Good night

The club was packed tonight, which was a welcome surprise and a change from Thursday's almost empty room. Having seventy people to perform to presents different issues to seven: it was more difficult to make sure the whole room was involved, and the audience had a lot of local Hong Kongers, for whom the sophisticated wordplay often falls flat. Unfortunately even my crude stuff usually relies on a subtle difference of meaning between two homophones, so that was something of a challenge.

So perhaps my "I had sex with a fish - felt out of plaice" will be retired, at least until I get a lucrative gig at the National Fishmongers' Association Christmas dinner.

Today I prepared carefully for the evening by sleeping, and playing "Install office productivity software", a new and very boring game that I've got on my computer. This weekend I finally bit the bullet and purchased a new computer, after three years of an increasingly sluggish laptop had finally driven me to frustration. Honestly, there's only so many times in your life you want to wait ten minutes before you can start downloading videos of kittens from the internet.

This time around we bought a Mac Mini, which is lovely and shiny and minimalistic, but doesn't have any USB slots on the front, which is a right royal pain in the arse when it comes to plugging in cameras, ipods, hard drives, hotplates, polygraphs, or any other peripheral you might care to name. It does feel a lot nicer than either Windows, which is always just-about-good-enough, or Ubuntu, which still feels like it will be finished in six months, but there are the occasional surprises. On a Mac, you can happily rotate the display through 180 degrees and it will do that without first checking whether you really want to do something so stupid. Or at least something that had us standing on our heads until it was fixed.

So the good news from that is that we can throw our old DVD player in the bin and use the Mac instead, and I can now browse pointless websites rather more efficiently than before. I won't go on for any longer about this because there's little duller than a man writing about ohmigodwow I have a new computeh! unless I become overcome with excitement at my new computer's ability to vary the desktop background every 30 seconds.

I ended the evening in Lan Kwai Fong, which is still full of drunk people, despite half the bars vanishing. Perhaps that's explained by the crowds of youths hanging around outside 7-11 with a bottle of whisky and four cans of beer. Which is disgraceful. In my day, youths got drunk in bus shelters or in remote parkland, not in the centre of town. How will the children of today learn to drink shamefully and incompetently, if not first introduced to the demon drink by a six pack of fortified cider behind a church hall? It's very troubling.

Also, I've now become old. I'd rather sit at home and play with the cat than sit drinking in a bar playing deafening music to fashionably dressed idiots. What has become of me?