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It’s remarkable I actually arrived at work on time today. After last night’s late phone calls and emailing my mind was so busy with things that I didn’t actually get to sleep until almost two this morning. Even so, I woke up after only 45 minutes of the alarm going off and made it to my desk bang on 10.

We’re getting towards the end of the mag now, and the last pages of the January issue go to be printed on Tuesday, so it’s getting a bit hectic and my day was spent reading pages and marking up corrections.

We all headed over to Masala Zone for lunch to mark Janet’s last day with us. She’ll be missed, and I’ll have to learn how to do the invoices. As has happened on every other occasion I’ve been there, one person’s meal got left off the order pad and arrived, after much complaining and cajoling, just as everyone else finished. It’s a worrying trend. The food is good, though, and it’s two minutes from the office, so it’s too convenient to boycott.

We went back to the office with curried breath to get on with our fact checking, and gave Janet her card, present and customary round of applause just before we drifted off home. She’s having her leaving drinks tomorrow, so it all felt a bit low key.

I came back by way of the gym, which was heaving. I’ve never seen it so busy. Every running machine was full, so I had to work around everyone. Nigel popped over for a chat between equipment swaps, and by the time I left I felt like I’d had a really good workout. In fact, my arms were shaking a bit, but I think that’s because I was well behaved this afternoon and confined my snacking to a single banana.

I had ever such strange thoughts driving back home about how you get to where you are. The fact I live where I do is less to do with what I’ve chosen than the choices of thousands and thousands and thousands of people who came before me. One of my ancestors could have got really fed up with the weather in the middle of a dull March in 1700 and moved off to Wisconsin on a whim. I would probably never have heard of Chelmsford or PCW or LBC and wouldn’t know any of the people I know now if they had. Of course, the fact that they didn’t also means that I don’t know a lot of things about Wisconsin, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2001 at 11:52 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.