Was talking with some friends, discussing the blog of a person we all know (and don't like). He writes about his sexual encounters and one-night-stands, and at the same time says he loves his boyfriend.

"What is this? He loves his boyfriend but he's fucking everybody under the sun!" I said.

"Irene, you just said a swear word!" one of my friends exclaimed.

"I wasn't swearing. That's an action!" I replied. (I would have said it was a verb but I can never remember the proper terms for these things. Especially when I'm put on the spot.)

Everybody burst into laughter. I am a comedian even without trying. I think I should change my line of work.

We all know that the 1960s are called "the Sixties" (60s), the 1970s are called "the Seventies" (70s), the 1980s are called "the Eighties" (80s), and the 1990s are called "the Nineties" (90s)... has anyone ever wondered what to call the era we're living in now? The Zeros? The Zero Zeros?

"We called the 1900s 'the nineteen hundreds'. Can we call the 2000s 'the twenty hundreds'?" mused a friend.

"Or 'the two thousands'," I quipped.

Really, nothing sounds right. I haven't heard anyone proffer an opinion on this. Does nobody else wonder about these things?

It is very irritating to think up great things to write just as you turn out the light and find a snug comfortable position on the bed. You know you have to get up again, turn the light back on and start scribbling, because otherwise all that marvellous witty phrasing is going to fly right out of your brain and tomorrow your head will be as empty as it ever was.

Did I just admit my brain is empty? Uh... em... errr... of course it's not! It's got something called Grey Matter inside, right? It couldn't possibly be empty. Could it?

I always have impossibly witty and intelligent posts written in my head, but they never sound quite as witty and intelligent put down on paper. Something unfailingly gets lost in translation.

One possible solution is to just speak my thoughts out loud and capture them with some sort of recording device. This would backfire, though, because I'd first have to set up the recording device, and that would make me self-conscious, which in turn would render me unable to articulate my sentences exactly the way I'd formulated them in my head.

If anyone ever invents a mind-reading machine, be sure to let me know, okay? Thanks.

You can rant all you want about discrimination and claim to be a great writer, but if you can't even spell correctly, that really doesn't help your cause any. Great writers do not allow homonyms to trip them up all the time, do not confuse countable and uncountable nouns, do not have such difficulties with subject-verb agreement, and do not jump from one tense to another in the same paragraph. Great writers also know that "even though", "a lot" and "all right" are two separate words.

I do not consider myself a great writer, but sloppy writing, bad punctuation and lousy grammar irritates me no end. It's different if English is not your first language — I applaud those who are brave enough to practise writing in English, despite the mistakes they might make along the way. However, when you are a person who not only speaks English as a first language but claims to be a "great writer", there's no excuse for careless writing.