houses in motion

Some young hippy came in looking for Carlos Castaneda. I gave the stock answer: 'He doesn't work here anymore'. Turns out, though, he's an author - but we don't stock him. We offered to order something in, but the young man said, a bit pertly: 'There's a thing called the internet', then left. Wait! Stop! You can't just say something like that and walk out! What is this mysterious thing that you speak of?

Now I fear that we shall never know.

We have been looking for new accommodation, since our landlady has plans for this house. There aren't many three bedroom houses about at the moment, though. And most of them are just the same houses photographed from slightly different angles and claiming to be in different locations. House-hunting is difficult enough when the houses stay in one place, but this is ridiculous. And it didn't help that when one of the estate agents asked if any of us were smokers I thoughtlessly said yes, one of us is. Am I the first person, ever, to admit that? So we won't be getting anything through them, unless a giant ashtray comes onto the market.

Eviction... giant ashtrays... I now see that this has just been one big lead-in to Big Brother. Yes I have been watching it. Do you have a problem with that? I like to try and predict who will win on the first night. I have been successful on numerous occasions, in the case of, er, thingummy, and, oh you know... whatshername. Not so much this time though, since according to my diary I appear to have tipped Alexandra. That's the one who has just been chucked out after making some ambiguous comments which meant either that (a.) she was going to have Rex and his family shot by her gangland friends when he got out of the house or (b.) (Her own favoured interpretation) that she would refuse to attend the opening of his restaurant. Well, language is a minefield. I was also impressed by Rex on the first night, but he isn't shaping up either, except in one sense. Is it his head or his hair that makes him look like a walnut whip? If only he was black, and wore his brain on top of his head rather than inside it, the resemblance would be complete.

My (metaphorical) money is now on Rebecca, who, when she first came into the house, was only capable of saying 'Oh my God!' and shrieking. She's speaking whole sentences now. It's all quite inspiring.

fired

We had a bad mystery shopper report. Among other things, while 'browsing and relaxing', the shopper seemed disappointed to experience 'no sales pressure'. He or she seemed to be rather conflicted in this respect. Anyway, we are now meant to treat every customer as though they were a mystery shopper. The simplest thing, we find, is to ask them. 'Are you a mystery shopper? No? You can go fuck yourself then.'

This is just our way of being 'passionate'. 'Passion' is one of our 'core values', as we discovered a month or so ago, on TV.

The TV's arrived in all the shops, all at the same time. It was rather sinister, like something out of Doctor Who. But the TV's were seemingly procured so that we could all be shown this DVD, based around the company conference in Brighton. What would it be? Get Selling: The Musical? Sadly, no. Instead it involved representatives of head office sitting staring frozenly at the camera, eyes occasionally dropping to the script as they read the words that told us how passionate they were and how excited they were about the future of the company. It did seem a curious kind of passion that they were demonstrating: the kind of passion radiated by cold dead trout on the fishmonger's slab. Perhaps something was going on subliminally. Indeed, it was almost to be hoped for given the uninspiring quality of what we could actually see. The one exception, curiously, was the MD, who had an almost impish quality in comparison. However, he only appeared at the beginning and the end; the rest of the time, possibly, he was occupied in holding a gun to the other participants' heads.

I could see their difficulty, though. If you hold passion as a value, where on earth do you stop? Passion by its very nature must be unconstrained, and if it is one of your 'core values', then are you not obliged to yield to it at all times? How long before the company becomes one big orgy? So they wisely kept it in check; after all, it wasn't that kind of DVD. Which is just as well, I think.

Although at one point the word 'Engagement' was flashed up, to be succeeded by a shot of a man and a woman both sitting facing the camera, looking uncomfortable. Were they about to announce their engagement? If so, I didn't hold out much hope for the marriage. But no, 'engagement' meant something else, something positive about the company though quite what I'm afraid I don't remember, though no doubt it filled me with a warm glow of security at the time.

