I'm going away for 5 days, so (a) no blogging, and (b) I was looking at setting up one of those AutoReply OufOfOffice things that posh people with real jobs have every time they go for an extra-long poo or something. You know:

"I'm not at my desk from 12:35pm today. If you need anyone in the mean time, contact Janice my very Personal Assistant, yeah, that's right, I have a Personal Assistant, and she does exactly what I tell her, cos Janice, you're all mine. Mine! Bwahahaha. I'll return at 12:37pm. Oh, and actually don't contact Janice, cos she's probably with me offering me toilet roll."

I've never enabled one of these before, but it's the weekend before the gig I run at The Stoke in Guildford, and normally that's when everyone emails saying they want to reserve tickets. And I don't want them thinking that because I haven't replied, that they'd better make other plans (particularly now that every pub in Guildford has a comedy night now - all vastly inferior of course). So, AutoReply it is.

But then I thought maybe I shouldn't. Whenever I email my mailing-list, I always get a few AutoReplies - some saying the email address has changed, some saying things like the above one (but about holidays, rather than no.2s). So what happens if I send out a reminder to the mailing-list about the comedy night next Wednesday, and then I go away on my long weekend away? My email will generate several AutoReplies from people not in, which will then be sent back to me, which will then fire out my own AutoReply email, which will then generate more AutoReplies from then, which will again generate more AutoReplies from me... This will continue until I have sent or generated several million emails between Thursday and Tuesday, thus breaking the internet. No wonder broadband's so slow.

So I shall not do that. I shall stick to ManualReply. I don't want to have the downfall of the online world on my conscience.

Oh, and...

Yesterday I bought a thing, and asked a man about something.

This week I watched the single worst adaptation of anything I have ever seen. Regular readers may know I'm a fan of film, and religion, which makes me particularly interested in those lavish American star-studded biblical biopics. Richard Harris as Abraham. Charlton Heston as Moses. Yul Brynner as Aaron. Grace from Will & Grace as Mary Magdalene. I like 'em as I like any historical biopic, no matter how conjectural: The Other Boleyn Girl, Shakespeare In Love, Spartacus...

But Jon Voight as Noah is something to behold. I don't mind the odd liberty being taking to dramatise it. And I'm sure not everyone reading this will be familiar with the finer points of the Noah's Ark story. But I'm sure all of you most know that nowhere in the original text does it even hint that there are pirates...

That's right - the NBC version of Noah includes pirates. God wiped out everyone on the planet, apart from Noah, his family, all the animals, and, oh, the odd ragtag bunch of angry villagers who cobbled together a few planks to make something that floats.

It doesn't stop there. The original version has Noah welcome his wife (here played by Mary Steenburgen), his sons and their wives onto the ark. Only in this version, Noah piles on his wife, his sons, and then three random women. It's only during the course of ark's journey that the three sons get a bit rapey, and Noah intervenes and says, "Hey! You've got to get married first!"

You'd have thought God would be angered by this rapiness, but he's too busy playing with Noah's head by offering him mirages of dry land, then laughing when Noah realises it's just an illusion. Ha! The prankster God, so seldom seen in the Bible. Yet here he's also the impulsive God: at the end of NBC's 'Noah's Ark: Beyond The Thunderdome' (it might as well be), God decides that actually he's going to kill Noah, his family and all the animals after all. Noah begs God, but to no avail. So Noah starts whistling. It is a funny whistle. He even does a little dance with it (in Jon Voight's most demeaning screen appearance since - no, including Anaconda). God likes the whistle/dance combo, laughs, and lets Noah off.

What?! If that's what changes his mind, why has no one else done this since? When Hitler pulled out his gun in his bunker, did he pucker up, do a few bars of Deutschland Deutschland Uber Alles, a little jig, and Bob's Your Uncle?

Oh, and Mrs Noah tries to kill all the animals she doesn't like. And they all go mad, like in Cast Away. They start chanting and wanting to sacrifice each other, and I wouldn't put it past them to have conversations with a football called Wilson. Then there's a peddler man, who like the pirates, somewhere survived the flood. He's played by James Coburn, and sells useful items, novelties, party tricks... Noah doesn't buy anything, which must nark the peddler a bit, because I can't imagine there are many boats around. Unless as well as Noah's Ark, there's also Jeff's Ark, Steve's Ark, etc, which I wouldn't put past 'em. That's NBC: Not Biblically Cohesive.

It's been quite a few days - beginning on Thursday morning with a trip to A&E. It was half a day of lying on a hospital trolley, two days of worry, four days of terrible pain, and a fair amount of chess. But generally the weekend played out like an episode of House. I had a medical conundrum that no one could work out. So my first question to you is this: are you a fan of TV show House? If so, and you don't get embarrassed or awkward about reading a stranger's (or friend's, depending if you know me) medical history, then read on, and see if you can work out what was wrong with me...

