Quietly, in the background, Cambridge colleges are doing their bit for modern architecture.

I can't remember exactly where this is, but I'm pretty sure it's hidden in the depths of Trinity. It's unapologetically modern, but nonetheless it's sensitive to its context. And I thought it looked nice.

That's me, and the extent of my architectural criticism that is. Oooh it looks nice. Deep.

The Adelaide Road Condom has gone.

Perhaps it was cleaned up by Dublin City Council. Perhaps it finally decomposed. Perhaps it was salvaged for nutritional value by some shaggy-bearded vagrant, or an ample Eastern European woman with a small child nestled precariously on her jutting hip. Perhaps it was run over by a large van driving along the pavement, as is all too common along Adelaide Road these days. We may never know.

In a synchronous move, the light has gone out on the top of the Dublin Spike. Once jutting into the night sky, almost indistiguishable from a large crane. Now, little more than a danger to low flying helicopters. How things change.

Hopefully, though, it's only the temporary light. And hopefully, the permanent light will be more resilient. And on the day that they turn on the permanent light, I will celebrate in my own way. By leaving a soiled condom on Adelaide Road.

I think I could turn and live with animals. They are so placid and self-contained. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God. Not one of them kneels to another or to his own kind that lived thousands of years ago. Not one of them is respectable or unhappy, all over the earth.

We watched The Wicker Man on Sunday evening, for the first time. Excellent.

Written by Anthony Shaffer, the movie tells the story of a Scottish policeman who travels to a remote private island to investigate a missing girl. What he finds there challenges his deeply held Christian beliefs, and eventually leads him to a shocking revelation and the highly memorable conclusion of the film.

It's been hailed as one of the classics of 1970s British horror, but it's not really a horror movie, which is perhaps part of why the studio chopped it up and didn't distribute it properly. It's much more of a thriller - psychological and psychosexual. It's well written and directed, and is every bit the exceptional film that Christopher Lee believed it to be as he was making it.

Due to my brief foray into the lore of the anglo saxon, norse and celtic worlds, I was aware of the nature of a wicker man before I saw this film. Although the cover of the DVD kind of gives it away too.

How do we know Iraq is a witch? It looks like one.

We're round at her house now, looking for witchy-stuff. If we find some, then it's proof that she's a witch, and we can burn her. If we don't, then she's hiding it. So she's a cunning witch. So we burn her.

The 'civilised' world has a great and noble history of witch hunts, usually simply on grounds of belief. The current situation has something of a feel of that, and something of a feel of 'the boy who cried wolf' - what if this time, the witch-hunters are right?

The rhetoric, the posturing, the delaying attack to seek proof - all of this is intended to win the people round to pro-active aggression. And that may be the right course of action. But it's also giving those who are against aggression more time to form their arguments. And when there are many more weapons of mass destruction in the hands of our allies, we have to ask who is coming round to our houses to check if we're witches.

I noted two things on the way in to work this morning. One was that the Dublin Spire is clearly visible from Harrington Street, looking for all the world like a very thin radio mast. When it's formally launched they will take off the flashing red light that they have at the top, and it will glow majestically. Until something flies into it, or it's vandalised, or it just falls over of its own accord.

The other is, of course, the Adelaide Road Condom.

A small landmark, but one that I have noted every day for around six months now. Once a proud remnant of a moment of passion, filled with potential, this rubber remnant lies on top of a small square grille in the pavement. As time I have passed, it has aged badly - assailed by the elements, it has grown thin, but still recognisable. A small reminder of passion, even on they greyest morning.

And this morning - as I passed by, ready to give my best conspiratorial nod - a major change. The landscape of Adelaide Road has changed completely. It's moved about an inch to the West.

Junior Oddverse

This week The programme on television that I am looking forward to very much is called 'The Book Group'. It is on on Friday on Channel Fore. It is also on on Thusday but that is repeats so I have already seen that.

I think this programme is good because it is very funny, and because it makes me laugh. Although sometimes it is a bit surrele and bad things happen to people.

My favourite character is Rab, because he picks his nose and he wear shell suits and loves footballers.

After finishing "His Dark Materials", of which more later, I decided I fancied something a little weightier. The publication of Granta's list of toppest young british authors and the coincidence of finding it in a book store in an airport led me to Toby Litt's Deadkidsongs.

It's deceptively simple, yet structurally complex. A tale of four boys, who are members of a gang called simply Gang, sometime in the 1970s. It starts with falling out of trees, with rivalry between fathers, with almost drowning, and veers into darker territory from there.

Litt does some fascinating things with narrative, and with authorial voice in this book. For example, the first four chapters use 'we' a lot, but never 'I'. The novel is full of factual errors and deliberate inconsistencies, despite the stated intent of Gang to have one record of everything that happened. And the closure presents two possible versions of events - both compelling, and inconsistent, and flawed.

The book, however, was excellent.

Lugano in January isn't a tourist centre. It's not a bustling hive of activity. However, it is beautiful, and calm.

I spent about eighteen hours in Lugano, and for a large part of that, I slept. But when I was awake, I was completely in awe. Partly, this is the setting - nestled on the shores of a number of lakes at the southernmost tip of Switzerland, surrounded by the craggy beauty of the alps. Partly, it's the calm. As I mentioned, it was a clear crisp January day, and the streets were quiet. Nobody around.

