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2005-02-07 - 5:53 p.m.

Oh, this isn�t going well AT ALL. I somehow assumed being freed up for lots of freelance projects would mean floods of last minute offers to go to write about the Penguin Museum in Minsk, or to take trains out to strange parts of the West Country to interview a pensioner who has collected his own body weight in nasal hair and exciting errands like that. Instead I�ve just got lethargy and trying not to order the exact same thing from the sandwich shop round the corner every single day and even though I�m not averse to the freedom to masturbate whenever the whim should take me, that sort of behaviour doesn�t really pay the rent, unless you happen to be a 17 year old exhibitionist with her own web cam and a head for business.

My state of mind was no good for meeting people over the weekend. I am best manning for my oldest friend, whose career in the legal profession I�m allowing as it will no doubt be of use to me at some point in my life. His friends in London are an uneven split between people who handle corporate legal matters for salaries that would allow them to pursue their own nuclear weapons programmes, and someone who is now down to drinking the furthest reaches of his duty free collection rather than stretching his finances to buy a four pack of beer.

That would be, er, me, then.

I hadn�t really met them before, but since I have to organise a stag weekend and keep them all entertained, I should get some idea of what they were like. They were thankfully very pleasant, and not at all afraid to indulge someone obviously ducking his round until we got to the affordable pub. It was a bit of a meeting of worlds though, and it doesn�t do wonders for your confidence when you hear people your age say things like, oh, I don�t know, they�ve just on a whim paid for their children�s nostrils to be slightly widened or that they use �950 bottles of wine to clean the bathroom windows or that the only real way to fly to the Bahamas for Christmas is to be towed in a gold plated balloon by a fleet of diamond-encrusted humming birds. That kind of thing.

I don�t begrudge people wealth, of course, especially when they�re asking you what you would like to drink (one exception being the slug-brained turnip on daytime TV who has just, as I type, won four grand for coming up with five words associated with eggs). And of course material success is no pointer of personal happiness, but trousering several hundred clams a day can�t hurt any. I forget my point.

Stopping smoking every week really plays havoc with your waistline, by the way. I went to be fitted for my morning suit and they almost had to draft in an extra tape measure.

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