For the first part of the flight back from Malta, we had fun with Abi as she enjoyed the flight and liked her mini seat just between us as we'd folded up the arm rest.

After we'd had the in-flight meal on the return journey, and after Abi had fallen asleep, my stomach started to feel a bit funny so I got up to stretch my legs and get some water. I got as far as the galley, started to ask for some water and that's the last thing I remember until the black haze cleared enough to see some blurry shapes that resembled the stewards around me.

Eventually I made out Des's voice talking to me. I was laying on the floor with my feet rested on a metal box. I was given some water and my head wiped with a cool wet cloth.

Gradually I started to feel better and decided that I wanted to sit up somewhere so I was lifted up onto one of the fold down chairs in the galley. I sat there for a bit and had some water, but then I started to feel cold and shivery. I remember Des saying "He's going again" and that I was looking pale and I was laid back down on the floor.

I was put on oxygen for the rest of the flight. This made me feel a lot better - pretty much back to normal, but I stayed lying down until the paramedics checked me out. Lying on the floor of the plane for the landing was very strange - I had to be held still from all angles, Des was holding my head, one of the stewards was holding my shoulders and another my feet. The force that was wanting to push me down the plane was incredibly strong - you don't realise this when sitting strapped into a seat, but on the floor it really felt like I would have gone flying right down the aisle.

When we arrived at Gatwick, paramedics from the airport fire service met us as soon as we'd taxied to the airport. They did some basic checks and everything seemed to be normal. Then the paramedics from the ambulance service arrived and did some more checks, which again seemed to be normal. They got me to get up slowly and took me down to the ambulance to do an ECG and check my blood sugar level, both of which came back fine.

The ambulance crew thought that it was because I have a slightly low blood pressure anyway and with various other factors - the plane being hot and stuffy; the pressurised environment; exhaustion and just having eaten it had been affected more. Apparently they get quite a lot of calls to hot restaurants when people have had similar incidents.

After leaving the ambulance, I was led back into the terminal through the airport by a fantastic BAA medical assistance guy, as I'd originally come down the stairs at the side of the link way to the plane. I was taken to where Laura, Des and Abi were waiting for me and then he ushered us all through the airport and got us through passport control without queuing and led us straight to where our baggage come out.

Just a reminder, so I remember the difference! - chomp is a safer version of "chop" removes any trailing string that matches what perl thinks is a new line)

` $string = "abcdef";
chop($string) # $s is now f, $string is now abcde
chomp($string) # $string is still now abcde

$string = "abcdefn";
chomp($string) # $string is now abcdef
`

We've had a fantastic day today - done loads and now I'm exhausted!

We started off with visiting the Portsmouth & Hampshire Art Society at the Portsmouth Cathedral - there were some fantastic pictures there and Abi enjoyed it particularly the boat pictures. Then we had to dash off to a Kati, Dillon and Duncan's birthday party that Abi had been invited to, which was really nice as there were lots of our friends from church there and Abi had lots of fun playing with the other children.

After the party we went back to Stef and Gerard's house to borrow a thing to put on the side of Abi's bed so that she doesn't fall out, and we ended up staying for quite a while. Abi had fun playing with Tyler, Laura loved holding their little baby Daniel and I had a good chat with Gerard.

This afternoon we went down to Gunwharf Quays to get Abi some new shoes and decided to go up the tower as well. As there's a "Meet the Navy" event on at the dockyards, we had really good views of all the extra boats that are around the harbour for that. Abi had great fun up the tower, and loved the glass floor - she walked very confidently on it, laid on it and even stayed there when people were jumping right next to her!

Then we finished off the day with a barbecue.

This morning Laura spotted a spider in the bath and asked me to remove it. I picked up the spider and showed it to Abi. I then took the spider outside. Abi slammed the door behind me and screamed in protest.

When I came back without the spider and shut the door, she held out her hand as if to hold the spider and said "Abi loves spider"

This blog has been through various different iterations mostly based on custom written code- I tried Wordpress for a while, but didn't get on with it - it was too complicated for what I wanted, and I got too much comment spam (mostly filtered out, but still a lot to check it wasn't filtering valid comments).

A while ago I decided that I wanted to include content that I'd created elsewhere into my blog, so initially attempted this with the timeline approach - however this took the content too far away from the front page. In this latest iteration, all content is included in the main flow of the blog with different rendering styles for different types of content.

The content currently comes from twitter, flickr and from my own post form. These get updated using an ajax call once the front page of the site is loaded to ensure the content is up to date. At the backend, this is written in PHP and stored in a MySQL database, with each type of content having a PHP Class which controls how it is displayed.

Update:  And I'm back to Wordpress again!

Update- Download day is today! - go get Firefox...

When Firefox 3 is released, the Firefox team are attempting to set a world record for the highest number of downloads of a piece of software in 24 hours - why not join in?

After we read the story of Cain and Abel with Abi this morning:

Me

God sees everything including what you are thinking

Abi

Don't worry

The other night when Abi was in the bath, she decided to do some swimming. She went down onto all fours, and then lifted her feet up to float along the surface of the water. Like this she 'swam' lengths of the bath with her hands on the bottom.

Make sure that expire_logs_days is set to ensure that log rotation takes place

For a short while when we've been having our morning family devotional time together Abi has been repeating a prayer word by word after me - usually something intended to be like "Thank-you Lord for mummy and daddy" but usually when she's said 'mummy' and I say 'and' she adds 'Abi' but this morning I asked her if she wanted to pray and said 'repeat after me', and she says:

Thank you Lord for work work work > >

Amen