It must be all of ten years since we hung up our collective bellies and stopped bringing the hallowed name of football into disrepute. All of which means it's well past time we held an evening of drunken debauchery in honour and exaggerated remembrance of the fortunate passing of our doubtful skills from the hazy annals of footballing folklore. So the call goes out: if you ever disgraced the Meadows in the infamous Bellies' strip, get in touch.

Even though it's my unspoken duty as a writer to make it so, my life is still governed by the rule of coincidence. Take my masseur. Dimitri. He's from Tver, an industrial ghost town on the Volga, a two hour drive north of Moscow. Not only is Tver the same town to which my favourite fictional detective Arkady Renko is posted in the novel Stalin's Ghost, but Renko's main antagonist is ex-OMON. Dimitri is also former Spetsnaz — though from the tantalising morsels he feeds me during treatment, I assume he served his time in one of the more covert units associated with the Federal Security Service (FSB).

I don't ask too many questions. Deep tissue massage can be painful and Dimitri's skill is in making it unforgettably so. It's not just about breaking down adhesions and metabolic waste, he tells me, it's about eradicating trigger points. And he uses the same hardened fingertips on my trigger points as he employed in his shadowy exploits with the Special Forces. In the Balashikha-2 training camp just outside Moscow he conditioned his fingers in sandpits. A finger-strike through six inches of wet sand to clutch a buried rock requires the same amount of force as plucking a human heart from its locked cage of ribs. The things you learn.

Take Lockheart. A name that conjures up mediaeval images of romance and chivalry. Of course it wasn't always Lockheart. It has Franco-Flemish roots — Locard — and arrived in Scotland in the 11th Century, perhaps even in the same retinue of the de Bruys as my ancestors, the Kers. It was only after the Battle of Teba, in which Robert the Bruce's heart played such a prominent role, that Locard became Lockheart became Lockhart.

So is it a coincidence that Lockhart is also the name of my protagonist in The Phantom Code? Ian Fleming once wrote that "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action." Lockhart isn't so generous. He believes once is coincidence and twice is once upon a time too many. He doesn't believe in fairy tales or fair fights, which is why he favours the knife. He prefers the personal touch. He believes you have to enjoy killing or you'll never get good at it. I'm not sure about Dimitri. I once asked him what his surname was and he said it had died on the lips of those whose hearts he'd untimely ripped and whose scabrous ghosts now haunt the petrified forest of his dreams. I'm glad I asked. Today I have bruises like quicksand where my trigger points have been eradicated and not for the first time I wonder for whom this deep tissue massage is most therapeutic.

If you've been looking under chairs and tables, trying to find the key to the pop-up searchbar fable... then your search is over. The Seeker is here. And it'll help you find what you're after. With style.

The Seeker Animated Searchbar Snippet Pack and Workshop

Visit The Seeker's dedicated website where you can learn how to easily create your own animated searchbars and incorporate them into your RapidWeaver projects. In the Workshop you will learn how to:

• Work with Snippets
• Create Your Own Snippets
• Combine HTML, CSS and jQuery
• Move your parts with Fresh Me's Move Parts Snippet
• Enhance Your Seeker Searchbar with RapidSearch
• Easily Create Your Own Animated Searchbars

Download the Seeker Project Pack and use the included Photoshop templates to create and customise your own searchbar styles, or choose from more than fifty ready-to-use styles. The Snippet Pack contains:

• 1 Searchbar jQuery Header Snippet
• 1 Searchbar HTML Snippet
• 1 Searchbar HTML (RapidSearch) Snippet
• 1 Fresh Me Move Parts Snippet
• 1 Searchbar CSS Snippet
• 58 Search Icons
• 3 Search Icon PSDs
• 50 Searchbar PNGs
• 3 Searchbar PSDs
• 1 RapidSearch 3 Demo Plugin
• 1 RapidWeaver Project File
• 1 Tutorial URL

So here it is, RapidWeaver Central's first workshop. Have fun.

