2001-11-19 - 10:06 p.m.

�I travelled among unknown men, in lands beyond the sea; Nor, England did I know till then, what love I bore to thee. / �Tis past that melancholy dream! Nor will I quit thy shore A second time; for I still seem To love thee more and more.�

Apologies if I don�t seem as bright-tailed and bushy-eyed as usual. Temping, with all its grubby rituals, has once again taken control of my life � for she is nothing if not a forgiving mistress, ever-willing to take you back, but within minutes you realise why you would sell your soul to escape her superficially charming �reasonable hourly rates�. The sudden dawning that ironing shirts is now a compulsory activity; snatching a few minutes of escapism reading the diaries of Quentin Crisp on the tube, much to the sweaty indifference of the hardened commuters, swearing as you try to get out of three people�s way at once and cause momentary human gridlock. You fools! See how you strain and fight to get off at your stops! Why not stay in the womb-like safety of the carriage, bound for Heathrow Airport, foreign adventure and abrupt summary dismissal?!

I shouldn�t really go on crowded tubes on my own. I do always end up standing in the most universally awkward place, in between two moony-eyed lovers whose morning bliss is rudely interrupted when they suddenly have to contemplate my weary chops, cutting off a small disabled child from its doting mother who was just about to administer emergency medication, inadvertently crushing a old blind woman against the door, her startled protestations muffled by my capacious rucksack.

I�m not a big fan of the commute.

�Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed, The bowers where Lucy played; And thine too is the last green field That Lucy�s eyes surveyed. / She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love.�

I�m in a nondescript government office dealing with the training of some obscure wing of the medical profession. There�s a whole mountain of data to be moved around for little or no apparent reason, and I�m the lucky fella charged with doing it. It astounds me, the money that the Public Sector has to spend on this kind of mind-numbingly pointless activity. Tony? Why not just do without me, and use my wages to keep a pensioner doped up on diamorphine for the winter? No-one will ever read this data ever again. I�m filing policy documents from 1986. Is some surgeon going to wake up in the night screaming because he can�t remember which committee members attended the conference on Congenital Nose Picking over 15 years ago?

I had to sign a government confidentiality document � yeah right, because this stuff is political dynamite. I�m going national with these papers, Tony, and no-one�s gonna buy me off! I�m gonna take you down to Chinatown!

Ahem.

I understand the irony of my having been so desperate for a job. I should be glad these posts exist or I�d be pretty much unemployable.

�A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears; She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. / No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth�s diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees.�

Mister, he�s a poet