I know. I was reluctant to speak to anyone. That’s why I ended up looking online for advice.

Of course, when you go online, you have to be careful what advice you follow – there’s more chaff than wheat, usually. But there are some good resources out there, and the NHS provides some useful material.

I can pass on the tips I’ve found, as well, of course! For starters, you’ve probably heard of Kegels. If you think it’s a breakfast cereal, then you’re very much mistaken. Kegels, or Kegel exercises, involve working the pelvic floor muscles. In other words, contracting your muscles as you would to stop a wee mid-flow.

You can do these anywhere – no one will know! – and after a while they strengthen your pelvic floor like any other muscle, making incontinence less likely.

Diet can also help. Try to avoid alcohol, or too much of it, if you can, as it can actually interfere between your brain and bladder messaging system, and hence bladder control. Caffeine is also a bad drink to have, and a diuretic (it makes you pee), so try to cut those coffees down, if you can’t cut them out.

I’ve found after reducing the amount of tea I drink, and cutting out work night glasses of wine, my bladder control has improved – along with all that Kegel work! Hopefully you might benefit similarly.

There are also a number of incontinence products out there to help you feel safe, clean, and comfortable, no matter where you are.

Altogether, a horrible condition, but one I’m learning to live with.

It’s been a long relaxing summer since I finished my law degree, but I started applying to a range of solicitors in August.

I got a number of applications sent out and had four interviews, which was definitely encouraging considering the recession we’re in. In the end I choose a company called The Injury Lawyers.

Anyway, I start work on Monday (27th Oct), so am looking forward to it.

The Injury Lawyers, as the name suggests, specialises in injury claims: at home, at work, and almost any kind of accident you can think of.

Main areas include:

• Whiplash claims
• Car accident claims
• Accidents at work
• Injury claims

They also have a second website that specialises in the Whiplash Claims side of the business, and provide general information on whiplash compensation and whiplash settlement amounts.

This is not least because whiplash injuries are very common, even in low speed traffic accidents. However, business has to stay very much above board as there have been a lot of changes in the whiplash and injury claims industry, not least greater scrutiny from Parliament and the suggestion that further regulatory reforms may be required to the industry as a whole.

Either way, TIL seems to be a very reputable company, and I’m obviously joining at an exciting time.

Is there life out there in deep space?

Traditionally, those people who “believe in aliens” are regarded by society at large as mild fruit cakes, or perhaps even tin-foil-hat-clad barn-pots.

Some of them are, of course. But not all of them.

When you think about it, just a little, the universe is infinite.

Life exists here on Earth, so there must be little microbes hanging about on other worlds somewhere in the dark depths of the universe. And they could just as easily have evolved into some form of sentient life.

In fact, given that the universe must be infinite – how can it have an end? – in fact there must be an infinite amount of sentient beings kicking about. Surely?

It’s interesting to see a change in the press in relatively recent times, too. For instance, Stephen Hawking coming out in 2010 and saying it’s “perfectly rational” to believe aliens exist.

Although Hawking also warned that the human race probably shouldn’t be reaching out to contact them.

He compares aliens visiting Earth to Columbus and America – they’ll basically raid us for our precious resources and bugger off, leaving us stuffed.

Oh well, it’s a step up from incinerating us with their Death Star style giant ray guns.

I think that before this decade is out, there will be some news on alien life, in some respect. And not just the usual UFO is-it-or-isn’t-it-a-hoax stuff. Some real news. Mark my words!

Yes, the iPhone 5 is out this week! After many months of iPhone 5 rumour upon rumour.

It’s out on Friday, in fact, but there are a couple of bits of bad news. Firstly, apparently it’s pre-ordering like “hot cakes” to the point where the initial stock is sold out.

So you’ve now got a 2 to 3 week wait on the Apple store, if you’re ordering online – that means you won’t get your iPhone 5 until the end of the first week of October, or the week after that.

The real kicker, though, is the price. This is the most expensive iPhone ever, with the basic 16GB model pushing past the £500 mark, and costing £529 sim free.

Which is why it’s a good idea to not buy this thing immediately – and indeed shop around for the best iPhone deals.

If you can stand to be without the latest technology – and that slightly larger screen – then the iPhone 4S is a good bet, particularly if you shop around as suggested. Apple itself will be selling the 4S for £449.

And indeed if you take a step back to the iPhone 4 – which isn’t hugely different to the 4S, really – you’ll be able to pick that up for £320 (with a cut down 8GB worth of storage). That’s not all that far off half the price of the new iPhone.

