"And then he said..."

Yes. New haircut. Requests to see it. Seven across the three versions of this journal. Are you all mad? Or is it just me?

Me, I suspect.

Well, here you are. Two for the price of one.

The emperor's new haircut
Much like the last one really, only a bit different. Sorry if I raised people's expectations unduly.

The second one is my submission to Greenpeace's 'virtual march' against whaling. This is a vast photo gallery of people holding up signs opposed to whaling which will be displayed during the forthcoming International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting in Ulsan, Korea - a nation that is considering flying in the face of international opinion by taking up this thoroughly distasteful industry.

Greenpeace organisers write:

It is impossible to bring you physically here, to the “Whale embassy”, to fight together for the life of whales. This is why we invented this new concept, the “Virtual March”, where, by sending your photo with a banner expressing your rejection for the killing of whales, you can actually be in Ulsan. Your photo, together with thousands of others, will be published in our web site and, from the day the IWC meeting starts, projected on the walls of the building where the meeting will take place.

Beware if you visit the site at work - it's irritatingly noisy and rather slow to load.

Pardon my Korean
This is my submission to the Greenpeace Virtual March against whaling.

And here I am on the site.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The ongoing bafflement about what to do with my hair reached a climax this morning. A family wedding next weekend demands it short. Beloved Other Half likes it long. I spend half my time cursing its length, and the other half feeling rather pleased with it.

The upshot is that at one minute past nine this morning I walked into a unisex salon that Beloved Other Half used to visit two owners ago and threw myself on the mercy of a rather nice Chinese stylist called Nina, who was understandably confused to be asked to make my hair look short while actually leaving it long.

After throwing her hands in the air a couple of times and asking “but what you want me DO with it?” she eventually realised she wasn't going to get any sort of clear steer from me and took matters into her own hands. She detected the remains of 11-month-old layers, turned her nose up on hearing which of her local rivals had been responsible for them, and then set about putting a new set of her own in.

Twenty minutes later there seemed to be a remarkably small amount of hair on the floor, but the effect on my head was disproportionately dramatic. Instead of looking like a long-haired, dark version of Boris Johnson I am now svelt and Depp-like. Well, fat and Depp-like. But you know what I mean.

I like it, a lot.

I just don't know what my mother's going to say, that's all…

Because it has been suggested that I look as if I were dead in recent photos, here is one in which I don't. Much.

Below is the latest email from the campaign against ID cards. If you're in Britain, please - sign the petition. If you value your ability to stick two fingers up at society and say 'sod you, I'm me and I'm the one who decides what that is, not you' (as I know a fair few of you do) then you really don't want to live in an ID card state.

Dear friends,

I'm writing to you now as the Government prepares to steamroller its “Identity Cards” Bill through Parliament. Each one of you can do something immediately that will help in the fight against this unnecessary, oppressive and invasive legislation.

Even the polls which the Government portray as indicating 'overwhelming support' for ID cards clearly indicate that there are 3 to 4 million people in Britain who are strongly opposed to ID cards. What I would like you to do now is quite simple. Get as many of these people (and others) as you can to sign NO2ID's petition before the Second Reading of the Bill in early June.

When we tried this last year, we were hundreds strong and thousands signed in two weeks - now we are ten thousands strong our impact should be that much greater.

Two ways to go about this are:

1) Promote the petition on your website, blog, lists or (best of all) by e-mail to people you know - please do not spam! A personal request to just five friends or colleagues will take just a few minutes. The online petition is at http://www.no2id-petition.net.

2) Attached to this mail is a PDF copy of our petition, a downloadable version is available at http://www.no2id.net/downloads/forms/NO2ID%20Petition.pdf. Print it out and collect as many names and addresses as you can - some supporters have already sent in dozens gathered from their work, college, church or pub in just a few hours. The address to send completed sheets to is on the bottom of the page. Don't worry if you can't fill a sheet, send us what you have got.

Thank you for helping us. Please act now.

Phil Booth
National Coordinator, NO2ID
www.no2id.net

Well, that's the end of this stint at the Independent. No more sleep-deprived battles with the Scottish division three table (did you see Gretna this season? What were they on? Chelsea? Pah!) No more late night drives across darkened London. No more celebrity interludes at 24-hour service stations.

Will I miss it? Obviously. Am I glad to be finished? You bet. Was I pissed off when I tried to drive out of the underground garage at 3am to go home, and found the security grille was down and I was trapped inside? Actually, no - it provided the opportunity for one last joke with the security guards when they eventually arrived to let me out.

