the next move

Since Dave now wants to let the maisonette out to a young professional couple or cast member of TOWIE, I have been plunged back into the existential horror of flat-hunting. My preliminary visit to various estate agents in town was remarkable for the fact that the agents in question seemed to have less and less time for me as I went on. Finally the guy in the last one I entered just chucked a photocopied set of listings at me and told me to go on Rightmove. It was tempting to pretend ignorance ('What is this... right...move?') but I just got out of there. I considered trying one more place but was worried that, the way things were going, I'd be physically assaulted.

The first place I saw was pretty dismal, but I couldn't have afforded it anyway. So that was lucky. I lowered my expectations sufficiently to look at a bedsit (or 'studio apartment' as they are now known) and because there was no money in the meter, had to look at it in the dark. Well, there wasn't much to look at. There was a massive wardrobe, but this proved to contain a fold-out double bed, like something from a childhood nightmare, poised to drop on me.

The landlord was 'a building contractor from Romford' (aren't they all?). 'So at least he isn't in deepest darkest Peru', the estate agent reassured me. Though he probably could be, at a moment's notice, if I needed him for anything. In the event, I suppose I might even prefer him to be.

Finally I looked at a flat in King's Road just down from the kebab shop. It was evening time. I loitered on the pavement for some time before it became apparent that the estate agent wasn't going to appear, feeling like the world's oldest and least successful rent boy. They were understaffed, it turned out, hence their non-appearance, but I got to see the place the next day. The estate agent called up the stairs - no response, so we proceeded to loudly disparage the state of the place (the toilet looked like it hadn't been flushed in a month) until a groan alerted us to a blanket-covered form lying on the couch. Perhaps he was ill, perhaps hungover, it was hard to tell. He didn't seem to care about our snide comments; didn't seem to care very much at all really, just pulled the blanket over his head. It was the best place I had seen (even though the fixtures and fittings had seen better days) but I wonder if it would eventually reduce me to a similiar state.

All the stress of the idea of moving has left me feeling quite fragile. Even The One Show is too brutal for me now. They did a report on some cooling towers. That was fine: I like cooling towers. Then, halfway through, it turned out that the report was about the demolition of these cooling towers. The reporter was just as excited about this as she had initially been about the architecture of the things. 'That was absolutely amazing! They just... crumbled!' Criminally, there was no number to call 'if you have been affected by these issues'.

The next day, the headline in the Daily Mail was 'GREED OF THE ENERGY SHARKS'. That freaked me out too.  What were these 'energy sharks'? Were they invisible? Were they IN THE AIR ALL AROUND ME?

Perhaps if I'd read the story it might have calmed me down. But there was no time. I went to work, warily.

lottery of worms

An impromptu lottery syndicate arose in the office, inspired by the prospect of big wins in the Euromillions lottery. Our initial attempt netted us £4.90, then in the absence of the organiser, the management of the next phase fell to (or fell on) me. It was a highly complex affair. Should the winnings go on further tickets? If so, another eleven pence would need to be paid by everyone in order to enable us to buy three whole tickets. However, if even one person refused to pay their eleven pence, the sum required would necessarily change. And then there was the question of further tickets - did people still want to go on? It was, as they frequently say where I work, 'a can of worms'. And I hadn't even opened it.

As the e-mails were fired back and forth it became apparent that a whole new syndicate would have to be created, and another form signed. 'Have you done any work today?', I was asked. 'This is the hardest thing I've ever done', I replied sincerely.

And then I had to buy the tickets, a whole new experience for me. It was hardly reassuring that the person in front of me, a teenager, was being verbally abused by the woman behind the counter for trying to buy lottery tickets without ID. 'He said he came from Toni And Guy', this formidable Asian lady informed me once the poor child had been sent packing: 'What is that supposed to mean?'

Rather than attempting to explain that it was a well-known chain of hairdressers, I judged this to be a rhetorical question.

Having got the tickets I resisted the impulse to check them until the following day. I kidded myself that I had no expectation of winning, but as I walked to work that morning, I caught myself looking at everything in a lingering way, as though it would be the last time I would see it through the eyes of a non-millionaire. We won £2.60, and it went straight in the tea fund.

Later in the week I was thrilled to be able to proof-read the Donor Magazine, a copy of which is sent to every blood donor in the country - albeit now in e-mail form. There was an article on the NCC or National Contact Centre, our call centre based in Bangor, Northern Ireland. It boasted that all the staff 'are trained for nearly a month before they can even pick up a phone.' This was meant to demonstrate their professionalism, but gave rather the opposite impression, I felt. It turned out that this line wasn't going to be used prominently in the article anyway, but on second thoughts, that seemed a shame, since it does give an insight into how the NHS works - through endless training.

Imagine being on that course. First you are gradually introduced to the concept of a telephone, then you are encouraged to marvel at pictures of different phones - eventually you are permitted to stroke one very lightly (anybody daring to make a fully-fledged grab for one is brutally ejected from the course).

Finally, it turns out that, since you will be using headsets, you won't actually need to pick up a phone at all.

Not Connected - Three Films I Have Seen In The Past Few Days

Water For Elephants

There ought to be a golden rule of movie-making that if a major character in your film is going to be an elephant, then the film should be either a cartoon, a comedy or an art movie. It shouldn't be a horror film. Or an action-thriller. Or, in this instance, a romance with Robert Pattinson.

Initially, I thought that this was modelled on Titanic (with Pattinson as Kate Winslet and an elephant as the iceberg), taking as it does the form of a senior citizen's flashback and leading as it does up to – so I was excited to be informed in the opening stages – the third greatest circus disaster in living memory.