And partly it was the architecture. A fantastic range of modern and traditional architecture, with the modern architecture being sympathetic to the traditional, while not slavishly emulating it.

There was something very right about this.

You spot him as you walk in to the party. He's your type. Just the right sort of weight, just the right level of hairiness or otherwise, the right haircut, the right smile. And more than that, you know he's your boyfriend's type too.

Later, as the party's moved on, as the social flow has chaotically separated the two of you who started so close together, you realise that your boyfriend is over on the other side of the room chatting to Him. And you're spotted, so you go over and join the conversation. And it's all going well. Possibly too well. And then a third person arrives. And that's the moment of realisation.

He is now surrounded by three gay guys. You know that you fancy the stranger, you know that your boyfriend probably fancies him too - or maybe he's just being chatty - and you've no reason to suspect that the third man isn't ready to make a move. You've got no idea of the sexuality of the man in question, and all you really know about him is his name, the fact that he works with one of your hosts, where he comes from, what colour his eyes are, and the approximate shape of his arse.

What do you do, hot shot? What do you do?

Coming down through cloud cover over south-central Scotland, I was treated to the sight of a monochrome world. Winter had sucked the colour out of the countryside, and all that was left was a patchwork of greys and silvers. Only half an hour earlier, Ireland had been beautifully green. An emerald isle indeed.

When I look in the mirror, I see more and more white hairs appearing. Mainly at my temples, a few in my beard. Fortunately, none elsewhere on my body. Except one.

My right eyebrow has one white hair that grows about four times faster than the rest of my hair. And it grows at a strange angle. Very, very odd. But part of an encroaching trend, I suspect. I am turning, very gradually, into a geography teacher.

On a train in Denmark, I first heard the word "Jism". It struck me as odd at the time that there was a word out there - a rude word - that I hadn't come across before (please pardon the pun).

The context was this. You're on a train in a foreign country. You pick up a newspaper, abandoned by a previous tenant of the carriage, carefully discarding the slim volume of hardcore pornography contained within - after all, you are in mixed company, and you find the crossword.

And then you and your companions spend a pleasant half an hour filling in the crossword, trying to put in only real English words, and the ruder the better.

And so it was, that on a train in Denmark, that I first heard the word Jism, passing the lips of a delightful young lady called Anna.

But she didn't know how to spell it.

The forgotten erotic region. The wiggle in the walk. Hair hell.

The top of the leg... just below the crotch. Where the skin is thin, and sensitive to the touch. Where a gentle caress can be incredibly arousing, where the tip of a tongue can send tremors through the body.

Often forgotten about, this particular erogenous zone is causing me a few problems.

The short curly hairs on my right thigh have decided that they really want to be knotted to the short curly hairs on my left thigh. This usually happens when I am walking along the street, leading me to change my walk from a manly swagger to a more effete, tight-buttocked mince. While this perhaps led to more admiring looks from the young men at the bus stop on Harrington Street, it's not a comfortable feeling.

And there's only one way to resolve this problem.

Last night was probably the first time that I died.

It was dark, it being night time, and I was alone, in woods. Or I thought I was alone. There was another person there, although I don't know who. It doesn't matter. All I knew was that he wanted to kill me, and that although I ran, he succeeded.

The last thing I remember before I died was realisation of the fact that I was about to die. That, and a calm acceptance of this fact before I finally went. I guess that's part of what stopped this from being a nightmare. Because it wasn't a nightmare. Don't be scared, boys and girls. How could it be a nightmare? It had Tom Baker in it.

So next, after my death, I am helping the police with their enquiries. As led by Tom Baker, round about 25 years ago when he was at his most manic, big haired and scarftastic. And eventually, I was the one that found the graveyard that I had run into and been brutally murdered in. Yay me! And obviously because I was alive and well and helping with the investigations, my lifeless decaying corpse wasn't actually lying there, but some of the things that I dropped were, and from that and from the name on the head stone that I fell in front of. Hurrah! Killer caught, justice for all. And me, although obviously I did get killed at the beginning, still walking, talking and making crap jokes about scarves.

It's three days in to 2003. I haven't had a decent night's sleep yet. And now, possibly the most obscure dream of my life. It's all signs and portents, you know.

Apparently, the Lord of the Rings is to be made into a high budget series of movies.

This is an interesting idea, and clearly flawed for a number of reasons.

I reckon they'll get the look pretty much spot on. After all, they can do so much with CGI and pretty pictures of New Zealand. I reckon that they'll probably cast it very well, particularly if they can get Elijah Wood as Frodo and Christopher Lee as Saruman.

But unless they do some fairly major re-writes to the script, the whole thing will be an incoherent mess.

Don't get me wrong, I love the book. But it's a single book. Structure-wise it's incredibly flawed, the climax is rushed, the middle is confused, and the beginning is painfully twee. The second film would either have to be in two parts, or a cunning juggling of narratives that would need care not to lose the impetus of anything.

The three books don't stand alone. The films will probably be much the same.

And if they make them really long, about three hours each, then I'm sure that people will get bored.

But the sad thing is that people will love them regardless.