With T-Mobile, you can get that iPhone 4 8GB for £21 per month on a contract, paying only £29 up front for the handset.

It all depends on how much you want that bigger screen, and 4G connectivity, really. And a lot of folks won’t be able to make use of the latter, anyway.

Recently, a load of 4KTVs were launched by certain firms at the IFA show over in Germany.

Sony had one, so did Sharp, LG, Samsung and Toshiba – basically all the big TV makers except Panasonic (and indeed Toshiba already has a 4K set on the market, if you’ve got five grand burning a hole in your pocket).

What’s a 4KTV you might ask? Well, it’s quadruple the resolution of 1920 x 1080, in other words, 3840 x 2160. Mighty high resolution, or instead of High Definition (HDTV), manufacturers (or some at least) are also calling it Ultra Definition (UDTV).

Never mind Toshiba’s 5 grand, Sony’s is going to cost more like 20 grand; mind you it is an 84 inch model. Some of them are only piffling 70 inch TVs. The Tosh one on the market now is a 55 incher. Pah.

The real joke is that there isn’t any 4K resolution content, or barely any, for these TVs to display… though they can upscale, it’s not quite the same.

There’s one really smart feature, though, for gamers who are tired of playing split-screen in shooters, and their opponent looking at their half of the screen and basically cheating.

These TVs allow for the display of two full HD images at the same time – with two pairs of special 3D glasses allowing each player to see their own separate full-screen (non-3D) image. Very clever indeed – and a definite reason I’d want one of these.

But they’ll have to come down just a little bit in price, yet…

If you want to dream for now, though, there’s a nice little look at some of these televisions here.

Busy blogging day today! But I had to post again, as it’s rare that there’s a good piece of comedy which hits our TV screens, these days.

Most so-called comedy shows just aren’t funny. Yeah, sense of humour is a subjective thing, true enough – but whoever you are, you’d expect the odd laugh, or at least smile, while watching 30 full minutes of a sitcom episode.

Not so with some programmes, which seem to have forgotten the “com” element, and just left the viewer with the “sit” experience – sat on their sofa for half an hour bored crapless.

Fortunately, not all is doom and gloom, as Charlie Brooker and Daniel Maier have put together a genuinely funny new detective drama spoof, A Touch of Cloth (as in Frost). Which is on Sky 1, incidentally, and that makes me feel good about my recent decision to go about installing a satellite dish and getting Sky.

A Touch of Cloth is over-the-top, and very silly, but brilliant. It reminds me of Not Going Out crossed with the Police Squad/Naked Gun – the gags come thick and fast, and there are some very silly ones, daft puns on names, police procedures and the like.

All of them had me smiling though – all right, most of them, apart from the occasional groan.

What I really like is that they’ve packed the gags in, and made a great job of parodying the police drama, from the music to the murder footage and camera tricks. There’s lots of fourth-wall breaking, too, and the whole thing is just plain funny.

Which is what it should all be about. If you missed A Touch of Cloth, I’d suggest you watch again on your Sky app (if you have one on the Xbox, or similar – or if “Now TV” is doing it, not sure on that).

It won’t be for everyone, but if the show does tickle your fancy, it’ll tickle hard.

Incidentally, I don’t think Sky quite set my dish up right – seemed to be a bit of a rush job to me – as I’m not 100% happy with my HD picture. So I think I’ll get a local firm in for a proper satellite dish alignment, to make sure I can fully enjoy future HD programs.

Not that the picture spoiled any of the many laughs Detective Cloth gave me!

I recently had FTTC, or fibre-to-the-cabinet, installed at my house.

In other words, that’s where fibre is run from the exchange to the local green cabinet in your road – so the connection is mostly fibre, but the last little bit is still copper phone line.

Even so, it offers blistering performance in comparison to traditional wholly copper phone line-based ADSL.

Previously, on standard ADSL I was getting around 6.5Mbps (which is pretty good – and it could have been more than that with ADSL2, of course, which would probably have boosted things to 15Mbps).

Forget that, though, FTTC is a far bigger jump – I now get around 60 to 70Mbps downloads. It’s literally ten times as fast when it comes to actual download speeds – and uploads are improved even more. We’re talking a jump from 600Kbps to 15Mbps, a boost by a factor of around 25.

But while this is all well and good on my laptop downstairs, directly connected to the router – I used homeplugs upstairs (which run your Internet connection over the electricity wires, via standard plug sockets).

