The feeding of the five thousand

Well, not really, it was sixty four.

I'm not the greatest fan of catering tournaments at work. They always seem so simple but it's the customers that manage to complicate things. Susan thought that the sixty-four golfers taking part in the amateur tournament (wittily titled Am-Am) would come in in groups of four, fairly well spaced apart so we could serve them their free bacon roll and coffee calmly.

In reality, everyone piled in to the cafe at once and nearly got wedged in the doorway. We'd foreseen it this time, though, and used the urn for coffee rather than breaking the kettle again - we finished just as the overworked dishwasher was reaching condition yellow.

After that mayhem I had the difficulty of deciding on a birthday present for Jamie, as it's his 18th today. Buying presents for him is made doubly difficult due to the fact that he doesn't like chocolate, and if he eats it he starts foaming at the ears and explodes. Wandering around Tesco I suddenly spotted a decent gift for him - a wireless computer mouse. If he's going to have a computer only marginally better than my old one next year, he might as well have the best possible bits and pieces for it.

I was unsure of whether it was an optical or traction mouse, though - there was no indication on the box either way. So I asked at the checkout (you can see what's coming, can't you?), but because they had no idea what I was talking about even after further explanation I was directed to Customer Services.

Simon (dunqn's long lost twin) wasn't there as I had hoped - he would have known what I meant. Instead I spent about five minutes explaining to the woman behind the desk what I wanted ("But it says it's wireless." "I KNOW it's wireless - is it optical? Does it have a light on the bottom?" "It has a light there." "But does it have a ball on the base?") they spent another ten minutes running round the store searching for someone who knew what an optical mouse was. A spotty fifth year from the academy was eventually able to understand my (to them) indecipherable jargon, although even he didn't know which it was. I was assured that I could take it back if it wasn't what I wanted.

It turns out that it was a ball-driven mouse after all, so I've returned it - it took far less time this time, they probably saw me coming and decided to give me the money back quickly rather than have me put them through all that again. Happily, the phrase "mouse balls" didn't come up once during the entire exchange.

So Jamie, myself and my dad went to see "I, Robot" down at the UGC. To my surprise, it stuck to the book quite closely (with some of the same characters, definitely the same world, and so on) and it really did have some of the cleverest bits of any film I've seen since Terminator 2.

Waiting for other people to arrive in Aberdeen afterwards, I gravitated towards the DDR machines as usual and found a sea of children running up and down on them, spinning around in the revolving door next to them, and being as loud as possible. It was mayhem. Well, there were only about eight or nine, clearly a children's party, but you know how they can resemble thousands.

Undeterred, I swept past them with all my Chinese shirt and leather jacketedness and got to the machine, smiling a bit as one of the girls looked at the high scores and said "Wow, Wong must play this game a lot", unaware he was towering over her. Well, I say "towering" but I doubt I was much taller than she was, really.

Anyway, picking Normal 1 I bounced away (getting top of the list and increasing my greedy dominance of the high score table there, as it happens) and turned to go. There in front of me was the group of children - enthralled, with their eyes so wide and their mouths so O-shaped in surprise that their heads resembled the bowling balls being used next door. A parent who had just arrived to control them just congratulated me with "You're amazing." I had got them under control and brought order to chaos by means of DDR. I felt like an utter hero.

Even better, my plane ticket has finally arrived - I get to see Whitney in November! But on the front of my ISIC card that was sent along with it, it proudly declares that I'm a student at the "University of St Andrew". D'oh.