I am now having some difficulty with my news in the morning. For a long time I was quite happy using Plucker to download news from a number of sites in the morning - but particularly from The Guardian's pda site. This was a superb, simple summary of The Guardian good for reading on a Palm. I'd transfer the Plucker file first thing and then read it on the bus on the way into work.

All of a sudden, The Guardian seem to have stopped updating this part of the site. I'm now struggling to find an easy way of downloading and reading their news. I've emailed them to complain about the site being removed but no reply so far.

Dreadful time in IKEA over the weekend. For the first time in a while, we genuinely lost Alex. He could have been anywhere in the shop, having wandered off, and we had half the staff out looking for him. He was eventually found - after what seemed like some hours, but was probably no more than 20 minutes - playing on one of the beds. As I said to the staff at the time, the danger is that because of his autism he will not react like a 'normal' 8 year old who's lost his parents - crying and such like. He'll be 'invisible' among all the other families, just running around having fun. As well as the shock of losing him, it put his disability in sharp contrast. I think I probably lost about 7 years off my life, and gained a few grey hairs. Deb has had to deal with this sort of situation more often than me, and was therefore much calmer. She managed the staff and got the hunt going, without which he'd never have been found. He said he'd been hiding in a wardrobe, then got bored and started playing on the beds. We must have gone past him while he was in the wardrobe, and then not realised that he was behind us, not in front. It all worked out OK in the end, but there was a moment when I really thought we wouldn't find him.

The visit to IKEA finished with us driving home with a new mattress for Jessica perched on top of all our heads. It would have been funny if it wasn't so darned uncomfortable.