I feel like someone has Duck Taped a truck to a baseball bat and hit me in the liver with it, while simultaniously sucking my brain out through a curly straw. The last week or so has been mental.

For a start there was 24HoursInAmerica - liveblogging the US Election for 24 hours straight, with James Aylett and Sarah Bee. Despite the odd technological fuck up (including, at one point, James having a physical fight with an electronic safe until we realised it could be reset simply by turning it off and on again), it went rather well.

We exceeded our traffic expectations, thanks in large part to our partnership with The Register. We also had a number of exclusives including Bill O’Reilly’s next move, Pollcat’s spookily accurate predictions, calling for Saxby Chambliss before anyone else, the 24HIA demographic breakdown, groundbreaking puns and of course Russian bear attack!

I was also ridiculously pleased with this joke even if no one else was.

Then, less than two hours after the coverage wrapped up, Sarah 2.0 and Olivia - um - 1.0 rolled into town to promote the UK edition of Sarah’s splendid book, ‘The Stories of Facebook, Youtube and Myspace: The People, the Hype and the Deals Behind the Giants of Web 2.0‘. Yes, that’s the UK title - a string of words so ridiculous that they could easily be part of a McSweeney’s list (which, by the way, appear to have stopped being funny).

Tour guide duties for the trip had, by way of a complicated pitch process, fallen to Robert and me and we were determined to show Sarah and Olivia the most interesting aspects of the London tech scene. No surprise, then, that our first port of call was the Hampstead Tech Meetup in a house in North London. While Sarah talked Book, Robert and I busied ourselves arguing with Americans about whether Turkey was ready to join the EU. We also ate prawns in the Holly Bush and saw a hilarious pumpkin.

On Thursday, things really kicked off, with a dinner held in Sarah’s honour at Joe Allen’s, hosted by Rob and Paul Walsh.

I arrived just in time for the after-party at Paramount, at the top of Centrepoint. Highlight of the evening: a slightly terrified-but-amused looking Sarah wordering what she had to do to get the message across to one of the group who was a little, how you say, over-enamoured with ‘Smoking Sarah Lacy’ (copyright, Valleywag). Never have I heard the words ‘my husband’ forced into so many non-husband-related sentences.  Still, at least he wasn’t wearing a hat - Rob would have probably slapped him. That’s, after all, what hosts are for. 

Having ditched all but the hardest of the hardcore, the evening ended up back at the Sanderson with red wine and fries. Food of the Gods.

Friday - the main event - Rob and I interviewing Sarah on stage at a former strip club (epic venue win) about the ‘Secrets of Silicon Valley’. There’s video of the event coming soon from Newspepper but here’s a low-res trailer, courtesy of Zoe…

Despite the shaky camera work, I really think it gives a sense of Rob’s and my professionalism.

With our formal hosting duties at an end, it was time for some fun, and where better to find that fun than at Martha Lane-Fox’s karaoke bar with Sarah, Olivia, myself, Rob, Anna, Maggie, Simon, Scott, Hermoine, Michelle Dewberry and the rest of the gang.

The highlights are too numerous to mention but, even in the face of Sarah and Olivia’s bootylicious dancing to Sweet Home Alabama, we all agreed that the star of the evening was Simon Prockter with his extraordinary rendition of Blue Moon. 

Dangdagaganga da danga dang dang…. Blu blu blu blu bluuuuuu mooooon. 

And so to the weekend, and a trip to see the brontosaurus at the Natural History Museum. Sarah was very enthusiastic about the tail - “there’s the tail!” she screamed as we rounded the corner - but her enthusiasm turned to disappointment when she realised that the brontosaurus - A FREAKING BRONOTOSAURUS - wasn’t as tall as she’d have liked.

It’s a shame Michael Crichton’s dead; he could have rewritten Jurrassic park to include a Sarah character who, when faced with the snarling escaped T-rex could have simply yawned in its face, saying “You call those teeth? I guess I just thought they’d be sharper. I’m not angry, just a little disappointed…” 

To make up for that disappointment, we walked for eight miles to have some Proper English Tea and scones. There were far too many scones but just the right number of old people.

Sunday - and it was off to Judith’s house for a roast. What I hadn’t realised was that the subject of the roast would be me. No amount of wine could dull the pain of hearing our host telling stories about my - um - adventures among her friends. This, by the way, is the same Judith who introduces me to people with the warning “this is my friend Paul, he’s great. Don’t sleep with him.” Bless her heart.

Fortunately the food was delicious, as was the company - even those who, despite being able to win a game of Scrabble moments earlier, couldn’t quite cope with the mechanics of remaining upright on a chair. 

Monday brought one final professional (in the loosest sense of the word) task - guest hosting the Guardian Technology podcast with Sarah as special guest. I’ve never actually presented anything before, despite doing lots of guest radio appearences, and it’s not as easy as it sounds. I hate, hate HATE reading from a script  as it just makes me sound like I’m reading from - well - a script. See what I mean - the Podcast is below. Sarah was, of course, brilliant.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Fucking professionals. 

(Also, see her blog for an exciting behind the scenes photo or my Flickr account for Olivia’s best facial expression of the day)

And now with Sarah and Oliva back in San Francisco without any serious physical injuries (too early to tell for the mental ones), it was time to catch up with everything I’d been neglecting for the last eight days, starting with my new weekly Guardian column. 

It’s called Not Safe For Work and, amazingly as I only filed it - late - a few hours ago, it’s just appeared online.  The column is about my strange adventures in technology so for this week’s subject… 

Who else?

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