I mean, it could have been worse: the DVD could have shown us Alan Sugar pointing out at us and uttering his well-known catchphrase. The Apprentice came to an end this week, with Lee winning, his pterodactyl impersonation - unwisely performed in one of his interviews the week before - now apparently forgotten. I rather hoped that as soon as Sir Alan had uttered the phrase 'You're hired' the pterodactyl would make an immediate comeback, and Lee would start squawking and swooping around the room in triumph and everyone would start screaming and running away: a real Doctor Who ending. I was of course disappointed. Though no more than usual.

tired

The other day I bought a Radox shower gel called Stimulate. My Get Selling skills kicked in: nice window of opportunity for purchase affirmation here, if only I worked in Wilkinson's. 'Stimulate! Ah yes, I like to stimulate myself in the shower, don't you?' I even thought of saying it to the woman at the checkout, possibly in a comedy German accent. I have been quite tired recently.

When I'm even older, will I actually say all the things that pass through my mind?

I said 'Get Selling skills' there, but sometimes I wonder if I have any. Or if anyone has any. There is much talk about 'keeping Get Selling alive', but was it ever alive? There are times when it seems that it was all a dream. A lovely dream, of course.

Because it was such a nice gentle course: it didn't really tell you what to do. Rather, it told you what it wanted you to do, and then asked you to discuss how you were going to do it. Not an approach that would work with brain surgery. 'Open up the patient's skull. What will you use? What is the impact on the patient?'

A woman came up to the counter to demand 'free gift cards'. 'What a fucking cheek!', I felt like saying (as I say, I have been tired). 'You bastards want it all for nothing, don't you?'

It turned out that she'd said 'three'.

Someone returned Trainspotting for the very good reason that it wasn't about trainspotting.

dome

Some charity was at the door again, collecting for 'the disabled'. 'Do you know any disabled people?', asked the woman. I thoughtlessly said no, fervently wishing that Dave had stirred his crutches to answer the door instead of me. 'You're lucky!', she said - which was certainly subject to misinterpretation. What I should have said was: 'Actually, I've got one upstairs. Give us a tenner and I'll pass it on.' Instead I just stood there, waiting for it to be over.

I was similiarly paralysed by another situation. One of the people who interviewed me for that job I didn't get turned up in the shop, browsing. How should I deal with this? Do a Get Selling on him, but sell... myself? Or adopt a more Peggy Mitchell approach? ('Not good enough for yer, eh? Well two can play at that game. Yer barred!') Or perhaps something more Shakespearian? ('Thou didst reject me!')

He'd gone long before I'd made up my mind.

On Saturday we went to the Dome. (Yeah, I know it's the O2 Centre now, but it's still a fucking dome, innit?). It's a bit eerie, like something out of Quatermass: stuffed with bars and restaurants, it's like a glimpse of a future world in which leisure activities are all we have to do, and the air outside is too poisonous to breathe. We saw the new Indiana Jones and the Sex And The City movie. Neither of which would have been my choice, but both of which are good three-star movies (Out of what? Out of five, six or seven, it really doesn't matter.) In fact they were surprisingly similiar. In fact, they were exactly the same. Maybe it was the controlled atmosphere of the Dome, but they have more or less merged into one in my mind now:

Recuperating from a small thermonuclear explosion, Harrison Ford (who now looks exactly like Clive James) hires a black female PA (Shia LaBeouf, miscast) to help keep his treasure maps in order. Together they go off in search of the fabled crystal Louis Vuitton handbag. Louis Vuitton, like all fashion designers, is actually an alien deity who hangs out in a lost city in Mexico, where he forces the Indians from Mel Gibson's Apocalypto to sew sequins onto his bizarre creations. Unfortunately for our heroes, a group of shrieking villainesses known only as 'The Girls' are also on the trail of the iconic handbag with its amazing supernatural powers. The dark-haired one gets hold of it, but the pleasure overload is too much for her, and she shits her pants. The End.

Afterwards we went to an intimidatingly expensive restaurant. I had thought - unlike anyone else in the group - to wear a shirt, but this was counteracted slightly by the fact that my lips and tongue were blue from the 'slushie' I'd consumed in the cinema. Luckily it was pretty dark in there. In fact, as I recall, they turned the lights down a significant notch almost as soon as we sat down. We did not take this personally.

Then half of us saw Boyzone and the other half got the DLR back to Stratford, with the result that everyone was happy. Along the Docklands Light Railway, the stations are so close to each other that the effect is more of a novelty than a means of transportation: a ghost train in which the only frights come from your fellow passengers. Mat, Rhys and I whiled away the time by betting on how long it would take to reach the next station, usually about a minute. Once home they started playing Star Wars Risk, and I drifted off, in more senses than one.