I was envisioning something along the lines of a live-action Dumbo, fifteen elephants unsteadily balanced on a single beach ball. In the event the disaster feels like an afterthought and the main focus is on a love triangle between Pattison (insipid), Reece Witherspoon (insipid) and ringmaster Christoph Waltz (excellent), all set to syrupy music. And then there's the elephant, Rosie, who Pattison has been hired to train. As he reclines in the hay with her, and the villainous Waltz sets about her with his big stick it becomes increasingly clear that she is looming large in the lovers' psychosexual dynamic - indeed, at one stage it's touch and go as to whether Pattison will walk off into the sunset with Witherspoon or the elephant (as it turns out - both).

Finally, even Waltz isn't enough to save this film from collapsing under the elephant's weight. I mean, why an elephant? A lion would have been more dramatic – or if they wanted to go for cute, how about a performing seal? Admittedly, the scene wherein Rosie finally turns on and kills Waltz would have been tougher to play with a seal, but I'm sure Waltz would have had a good go. As it is Rosie's murder of him is disappointingly casual – a mere single swipe with a tent peg. I was hoping for an extended scene in which he was viciously trampled into two dimensional form, thus bringing him into line with the rest of the characters.

The Master

The posters for this feature Rorschach blots, which is appropriate because different people have seen different things in this film. Some have seen a masterpiece; others, a load of old crap. As always with these love-it-or-hate-it films I didn't love or hate it. It was OK.

Joaquin Phoenix (channeling Popeye) plays a drunken sailor who at the end of World War II falls under the influence of Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing the leader of a cult called The Cause. It is easy to see what these two see in each other – Phoenix needs a father figure and Hoffman needs a challenge – but less easy to feel it. Despite intimations of a suppressed homoerotic bond, there's no chemistry between them. They are both acting their little socks off, but they might as well be in separate films. Of course, the point is that they don't connect in the end, but we need to feel that they do at some level for the film to work emotionally – which is maybe why I left the cinema wondering what the point of it all was.

I blame the Germans – not only did they start the war which creates or enhances our sailor's malaise and generates a psychological need for 'The Cause' – they were also responsible for me seeing this film in the first place, since the film I'd initially bought a ticket for had been 'pulled' to go to the Berlin Film Festival, and it was either this or Here Comes The Boom.

I was alienated enough to come up with a self-conscious reading of The Master, in which the relationship between Hoffman and Phoenix is in fact a representation of that between director and audience. The chief benefit of this interpretation is that it lends the film a much-needed sense of humour – not only the wryly self-deprecating humour of the director (Paul Thomas Anderson) referring to himself as 'The Master' and depicting himself as a massive fraud, but the humour of embodying 'the audience' in the form of a drink-sodden freak with a penchant for fart jokes.

Conspirators Of Pleasure

If Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer had made Water For Elephants it wouldn't have had an elephant in it – 'Rosie's' role in the film would have been taken by, probably, a wardrobe. Come to think of it, that was exactly what the film needed.

In this dialogue-free film, we are privy to the secret desires of several characters who live alone (well, in one case it's a married couple, but they might as well live alone as he spends most of his time in the shed pleasuring himself with a range of mechanical brushes, and she, as a newsreader, spends most of hers on TV – when not indulging her fish fetish, that is). I saw this film as a hymn to the freedom you can enjoy when you live on your own. You can wear bat wings made out of an umbrella with a papier-mache cockerel's head. You can fill your head with doughballs. You can create a device that enables the TV to make love to you. The possibilities are endless.

However, there are consequences to these indulgences, as we come to realise when the newsreader enjoys a fish-generated orgasm on live TV. No man is an island, not even Joaquin Phoenix. Nevertheless – inspiring.

copper blues

How long will I have my job? So many threats seem to be looming that trying to guess what will happen is like trying to guess how the world will end. Will it be a fireball from the sky or a plague of mutated frogs escaped from a lab? It's anyone's guess. For example, the company that now does all the print work for the NHS is reaching out to us to take some of our 'less demanding' jobs off our hands. Unfortunately, the less demanding jobs are just the kind of jobs I do. Why can't they do the more demanding ones? They are, after all, more demanding. Well I shouldn't worry, because soon enough, I fear, they will be doing the more demanding jobs too, as well as all the moderately demanding ones, leaving us with nothing to do at all. And no chair or desk either.

The ongoing relocation of our office is still ongoing. Obviously they haven't found anywhere scummy enough yet. Last week they were 'testing the generator', a process which involves clouds of noxious fumes being released into the car park, fumes which seem to reach us even through firmly closed windows. The rumour soon started to circulate that we were being gassed - someone up top having realised that dead people are easier to relocate than living ones. The group of workmen outside kept looking up at the office window as if to check that signs of life (never very apparent at the best of times) had finally ceased. They were wearing ear defenders, which seemed less likely to protect them from the effects of poison gas than, say, gas masks -  but that is exactly the kind of institutional fuck-up that we have come to expect.

The gas proved innocuous. Green flakes of copper have been appearing in the tea, however. On first noticing these at the bottom of my mug, I had simply assumed that one of my workmates was trying to poison me. I've been there long enough now. However, everybody seems to be affected. I read a list of the symptoms of copper poisoning from the internet - nausea, headaches, paranoid schizophrenia - and everyone nodded gloomily in recognition. But then someone pointed out that copper bracelets are considered to be good for rheumatism, and the subject was dismissed.

I went back to looking at the BBC Health News. Breakfast Skippers 'Seek Out Fat' said one headline. This means simply that people who do not eat breakfast tend to eat more later in the day, but that was not immediately apparent to me from the headline, which instead brought to mind images of buccaneers sailing the seven seas on big plates of bacon and eggs and shouting 'Fat ahoy!' when they spy a glistening iceberg of lard in the distance. Did they intend me to think that?, I wonder. Or is it the copper getting to my brain?