It's been the issue that's divided society for the past twenty years and I feel that I cannot let another day pass without addressing it here. Is What's Up by 4 Non-Blondes (1992) a rip-off of Don't Worry, Be Happy by Bobby McFerrin (1988)? I mean, obviously the answer is yes, but I'm still amazed that not everybody can hear it.

So, where do you fall on the Non-Blondes/McFerrin issue? Do you think that Linda Perry's song about being a bit confused is a bit too similar to McFerrin's a capella ode to blind optimism? Or do you wrongly consider the two tunes to be utterly different on the incorrect basis that simply being in a different key and having an acoustic guitar strumming, rather than some bloke whistling, is enough to cover up the identical chord progressions, the comparable song structure and the far too similar melody?

Tomorrow I'll be discussing more bang-up-to-date, cutting edge music like Led Zeppelin, Glenn Miller and Mozart. In the meantime, Ron ended his £9000 game of Deal or No Deal today with a bit of music, singing a song that was supposed to sound a bit like My Way.

This evening, I was called handsome. And dashing. And other complimentary adjectives that are never usually used about me by sober people. All because I wore a red shirt and a reasonably smart jacket to my work's summer ball thing.

Mind you, there were plenty of students there who'd made a far bigger effort than I. Most of the lads were properly suited up and the girls were looking properly glamorous in their formal dresses. This was particularly noted by one of my students who took me to one side, all matey like, and said to me, "The girls, they look so ugly at school but they are so beautiful here!"

I had literally no idea how he expected me to respond to that.

After that, I got home and watched Alhena's superstitious beliefs on Deal or No Deal help her win the lowest possible amount that was available to her all game. Luckily for her that amount was five grand.

I spent an hour cleaning mini-whiteboards this afternoon. You know what mini-whiteboards are, yes? A4-sized pieces of white plastic which students can write down in eraseable marker ink the wrong answers to questions you shout out at them. They can then hold their wrong answers aloft so everybody else can see how little they've learnt. Those things.

Well, after various students of mine had spent the past year-and-a-half using my mini-whiteboards in the classroom, they'd got a bit grubby. Some of them wouldn't even wipe clean properly, leaving a permanent residue of the student's wrong answer there for ever more. So, for the first time ever I decided to use some proper cleaning fluid and get them gleaming and white again.

And you know what? That cleaning fluid did a fantastic job. The only real drawback is that the fumes from it made me quite dizzy. In fact, it was a good job I was sat down because I would have probably collapsed otherwise, so strong was the smell that was being given off. At least, that's my excuse for feeling faint, and the fact that I was overly tired through stupidly not having had anything like enough sleep the past couple of nights had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Anyway, I'm off to bed soon. Right after I've mentioned the fact that Rich's game of Deal or No Deal today saw him win £16,000.

I think that a new tenant has moved into one of the flats in my building. Obviously I don't know this for certain, because that would involve me being friendly and sociable and taking an interest in other people, but I have my suspicions.

You see, this morning I was lazing around in bed when I heard a knock on the door of my flat. I didn't answer it because I was too lazy, but a few seconds later I heard something being slipped under my door. It was an official letter from the Inland Revenue that had been sent through the post, but the unusual thing is that rather than just leaving the letter for me to collect from the communal hallway area, somebody who was inside the building deemed it so important that they chose to deliver it directly to me. This has never happened before in over a decade of residing here.

So I think that a new person has moved in and wanted to take the opportunity to meet me. Either that or they really hate the idea of leaving mail in the hallway area.

After the last couple of days' excitement, it was rather a subdued game of Deal or No Deal today as Olga won £2250.

You'd think that a board game called Last Train to Wensleydale, all about moving cheese in the Yorkshire Dales, would be nice and gentle. At least, that's what I thought when I volunteered to play it earlier this evening. But it just about fried my brain.

In fact, after about three hours playing it, I'm still not altogether sure of any real strategy. I think I was put off slightly by the fact that -- as observed by one of my opponents -- the board itself looks rather like a diseased lung. And also that there was no actual cheese, Gromit. Instead there was simply a bunch of small inedible orange wooden cubes that represented the cheese.

Still though, this is what modern board gaming is all about!

There were no cheesy nibbles for the Banker in today's Deal or No Deal, since he ended up forking out a total of £10,250 in Lee's extraordinary game.

There was a distinctly pungent smell in my classroom just after the students had returned after a mid-lesson break this morning.

"Who's been covering themselves in after shave?" I asked.

"It is me, teacher!" said one of the Arabic lads enthusiastically, whose steadfast refusal to use my actual name when addressing me irks me to this day. "Do you like it?"

"Not really," I replied. "It's making my nose hurt."

"But the girls, they love it!" he said.

I thought about asking the female students in the room whether they did indeed love the thought of being near to a teenage lad who had smothered himself in a sharp and acrid smelling substance so strong that you could practically taste it, but ultimately I decided that it'd be better to simply concentrate on discussing the scalar product of vectors instead.

That's the end of that anecdote. The second anecdote I shall tell you about is that Candice was jolly and bubbly when she played Deal or No Deal today, and it'd have been good if she'd have won much more than the fiver she actually ended up going home with.