Thursday morning I awoke with agonising pain in my abdomen. I had got through a bottle of wine the night before, so wondered if it could be something hangoverish. But this was properly agonising, so pretty soon I thought it can't be that.

Six years ago I was rushed to hospital with peritonitis, which is a pretty bad condition, which in my case resulted from a rupture in my bladder. It was very dangerous, and only thanks to immediate surgery did I get through it. That too began with a sharp agonising pain in my abdomen, so when this new pain appeared last Thursday, I panicked a little. The main difference is that six years ago it was just on the right side, and Thursday's pain was all across from right to left, and a little higher. Could it be some internal rupture, just a bit higher up?

My other pondering was that it could be related to lower back pain I had two weeks ago: same region of the body, only the back pain was around the back and the front pain was, well, around the front, obviously. I went to the GP then and he diagnosed it as mechanical back pain (common for tall men) and gave me a course of Diclofenac - a hefty ibuprofen-based painkiller. So that seemed to sort the back pain from two weeks ago, but could he have misdiagnosed me? Could Thursday's new abdomenal pain be this same back pain, only... moved round the front?

A&E couldn't work out what it was. I had an X-ray, blood tests, wee tests, and my poor parents and girlfriend kindly wondered in to see me lying on a hospital bed in A&E wearing a hospital gown with a needle in my arm and an oxygen mask around my mouth (I was feeling a bit faint from the pain). Bless 'em. In the mean time, a surgeon visited me to see if I should have surgery, as I did with the peritonits 6 years ago. He decided not. He concluded a few things were behind it, including a wee infection among other things. So he gave me some antibiotics, some new painkillers, and sent me home with them.

So what was wrong with me? We think we know now (although it will take another few days to know for sure, till the correct drugs kick in), and it was solved by my GP, and my mum chatting with a roomful of nursing friends. But do you know? It can be solved from the above information, and you don't need to be overly medical to work it out. If you need some more thinking time, have a quick re-read. For the answer is in the next few paragraphs. In the mean time, here's our Graham with a quick reminder...

Would you have done surgery?
Would you diagnose a wee infection?
Would you suspect the evil peritonitis (internal rupture) from 6 years ago had come back?
Was it the back pain from 2 weeks ago, making its way to the front for some reason?
Or something else?

Right. Time's up. Let's see if you're more like Hugh Laurie as Dr House, or more like Hugh Laurie in Blackadder. If you've seen House then you'll know it follows a pretty familiar formula. Well the history of the bladder rupture - that's the early diagnosis, and the red herring that a House episode would feature about 15min in. That was enough to panic me, but the pain from last Thursday was higher and not just on one side, so nope - similar feeling but not the same. So if you opted to do surgery on me - you're wrong. Or you're sick and twisted. In which case you're still wrong, just in a different way.

The A&E doctor suggested a wee infection. Also wrong, because if so, I'd have had the pain lower, ie. where the wee is. And what about the back pain from 2 weeks ago? Related? No, that was just back pain from bending over in the wrong way. But me having the back pain is related to it...

The drugs the GP gave me two weeks were a course of Diclofenac - an ibuprofen-based painkiller. As you may know, ibuprofen is the one that you have to take with food, otherwise it enrages your stomach. Well, I had been, but it's still a pretty heavy-duty painkiller, and to have a course of it is a little bit excessive. But I obey the GP, so even though it had fixed my back, I was still finishing the course. Which didn't make my tummy very happy. It gets pretty acidic, and you can change the 'pretty' to 'really very very' if you add something else acidic and silly to the stomach like, say, a bottle of wine... which I did mention I had the night before the pain. So, bottle of wine, plus stomach of unneccessary ibuprofen, equals much abdomenal pain.

It's still there, but at least I know what caused it now. Oh, and if you guessed right, well done, you have now graduated medical school. And you're better than the doctor in A&E...

Had a hairchop today (prompting, as ever, cries of "Haircuhuhut" from my housemates), and I was very impressed. It was the first time ever ever in my 29 years of having my hair cut that the barber offered to trim my eyebrows. I thought wow, what a great barber. It has clearly slipped the mind of all previous barbers.

Only of course it's not necessarily that the others were lacking by not offering such a service. The other explanation is that I'm ageing, and thus hair is protruding from places it shouldn't. Indeed, this morning I bought my very first nose-hair trimmer. Too much information I know, but that's what blogs are for. It is a definite step towards the ageing direction. See my previous post for the more serious reasons that this week sees me feeling like I'm growing up finally. Well today is proof in a more trivial way that the ageing process even happens to us twentysomething (where 'something' = as high a number as possible).