Here's a something I've been playing around with recently. It's a jQuery effect called Parallax. After seeing it in action it didn't take me long to decide my Bad Bullet Day banner was just sitting there begging to be parallaxed. Of course the final effect doesn't really add anything to the site — except one more reason for IE users to curse the unrighteousness of an interweb that regularly conspires against them — but for me it is one more door of perception opening on a new jQuery dimension. If you fancy implementing Parallax in RapidWeaver then Tobias Vogel has written a tutorial here. Now of course I'm wondering if I can incorporate it in my experimental Bad Bullet Day website here...

There has been such a call lately for an animated pop-up searchbar for Rapidweaver — similar to the one used in the Realmac Forums — that I have assembled a team of top boffins to work on the research and development of a Tutorial and Snippet Pack to meet those desperate needs. Although Project Secret Animated jQuery Searchbar for Rapidweaver is still under wraps in the initial stages of testing, you can crawl under the canvas and take a sneak peek at its progress here. But don't tell anyone.

If you look under the hood you'll notice a few changes. Although my initial code was inspired by Elixir Graphic's elegant Float theme I have now rewritten it from scratch using Messrs Karl Swedberg and John Chaffer's Learning jQuery 1.3 as my mentor and guide. But guess what? I still can't make it work in IE6 and IE7. Should that be news? Not in this decade. Should I even try to make it work? I'll let the fickle finger of fate pick that particular nose.

You'll also notice that I've incorporated Tobias Vogel's incredibly potent Moveparts snippet, which is a simple Javascript you can use to move elements to different parts of the page. If you haven't experimented with this script, I urge you to do so now because even if it doesn't make you a better lover it will certainly make you think you are. Meanwhile I'm working on the graphics.

If like me you’ve been seriously annoyed by the page-load delays in Safari 4 (beta) then you may be interested to learn of this ‘fix’:

Go to System Preferences > Network > Advanced Settings > TCP/IP and change Configure IPV6 from Automatic to Off.

And here's a fix for those of you who also prefer your tabs back where they belong — below the Bookmark Bar.

Finally, if you really want to extend Safari's features, check out Glims.

[UPDATE] And here's a great new tip from regular RapidWeaver Central passenger Tom, who sent in this heads-up on Safari's Secret Tweaks Menu. Here are some of the options it enables:

• Tabs on Top - toggle between Safari 4 and Safari 3 style tabs
• Toolbar Redesign - toggle address bar having additional controls inside
• CoverFlow in Bookmarks - toggle CoverFlow
• Google Suggestions - toggle Google Suggestions when using Safari Search Field
• Fancy URL Suggestions - toggle between Safari 4 and Safari 3 address bar suggestions style
• Transparent Window - make window background transparent. This is only noticable for pages with no background set
• Top Sites Feature - toggle Top Sites feature on and off completely
• Top Sites Dimmed Animation - dim pages when opening them using Top Sites feature
• JavaScript No New Windows - toggle whether JavaScript can open new windows or only new tabs
• Don't Confirm Unsubmitted Text - don't show warning when closing a window with unsubmitted text

Get your Safari's Secret Tweaks Menu here

I've been getting a lot of requests recently for a jQuery Hidden Content tutorial detailing how I achieved the several variations on this effect on RapidWeaver Central. You'll be pleased to know that such a tutorial already exists on the site.

Succumbing as I sometimes do to impulsive logic-warps that divert my thought processes down strange metaphysical wormholes of existential exploration, I decided to hide it away in a shadowy corner of the site where it could only be found by the accidental stumbler or the insanely curious.

Don't ask me why. Quantico's internal PSYCINT/101B report infers I am not solely responsible for my actions and that the voices in my head must take at least some of the blame. Of course I've heard their theories before, and while it may be true that my earlier websites made the disorganised crimescene of a frenzied psychopath appear structurally superior by comparison, I have moved on since then. I have sat up and snorted the coffee. My life is now governed by a 960 Grid System that keeps me chained to the atomic ley lines of design. To hell with existential freedoms. Break out the straightjackets. Imagination needs to escape something.

Every now and then someone other than my psychiatrist asks me if I structure my novels. I can see why they ask. Looking back at my chaotic beginnings it's easy to see them as distorted reflections of my own rather turbulent mental state. It's not that I was mad, I was just at that awkward age when it's impossible to tell the difference between a thought and a hormone. Then I turned fifty.

