Time waits for no man

First I celebrated my 34th birthday. Other than toppling into a new age bracket on certain questionaires this barely warrants a major milestone on the grand arc of life's calendar.

There is none of the rites-of-passage significance of 18 or 21, or the thudding clunk of 30's door shutting behind you, forever closing off your 20s.

No, 34 is not a particularly momentous age to reach. Yet for some reason I have found myself taking stock of life more than usual.

As I can no longer legitimately claim to be in my early 30s, time no longer seems to be on my side.

In fact I would go as far as to say it has switched teams at half-time and is squaring up against me with the looming menace of a Sunday-morning midfield bruiser determined to shake off his hangover with liberal application of his studs to my person.

Suddenly there is the very real prospect that unfulfilled ambitions could well stay unfulfilled unless pretty immediate action is taken.

As the Americans would put it, "It's time to s**t or get off the pan."

At the same time the beginning of my 35th year on the planet has finally seen me enter the digital age, thanks to my girlfriend.

Having grown tired of my laments on the ever increasing avalanche of nonsense that passes for programming from the five terrestrial channels Georgina gave me a Freeview digibox for my birthday.

The purchase could not have come at a better time with Celebrity Big Brother and another show fronted by one-man cheese-fest Vernon Kay looming on the New Year schedules.

I know the new channels now available to me offer just as much chaff as their terrestrial cousins but set against the vortex of reality hell into which we are all being sucked the offer of seven-hours of back-to-back reruns of Home Improvement on ABC1 suddenly looks as culturally sophisticated as a trip to the Tate My digibox was followed by a digital radio - something I have been pining after for a fair few years - on Christmas day.

Armed with new technology I am now ready for the year ahead. - well partly.

And that brings me to the biggest change of the last couple of weeks - the departure of my trusty colleague Rich.

Having completed his secondment with the Express & Star the Humbersider has returned to the country of his mother tongue for good, leaving me to continue the video team's work single-handed, for now at least.

While Rich reacquaints himself with the Hull fog, his whippet and a strange concoction called chip spice which doesn't seem to exist anywhere else than in his hometown, I am going to face a major readjustment to life without him.

Barely an hour has gone by during the last five months when Rich hasn't been forced to guide me out of another cul-de-sac of my own making as I've tried to navigate my way around our video editing software.

Life will be a fair bit quieter and easier for Rich without having to watch my Basil Fawlty-esque attempts to master my computer.

There again his return to Hull may not be all plain sailing. Every time Rich has gone home this year he has returned with another tale of woe and injury.

First there was the kebab choking incident when a rogue sliver of doner meat almost did for him.

Assorted bumps, bruises and knocks accompanied his continued participation in Sunday league football.

And then there was a rather nasty incident at Sheffield's Meadowhall shopping centre where, for no reason at all, Rich was punched in a sensitive area by a young child.

The mind boggles at what misfortunes will befall him in 2007 but I am looking forward to regular updates from east Yorkshire.

Andy Toft is the Express & Star's video journalist. Read other entries in his blog by clicking here

To comment on Andy's blog, click here