me to scream like a child.

But I don't mind. I had a strong coffee made for me. A very strong coffee. It had 3 teaspoons of coffee in. So much for the New Year's Resolution of cutting back on the caffeine. This has made me numb to everything and I no longer see the glass as half empty. There are plus sides to everything.

I can now fly to Tesco at lunch.

Buzzzzzzzzz!!!