lemons

Dave said that the shower had mysteriously stopped leaking, and theorized that the mould growing in there had plugged the leak. Perhaps this is how it will work: any problems with the house will be solved by new problems. Some kind of fungus will fix the loose fence panel; ants will repair that broken hinge on the kitchen cupboard door. I suppose it would be better if the landlady did it. But there are so many little problems that to describe them to the letting agent would be simply too much - you'd end up sobbing down the phone, overwhelmed.

I had a week off. Perhaps the highlight was being in the same cinema audience as Anita Harris, Miss Diane from Crossroads, David Van Day and Nick Cotton from Eastenders. Or was this some weird dream I had? Oh no, I seem to remember it did happen. The BFI were showing three short - though not that short - horror movies originally made in the 80's to be played before such classics as The Exterminator starring Robert Ginty. One of them featured the young David Van Day, so that accounts for his presence at least. It featured also a killer garden gnome, something of a first in film history, I understand. Also, as far as I am aware: a last.

But there was really only one question on the audience's mind: where was Christopher Biggins? There was no reason for him to be there, but there was no reason for him not be there either. It turned out that indeed he would have appeared, if only he hadn't been 'stuck in traffic' (or 'stuck in a door', as one wag in the back row suggested.)

There was a brief Q and A with the director, the writer, and a Punch and Judy man (I would explain, but I really don't have the time.) This was dominated by a rather eccentric man in the audience who was less interested in asking questions than in making puns on the director's surname, which was Long. Something like: 'You are long in the tooth but also long on substance.' Then he started talking about Vlad Dracula, but only so that he could make a pun on 'Romanian' and 'remaining'. At this point they hurriedly took another question.

Dave bought a packet of lemon raisins, the entire point of which was that they were raisins, but tasted like lemons. I wondered if there were any other foodstuffs that might be sold on that basis. Oven chips? Apples? No. Even lemons themselves would probably sell better if they were advertised as tasting like something else.

They didn't even taste much like lemons anyway, to be honest.

Towards a new etiquette

And then it snowed again, throwing Ross into a frenzy. He was rushing out every five minutes to clear the garden path, even as it continued to snow. I overheard him struggling to compare this snow with the previous week's: 'It's thicker, but... not as thick', he finally arrived at.

It was true. Last week's snow was so thin, yet strangely thick, that it managed to destroy the whole world temporarily with its weird contradictions. Time ceased to mean anything. I left work early and walked through a freshly deleted landscape. Kids played in the snow; or, to put it another way, youths loitered menacingly in the snow. Their new-found inability to communicate except through snowballs had created confusion in the land: were they little vandals or innocent rosy-cheeked scamps? Questions were asked on Jeremy Vine: 'Have you been the recipient of an unwanted snowball? We'd like to hear from you.' Wandering through the icy wastes I saw a group of sullen youths rolling an enormous snowball that looked more like an ice boulder. Were they going to roll it in front of a moving car? Even if asked, they probably wouldn't have been able to tell you. They'd just have stabbed you right away. I shut myself in the house and prayed for a thaw.

Days later I saw three great ice boulders sitting on Shenfield Common like megaliths awaiting the worship of primitives.

Not a great deal has been happening at work. Our work, in the admin department, is measured in 'job bags', which are brown A4 envelopes in which everything relating to - say - the production of a sign is stored, but these have only been trickling through recently. The other day, when one did drop into the in-tray, my opposite number Lorraine accused me of looking at it 'with lust in my eyes'. I said I was just curious.

Personally, I feel that I have adapted well to the routines of office life. It does not seem strange to be communicating with someone in the next room by e-mail. Though it still seems odd not to get an immediate response. I'll send through a designer's cost to be approved and not hear anything for five minutes and start worrying: did I write 'fuck you' instead of 'regards'? Did I come on too strong?

also it snowed

It seems that I am after all going to have to be interviewed for my new post in the restructure. Shit.

There are no guarantees, it seems. This week my boss found out that she hadn't got the job we all thought was hers almost by right. This makes everything lower down the structure doubly uncertain. Certainly if their intention was to shake our complacency, this has been achieved. Thing is, I've only been there four months and that's nowhere near enough time to become complacent. Isn't complacency my right? Perhaps I will form a protest group. Complacency! It's a motivating concept. Something to rally round.

Or maybe I'll just slink back to retail with my metaphorical tail between my legs.

After all, there are plenty of people on the shop floor less suited to it than I. On Saturday I went with Dave to PC World to get a computer. It was intended to be just a stop on the way to Lakeside but it became the main event. First we had to find it. Despite my abortive attempts to read the map on Dave's i-phone, we eventually made it through the traffic-clogged streets around Romford to find ourselves in the place the map indicated: a truncated residential road ending in a grassy recreation area. Indeed, the road was even called 'Recreation Avenue'. Whatever next? 'Exercise Lane'? 'Activity Grove'? A graffiti-scarred sign ahead of us began: 'Dog faeces can be unpleasant...' Can be? I must admit I find it hard to think of circumstances in which it could be anything else. But this was Romford - anything goes.

What the place clearly lacked was a branch of PC World or in fact any retail outlet at all, however tiny. Something had gone wrong. Eventually we found it by going down a road we'd taken earlier by (as we thought of it at that time) mistake. Inside, Dave stationed himself by the thing he wanted and waited for a member of staff to approach him. This was his mistake. There were plenty of staff available to sell things to people, but the appearance of someone who knew what he wanted seemed to throw them into confusion. Even the security guard (who looked about fifteen) was summoned, such was the unprecedented nature of this event. He and a number of other staff disappeared, ostensibly in order to fetch his purchase, but 'disappeared', it turned out, was the operative word. So we disappeared too.

culture vultures

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall was on television trying to measure a chicken's happiness. Apparently, it is not enough just to eat chickens, you have to keep their spirits up before slaughtering them. You can taste all that juicy happiness, apparently. Ross couldn't see the point of all this concern over mere chickens. After all, as he pointed out, 'we're at the top of the food chain'. I looked around the room. Only Ross and I were present. Did he mean us? Just the two of us? When Dave got back from the kitchen, would he suggest eating him?

Dave does seem to be happy at the moment. When I got in from work he was uncharacteristically washing up, then uncharacteristically wiping surfaces clean, before uncharacteristically making tea. And smiling. Eventually, I asked him if he was having some kind of breakdown. He denied it. The next day he was back to normal, except for laughing hysterically at something a work colleague had said. This guy had described a woman at the checkout in Somerfield as having a face like 'a bag of spaniels'.

A possible explanation for any personality change presented itself later in the week, as Dave's attempt to put the BT account in his name rather than Mat's gave rise to a communication the next day addressed to the composite creature 'D. Sadler'. It is as though they have been spliced together, as in The Fly.

I will monitor the situation.

On Saturday I finally went to the Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern, just before it closed. While never pretending to be anything other than paint on canvas, Rothko's works are capable of a profound, visceral effect. It's weirdly appropriate that many of the works on display were commissioned to decorate a restaurant: they look like they might consume you, given the opportunity. One of the canvasses looked blood-soaked, and the larger ones seemed to demand, at the very least, human sacrifice. So I was pleased in a way that the place was busy. At one point I walked into a room which contained only one large painting and a group of spectators ranged against the wall, looking as though they were backing away from a live and unpredictable beast. Like so many hypnotized chickens, I thought. I hadn't eaten in a while.