The advantages of this are pretty obvious: if she gets sick or injured and needs to go to hospital, she will get access to high quality private healthcare and it’s not an expense that I’m worried about paying out for. My sister’s a worrier, so I think this peace of mind is a great present for her – after all, it’s not like I’d have a clue what else to get her.

Sometimes the boring gifts are the most useful; there’s nothing particularly exciting about student health insurance, it’s certainly not up there with a new phone or TV, but knowing that she will get seen quickly and to a probably higher standard than through the NHS should something go wrong while she’s away is something that’ll put the minds of her, my parents and myself at ease and ultimately that’s the best thing.

Maybe it’s an internet generational thing, but whenever the letter E is in front of something, the first thought that goes through my head is that it’s digital. Not necessarily an online store, just something electronic that I can possibly download and look at on my phone or iPod. How would I go about downloading tyres?

Obviously, I was being a bigger idiot than usual; you can’t download tyres. It turns out that Etyres tyres are the product from an online store. Their prices are really good actually, and it’s got a video with Eamon Holmes on the homepage. If I still had a car, I’d buy tyres from Etyres, but I don’t so the point’s kind of moot.

It’s situations like these that make me realise that for all the people – myself included – that squawk about getting off of those stupid Facebook games and read a book or something, there’s just as much valuable information out there on the internet. You just need to know how to find it.

This is what’s known in the trade as a schoolboy error. Last time I took something from this car hire place, I pranged it on a tree. It wasn’t my fault, but I don’t think they’re my biggest fans right now. Maybe I should have thought about this before I rocked up there with the company credit card, but if you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ll know that I don’t DO forward planning.

It wasn’t even close to being funny – they actually recognised me when I walked in the door and told me to not even think about it. Whoops. Fortunately the other guy who was going to the meeting with me was able to book it. He’s never crashed a car (at least not one from this place) and they were OK with letting him take one.

I suppose the moral of the story here is that I really should start to think before I walk into places to get things. If you crash a hire car from one supplier, go to a different supplier when you need to hire another car.

I use Microsoft software a lot; both my work and home computers are PC’s and I use MS Office programs pretty much all day. I don’t mind it, it functions OK – especially the new 64bit 2010 version – and I’ve had a go with a couple of other suites as well, but they all feature one distinct characteristic – you have to install them. That’s not too much of an issue most of the time, but what if you want to access your work on the go? What if you want to make some changes in an internet cafe? What if you want to show someone something you wrote but they’ve got a computer that’s incompatible with the file type?

There are ways around this; things like Dropbox and so on are valuable resources for accessing your work on the go, but there’s always the simple question – what if the computer you’re trying to access it on doesn’t work with the file format? That’s where I think an online or ‘virtual office’ suite could be useful – you can load it up anywhere anytime and it’ll work. I’ve been using one a bit for the last couple of days and I’m finding it very useful. I’m not sure that it’ll ever completely replace installed software for me, but it’s definitely something that I’m finding handy while I’m on the move.

This is the perfect solution – if I did buy one, chances are I’d only use the thing once, then realise that I really didn’t need it and sell it, but if I join my dad on his digger driving day, I get to drive one, cause some havoc and spend some time with the old man. All in all, it sounds like a great idea.

So there we have it; I’ll drive a JCB 3cx, probably destroy something and have a laugh. Of course, this doesn’t really satiate my need to get something extravagant. Maybe I need to get a new phone or something.

I suppose that’s how people like us handled jobs like that. Being around death all day every day could potentially drive you insane if you let it get to you, so we had a laugh – and believe me, we did have a laugh. We stopped just short of being disrespectful, but we had a lot of fun, especially when we had new people or work experience kids in.

I was, unfortunately, the person at the butt of the joke on my very first day. There I was, nervous, just seventeen years old looking for a summer job that would be relevant to my dreams of working in forensics, and something happened on my first day which made me jump about a mile into the air. On the second autopsy of the day, the body burped as they made the first incision. Now add to that, the fact that I’d been up stupidly late watching Dawn of the Dead and you can imagine the path my mind was taking. There were expletives, there was about a foot of air between my feet and the floor and I’m pretty sure that I yelled the word ‘Zombie’.

As I stuck with the job, I came to realise that this is normal behaviour for a dead body – and more besides. One of the grave diggers I met once told me that he opened up a coffin on the grounds that he was convinced that the body in there was banging on the coffin to escape. I’m not going to tell you exactly what that banging was, but it wasn’t the nicest thing ever.

There were a lot of downsides to that job, but it was still a great few months. I’ve got a lot more stories that I could tell about teenaged goth morgue assistants, insane forensic scientists and thoroughly hilarious grave diggers – I’m sure that I’ll share more as time goes on.

Individuals are rebelling against their couches and their consoles in preference of more productive pastimes. However, though people’s intentions appear to be good, they could in reality be creating themselves more damage than benefit through wearing the incorrect running shoes.

It is a well known truth that while you walk your entire bodyweight is spread via your knee and ankle joints. When you run the pressure that is exerted via those joints is exaggerated further and should an individual continue to exercise and exert stress via such joints through extreme quantities of physical exercise then you might in reality bring about long term damage to your body.

There are a selection of various manufacturers on the market right now which include labels such as Nike, Adidas, Asics and Reebok to name but a few, and each one of these labels have invested lots of time and expense to get the best solution to help cushion the impact suffered by the vital joints in the human body. Some of these manufacturers use gel and air pockets, while others would rather choose cushioning foam, but all these solutions have their own positive and negative elements that you must explore.

Whenever you next plan to purchase a pair of running shoes intended for physical exercise then you need to consider any different features and ensure that you invest a little extra time making sure the footwear you are about to buy will be the best partner for your feet.

My reasoning for signing up is sound – I’m not convinced that my body’s not going to fall apart on me within the next couple of years and I’d rather be safe than sorry and make sure that my bills will be covered if I need to take some time off. After all, I still take each paycheque as a challenge and have nothing saved at all, but paying some premiums for a little while will keep me covered in the event that something does give up the ghost for a period of time and I can’t work for a while.

Maybe next, I’ll buy a gun.

See, this is something I can do. A good bottle of champagne is well within my budget, is a perfectly appropriate birthday gift and it’s something that she’ll want. Mere words cannot express how much this wins.

So that’s one good present out of the way, I just need to decide what else I should buy her. Back to the drawing board.

I’ll make no bones about it, some of my friends, especially my London-based ones, aren’t the cleanest living people in the world. There are the smokers, the ones who have a beer for breakfast, the ones who can’t seem to stop themselves losing their tempers with everything and everyone who looks there way, not to mention some others with other, more serious issues. Thinking about it, I suppose I can’t blame them for looking for ways to get help with these things – I probably would if I could afford it and I felt that I really needed to make a change.

I’m glad for these friends of mine really. It’s not like we’re kids anymore, hell, most of us aren’t even in our twenties – it’s just not the same anymore and we can’t coast by just being a little dysfunctional but ‘creative’. Reality has bitten, we all have jobs, some of us have significant others and if hypnotherapy in London is helping them to make their lives better, I’m going to make sure that I’m proud of them and give them all the support I can.