It is at this time of year that my thoughts turn to where to go during the summer holidays. Well, they didn't do that last year because I already knew that I was going to be spending a week in Kansas City, but then I came back from that and had seven weeks of doing pretty much nothing. Which is the kind of thing that happens when you don't have any work during the months of July and August and you haven't planned anything else.

So this weekend I've been considering my options. Someone or other suggested I go to Italy, but I have to be honest and say that visiting Italy has never really appealed to me. Maybe it's the hot and sticky Mediterranean climate that puts me off, or maybe it's the fact that Roman mythology is just copying Greek mythology with some of the names changed. (Actually, it's probably because having to cope with things not being in English is far more stressful than it is relaxing and I think that this year I'd quite like my holiday to be relaxing.) So I'm not going there.

Mr knaw mentioned the Isle of Arran, which sounds much more up my street. Maybe a few days wandering around there will be nice. Or maybe it'll be dull and boring. I suppose that's the risk you take whenever you go somewhere new by yourself. That's why I even had a look at the web sites of some of those agencies that specialise in holidays for singletons. Aside from the fact that they're quite expensive, it seems that their main focus is either on matchmaking, or their main customer base is middle-aged women. Either way, they expect the people that book on their holidays to, you know, interact socially with complete strangers. And that doesn't sound relaxing at all. (Did I mention that I'd quite like my holiday to be relaxing this year?)

Of course, with Deal or No Deal not taking a month's break over summer, staying in the UK would mean that I could still keep up to date with that every day too. Although it'd be hard to do even that if they decide to have two games a day like they did today. Game 1: Mark won £6500 for himself. Game 2: Celebrity Peter Andre won £1000 for charity.

If you ever want to know what it's like to entertain people by singing at them at a wedding reception, then allow me to inform you right now. The events I am about to describe are pretty typical really, and may or may not have actually happened today.

• 1.10pm: Arrive at the country pub where the reception is taking place. Get shown to a room. Get changed into lounge suits that appear to be quite smart but are actually fairly shoddy when you get up close to them.
• 1.30pm: Still in the room, sing through a couple of songs quite badly. Then sing them again, only this time much better.
• 1.50pm: Go outside and wait for the guests to arrive.
• 2.00pm: Start singing at people as they all take photographs of you. Finish the first song to virtually no applause because everyone's hands are full with champagne glasses and food and stuff. Decide to applaud yourself instead.
• 2.10pm: Get told to stop singing because apparently the room you got changed in wasn't meant for you so you've got to go and move your clothes and stuff out of it.
• 2.20pm: Try to embarrass the young woman who was singing along to one of your songs by making a big show of approaching her and serenading her. Fail to embarrass the young woman who was singing along to one of your songs because she actually quite enjoyed the attention.
• 2.25pm: Fend off the inevitable requests from guests for specific songs that you don't know by saying "Wow, what a great song! We should totally learn that one at some point!" Then sing something different.
• 2.30pm: Get berated by the crabby old Scottish woman for not having learned a barbershop arrangement of Dean Martin's That's Amore. Respond by telling her firmly that "we're going to sing Come Fly With Me instead, and you're going to like it!"
• 2.40pm: Have a conversation with the best man about voice parts, during which you get him singing a barbershop tag with you before he quite realises what he's doing.
• 3.00pm: Surprise the bride and groom by singing a particularly slushy song at them while everybody else there looks on. Then sing "the honeymoon song" (Tonight from West Side Story) to rapturous applause and praise, and leave.
• 3.10pm: Get changed out of the lounge suits. Open the envelope addressed to "The Barbershop Quartet" that was previously given to you to find a cheque, and a note reading "Thanks for singing! Everyone will have loved it."

Well, I definitely loved it.

Just after 11 o'clock this morning, we were disturbed in class by some loud music coming from outside the window. Upon looking out of the window we saw a car, inside of which two young women were dancing about maniacally in their seats. The front windows of this car were fully wound down and some sort of vaguely dance-ish music was raucously blaring out.

I'm not used to seeing such unashamed displays of exhuberance on a weekday morning, especially from people whose efforts could probably be better spent paying attention to the fact that they were in charge of a moving motor vehicle on a public highway, rather than throwing ridiculous shapes as they drove along. So I might have made a disparaging remark to my class.

"Well, at least they're having fun," said one of the most conscientious students in the room. Which immediately threw my misanthropic grumpiness into sharp relief.

Elsewhere, in Deal or No Deal today the £250,000 box came to the table for the third time in the past week. Lynn didn't win that prize though, having already accepted an offer of £17,000 earlier on in the game.

I received a joke book as a present yesterday. I'm not quite sure why it was given to me but I was very grateful to be given such a gift, despite the fact that most of the jokes in the book are rubbish. Not even rubbish in that groan-worthy way which is actually quite good, either. Just rubbish.

To demonstrate this, I am going to use random.org to give me a random page number and then a random joke on that page. I will then copy the joke here and then make a brief remark confirming the joke's rubbishness. Here goes.

Page 59, joke 5: Before a mother knows the sex of her baby it's a hidden a gender.

Rubbish.

You know, I was convinced today that if that Banker had seen £100 in Emma's box he'd have relished the chance to say so. Which is why I was convinced it wasn't there, which just goes to show how wrong I can be sometimes. Unfortunately for Emma she got it wrong too, so a hundred quid was what she ended up winning.