Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, has sneaked on to the guestlist for one of the Queen's annual garden parties at Buckingham Palace. He's going on the arm of Richard Barnbrook, the BNP's only member of the London Assembly. Me, I'm furious. Rarely have I been so angry. I may, in fact, explode.

“Richard Barnbrook has got an official invite in his capacity as a member of the London Assembly,” crows a BNP spokesman. “He is allowed to bring a guest, which will be Nick Griffin. For him to snub an invite from the Queen would be absurd.”

It makes my fists clench. Are we really going to put up with this? Can we possibly allow it to stand? It's “invitation”, you loathsome little man. Not “invite”. “Invite” is a bloody verb.

You want to mess around with “less” and “fewer”, so be it. But “invite”? I won't have it. My own wedding, two years ago, was almost ruined by this sort of thing. “I got your invite!” dear friends would trill. “No you didn't,” I'd very nearly reply. “You've got my invitation. Which I now want back. Because I suddenly hate you.”

My wife tells me I'm quite unreasonable about this. I don't care. I'm right. And please, Mr BNP Spokesman, don't give me that “it's an abbreviation” nonsense. She's tried that, too. It isn't. “Invit” would be an abbreviation. “Invite” is just the wrong word. Anyway, we're talking about the Queen, here. One does not abbreviate with the Queen. Honestly. What sort of nationalist are you?

A heavy price to pay

There's something faintly depressing about the idea that house prices might be on the verge of recovering. I'd completely forgotten about house prices. Remember how much time we all used to spend talking about them? Those endless, tedious conversations, full of judgment and assumption, and nobody really listening to anybody else? For ages we were all excited, because they were going up and then we were all depressed because they were going down, and then we just... stopped. The whole topic just disappeared. Nobody missed it. And strangely, it's only now that it might be coming back that I've even realised it went. A bit like Margaret Beckett.

Party animals

The more I think about it, the easier it is to picture Nick Griffin at a Buckingham Palace garden party.

Roaming the lawns. Not knowing what to do with his cocktail sticks. Maybe slipping them into a pocket. Awkwardly circling the Queen, and spluttering crumbs of scone over people he doesn't recognise but knows he should. Later he'll get home, and be mortified to find the remains of that cucumber sandwich he lost in the marquee mashed into whatever shiny fabric he's stretched over his fatboy British Beef backside.

What I can't figure out, though, is why he's so keen to go. “It is something people are going to have to get used to,” harrumphs that same BNP spokesman, “as we become part of the Establishment.”

The Establishment? You lot? Aren't you supposed to be against the Establishment? Isn't that the whole new strategy - to present yourself as an alternative to this corrupt, back-slapping system of ours, that stifles our national discourse, and makes us pay for its bath plugs? But no. They want to go to the garden party. In a terrible, warped sort of way, it's almost quite sweet.

Therightwordforitness

A few years ago, and with the assistance of a helpful nearby German, my colleague Jack Malvern came up with a new word. He'd just fixed his oven. He'd had to order a new part over the internet, and then order a special screwdriver over the internet, too. The whole process took weeks, but did, slightly to his surprise, actually leave him with a working oven. Jack was thrilled, and wanted to talk about it. Understandably, nobody else gave a damn. So Jack mulled this over for a while, thought about how he felt, and realised that there wasn't a word for it. Undaunted, he got a German to make one. You can do that in German. It's like Lego. You just stick bits together.

This week, my main achievement has been to install an operating system called Ubuntu 9.04 on to my laptop, and to get the whole thing to work just as well as it did under Windows Vista. It wasn't easy. It took hours. I had to type a lot of bizarre things into really weird little boxes and, now that it is done, I am more pleased with myself than you could possibly imagine. But you won't care. At all. You'll probably have stopped reading at the top of this paragraph.

At least, thanks to Jack, I know what my problem is. I have technishererfolgangabemangelsfrust. That is to say, “the frustration caused by having a sense of achievement for completing a technical task but being unable to boast about it because it is too boring”.

I'm now doing my best to learn how to say it. And when I do, possibly, I'll have that feeling again.

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