It's hard not to find it amusing when you arrive at work and find someone trying to get into the building using their Oyster card. It got me thinking about how reliant we are upon devices that we don't truly understand. The metal key, a device that even now seems quaintly old-fashioned, is something we have all grown up with and can make sense of without much difficulty. The teeth of the key line up with the grooves inside the lock and with a simple clockwise turn, the lock pulls back the bolt. Yet, with a microchip-embedded piece of plastic, what actually happens? Have you ever stopped to think about it for a moment? How does it work? What goes on behind the scenes?

You may think this is a pointless question, worthy only of armchair philosophers with nothing better to do with their time. Yet, consider this: the microchip inside that plastic card (whether it's your Oyster card, your security pass, your hotel room key) stores information; and the reader that you swipe it against is capable of receiving information too. The microchip stores details about you: this was made very clear the other day when a colleague borrowed my pass and was stopped by the front desk because they weren't me. You see, the security staff, on their surveillance screens, can see the name of the person whose card is being swiped each time it is used. Such a thing would be unimaginable with a simple metallic key, but with a microchip card, the possibilities are endless. Your Oyster travelcard stores details about every journey you make. It is registered to you, and allows the transport authorities to track your every move. How well protected is that data? Do you know? Do you care?

You should. Freedom of travel is one of a number of basic human freedoms. It means the ability to move, without hindrance, from one place to another, and not to be questioned about or restricted from so doing. Remember the days of the Berlin wall: simply crossing that divide was taking a potentially fatal risk. And how about that security pass you use every day to get into work? Harmless? Where is all that data going, what is it being used for? Tracking when you arrive at work, when you leave, when you take your lunch break, how long you take it for... Does it make you comfortable to think your employer might be tracking this information over a prolonged time period? What about if your security pass was fitted with an RFID that could pinpoint your position within the building? How much time are you spending in the toilet, how much time do you spend at your desk? Let's plot a graph in Excel and see how efficient you are at your job...

Perhaps this seems far-fetched, but the technology is already here. Such a future has already arrived, and all it takes is for the right (or wrong?) people to make use of it to their advantage. So think about it, next time you use one of those plastic cards. You may not understand how it works, or what information it's storing about you, but one thing you can rely on is this: you're being watched.

Is it peculiar to despise a person you have never met?

I have, for many years, disliked David Miliband. Long before he was "prematurely" elevated to the Cabinet, let alone to the position of Foreign Secretary, I can recall seeing him interviewed on television at a Labour Party conference. The interviewer put it to Miliband that he was being widely touted as the official "heir to Blair". Now, bearing in mind that at the time, few outside of the Labour Party (let alone the Westminster Village) knew who this slightly odd-looking character was, you might have thought that the young Miliband would temper his answer with a degree of modesty. At the very least, it might have been thought that he would shrug off the flattery. Not so for David. He instead revelled in the description, grinned inanely and did a none-too-shabby impression of Kenneth Williams, eyelids a-flutter, wrist bent and accompanying words to the effect of "ooh, you are awful!" In effect, he lapped it up and made no effort to hide his enjoyment of such praise. From that day on, I set myself against him and have had to endure, with abject pain, the meteoric rise of his political career.

David Miliband is the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Just let those words sink in for a moment. Notice how you progress from a state of disbelief, through to hilarity ("shurely shome mishtake?" as Private Eye's editor might say) through to sheer, unmitigated horror. This man represents the interests of the UK abroad. How can somebody so socially inept, so arrogant, so painful-to-the-eye have become the UK's foreign envoy? He has no discernible talents, he irritates all who meet him, and he looks like some kind of hideous manchild (indeed, perhaps somewhere in the Miliband attic there is a ghastly oil portrait that shows how he ought to look at the age of 43). How has this been allowed to happen? It's as if the hype surrounding Miliband has been swallowed by all, and somewhere along the line it has become the accepted truth. Why else would Miliband have ever entertained the notion late last year that he could challenge - nay, perhaps even beat - the Broon in a leadership contest? He believes in his own propaganda - and so, apparently, does everybody else.

The man is an embarrassment, and this was no clearer than on his recent visit to India. His comments were shameful and his behaviour downright impudent. No wonder that India's press wrote off the importance of Whitehall - was this, after all, really the best man they could think of sending, the man that the ever-incisive Bob Marshall-Andrews called a "pillock on his gap year"?

Today I saw photographs of Miliband and Hillary Clinton standing together, Miliband being referred to as Clinton's "counterpart". The juxtaposition of these two figures - one, a titan of American politics who narrowly missed being the Democratic Party's nominee (and, by extension, very likely winner) in the 2008 Presidential Election, the other... Miliband. A man whose only achievements seem to have been elevating himself to positions increasingly beyond both his skill and his capacity.

And so it is that I find myself despising him. We've never met, and in all probability (especially if I have anything to do with it) we never will. Yet there it is.

Consider the scenario:



1) A colleague makes a request
2) You do them a favour and meet that request
3) The following day you get blamed by your manager for doing so
BUT... your manager doesn't know that your actions were carried out on the basis of a colleague's request.

What would you do? For my part, I took responsibility for what I had done and did not implicate my colleague in any way.

Can an honourable act be commensurable with preserving your career prospects?

As I was driving back from Bristol on Thursday night, I experienced something quite terrifying. I had reached about 80mph, and had entered into that slightly disconnected state in which driving becomes a secondary concern. My mind was elsewhere. Momentarily, my attention was drawn to what I thought was a cigarette butt being thrown out of the vehicle in front. This was because it sparked in the night and bounced across the ground. Then, before I could register what was happening, the left side of the vehicle buckled and there were sparks flying everywhere. The vehicle slewed across all three lanes, and I had to swerve into the outside lane to avoid collision. As I continued to drive, I looked into the rear view mirror to see that the vehicle had spun around and then screeched across the motorway onto the hard shoulder. I drove on, realising that if I had been but a little closer to that vehicle, it would have hit me and it would have been quite a different story.

I've been out of the country for over two weeks, and after being brought down to earth with a bump yesterday (via the medium of taxi driver abuse) I am quite despondent about going back to work tomorrow. It would make things a whole lot better if I wasn't stuck in Bristol for the whole week. If I was thinking about a day in the office in London tomorrow, I wouldn't be nearly so glum. Whilst it would be a stretch of the imagination to call the work I do "enjoyable", it is nevertheless non-objectionable and I work with some fine people. However, the environ really makes a difference. Being away from London, away from friends and away from all the trappings of a world city, it makes one's outlook quite dull. Just today I remarked to a friend that I hadn't been to see a play since August, a live classical concert since February, and a gallery since I can't even remember when. I moved to London largely because of my love for these things and for my friends; yet I am separated from both every single week and it's frustrating.