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Another really hot day. First day in shorts (always a happy occasion for my ankles). I was due to write all day again, but the sunlight lured me outside. I succumbed to a gardening urge. Nothing green-fingered, just maintenance. I hacked down all the nettles that have been allowed to prosper round the side of the shed during the winter. I wore gardening gloves, but of course I stung my arms, that's part of your destiny as a nettle-clearer. While I was about it, I became inspired and pulled up weeds from the drive. Good, honest, hot, sweaty work - a real tonic when all you do is talk or type for a living.
Didn't feel like going back to the keyboard, so instead went shopping for what bits and pieces hadn't arrived in our organic box. (They were low on meat this week.) Also bought some new blank videotapes as the others are looking a bit sad and overused. Of course, what would once have been the videotape shelf in the supermarket was now dominated by CDRs and recordable DVDs. Ever felt old-fashioned?

No West Wing yesterday so I was pleased to pick up the story at the end of what was a commendably workshy day. (As in paid work.) Ep 8 Shutdown, written by Mark Goffman, was one of those politically baffling ones - to me, anyway. Jed had closed down the Federal Government in a face-off with the Republican Speaker over the budget. It meant workers going home and social security cheques not being available to ordinary Americans while almost childishly Jed stood his ground for four days. Result: Josh was allowed back into the fold. And Jed won. Of course Jed won.

Finally got round to breaking out my laptop and loading a huge pile of albums into iTunes. (It's not installed on this machine as the OS is too old, so I use my PowerBook for stuff like iTunes, Contribute and reviewing DVDs - it seems to work, but it means weeks sometimes go by without me updating my website, as I can't be arsed to hook it all up to my broadband modem. No excuse really. If I liked the keyboard, I'd write on the laptop, but I don't.) Just received Volume 2 of 12"/80s - another three-disc set of extra-long nostalgic remixes of great tunes from that decade. Can't wait to get on the train tomorrow and go back to my youth.

Too impatient to wait for C4 to show the last two Desperate Housewives, so watched one I taped off E4 (which, incidentally, arrived on Freeview today - it just gets better and better). It was a classic penultimate episode - all storylines poised for either a death or a bust-up. I predict a cliffhanger.

Big news 1: next week's BBC strike is off due to headway at ACAS talks.

Big news 2: I got Letter of the Week in the New Statesman, with a considered rant I was moved to write by last week's cover story. It was about nuclear power and the media conspiracy to sell environmental issues only in black and white terms. I was so excited when I opened up the magazine and saw my name there. They haven't commissioned me to write anything for them for two years (the staff keep changing), but my voice is still heard!

Saturday May 28
Team America: Word Police on DVD tonight. As I'd suspected when I didn't go and see it at the cinema, it's technically amazing, and a knockout concept, but once you're over the shock of hearing Gerry Anderson style puppets swearing and having sex, it can get tiresome. An hour and a half of it was quite a trial - not a problem I had with the South Park movie incidentally. I think Matt Stone and Trey Parker are geniuses, but this one was hard going. Having said that, it had some solid gold moments, not least the mock Broadway musical Lease and its showstopper Everybody Has AIDS. And every time the Matt Damon puppet just uttered the words, "Matt . . . Damon" I laughed.

Sunday May 29
Went to a book and comics fair in Central London before work. I love the smell of those places. That musty tang of old, browning paper. It's easy to mock the kind of collector who hangs around looking for old copies of Warlord or Silver Surfer (I saw a number one of Warlord, by the way), and a comics fair is one of the only places in the 21st century where you'll see that many middle-aged men with ponytails, but these people love what they do. There is passion in their pastime, and an appreciation of old things. I picked up two 1950s Penguins, mainly because I find it hard to walk out of a fair with nothing in my bag. They were half-price and smell beautiful. (Yes, one of them is a collection of Peter Arno's cartoons from the New Yorker, but you know I'm obsessed with that magazine at the moment.)
Watched last night's Soul Deep about Otis Redding and Stax, by far the best episode yet. I can't believe there are only six in the series. How can they cover it all? I was fascinated to learn about James Carr, the tragic "new Otis" who lost it to drink and drugs. And when Steve Cropper cried at the memory of Otis's death, it touched me more deeply than when Phil Neal cried for the Heysel victims.

For a change, we broke out an old movie on DVD for our Saturday night's entertainment, and although I nodded off for the last 10 minutes (a habit of mine since I turned 60), I'm really glad we chose The Boston Strangler. What a shock that must have been in 1968 - so sexually explicit and nasty, and to see Tony Curtis in the title role (although he doesn't appear for the first hour, which was also brave). Heavily stylised, with lots of split screen - even though the blurb on the DVD box speaks of "documentary realism"! Hardly! Who writes this stuff?