Those Solwise homeplugs are rated at 85Mbps, so should be able to deal with 60Mbps speeds, theoretically, but the truth is the rating is codswallop. In fact, they can only manage 15Mbps! Basically that’s fine for my uploads, but severely hamstrings my downloads.

Bah! How they can get away with being rated at five times their actual throughput, I’ve no idea.

Yes, they are three years old, but still… looks like I need to buy some new 200Mbps homeplugs, which might just be able to cope with the full speed of my new connection. With any luck, anyway.

Our high street might be quite pretty, down in Southampton.

But the roads off it… well, some of them aren’t quite so nice to look at. In fact, some of those little side streets can be quite ugly, not to mention narrow, and there’s one in particular that springs to mind, which I was walking down yesterday evening where scaffolding had been put up.

I mean, I’m no expert in scaffolding, but this didn’t look very safe to me. Some of the boards were slightly skewiff, and a large bucket appeared to be perched precariously on the edge of the second storey (as it were) of the scaffolding.

Lord only knows what was in the bucket. Tools? Concrete mix? A five pound lump hammer? Whatever it was, I didn’t want it falling on my head, so I walked in the road – like a superstitious person avoiding a window cleaner’s ladder – and not underneath the scaffold. You’d think that the shop having the work done would have taken the time to find a decent scaffolding hire firm.

But apparently not.

I have a friend who works in the building trade, and I know for a fact that it isn’t that difficult to find a reputable firm to put up some scaffolding in Southampton.

I can’t understand why would you would be happy to risk injury to some poor passing pedestrian… and I think I’m going to email the council over this one, and see if there’s anything they can do.

Not that I’ll be holding my breath too long for a reply.

Video games these days tend to be easy.

In the good old days – or bad old days, perhaps, depending on your viewpoint – you played, say, Sonic the Hedgehog, and there was no saving the game.

That’s right, youngsters; if you battled through to the final level, and five hours of jumping and ring collecting later, you stupidly died due to the slip of a finger – well, that was that. You had to dust yourself off and start again right from the beginning. Level one.

And the thing was – you did.

These days, games are scared of making things difficult. They have to hold your hand, prompt you with clues, give you plenty of save points – or even the ability to save at any point you want. Zero risk, basically. That’s the motto a lot of the time.

And then, yesterday, I started playing a contemporary game you may have heard of called Dark Souls.

And Jesus H. Corbett if this isn’t the hardest game I’ve ever played…

It gets incredibly tough only a couple of hours in, at the second boss, which I spent absolutely ages trying to beat. But the sense of satisfaction when I finely figured out how to down the beast… that’s second to none.

And a gaming feeling that I haven’t experienced for quite some time. I thoroughly recommend you try Dark Souls, as you can pick it up for £20 on the Xbox now (and it’s just come out on the PC). And for twenty quid, in terms of time to gameplay ratio, that’s probably going to work out as the biggest bargain ever.

Playing this title got me thinking about the other hardest-ever games I’ve played. Some of the earlier platformers were torturous, like Bounty Bob or Manic Miner/Jet Set Willy. The timing required on these was horrendously unforgiving, although the controls themselves didn’t make your leaping and collecting task any easier.

More recently, Ninja Gaiden was also brutally tough. But not as tricky as Dark Souls…

Right. I’m off for some more hurling-the-joypad-across-the-room fun.

So, I’ve been looking at ways I can save money.

I figure if I make lots of little adjustments to my life, each might only save a few pennies and pounds here and there – but add all those up over the course of a whole year, and you could be in for some considerable financial gain.

So I started with some little things. I found a cheap Xbox Live subscription renewal on Amazon, which saved me quite a bit compared to buying it on Live itself.

I sold some old games at my local Blockbusters (no, not great money for them compared to eBay, probably, but so much less hassle).

I’ve started looking for the deals in supermarkets – you know, buying packets of mince, three for £10, that sort of thing. It’s amazing how quickly those sort of offers can add up to a fair bit in the way of savings.

Another good idea I had was setting my monitor to go into sleep mode after just five minutes instead of fifteen. I quite often leave the computer and forget about it, you see.

I’ve also bought some lower wattage light bulbs for the bedrooms in my house, as you don’t really need bright lights in there.

Most importantly on the power saving front, though, I checked out energy deals, and used an online comparison website to get a better tariff. That made more than a few pennies worth of savings, too… to say the least.

All in all, I’m pretty happy. I can put some of this money away towards our planned winter holiday, probably in Turkey, which will be a respite from the cold which may (or may not) grip the country come December.