Peter J. Evans, Croydon – “Many thanks for the copy of TC20/21. I’m amazed that my subscription has expired, but then again the days have started blurring alarmingly into one another recently. Do you have any plans for 1997?

Anyway, here’s ten quid which, even accounting for postage and packing, should see me sticking with Trash City for the next six years or so (now there’s a scary thought). I’m sending you a note rather than a cheque because right now my bank account is the physical embodiment of quantum theory – I can never be exactly sure of what’s going on there, and actually observing it can send the whole thing into a kind of fractal Hell. To simulate this, roll 1D6 on the ‘Pete opens a bank statement’ table:

• 1          Sink back into chair and sigh with relief
• 2-3       Swallow loudly and start snivelling
• 4-6       Laugh hollowly a la Eddie Hitler in that episode of Bottom when they were stuck on a ferris wheel (‘Things are looking bleak’).”

Disturbingly, I rolled a 7 – quite remarkable on a six-sided dice…

Geoff Barker, Sheffield – “About Diana – I can’t understand why anyone, given a choice of who would you rather give a damn good tw***ing? would choose old horseface Camilla rather than young, pretty desirable Diana. Most blokes think with their dicks. I know I do…

Can anyone tell me why is it that on TV “lesbians” are all attractive women/girls (for example, Beth & Margaret from Brookside, and Zoe Tate from Emmerdale) yet in real life they’re all butch types, more reminiscent of the Viz character Millie Tant? Signing the letter as my sister-in-law (a card-carrying dyke), I did send off for a copy of Blaster on Her Hip an SF/Fantasy ‘zine for “women who like women”, but was well disappointed. Where was all the totty?”

A subject that I feel deserves further study. Where did I put that copy of ‘Wild Things’?

Claire Blamey, Great Yarmouth – “I am now the proud owner of a computer. It was a freebie – I have been involved in a ‘mentoring’ thing with a chap from BT (don’t ask). I called him Polyester Ken (not to his face of course) because his name was Kenneth and he looked exactly like Ken of Ken-and-Barbie. He is the perfect example of all that is wrong with capitalism. Don’t get me wrong, he is a nice bloke, but for someone in a very high position in the company, with the attendant salary and 50 weeks holiday a year, he was thick as two short planks. He could just about write (block capitals in a sort of studied 10 year old way) and had absolutely no interest in anything apart from his boat (yes, a yacht, no less). No qualifications, left school at 15, and is now in charge of the hiring and firing of telephone field engineers in an area that extends from Northampton to Hampshire. Scary.

Anyway, BT in the usual foresighted and we-don’t-waste-any-of-our-shareholders’-money way had discovered that all the computers they had bought in the last three years for their call centres (thousands of them) were not Y2K compatible (see – I even know the lingo now). So the whole lot of them were basically chucked out – except this one which Polyester went and fetched from Bristol for me in his car and brought it up here (which was very nice of him). It’s only basic, but it’s got a colour monitor, etc., and I got our computer chappie at work to load Windows 95 on it, so it’ll do for me. It hasn’t got any Internet connections which I don’t want, as if I had it I know I would be stuck on it all day and turn into some sort of biotech interface thingy with no life (or at least less than at present – which come to think of it would be no life anyway). So now the letters I used to scribble in 5 minutes take me five times as long to do – isn’t technology wonderful?

{The Jill Dando murder] …when they had the reconstructions of the bloke who ran through Bishops Park, and went over the railings by the river, that was just about the spot where Gregory Peck has his meeting with Patrick Troughton in The Omen”

An appropriately millennial note on which to finish this last letter column before we hit 2000…