Monday May 30
Bank Holiday, and we treated it like one. No work. A trip into the West End to catch a film in the afternoon. Lazy day. Fantastic. The Jacket was a well-made psychological thriller from John Maybury (a British director whose work and I have never crossed paths, not even that film he made about Francis Bacon), with Adrien Brody doing his haunted-eyes, no-dinner bit as a Gulf War soldier who dies but doesn't die. I was delighted to see British actors in all the supporting parts, Daniel Craig, Steven Mackintosh, the union organiser bloke out of North And South, even ex-Marillion singer Fish as a mental patient. Turns out it was partly shot in Scotland (as well as the obligatory Canada). Nice to see a thriller that makes you think afterwards. My own theory - and this doesn't give the plot away - is that Brody was a modern-day Jesus.

Went wild in HMV and bought a DVD, Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster, and a three-CD box set, Atlantic Gold for £20 (inspired by Soul Deep to fill the gaps in my collection - perhaps that's why there was no James Carr in the rack except a horrible-looking modern compilation). Watched half of Metallica before dinner. All I can say is: only in America. Luka and Sam were also in therapy on ER. Why do all these people need professional help to talk to each other?

An interesting Horizon documentary about the MMR vaccine, which ultimately descended into pharmaceutical propaganda. It almost boils down to whether you think mass immunisation for largely non-fatal diseases is right or wrong. In the end, if you're a parent of a 15-month old baby you have to weigh up the possibility of autism and gut disease against a pregnant woman catching rubella from your unvaccinated child. It's Sophie's Choice. My instinct is always to look at what we did in the old days. There was no MMR when I was a kid. We survived. It's as my friend Kate once said to me: get stung by a nettle, find a dock leaf.

Tuesday May 31
This is how I always wanted it to be. It was a working Tuesday on paper but it felt like a Sunday. Maybe because yesterday was a Bank Holiday and nobody called my mobile or emailed me. The gorgeous summer weather helped. It may have been a Tuesday out there, but not in here! Having said that I ticked off three writing jobs on this week's pink Post-It note: a long piece about jokes for Word, my monthly TV column for Word and one rewrite for Radio Times. (As Film Editor, I am constantly upgrading the film review database. Occasionally a review's star rating will be questioned by the film team when it turns up on the TV schedule and we'll either take it up or down a star according to office consensus and tweak the review to fit, or else I'll end up rewriting it completely, which I did today to the terrible cop thriller Fifteen Minutes. For some reason it went through at the time as an enthusiastic four stars. It's two stars now. Retrospect is a wonderful calming influence.)

Bought a lawnmower at last, after some weeks of letting the grass return to its natural state. I love it long but there comes a point when to not cut it would cause problems. Haven't actually assembled the mower yet, but I will. Maybe tomorrow. Buying it was the first mental hurdle.

Today's West Wing: episode 9, Abu El Banat (which means "man with daughters"), written by Debora Cahn, the Christmas special, mostly revolving around a family dinner it looked like Jed was never going to sit down to. Not a lot else, except Toby kicking Will out of the West Wing and a cameo by Dylan Baker as the Attorney General - an actor I can't see without thinking of him as the paedophile in Happiness. Honestly! You play one father who rapes his son!

OK, I love Gordon Ramsay. Yes, he's got a filthy mouth, but he really wants to help the ailing restaurants on Kitchen Nightmares. Sadly, tonight's was a lost cause, a fusion café bar in Chelmsford that was using 70 per cent frozen, ready-made ingredients. You think you've got the measure of this kind of makeover show, but when Gordon returned six weeks later the owners had been kicked out by the brewery that owned it, in debt and with a baby on the way. Gordon couldn't help them.

Second half of Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster - genius. It's a dull thing to say now that it's like a real-life Spinal Tap, but . . . I honestly think these people deserve each other. Every time their therapist (who looked like Bill Nighy and couldn't have been more West Coast if he'd been a fictional character) popped up at an important band meeting, I wanted to scream at them. Get rid of him! Talk amongst yourselves! Have a beer! At one point James Hetfield got up from the table and went to the kitchen, talking the whole time, and I swear not one useful word came out of his mouth.

