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It’s been a couple of weeks now since my last blog.  What’s he been up to? is the question that probably couldn’t have been further from your thoughts.

Have I been out running, eating healthily, and losing weight?  No.  Although I did lose three pounds.  Then went out, got hideously swearily offensively drunk and had a curry.

Have I been putting the blog to one side while I focus my creative energy on my novel?  Have I fuck.

Have I become addicted to playing iPhone games in my every spare waking moment?  Yes.  Oh Lord yes.

I imagine I’ve followed a well-trodden path.  You get your iPhone and you want to try as many of the alleged 100,000 apps on offer.  But no games, you tell yourself.  No games; only useful apps that will come in useful.  Like a tube map, online banking and something that tells you where the nearest pub is.  Useful apps that come in useful.

And then you get Paper Toss.  It can’t hurt, you tell yourself, to get one silly little time-wasting game, the object of which is to flick your finger up the screen to toss a scrunched up ball of paper into a bin across an office, accounting for the wind effect of strategically placed desk fans. 

But then paper toss gets a bit easy, and you need something else to fill your idle moments.  And then, before you know, you’re a big iPhone game-playing nerd.

Then, one evening, your girlfriend asks if you’re OK.  You’ve been spending a lot of time on the toilet lately, she says.  Is everything OK?  You weigh up your options: which is less embarrassing?  Do you tell the truth?  Do you admit you’ve been sitting on the toilet for half an hour playing The Settlers (building a tiny cartoon village from scratch, build up your economy and create an army before killing the inhabitants of another cartoon village over the course of several hours)?

Or do you say you think you might be constipated? 

You go for the latter.  “I think I might be constipated,” you say.  “It might be IBS,” she says, cheerily; “probably stress-related”.  “Yeah,” you say.  That’s it: stress-related bowel issues.  Far less embarrassing.

Now, back to my cartoon village…