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.