Oh my god, this is so outrageously boring I think I might die. It has been a long day and I have to stay for yet another hour. I do not want to be here. Why have I been here for 20 months? It don’t make no sense and I must stop acting out of fear before too much more of my life slips by. Fear to delve into the other stuff and fear to find out what I really want.

Such a contrast between today and the conversation last night, when I stated it would seem ludicrous to come to work today after the insights and realizations. The two just don’t seem compatible. So, in six weeks I’m outta here. Maybe not from Portsmouth but from Zurich. It is too much, working with a group girls whose major topics of conversation are television and shopping. A mundane, bland, straight, square environment. Portsmouth is the same and Zurich is the epitome of it all. Too much. Off into the world to see what’s going on. I might run back with my tail between my legs, but so be it. I wish I’d never come back to shirts, ties, ironing. I wish I’d never come back to shitty old machines they call a computer system, with their ancient green fonts.

A couple of calls interrupt my moan. Bullshit of course – where is the cheque for a return premium? A credit card payment with no expiry date. So incredibly tedious. That’s the start. The problems escalate to horrendous commerical direct debits with large possibility for error, and complex queries that take hours to solve. And what is all this for? To make some shareholders wealthier, or at least to keep them secure in the knowledge that their shares are still worth something.

Janet Street-Porter kept her first husband’s surname. England beat Wales at rugby over the weekend. Some people can see colours with their fingertips. The dispay is the most power-hungry part of a laptop. There will be a multinational space station by 2003. A new Gulf War has probably been averted.