I don't know if you ever search for your own name, occassionally I do. Under "Ali Yates" I find a few things, like a balloonist and someone's girlfriend. However, I tried "Alison Yates" today, yes, I know I hate the full name, but I was just interested. There's quite a lot out there apparently, but the most interesting was this, there's a type of heather with my name. I think. How amazing is that?!

'Alison Yates'

Long racemes of white flowers, Sep-Oct, with silver-grey foliage. Vigorous but compact habit. Named after the daughter of Geoffrey Yates, the introducer. Ht. 31-45cm. Spd. 46-60cm.

I have to say that personally I think it's a rather stupid name for a plant, but never mind. It amazed me. I'm going to turn into Dave Gorman if I'm not careful and start dragging Helen round with me trying to find other people called Ali Yates. Incidentally, if you haven't already, I would recommend reading Are you Dave Gorman? not that I necessarily know you, so who knows, you might hate the books I like. However, I thought it was very funny, I read it the other week. Basically Dave and his housemate Danny Wallace try to find 54 people called Dave Gorman. It's great, one of the best things is the total lack of organisation. Plus the writing of the book is just very funny, it's written by both of them, with Danny being very cynical and Dave being excessively enthusiastic, it's a lot of fun. It's kind of similar to Round Ireland with a Fridge which I also read recently, well similar in that as a result of a drunken bet they each spend an awful lot of money and energy doing something fairly ludicrous. However, I preffered Are you Dave Gorman? because in Round Ireland with a fridge he ended up advertising quite a bit and being a lot more organised, so the bet seemed a bit easy in the end, whereas the Gorman one was a lot more stupid and having two people write it up probably made it more refreshing.

Oddly enough I was wondering about what catastrophic bet would occur if the combined powers of the two stupid bet teams joined forces. What's odd about this is that just now as I was looking for the Tony Hawks site so I could link it and as I did I spotted a link on it to Danny Wallace so they are connected already. Scary!! I guess it's not that odd though, they work in the same kind of circles I guess. Oh, if you are at the Tony Hawks site check out the email replies that he has sent to people that think he's Tony Hawk, the skateboarder, they're very funny.

Okay, I was talking about having the same name as some heather and got onto reviewing a book, see, this is what my brain does to me, it just goes off on tangents, it's very confusing really. You might be confused, but you don't have to live with it. Imagine what it must be like for me!

Anyway, the even vaguely observant amongst you will notice that I have actually posted twice tonight, I blogged about 20 minutes ago and said I was going to bed. As you can see, I have not actually made it to bed, I am under my bed (I have a loft/cabin bed with a desk under it, it's great), I got distracted doing pointless searches. I will now attempt, for the second time, to get off the internet and go to bed, I won't guarantee anything, but I doubt that I'll suddenly feel the desparate need to blog.