Smoke gets in your clothes...

Within five minutes for arriving at work today I'd drafted the opening line of this post: "Stumped up to be confronted by Yoda and the Big Swinging Dick doing a sick-making double act..."

but I mustn't be mean to the BSD. I must be NICE to the BSD because the feed back following our brace of excursions to the big smoke continues to be very very positive and a glimmer of hope might just reside there in.

I've given him serious amounts of kudos and he KNOWS it because I can do things that he can't. He can do lots of things I can't (like remember and retell really filthy jokes, but that's another story) but he lacks the polish that comes of being a senior manager within a global management consultancy who might be asked at a few hours notice to turn up in the office of some SERIOUS City of London heavy weight and interview him (or her? don't make me fucking laugh) from a position of strength or at least credibility.

It is an act but not one that everyone can pull off. I did. For years. And I still have it, too. I can't do the ducking and diving that he can, or at least I can't do it as well as he can.

The two skills are not necessarily mutually exclusive, in fact I can think of some slimy shit bags who were working my side of the fence when I was in the city who would leave him eating their slime trail any day. But I don't have it. That's why I only made it as high up the food chain and went when I did. I didn't complain then, I'm not complaining now. I don't want to have what it would have taken. Simple really.

Ours has the makings of what is known in the trade as a symbiotic relationship. But that entails me getting something out of it, too. So far all I've got is respect, but that's more than I've hitherto enjoyed.

So I'm basking in that faintly golden glow and struggling to keep the contents of my stomach in at the same time. Thank God it really is true that women can multi-task.

Mind you, this was the height of today's demands on me. Even dealing with the fact that Darryl the Dick Fiddler's formerly gorgeous older brother has totally outgrown his looks and is now of deeply weird mien. How sad. He's only a boy still. He's got an entire life to get through looking like that.

And Jack the Lad is getting all hairy, which is slightly icky. I'm developing a crush on Carl "shocking" Hot But Dim, and the worst of it is that The Paper Shuffler in Chief fancies him too. I might need a lie down and some serious medication. Carl suggested that I needed to "chill, smoke something". Perhaps he's not as dim as most people suggest.

Blah, blah. More of the same. Bolshie Book Worm took over in the afternoon. Senior Frustrated Novelist was my side kick.

Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here. Dismal customers, plenty of WAFIs about.

Summer started three days ago but it probably won't last long. It will, after all, be September before the end of the week. Today we had the first and probably final barbecue of the year. How sad is that. Loads of lovely beer (oh, didn't I mention I'd fallen off the wagon and landed with a hell of a thud?). How did I leave that bit out? How naughty of me.

Apart from the bread and the meat the ingredients were all picked from the garden in which we cooked and ate, as required. That's something. Nowt fresher than the spuds the offspring grubbed, the 'rots she pulled, the beans she plucked.

Genius. My clothes stink of smoke, of course. Small price to pay. Now two evening shifts and a morning shift and an evening shift and ... I can't see any writing being done between now and next Sunday. Not even in my head.

Shit.