Substantialreads: Space Chicks

It's not like I haven't read sci-fi by women before. This isn't an apology or amends, it's just me clutching at a theme for the month that doesn't involve cracking open a dreary tetraology.

The further adventures of self-indulgence: All my British homes

We've finally secured a reasonably good internet connection, so before I'm inevitably thrown back to the dial-up ages I've been making the most of those advanced, high-bandwidth services that you lucky people in the developed world take for granted, like YouTube videos above 144p, non-HTML Gmail and Google Street View, which enables less fortunate people to imagine they're wandering the real streets of wealthier countries in 2009.

I've thought for a while that when I finally make it back to the UK and visit the family, I might also take a tour of my childhood homes and haunts in search of overwhelming primal nostalgia or crushing existential despair about the transience of our brief lives. Any emotion would be fine really.

But since we just built a house, and that rules out travel for this year at least, I settled for a synthetic virtual substitute and spent an hour or so clicking along familiar routes to schools, playgrounds and newsagents where the latest issue of Dinosaurs! magazine with another free bit of glow-in-the-dark Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton isn't waiting for me any more. I didn't feel much of anything.

If you're ever in South Cheshire, Lancaster or Edinburgh and you feel like paying tribute to my life, here's where to light those candles.