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So, this afternoon I was strolling around with my camera, seeking out interesting things to photograph. I do this from time to time.

The town in which I currently live is not exactly renowned for its exciting photo opportunities; it's a sleepy place, chiefly famous for having given its name to somewhere much larger (and I'd imagine infinitely more stimulating) in the United States of America. But wherever you are in the world, you can never entirely dismiss the possibility that a tiger will escape from a zoo and cross dozens of miles of farmland undetected, before crashing into your town centre with carnage on its mind. So sometimes it's a good idea to dawdle, with your lens cap off just in case.

Alas, no tigers today. But these two fellows came up to me, and asked me to take their picture. So I did. Why wouldn't I? While I was ushering them to stand closer together and eyeing them through the viewfinder, I did however wonder who exactly was supposed to be benefiting from this Kodak moment.

I didn't want a picture of them. They would never get to see the picture I was taking. In fact, I was fairly certain I was going to delete the image directly off the camera the second they were out of my eye-line. In the end, I kept it because it amuses me. I like to think they wandered off and one said to the other: "Oh, maybe we should have given him our camera...."

I wonder if they might not be international celebrities, who have somehow fallen under my own radar. (After all, if it isn't on MSN I don't know about it. I couldn't spot, say, Katy Perry in a line-up.) Perhaps they're so used to being the focus of attention that they saw the camera and thought: "Oh, no. A Paparazzo. Well, let's play nice. If we give him a picture now, maybe he'll leave us alone on the way to our secret film premiere."

If any readers have any alternative explanations for why two men would ask a stranger to take a photograph of them they were never going to see, I'd love to hear them. Baffling.

Oh, and in the unlikely circumstance under which those two blokes stumble across this blog: there it is, guys, there's your photo. Two quid for a digital download version, a fiver for a hard copy....

As memory serves, I've only written one thing in 2009, (Tweets, blog entries, and posts on message boards don't count. Obviously.) which seems a bit of a shame really.

The thing that I wrote in 2009 was a script for a short film called - for no terribly good reason - Finland.

Finland was an idea I had for a potential third "series" of ChurchOfBlow, boiled down to its essentials, and given something of a clever-arse sexploitation tone because I'd been watching things like Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Spiderbaby: The Maddest Story Ever Told, and Manos: Hands of Fate.

There's also a bit of The Wicker Man, a bit of Eraserhead, and a touch of Lars Von Trier in there. It's trashy, it's arty, it's compact, and it's hopefully quite funny. It's pretty good, I think (At least as good as any of the weirder ChurchOfBlow episodes). And it's currently in the hands of Jeremiah McDonald, who I trust to do a fine job of producing it should he ever find himself with rather less on his plate, and therefore the time (and resources) to do so.

The vague idea with Finland was to go via the traditional route of touting it around film festivals, rather than putting it online. But I'm sure, should it get made, it'll probably end up on the Internet as well for the widest possible audience.

But that's about it for 2009.

Now, I claim no expertise on writing, but it's probably fair to say that in order to get somewhere with it (Whatever we take that to mean), you actually have to do some. You can have that advice for free. That's the kind of generous and insightful guy I am.

So, I'm currently working once again on a television script, that next year I may be able to embarrass myself with by hawking it around production companies. The idea is one I had many years ago, but abandoned when Life On Mars was broadcast. My idea couldn't have been more different to Life On Mars, other than that it involved a bloke who may or may not have travelled back in time, didn't know how he had got there, was forced to forge a new life while coping with cultural differences in that period, and would - in the end - turn out to have been in a coma throughout the entire series having been involved in a car accident at the very beginning. OK, fairly similar. But he wasn't a police office, so....

The idea has evolved into something else entirely, largely through necessity, but partly through overdosing on the work of Joss Whedon. All the same, for various reasons, I'm fully aware that - the difficulty of getting anything on television notwithstanding - there is no chance at all of ever getting this thing made by anyone anywhere.

Even were I to come up with an undeniably high quality script (which I haven't yet), the project falls between too many stools. What's the target demographic? Time travel, again? Really, haven't we had enough of that on British TV lately?

So the impetus behind finally writing the thing is simply to write something I enjoy, to get some creativity flowing again, so that perhaps the next script I attempt will have some legs. Or I may attempt a novel. Either way, I'm making an early new year's resolution to get more done than one short film script in 2010. Even if none of it's any good, it's better than stagnating.

As an off-shoot of this grudging new work ethic, I will probably begin to use this blog again. I'll be needing something to do while I'm procrastinating and not doing what I promised myself I would.

Consider yourself warned.

Hello, stray reader. How the devil have you been?

I last blogged here in May. In Internet time, this places my last post on blogger in the same era as when Genghis Khan and his band of happy marauders were sipping cocktails in Kiev.

Why the silence, you may well have wondered. Admittedly, it's unlikely that you would have wondered that, given the overwhelming majority of people who have visited this blog during its epoch of inactivity have arrived by accident, usually after a Google image search for Elfen Lied (Who knew that was popular?) or Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

They have then quickly spotted that this blog has very little to do with either of those shows, or indeed anything else, and buggered off elsewhere.

But, in case you have been wondering, "Why the silence?" the short answer is: because blogging's rubbish really, isn't it?

I mean, it's really, really rubbish. Right up there in the big list of things the world could do with significantly less of, alongside neo-Nazism and Coldplay.

Evil and banal, the "blogosphere" is filled with the thoughts we'd previously have kept to ourselves. "Here's what I'm doing," "Here's my opinion on the latest media detritus masquerading as a news story", "Here's my cat, Toni. Awwww." A barrage of useless data clogging up bigger and bigger servers with more and more empty-brained cultural ephemera.

No-one needs to know. No-one will ever need to know. It's people broadcasting the undercooked contents of their pop-saturated brains all day every day simply because they can, because this technology exists and enables them to do so without pause to question why.

So...

... I've started using Twitter.

... What?