Bruce sent this to me and it made me feel a bit less like putting my head in the microwave and slamming the door on it several times. It really is better than the original, but you can search for that too if you’re curious. Don’t know if I’ll buy the mug, though…

Oh, you came back! In that case, I’ll plough on with this entry.

I’ve just watched a woman stand in front of a printer and swear profusely at each page that came off of it (evidently none of them hers) for ten minutes straight. Have you ever done that before? No? Well I don’t recommend it.

But I think I finally understand why women in this industry are typically so bitchy: they’re hungry! Go and eat something, vaguely threatening yet miniscule ladies of marketing! Then you will be free to join in on conversations about well fit birds and sports teams with your better-fed male counterparts!

If I don’t laugh about these things, I will start crying and never stop.

On a completely unrelated, completely related topic, my ex workmate reprimanded me for cancelling our morning walk to work by subjecting me to a barrage of heavy footfalls. She made several passes in front of my desk to achieve this monumental effect, and a few times she sniffed loudly into a tissue. If my going to the dry cleaners on a single morning proved this controversial, imagine the headlines when I tell her I’m taking the bus from now on!

My walk to work was lovely, though, and I mostly grinned at my own feet as I flipped through photographic memory cards of last summer. There are certain things I’m sure I must have invented, looking back from where I am now, but none of this matters - it all turned out better than I could have hoped for, and even my current job woes are elevated to new levels (the sales guy making throaty belches into his closed mouth as I type this).

I’ve been having a lot of dreams about my parents lately, mainly my dad. These were spurred by an original dream that my dad had died. In the dream, I regretted not visiting them more, or not knowing that he was going to die this year and foolishly leaving beforehand. All the things I would think and feel if it were true. There was so much that I didn’t properly resolve at home before running off forever. But meeting Bruce made my entire life unfamiliar, and rediscovering equilibrium has meant adjusting to more than just a new person, a big city and a distant country – it’s a second life I’ve been establishing.

It’s rained so much that everything is flooding here, though London may not see the worst of it after all.

I worry that I’m encyclopaedic amongst a shelf full of slim, dog-eared volumes of well-loved classics. You know? I’m Britannica but sometimes I think I’d rather be fiction.