Back from a quick trip to London (Monday & Tuesday) where I attended an Xbox conference organised by Microsoft. Quite informative, quite fun, but didn't get to see any new footage of games -- the Xbox, by the way, is Microsoft's upcoming game console; it's due to be released in November. We're all very excited.

London, by the way, is a real hellhole in summer. I mean, it's a great city; lots of history, lots of culture, lots of pubs...but during June, July, and August, it's hot, it's muggy, and it's filled with European (and I mean 'European' in that awfully generic and xenophobic way; technically, I'm European, but I don't count) tourists to the point where hearing someone speak English is actually quite a surprise. Taking the tube at this time of the year is pure torture. I don't think I've sweated this much since, well, the last time I was in London during the summer.

On the positive side, when I arrived at my hotel late Monday night -- after a quite excellent Microsoft-hosted party at a Tex-Mex restaurant on Gloucester Road where I got to hear a number of great Bill Gates stories -- they upgraded me from a standard room to a suite with a panorama view of the West End; normally £650, I got it for £120. Sweet.

Of course, this meant that I only had, oh, eight hours to enjoy the luxuries offered by this suite, and I wasn't about to throw it all away by sleeping. So I took a long, hot bath, donned a bathrobe (a bathrobe! I haven't worn one in years! I felt like Hugh Hefner!), and flopped down on the big, hard, English bed, switched on the telly, realised that half the channels were, for some strange, inexplicable reason, in Arabic, switched it off, closed my eyes...

And then I woke up the next morning. I didn't even get to raid the minibar.

On the plane home, I had a whole row in business-class to myself, and a good book (Nick Hornsby's "How to be Good"), and it was one of those perfect flights you've only heard rumours of. It was f*****g fantastic, mate. Honestly.

Tomorrow: Committing Adultery; a harrowing tale of seduction.  ¶ 00:05