2003-06-03 - 7:28 p.m.

Today was a great day, if only because I finally finished writing up the stuff on Key West, which has been hanging around my neck like a particularly uninspiring millstone that�s also really hard to describe as you forgot to take much in the way of notes when the millstone was right in front of you whilst you were busy buying drinks and you end up having to make up lots of things about the millstone and hoping that the millstone experts don�t pull you up on it. I wouldn�t normally do this, but it was an unpaid gig that I took for the freebie � hey, if money was changing hands, I�d at least make sure that the stuff I was making up wasn�t immediately checkable in any way.

Today was a great day because it was a day off that I hadn�t planned, and even the mundane arse-work like hefting the collected debris that constitutes my room into some kind of habitable living space was therapeutic in some way, as was buying bin bags, come to think of it, which makes me think the fumes from next doors newly-creosoted fence were stronger than they seemed.

Today was a great day because I got a real, proper, grown-up commission. My first in a long time, and even more thrillingly, it�s from the good newspaper. I�ll be representing them on a press trip. �Hi. Pablo Kickasso. I�m from the Goodnewspaper.� This excites me almost as much as that time I had to help my Grandma out of the bath last summer. Obviously it requires a remedial nod towards basic levels of professionalism, but I�m sure I can easily fake that, and I�ll be sure to pack my poshest travel journalism notebook, which is so far blank. As are all my travel journalism notebooks. Perhaps there�s a ready-to-be-broken pattern developing there. Oh, and the trip is to the seedily urban, sex-tourism-mungous Thailand, leaving next Wednesday, which knocks that Grandma-bath scenario into a cocked hat, frankly.