Wednesday June 1
Summer's over. Too wet to get the new lawnmower out. That's a shame. Stayed in and finished off yet another job for Word: a piece remembering my first trip to the Edinburgh Festival in 1989 as part of Renaissance Comedy Associates. We took a play I'd co-written with medical student Matthew Hall, President Kennedy's Big Night Out. We performed it for a week and got one review, in the Scotsman, that called it "an inconsequential mish-mash." That's showbiz. And Matthew went on to give up medicine and change his name to Harry Hill. (It's been fun reminiscing with Matt, as I still call him.) After I'd finished I got back to writing my book, but aside from a bit of polishing, I couldn't get going. It happens.

West Wing episode 10: The Stormy Present (watched during a break this afternoon), written by John Scarlet Young. Pretty good one, driven by the death of former president Lassiter and his funeral, attended by Jed, another former president James Cromwell and another, John Goodman. Some great writing about American imperialism.

An odd moment whilst preparing dinner - I had Springwatch with Bill Oddie on the kitchen portable (the now obligatory live nature coverage on BBC2: infrared footage of badgers, the first flight of baby tits etc.) and there were foxes snuffling in the garden at the same time. Who needs the telly?

And . . . Desperate Housewives came to its conclusion. I was right, there was a death (Rex), a final revelation (Mike is Zach's dad!) and a cliffhanger (did Zach shoot Mike?). A fine, admirably downbeat finale. New series in 2006. Nip/Tuck to pick up the quality US drama baton next Wednesday. All is well. Some things the Yanks do best.

Thursday June 2
I think it's OK to mention that I recorded a radio pilot this morning. Without going into a tremendous amount of detail as it may jinx us, it's a comedy review programme and involved myself and three other panellists discussing a number of humorous items: a DVD, a TV show, a radio show and a book. Enjoyable to do, but whether it's enjoyable to listen to is the clincher. I hope it gets commissioned.

I did it with good grace but I began to wish I hadn't booked myself in to do a local radio interview at 2.40 at the offices of Radio Times - if only for the fact that it involved getting a cab over to White City because the Central tube line was to pot with "severe delays" (you know it's bad when they use the s-word). I used to get cabs all the time when I had a job with expenses and I still occasionally accept one if a TV company is paying and it's either an awkward spot or an awkward time, but I much prefer to use a combination of public transport and my legs. I disliked giving in today but at least I was there on time and when you've agreed to do something at least be prompt and professional. (It was arranged by the RT press office, who are exceptionally nice people and I feel it's part of my remit to be an ambassador for the magazine.) It ended up being a fairly freewheeling pre-record with BBC Radio Southern Counties about "family films". I'd been incorrectly briefed but I busked it. Hope it was OK. Again, against my instincts for thrift and self-sufficiency, I took a cab back to Victoria. I had a racist driver, which is another reason why I'd rather not take cabs. He seemed to connect two unrelated facts: that traffic wardens were dishonest and disreputable, and that traffic wardens are from West Africa (which of course only some of them are). Stupid bastard. Anyway, I caught my train.

I've just been peering out of a bedroom window and I could simultaneously see a fox, a blue tit, a parakeet and two jays, all feeding at once. While a cat snoozed behind me in the wardrobe. Animals and birds are better than people.


Oh, by the way, Europe is in crisis.

Dozed off whilst watching West Wing episode 11, The Benign Prerogative, written by Carol Flint. I'll give it another go tomorrow. I got up too early this morning.

I must get this off my chest. About a fortnight ago I was asked to host the forthcoming Mojo Awards. I was delighted to be asked and accepted readily. Today they informed me that I was no longer hosting the Mojo Awards. Never mind the ethicality of withdrawing an offer after a verbal agreement, here's the official reason why: because I write a column for Word magazine (arch rivals of the company who publish Mojo) and that represents a conflict of interest - something nobody had spotted before. I am most disgruntled. I am also restraining myself from writing more than these bare facts. Somebody has to be professional.

There's only one thing for it: a Thai meal. Chicken, chilli, garlic, mixed vegetables, brown rice, pineapple juice, pot of green tea. Heard a great new band on XFM on the way home in the car, a bit like Muse but with light to go with the shade. Either Claire Sturgess didn't back-announce the record, or I was talking over her and consequently have no idea who they were.

And when we got back, a truly inspirational documentary about autism called Make Me Normal. Really unobtrusively shot over a term at a special school. Hats off to the staff and to the kids themselves, who were taught to be aware of their condition in the struggle to deal with it, and the outside world, which is confusing enough to people without autism. Nice to see a documentary on Channel 4 that wasn't called The Man Whose Head Fell Off And Rolled Down A Hill or The Real Porn Industry Laid Bare.

There are ants in the kitchen, what am I gonna do?

 
The views expressed in this column are the views of Andrew Collins and do not represent the views of the BBC.