Ooh, slap my hand! Finally there’s an editorial. What have I got to say for myself? Well, plenty seeing as I’ve been bottling things up for the past few weeks (or is it months?) I’m sorry I took off more time than necessary but I’m back and raring to go.

Happy new year by the way. Hope you have had a grand start to 2005. I had a crap New Year’s Eve – I ended up in bed with a headache, which was the result of having nowhere to go. But that’s OK because I sure as hell made up for it two days later by going to London Zoo. With two male companions. A better bargain than what the rest of you bagged in the sales, eh? This doesn’t imply I paid for ‘services’ by the way, I’m just in demand.

It’s been a while since I last went to London Zoo and from what I recall, many animals have vanished from there since. Where were the bears and pandas and why was there only one kangaroo? And just what do they slip into the lions diet that leaves them heavily sedated? Have these questions ever crossed your mind? Like you care!  What was really nice was I had a chance to catch up with our Matthew when he came over to ol’ Blighty for Christmas. Matthew returned to Las Palmas last week and it’s safe to say he is bored, so I was hoping we could resurrect this ‘Bring Back Matthew’ campaign this year. What do you think? Any bright ideas?

I can’t believe almost a month has passed since my birthday. One of the rotten things about having a birthday towards the end of the year is, after a few days when the next year rolls forward you’re reminded it will be your birthday again that year! Maybe I should have two like the Queen – one in the summer perhaps. I got an MP3 player by the way and it’s an iRiver. I can get 5000 songs on it but in reality I’ve only installed 200 tracks from my CDs so far and after the discovery I made today, it looks like the prospect of adding more is going to be impossible.

I downloaded my first single – legally – but with all the nonsense about protecting the song from ending up on illegal file-swapping networks, my bloody MP3 player can’t or won’t play protected legal downloads in WMA format. Wait a minute, only the US version can, which has pissed me off even more. Can anyone explain the logic in that? Unless I am doing something obviously stupid, it does look like I can’t play downloaded singles on my MP3 player unless the files are unprotected or better still, in MP3 format.

If anyone can advise me how to overcome this annoying problem, please drop me a line at editor@uk-fusion.com, and not hit on me like a random bloke did last weekend. I am aware I can be found on most search engines very easily but how do people think to look for me in the first place?

So after all that, what can we expect from uk-fusion in 2005? Your guess is as good as mine! I haven’t a sodding clue what’s coming up apart from a few hyped names who don’t do anything for me at the moment. Seriously, January is the aftermath of Christmas and with tongues wagging about the upcoming Brit Awards next month, we have to put up with Darius spreading himself too much in the mean time. Did you know he appeared on a Sunday morning religious/spiritual TV programme on the BBC called Heaven & Earth recently? What’s that got to do with his plugging music? Scraping the barrel surely…

Okie dokie, I’m going to sign off now. I hope my words were worth the wait. Don't forget to check out all the new reviews we've started to add to the site. See you next week.