not the end of the world

On Friday at work it was suddenly amazingly busy. The phone rang. It was an automated call offering help with any 'debt problems' I might have - still, that could come in handy, since my previous employers have written to say that they have overpaid me, and will shortly be demanding their money back, or some of it. Perhaps they have decided that they should have been paying me minimum wage for the last ten years. Well: you win some, you lose some.

I wasn't joking, it was busy on Friday. I reacted by immediately taking a week off. No 'three-month trial' period here. I went to London with Mat and Dave and Chad on Saturday. To the Barbican, a massive, confounding place with the air of an institution but stylised, softened. Odd echoes of the future as depicted in A Clockwork Orange: the decor, not the ultraviolence. (Although we were there to look at war photography.) Even the hand towel dispenser in the Gents was a puzzling brutalist art object. I could see the dispenser but not the towels. Then a fellow toilet-goer twisted a knob on the side. There they were.

We were watching a video 'about the war in Iraq' (woman tied up on bedroom floor; man fiddling with crotch) when Mat informally commissioned me to come up with an idea for some 'artwank'. 'Artwank: First Blood', Chad spontaneously suggested as a title. Is this how Damian Hirst started? Probably.

One of the events listed for that day in the Barbican was someone's wedding. Was this art? Could you walk in and peer at the guests? The question was too complex. We went to Tate Modern, where we knew what to expect. Bunk beds. Loads of them. The effect of cramming these into the Turbine Hall was, oddly enough, to create a jolly communal atmosphere, rather than the intended post-apocalyptic gloom. Even the 'sinister' art objects imported in to the scene (a monstrous Louise Bourgeois spider) failed to dispel the good cheer. Just as well that the bunk beds had no mattresses, or they'd have had trouble getting people to leave. If the world's going to end, might as well stake out your territory now.

The future was also a feature of the Mighty Boosh show we saw after this. The second half, which was the better half, consisted of a 'serious play' which began with a grim scenario of a near-future England devastated by environmental disaster and ended with the beheading of the Honey Monster with a giant hair dryer. After which poo came out of Winston Churchill's ears. Now that's art.

PinkSquareThings

A restructure is in the offing at work, and although it is '99.9999 - er - 8 per cent certain' that I will be 'slotted in', and not have to reapply for the job I got two months ago, I was encouraged to go on a 'career empowerment workshop' intended for people facing redundancy (which is in fact the case for a number of people in other departments). Amusingly, this workshop was given by the same person who did my 'welcome day' last week. One week she was telling me: 'Welcome to the NHS', and the next she was saying: 'Good luck in your next job.' Whew! It's like a roller-coaster.

Well, not exactly. There have been times this week when work has been just a little thin on the ground. So that I found myself doing one of those 'fun' personality tests that gets passed round - the kind of thing that bases all kinds of assumptions on whether you prefer the mountains to the sea. This one came from BUPA, although I can't vouch for its clinical accuracy. It matched you to a shape and colour: and so it turned out that I was a pink square. And that is how I will live my life from now on.

Our housewarming party happened (apologies if you weren't invited, but I wasn't very proactive in that respect) and it happened without incident, except for Ross - who has a very literal interpretation of the term 'housewarming' - spilling lamp oil over the fireplace. That was the extent of his misdemeanours, although he later wandered into the room, and out again, with a cereal box on his head. My prediction that, before the night was out, we would see him pursuing party-goers around the garden with a Samurai sword to the strains of the Benny Hill chase theme (which was on Dave's playlist) did not come to pass.

Neither did the colony of fleas which overwhelmed Dave in the greenhouse the other day, leaping upon him like starving bloodhounds, reappear to savage the guests. So maybe the spray worked.

Indeed, such was the atmosphere of feverish excitement that two people (at least) fell asleep quite early on. The sign of a good party; or is that just a pink square thing?

spillage

I discovered this week that I may not be getting my training in how to sit properly until next year. I might be dead of not sitting properly by then!

I went to a 'welcome day' in Watford, that place that you're either north of or south of but which does actually exist in its own right, I was amused to discover. We were asked that difficult question: why are we here? What special quality did everyone around the table share that made them ripe for selection by the National Blood Service? We never got to the bottom of this. Were we all secret vampires? High-functioning alcoholics? They are very picky, after all, even when it comes to donors. You'd think they'd be grateful to have your blood, but no, there's all these conditions. You aren't allowed to give blood if you've had sex 'in exchange for money or drugs'. How are you supposed to remember a thing like that?

Lunch was a seafood crumble. I must admit I was expecting a few scraps of white fish and the occasional withered prawn. But there were scallops! Big ones! I was impressed. Despite rejoicing in the name of 'The Mangerie' the restaurant there is staffed by enormous old-school dinner ladies, who have been there forever and by now are doubtless on (such are the NHS pay increments) about 70k a year. 'Who's the vegetarian?', bellowed one such formidable creature. The solitary young man who had unwisely gone for that option advanced trembling towards the front of the queue, clearly expecting the meal to be thrown in his face rather than handed to him on a plate.

Of course they wouldn't have done that - it would have been a violation of health and safety. Back upstairs, we had to consider the case of 'Alex', who spilled coffee on the stairs at work; of his/her colleague 'Jo', who saw the spillage, and did nothing: and of 'Sam' who slipped on it, and fell. We split off into groups to discuss what the consequences would be for each participant in this drama. The ramifications proved to be considerable. By the end of the session we had a possible murder charge, and several key government figures were being investigated. We moved on to fraud, another popular pastime in the NHS, apparently.

At work I got to do some filing. Not only sliding things into a steel cabinet but even making up the pockets the stuff was kept in myself! This was hardcore filing, everything I'd imagined in my fevered dreams of office life. My cup ranneth over.

In case anyone from health and safety is reading this, that's a metaphor.

Maggie! Maggie!

By the end of the week, hardly anyone was left in my office. Officially, this was down to illness, but I wonder if it was something I said. Or did. My late lunch habit has already caused a bit of a stir, unless I only imagine those dark mutterings: why, when he gets back to the office there's only a few hours of the day left... Yes well, that's the point. So do I already have the reputation of an iconoclast, a radical, a subversive element? What will they say when I start turning up in a sequined jumpsuit?

My late lunch means that the downstairs caff is relatively empty. I can sit there in peace, leafing through Chat. Chat is a women's magazine, but it's pretty hardcore. The cosy and the grotesquely horrible sit side by side. Diets, axe-murders. There is a psychic dog who answers questions about pets. There is a human psychic too, for human problems. One woman wrote in to say that her student son had been stabbed to death. What she wanted to know was: is he able to continue his studies on the other side? Answer: yes. Only, he's switched to psychology. And by the way, he sends his love. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Real people read this stuff and don't bat an eyelid.

I'm not saying that I'm any better. I bought the Daily Mail the other week, if only because you got the first Dexy's Midnight Runners album with it. It seemed odd, to find the Daily Mail associating itself with Searching For The Young Soul Rebels, which contains the line: 'The only way to change things is to shoot men who arrange things.' I half-expected them to have got Kevin Rowland in to change things himself. So that now it would go: 'The only way to change things is through due parliamentary process, and why do you want to change things anyway?' While Geno would become a tribute to Margaret Thatcher.