In my defense, though, when I first dreamed of being a writer I was reading books by Huxley, Burroughs and Samuel R Delaney. No wonder I was confused. And in the finest tradition of Kerouac and Kesey I was doing so many drugs I was never quite sure which parallel dimension I coexisted in. In fact I was so busy living the Bohemian life, staggering through Spain in the hallowed footsteps of Lee and Orwell that I eventually lost my way. Ended up in Thailand and turned to crime.

I don't think Henry Miller had ever met me when he wrote that chaos is the score upon which reality is written, but when I returned from exile my reality was like one of those surreal Dali paintings in which the world he portrays and the people in it seem to disintegrate into flying shards, each a fragmented reflection of the atomic chaos from which we are fundamentally formed.

In words even my manicurist would understand, I didn't know who the fuck I was. In a material world I had no material, in a capitalist world I had no capital, and in the stultifying status quo I had no status. I was down and out in a city I'd once been proud to call my own, chained to a kitchen sink that never emptied of dishes as I tried to haul myself from the dystopian swamp of my own wintry myth. So I became a shop steward.

Somewhere in the dynamics of my reasoning this made absolute sense and conformed to some heroic narrative structure I was recreating for myself. I would stand shoulder to shoulder with kitchen porters around the world and together we would sing The Internationale as we united in solidarity against The Man, even if his representative in the hospital kitchens was a weasly little slimeball called Mackie whose pathetic frame and bifaceted approach to industrial relations became a focus for both my metaphysical and material violence. Somehow from that chaos emerged if not the body then the structure for my first crime novel, Nobody's Fool, in which coincidendentally the killer Dominic Bain works as a cook in a hospital kitchen.

So to finally answer the question, today as I prepare to step out onto the Antarctic ice in my fifth novel I use a simple 3 or 4 Act structure as a framework for plotting the broad strokes of the storyline. In my current scenario, Act 1 is set in Cape Town, Acts 2 and 3 are set in Antarctica, and Act 4 is set in Berlin. Then as I begin to plot the finer details, I zoom in on each Act and use a framework like this, where each block is a scene and each column a chapter. Zoom in again and each chapter in itself becomes a 3 or 4 Act structure, replete with its own beginning, middle and end. Am I really that anal when plotting my novels? Yes. But then I've never been good at telling the truth.

For those of you following the FancyBox Tutorial — copy and paste the following code into the Custom Header pane of the Page Inspector:

My parole officer keeps asking me why my latest blog features more photos than written entries. "You're a writer, aren't you? So write." But that's the problem, you see. I write fiction. Crime novels and spy novels. I kill people, literally, for what may in distant realms of fantasy be called a living. Which means the boundaries between fact and fiction become blurred whatever I write. I've written shopping lists that read like suicide-notes, and a get-well card that made a serial-killer puke. In my blog I dip into reality only when I have to. You may have noticed. My therapist has a fancy medical term for it. "You're f**king insane!" she told me recently. But then she would say that. She needs the money. The truth, though, is partly this: I spend all day writing. Websites I design for fun or because my conscience demands reparations for the sins of my past. Whatever. A man must draw a line in the sand, if only to confuse the enemy. So here's an old photo I found recently. If you've explored this site then you might recognise it. It's where I grew up in the Highlands. That's Meall an t-Seallaidh in the distance, below which lies Balquhidder and Rob Roy's grave. It's what's known as a 'thin place', where the boundaries between Heaven and Earth, Fact and Fiction, are noticably threadbare. Welcome to my world.

I didn’t stay still for long back then. I moved with the seasons and followed the work. I was living in Spain. Catalunya. Near Callella de Palafrugell on the Costa Brava, in a village so small it didn’t have a name. It was a just a cluster of old stone farmhouses Catalans call masias. Ours had walls three feet thick and tiny windows to keep out the blistering sun.

We had no running water or electricity but we had a sun-torched garden with a well in it and an ancient woodburning stove that was also home to a family of mice. We cooked huge paellas and potato casseroles and mushroom stews. And once in a while an unlucky mouse. We hunted frogs by the light of the moon, stole chickens from a nearby farm and lived off the crops we plundered on our drunken way home from town. We spent what little money we sometimes earned on the bare necessities of our Utopian lifestyle: weed, whites and wine.