So let's for the moment presume that it's not that I'm ageing that caused today's barber to offer an eyebrow trim. Let's presume instead that it's just that it has a highbrow (as well as eyebrow) salon in a chic part of town, where such a deluxe service is offered as standard. And where is this fine salon, you may ask? Mr Toppers, Goodge St, £6.

Been an upsetting weekend – my nan died on Friday. Yeah, not a cheery blog – sorry. Her passing was expected at some point soon – I just didn’t expect it yet. A very generous person and a lovely and loving grandmother.

I’d normally keep all this private, and I'll do my grieving offline rather than here, but the interesting thing that came out of this, which felt bloggable, was that Nanny was my last grandparent, so I now move up a generation, which is a tad scary. I told my mum this, and she countered with, quite rightly: “How do you think we feel? We move up a generation too. It’s scarier for us – who’s next to go?” Fair point.

Tis odd how even at the age of 29, I still feel like adult life isn’t fully there yet, though Friday went a long way to growing me up – when you realise that you are the next generation, not the one after next.

Anyway, in other news, I’ve come away to Nottingham for Sunday and Monday, as Zoe’s got a business thingy here today. So it was a chance to come back to my old student haunt, feed her the best kebab in the world, and show her off to various Nottingham-based friends who don’t believe I could ever keep a girlfriend more than a week. One of my good friends from student years, Henry, who taught me the way of the kebab, had us to dinner at the vicarage where he now lives. So yes, he is a fully-fledged vicar, which again makes me realise that we are all proper grown-ups now. Someone I studied with is now a full proper big vicar. Not curate. Not deputy. There is no one above him in his church, apart from the obvious Trinity – so alright, he’s top mortal.

Oh, and the kebab shop was shut. So I’ll have to bring Zoe back another time to sample the delights of Tipoo, greatest kebab shop in the universe...

I was slightly narked when I came in from work today, and I've no idea why. Just one of those things. So I changed my Facebook status to 'Paul is narked but has absolutely no idea why'. A couple of clicks and I see that only one minute earlier, m'pal Russ made his status 'Russ is euphoric and has no idea why'. How odd. Then my housemate walked in and said, "I'm really tired and I've no idea why." So, what were you feeling at about 8pm tonight, and you've no idea why?

Another thing of whose origin I know not, is that I've hurt my back. And it wasn't that 'bend down, pick up a crate, crack!' moment. Just went, on Friday, when I leant forward half a millimetre. I've never hurt it this bad before - it's a constant pain. Anyway, doctor's orders are to keep it moving, by swimming and/or cycling and/or running. ie. Do a triathlon. I wonder if it's too late to enter the Olympic team?

Speaking of which, that torch relay was fun, wasn't it? At least we now know what all those rings on the Olympic symbol stand for. First there’s the outer ring of policemen in black, then another ring of policemen in yellow with cycle helmets but no bikes, then an inner ring of ninjas in blue tracksuits, then Trevor McDonald plus a flame in the middle. From above, it looked like those old British Airways adverts. I thought it was an eye, winking. Anyway, put those Chinese marshalls in the games I say - they ran 31 miles without changing personnel, so they're fit for the marathon, the relay, and by the looks of their dealings with some of the crowd, the boxing.

3 things I've got on this week to plug in chronological order...

- Thursdays, 11:30pm, BBC7 - Tilt. New topical show on the radio station known for playing repeats. So if you miss it, it'll no doubt be repeated. But then it won't be quite as topical, will it? I'm script-editing anyway, looking through the various non-commissioned sketches sent in, and adding jokes and the like.
- Fridays, 6:30pm, Radio 4 - The Now Show. A fine show, and glad to be back on this again. Punt & Dennis & Mitch Benn & Marcus Brigstocke & Jon Holmes & Laura Shavin. A fine cast, a fine show, and it's making me read the papers again finally. I'm writing jokes and/or sketches for it.
- Sundays, 10pm, ITV1 - Headcases. You may have seen this advertised (it even got a feature in The Times). It's the new Spitting Image, but CGI. Ooh, technology. I did some gagging up on this. Promises to be both funny and one of those water-cooler shows that should be a talking-point the next day, I reckon.

Plus the gigs as usual. Had my own one in Guildford last night, which was great - thanks to James Branch, Jude Simpson and Steve Best. Lots of London-based gigs coming up - Soho and Leytonstone on Saturday, then Bethnal Green next Thu, Fri and Sat.

There. That's the news. And now the weather... (look out of the window)