The night before last I didn't get to sleep until 4am. Last night I dropped off fine (because I was so tired after the previous night), but when I woke up my alarm clock said 5am. I began cursing my inability to sleep for a decent length of time. So as I was awake anyway, I got up and went to the loo, and as soon as I left my darkened bedroom I noticed it was suspiciously light for 5am in May.

It turned out that my alarm clock had somehow lost a couple of hours and it was in fact 7:19, which is much more sensible. However, that alarm clock is supposed to be radio-synchronised, so I had to check quite a few other clocks before I was convinced about which one of them was wrong. That's the trouble with radio clocks: most of the time they're much more reliable and accurate than ordinary clocks, but while an ordinary clock's failure mode is to gradually drift away from the right time so that as long as you set it or checked it recently you know it must be approximately right, a radio clock is capable of completely losing the plot in the space of minutes and leaving you utterly uncertain of the right time.

Oh well; when I got to work the clocks here seemed to think I'd got it about right, so no harm done. I just hope the alarm clock was only temporarily confused.

Also when I got in to work, I opened my mailbox and discovered that I had received spam about the Da Vinci Code. Arrrrgh! I've been waiting patiently for months for the entire world to shut up about that thoroughly uninspiring book, but it hasn't happened yet. If it isn't a high-profile plagiarism lawsuit or the high-profile launch of the film adaptation, it's endless ranting about the obvious truth, obvious fictionality or otherwise of the utterly clichéd conspiracy theory, which cartesiandaemon pegged very accurately last week as being exactly the sort of thing Foucault's Pendulum was mercilessly mocking fifteen years before it was even published, so nobody has any excuse for taking it seriously, or indeed writing it, now. Nobody in the media seems to be able to stop talking about it, and I am absolutely sure it simply isn't interesting enough to warrant all that fascination. But now spammers are getting in on the deal as well and I've had enough. SHUT UP!

beckyc told me in the pub today that she had happened to be passing through the police station recently and they'd been interested to hear she lived below number 1A, and asked if she might happen to know what I was doing with tinfoil over my bedroom window. sonicdrift then explained to me that tinfoil-covered windows are apparently often a sign of someone growing cannabis; that and high electricity bills for the bright lights (which is what the tinfoil would be hiding from passers-by).

In fact, the tinfoil is there because I'm ludicrously light-sensitive when I sleep, and don't appreciate it getting light in my bedroom at 5am in the summer when I don't want to get up for another three hours. I've tried thick curtains, and they help, but enough light still comes in round the edges that I had to resort to tinfoil as well, and having done so I can now get a full night's sleep even at midsummer. But the hilarious thing is, I do also have high electricity bills, because my flat uses night storage heaters rather than conventional gas central heating. (Well, I have high electricity bills in winter, at least; it's all turned off at the moment.) So I guess that puts me smack (ahem) in the middle of the profile for cannabis-growers, which I find wildly amusing.

What's particularly amusing about this is that I can't stand cannabis. I've never actually smoked it, but I've once or twice been at parties where other people were smoking it, and I'm sensitive enough to the stuff that the trace quantities in the second-hand smoke were enough to affect me – and enough to convince me that I don't like its effect. I certainly wouldn't deliberately smoke it; that would surely be the same thing only even worse. Also I'd be completely incapable of growing the stuff, on the grounds that I have whatever the exact opposite is of green fingers, and can't be trusted with so much as a pot plant. (Er, as it were.)

I almost wish the police had been curious enough to come and actually ask me, so I could laugh at them in person. For the moment, though, I'm going to have to settle for laughing at them from a distance.