The masia belonged to a French guy called Eric no one had ever met. He existed like a shapeshifter on the periphery of our imagination. He was Don Juan’s ghost. Maybe we had met him but he was a raven at the time and only talked to us in our dreams.

In those days I only had two posessions I valued, a typewriter and a guitar. I was reading The Naked Lunch. I didn't understand any of it. But I loved its chaotic freeform style. It meant I could write endless drug-fueled meanderings through the structural wastelands of my hormonally impulsive imagination, unconstrained by form and the outrageous demands of punctuation.

We lived with a pack of wild dogs who thought they owned us. Mwoof was the Alpha Male and Rark was his Alpha Bitch. True anarchists that we were, we had our own unspoken hierarchy. Carlos was our Alpha Male. He was older than the rest of us, a carpenter. He had a wife and a son and three mistresses, only one of whom was my girlfriend. Then there was Manilo, an artist from El Salvador who taught me how to lose graciously at chess. And Marilu, a rich heiress from Peru, who’d flunked out of uni in Barcelona and was now hiding incognito while her millionaire parents tried to track her down through the Guardia Civil and an army of private investigators. We were truly desperados.

Of course Franco had only been dead a few years and the Guardia Civil were having a hard time making the transition from complete bastards to merely civil bastards. Any time they wanted reminded of the old days they came out to the masia to kick us around, bust up our furniture and piss in our stove. They were stationed in a fortress just off the Placa Catalunya, in Palafrugell. I would get to stay there one long and scary weekend, but that, as they say, is another story.

I may be losing a few minor skirmishes along the way but I still feel confident that I’ll eventually win this noble war of attrition. The laws of physics - if not time and statistics - are on my side. And as long as there are still agents and publishers out there who have not yet felt the subtle cosh of my approach, my Bullet A Day campaign continues. This week another three submission packages have been programmed, primed and are, at this very moment, winging silently through the night towards their unsuspecting targets. I’ve now stopped kissing the packages before I post them.

"Ninety thousand hits a day?" I almost dropped the chick on the floor. "So where are all the publishers and agents?" My publicist just shrugged. He has his own theory. Formed in the crucible of greed, he calls it his Theory of Relative Worth. When I told him my self-esteem doesn't have a bipolaric scale extreme enough to track the abysmal peaks and troughs to which my metronomic moodswings propel me I could tell by the windswept streets of his ghost-town eyes that if it couldn't be tamed or bottled, measured and marketed in fiscal terms of profit and loss then in the doleful vacuum of what passed for his mind it had no worth at all. In other words he was just the man I needed. I asked him how long it would take to elevate my career to the next ditch of obscurity and he said, "You do believe in life after death, don't you?" and I said, "What do you call this?"

I haven't just been writing shorter sentences lately. I've been honing a few of my other criminal skills. Such as graphic and website design, HTML and CSS. If you're interested in that kind of thing then you can check out my Bad Bullet Day website here and an experimental version of it here, which almost gets interesting when you resize the window.

“Life's so much easier if you just don't care,” Lockhart said, staring out across the ocean. “Until the day you find yourself weeping in a darkened room in an empty flat on a deserted street in a strange city as you count on the broken fingers of your bloodstained hand all the things you really don't care about...”

Day 3. Camps Bay, Cape Town. On a million dollar patio with Dieter Stoller’s wife. On the subject of love and death. And Katja.

"What did the President know, and when did he know it?" I was living in Sindelfingen near Stuttgart during the Watergate Hearings, surfing couches and listening to the American Forces Network coverage of John Dean’s testimony to the Senate Committee. It was the summer of '73 and I was seventeen years old and I’d just been sacked from my first job in Germany. The hotel boss, Herr Breck, told me I didn’t have the right attitude. He was right. My hair was getting longer and my flares wider. I’d just seen Ten Years After and Black Sabbath at the local Sportshalle and dropped my first two tabs of acid. My doors of perception had been blown wide open and my sense of time - and timekeeping - badly distorted. I was obviously not destined to be a waiter. I didn’t know it then but I'd just crossed the threshold of my future.