Spa, I bloody love you...

Spa. It's fab, isn't it? That Herman Tilke bloke hasn't been allowed anywhere near it, and good job too. You can stick your fancypants modern F1 circuits where the sun doesn't shine (Cumbria, mostly); they don't have a hope against this place.

First off, apologies for the delay in this report: I've been away and miraculously managed to avoid the results of the race until I watched it this evening. Good job too - bit of a corker, wasn't it?!

I'd normally comment on qualifying, but as I was contenting with some tetchy hot dogs at the time, I didn't see it, although I understand the arrival of a few showers made it interesting and Petrov look like a right div as he tried to find out if the kerb was wet... by driving over it. Hello tyre wall! Goodbye dignity and credibility! Berk.

Rubens made it to his staggering 300th GP (but it wasn't to last long) and the BBC turned up trumps again with their Brundle and (my mate) Humphrey's drive to Spa in Martin's E-Type Jag. Funny stuff.

So to the race: straight away it seemed rain was likely, but even the wealthiest teams still (thankfully) can't precisely predict when it might precipitate, which probably really annoys them. For us though, it's good news. If they don't know, there's always a chance for someone to get it very wrong... or very right.

Webber managed to pull away at the start about as quickly as me in my Punto. On a steep hill. On an icy morning. With a piano on the roof. He probably wasn't pleased to see most of his main rivals nip past. Still, Rubens made sure he could toddle off for his anniversary cake as quickly as possible by careering into Alonso straight away, thus dropping one of Mark's rivals right down the field and bringing out the safety car. Hamilton was leading by this stage and everything seemed to be going along calmly for a bit. But this is Spa, and the weather forecast would have made Michael Fish wince, so, like an kleptomaniac finding a box of matches they'd forgotten about, excitement was clearly just around the corner. Sure enough, a hint of drizzle affected Vettel's brain and he tried too violently to swerve past Button. Instead, he piled into the side of his car after losing control . Button was out, but Seb managed to drag his car into the pitlane for a new nosecone and tyres. He then got a penalty for his trouble, which I think means he has had more drive thru's this season than McDonalds.

As this stage, Seb was probably thinking it couldn't get much worse. It could though. Just ten laps after undoing Button (I'm pleased with that one, by the way) he overtook Liuzzi, cut in a bit sharpish asd got a puncture from clipping Tonio's wing. It was a long old drive round to the pits too.

With 10 laps left, the rain returned. A bit like adding chilli sauce to your gran's tea, this livened things up quite a lot. Alonso had been moving steadily up the field after his early Barrichello-based problems, but a bit too much moist kerb (he should have listened to Vitaly) saw him total his car and leave it in the middle of the track. Safety Car time again. Hamilton went off track and just managed to avoid the tyre wall and skate over the gravel, and Kubica forgot to stop in time in the pits and ploughed into his pit crew. He was playing with his steering wheel, apparently. Well, they are pretty cool. His fascination with the twiddly knobs allowed Webber to get past and the race ended with an ecstatic Hamilton the victor, Webber 2nd, and Bob K 3rd. Massa (who must have had some cloaking device on his car - I don't remember seeing him) managed 4th, Sutil an excellent 5th in the Force India, Rosberg & Schumi 6th and 7th after some inconsiderate moves on each other during the race, Kobayashi 8th, Petrov 9th (he's not totally hopeless, then) and Liuzzi promoted to 10th after Alguersuarus did something wrong. Somewhere. I dunno.

Great race. Are Button, Vettel and Alonso now nearly out of the running? In F1 2010 it's anyone's guess.

(Dog-hearing-bothering Marcella Detroit's 94 album "Jewel" is threatening the glassware in my office this evening. How can anyone sing that high?!)

A fisful of change at the shops

A recent day out reminded me how much the retail experience has altered during my lifetime – and it’s not all good. I could stop typing this, and buy a fridge, in a matter of seconds. The shops are shut and it’s 9pm, but I could still place the order and arrange delivery. I haven’t got to wander round a white-goods retail emporium trying to work out which slightly different version of something that keeps my cider cold is better. It’ll be cheaper, too. But in amongst the convenience, endless choice and bargains, we’ve lost some of the personal, human, touches that used to make a trip to the shops something more than just a daily chore. Last weekend, we visited a local coastal town. Amongst the shops selling over-priced imported home accessories (who doesn’t need another roughly-hewn wooden heart, poorly painted and a bargain at £10?) was one that looked different. It’s window allowed you to see in, rather than being plastered with stick-on graphics and special offers calling ...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

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