But now is definitely the moment to hang up the old security passcard and move on to whatever the future holds.

At least until next time.

Virtue may be its own reward, but it appears that vice packs a punch all of its own. No sooner had I scarfed half the pork gelatine pizza last night than it all started to go wrong. One sudden and emphatic visit to the bathroom later I was forced to concede defeat - karmic justice had struck and the pigs had won.

The true measure of how committed we are to our principles is whether we can stick to them if doing so hurts us. Anyone can boycott McDonald's if the there's a Burger King next door. But can they still do it if they're in a strange country, hungry, don't speak the language, and it's the only eaterie they can find?

I'm a vegetarian, have been since 1988. I don't preach, if other people choose to eat meat that's their business not mine. I've cooked with it and served it to dinner guests since I went veggie. I've even worked in restaurants and canteens preparing meals with meat in. I just choose not to eat anything with animal products in myself.

One the way home from work tonight I stopped off at an all-night garage for supplies - margarine, fruit juice, chocolate mini-rolls, green soup, that sort of thing. And there was a pizza there, an eight-minutes-on-220 four cheese pizza looking all winsome and lovely, and my life but I was hungry. So I bought it and took it home.

At home, hungrier still, it took it out of the packaging and looked at the cooking instructions, and my eyes slid sideways to the ingredients.

Pork gelatine.

Bugger.

Obviously, it had to go in the bin. Can't eat something as blatant as that. But crikey I was hungry. This is the time, you see, when your principles are measured and you get a lovely warm glow because you did the right thing.

And really, taking everything into account, there was only course of action to take.

Tough luck, pigs.

I ate it.

Great review of last night's Doctor Who episode here, via Nick Barlow.

This is how storytelling should be. We get the objective correlative that explains how the relationships work. There's an adventure element, but it's really just about people. Really, life, love, being ordinary is an adventure… Anyone who thinks science-fiction isn't “proper literature” knows nothing about either… Americans, if your local channels don't buy this, they're idiots. This is class.

Oh - and sorry about the posting diahorrea today. It's like buses, you know - can't think of anything to post for ages and then suddenly three come along at once.

The biter bit
Dead brown ivy festoons a yew tree in the car park outside out kitchen window.

I'm pretty easy-going usually, but I have a real blind spot when it comes to parasites. Things like those wasps that lay their eggs inside grubs so that the lavae can eat their way out really freak me out.

Fortunately parasitic wasps aren't a big feature of English urban life, but I do have a reaction of almost visceral hate at the sight of poison ivy, which is rather more common. For me, one of the many pleasures of our short-lived allotment experiment was the slow death of the ivy choking the back wall after I cut a couple of inches out of its trunk at ground level.

Because that's the fail-safe way of killing the bloody stuff - remove a small section near the bottom and watch the rest, often hundreds of feet of it, slowly die over the next few months.

The car park behind our flats, which our kitchen looks out on, has a double row of yew trees running across it. They're magnificently tall trees, with a girth that makes one think they might have been planted as a cermonial avenue when the adjoining building was still Henry VIII's hunting lodge. They probably aren't actually that old, but they feel it.

One of them used to be completely swamped by ivy - the base of the trunk invisible because of the number of stalks running up it, evil poisonous green leaves crowding out the tree's own darker green right up to its tip somewhere in the distant sky, great long tendrils of ivy dangling down looking for something else to latch onto.

And then one day several months ago the managing agents of the flats sent in gardeners to do useful things like pollard some of the trees and, almost as an afterthought, they cleared the ivy from the bottom four feet of the tree. I came home from work to see broken strands of ivy hanging down in a ring at chest level like ripped-off arteries dangling from a severed head in a horror movie. It was a wonderful sight.

Since then, the ivy in that tree has been dying, bit by bit, day by day, and I've watched with a quiet satisfaction. Each morning when I get up (or afternoon, if I'm on shifts) I blunder into the kitchen to make tea, look out of the window, and see more dead ivy. No matter how foul my mood up to that point, it cheers me up.

It's a good way to start the day.

Half time in the last week of the football season and, as an Ipswich Town fan, I still have no idea whether we'll be in the same division next year as our local rivals Norwich City.

Will they be relegated in 45 minutes time, or stay in the Premiership? Will we be promoted through the play-offs or miss out? Will there be East Anglian derbies in the Premiership? Or will they take place in the Championship? Or will one of us be looking down at the other, gloating, from the higher division?

Exciting stuff.

Edit: Oops - ha ha ha!