‘Sorry I was late turning up; my bath overran.’

There ought to be a word for the moment when you realise you've made a joke by accident. It's sort of the opposite of ‘esprit d'escalier’: it shares the property that you belatedly realise there was a joke opportunity, except that in this case you find you absent-mindedly took it rather than missing it. Perhaps ‘esprit d'ascenseur’?

In other news, this has been a weekend almost exclusively dominated by Spectrum games. I slept badly on Friday night because I'd been up until late playing Exolon; I continued playing things when I got up on Saturday and by the time I went to the pub for beckyc's three-years-in-Cambridge celebratory afternoon my left thumb was killing me; by yesterday it had recovered enough to play a bit more, so I did. And I missed both the parties / film nights on Saturday, because Friday night's poor sleep had left me too tired even to watch films.

It's slightly worrying that this latest acquisition has caused me more immediate delight than any of the enormous number of gadgets I bought last year, and was entirely free. It suggests I didn't look carefully enough for the best possible value for money…

(It's also slightly worrying that of all the Spectrum emulators out there, the one Owen and I were able to run on the PS2 turned out to be written by a friend of ours. Every so often I get the strong feeling that my group of friends has written most of the useful stuff in the world. :-)