harmless innuendo; local colour

Paula paid us a visit, fresh from her adventures in the real world. She is now working at an RHS garden. It's a shed-based job: from it, she leaps out upon the unsuspecting elderly, trying to sell them RHS membership. Which, of course, they already have.

'It's a hard world out there', she said. The garden is swarming with hares; she and her colleagues were fretting the other day that one of the frailer visitors might be knocked over by one. One woman said, by way of illustration: 'When my Johnny took me from behind, my knees trembled.' Johnny, it turns out, is the name of her dog.

So, that's alright then.

I am reminded of a previous employer, a cat-owner, who went to a posh function at Ingatestone Hall and said, when a cat tried to leap up into her lap: 'She can smell my pussy.'

They knew what she meant.

This reunion took place in The Swan. I was in there Wednesday night too, doing the quiz with Mat and Amanda, JP and Alex (we won). The (female) staff were wearing bowler hats and white shirts and braces. It was meant to be typical English dress in honour of St. George's Day but they more closely resembled droogs.

Well, who can say what's 'typically English'? The other day I passed a pub that was advertising 'karake'. What 's that? Judging by the board, all I can imagine is an obscure martial art in which participants fling razor-edged musical notes at each other.

Not too far from the truth, I imagine.

regression

I have a second interview for that job. Dave says that means it's 'in the bag', and that it would be enormously hard to fuck it up now. Nevertheless, I have every confidence in my ability to do so.

It's surprising, thinking back on it, that I have not been written off yet. Didn't they say, towards the end of the first interview, that the job was 'boring, for the first two years'? Which sounded like they were trying to put me off. I mean, how, in the context of a job interview, was I supposed to react to this? 'Well, there's only one thing I enjoy more than being proactive and dynamic, and that's being bored! Boredom, to me, is just another word for excitement!'

When I was asked whether I had any questions, I chose to pick up on something I'd read in the job description and which I'd assumed was jargon. 'What', I enquired, 'is a nurse?'

'Well', they said, 'it's a nurse.' Apparently, this place does a lot of work in the health sector.

My big mistake, though, was that, not wanting to look like I'd made an error, I persisted in pretending not to know what a nurse was, so that they had to explain it all to me, with the aid, eventually, of diagrams (because I wanted to be convincing in my ignorance). By the end of which I had more or less reverted to childhood: 'Nice lady. Work in hospital.'

'That's right, dear', they said, encouragingly. Well maybe that's what they want: a blank slate. I can do that. My CV's 'personal statement' is now: 'I thrive on boredom, and have forgotten everything I ever knew.'

Well I am forty. And so is my brother now (what an unforced link!). This event was celebrated at the weekend. So many people turned up in The Swan that we were forced to create a fire hazard by pushing tables together and blocking access. Luckily, most of us had left by the time the fire broke out. We renewed our acquaintance with the Sakura, where the manager even provided Justin with a bottle of champagne and a cake. Curry and cake, together at last! So we shall definitely be going back there - for his 50th, at the very least.

unemployable

I had a job interview. Really. The place that rejected me last time got in touch about another position. So I filled the same application form again, fretting over whether I'd replicated the information correctly: did I really say, on the first form, that I'd written and directed The Shining? Of course I did; don't I always? They never check these things.

For the interview I wore a suit. Although I kept reassuring myself that this was normal, it is so unusual for me that I felt freakish. I felt that people were pointing and laughing (even more than usual).

I'm not going to say where it was. I'm not making that mistake again. Let's just say that it's a top secret government organisation. A woman led me down to the interview room, through deserted corridors. A table tennis table (unmanned) added to the institutional air. The interview was informal, friendly, and at times I even had the idea that it was all going rather well. Only later did I realise some of the things I'd said.

On reflection, when they asked: 'Why did you apply for this job?', I probably shouldn't have said: 'Because the voices in my head told me to.' And when they asked: 'What can you bring to the workplace?', 'Syphilis' was possibly not the response they were seeking.

But at the time they laughed, so it was hard to tell. If they call again, it will be to invite me to a second interview. Unlikely though. I mean, a two-interview job? I'm totally out of my league here.

I should probably just knuckle down to Get Selling. This job does occasionally yield new experiences, some of them not wholly disagreeable. For example, a policeman came in the other day after CCTV footage that might have captured an 'incident' on the High Street. I handed a tape over, and had to sign a 'witness statement' (I declined counselling). There is even, the policeman said, the faint possibility that I might have to go to court, just to affirm that I gave him the tape. Fat chance, I thought. If I'm going into the witness box, there's a few other things I want to get off my chest as well. 'You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!' Oh yeah, I said that in the interview as well.

in which I gain, and lose, psychic powers

I suddenly had a desire to penetrate the melon that has been sitting in our kitchen for the last four months or so. From the outside, it did not look rotten; it barely looked ripe. So Dave hacked into it with a cleaver.

And it was fine. I've encountered many worse melons. Dave shrank from it, muttering something about 'that disease you get from gone-off melons', but I was unstoppable, slicing lumps off it with the sharp knife and biting into them, juice dribbling grotesquely down my chin. In doing so I apparently became a legend on Facebook; a lot of people have been asking me about my melon.

After I'd finished Dave discovered on the internet definite links between melons and e. coli. This gave me a few uncomfortable moments during the night, waiting for a real or imagined stomach ache to develop into something worse. But the only effect of the melon was to make me psychic. The very next day I was out the back at work thinking about the Guillemots song Get Over It. I turned the radio on. The song was just starting.

(What I was thinking about the Guillemots song was that the cheery interjection 'get over it' would work very well if inserted into a lot of other songs - especially Bleeding Love by Leona Lewis.)

My psychic status was confirmed the day after that when, watching Deal Or No Deal, I just knew that the contestant chosen to play that day would be Big Ron. This is not quite enough to build a TV career on, I agree. Yet can anyone fail to be astounded by these extraordinary facts?

On Saturday night we went out for Hannah's 25th birthday. We ate at Prezzo's where, despite my aversion to peas, I ordered something that contained petit pois. Naively, I had imagined that petit pois were nothing like real peas. In the event they overwhelmed me with their greenness, their numerousness, and their comparative size. I was forced, cravenly, to avoid them as I ate. It was like the opposite of the melon experience. I immediately lost all my psychic powers.

Afterwards we were in the Slug and Lettuce. Everyone had gone home or gone to Sam's except me, Dave and Mat. We sat round a table in the coldest part of the pub (by the door), arms folded, like bitter old men, grumbling about young people and their inappropriate attire. Having compared himself - at some length - to a turd, Mat talked about his forthcoming masterwork, a 17-hour animated adaptation of The Illuminatus Trilogy in which all the characters are robots (for the sound artistic reason that Mat doesn't know any voice actors, and, in order to complete his masterpiece, he does not wish to have to leave the house.) He doesn't - he also said - want it to be too good.

As we left the pub I imagined that this would be the last time I'd see Mat for twenty years or so, as he went into hiding to complete (and, indeed, begin) his great work - only to destroy it, in 2028, in a sudden fit of rage ('It's too perfect!')

In fact, he stayed the night at our place and was still there in the morning. My psychic powers had definitively failed - usurped, so it seemed, by the weathermen, who had once again correctly predicted snow.