That's a relief...

Firstly, there's now a Thinking Highways Twitter page. We resisted for long enough but now you can find (to date) five tweets from yours truly and I'm already bored of it. Go to twitter.com/thinkinghwys (thinkinghighways was too long) if you want to see how I got progressively(and rapidly) annoyed with it. I can't really say too much in 140 characters.

Anyhoo - a couple of years ago (actually getting on for three) I was waiting for an article from one of my US contributors, Jim Joseph. He was never late with copy but he has two weeks past the deadline so I started calling and emailing every day. Only when I rang his son did I discover that Jim had died three weeks ago. You can imagine then, what I'd been feeling in the last few months of not being able to contact my good friend, former ITS America staffer and current TH columnist Paul Najarian. We've talked regularly over the last 10 or so years and email each other pretty much every week. I'd not heard from him since May, his work phone rang and rang, his mobile was seemingly switched off and his home phone was on voicemail. I was hoping he'd either moved, fled the country or 'gone underground' but I couldn't help thinking the worst...

And yesterday, I get an email from him. "Hey, I'm a diplomat now and I work for Mrs Hillary Clinton." That was a relief. And to brighten my day even further, that nice Mrs Clinton, the US Secretary of State, has said that Paul can continue writing for Thinking Highways. This will also hopefully mean that she'll register for her own copy. Which is nice.

Also nice to have Harold Worrall back after his enforced absence. His Bright Ideas column will re-energise in the December issue. It's great to have them both back.