2005-12-05 - 5:06 p.m.

You know when you don�t hear a word for ages, and then suddenly that word immediately starts appearing in your life with increased frequency? Like, you�ll hear the word �vestigal� on TV and then you overhear someone saying it on the bus and then you find out it�s, oh I don�t know, the name of a new reality TV show? Well, I�m having that, but with Henry Rollins.

That said, I�m not really sure how a reality TV show called �Vestigal� would work. �New on Fox this fall�ten contestants and their unnecessary body parts.� Perhaps people could vote off the body parts of the contestants just to see how long they could live without them. I haven�t really thought it through. That much should be clear by now.

I lasted about four hours at work today when my boss told me I looked �like death�, which most people would take badly, but for me it signalled a nice half day.

So far so dull, but the comment put me in mind of someone from my past.

Not Henry Rollins.

For some years, I worked as an administrator in the Social Sciences department of a London university, and one day, a new colleague started called Alan. His big thing was that he technically died for a minute and a half about three times every year. At first I assumed it was out of embarrassment about the outlandish haircuts that his mother used to come to work with. She was employed in the same department and looked like a strategically shaved wookie, but apparently Alan suffered from some kind of rare medical condition, the workings of which sounded distinctly sketchy to me.

He did tell me the details once, laughing about it like it was just some unfortunate quirk of fate, but I drifted off half way through the lengthy explanation, distracted by his frankly enormous teeth.

�Isn�t it scary having to be so close to non-existence all the time?� I asked.

�Oh, not really. I�ve just learned to live with it,� he said merrily.

�Not for ten and a half minutes a year you haven�t,� I thought about saying, but I sensed he had a latent violent side and that comments like that might not butter any parsnips with his kind.

He would gladly tell everyone that ever came out for a drink after work about it, grinning as if semi-fatal genetic flaws were something to be celebrated and used as an annoyingly successful chat-up line, I mean, sure, if you wanted to go home with some of the department�s most attractive employees by using something so pitifully transparent, go ahead. It wasn�t my style. My style was not going home with any of the department�s most attractive employees.

These alleged near-death episodes never took place during working hours, I noticed. Alan would sporadically be absent for a week, his mother telling us that it �had happened again�, and he would swan in the next Monday looking as fresh as I would have done given seven days with my feet up,

I knew how petty it was, but it really began to irritate me.

One night, I was talking with Alan and a girl called Rachel in the student bar, and he was going through his spiel and I decided to try and compete.

The best I could do was telling the story of how I put my head through a plate glass window when I was three years old. The trouble with that story is that after the set up, that�s pretty much it, and I didn�t so much nearly die as nearly required a few stitches, the wounds limited to a slight scar caused by a sliver of glass in my forehead. Alan and Rachel tried to sound shocked and then relieved that I had survived this minor household accident, but I could tell their hearts weren�t in it. I considered embellishing a car crash I had when I was 18, but I knew how it would look.

Er�I forget my point. But I�m feeling much better since coming home today.