Today a lawyer signed a document recording that I am sane.* He didn’t even need to have studied psychiatry to do this.

*OK, not specifically sane but at least able to understand what I was doing when I gave another lawyer power of attorney over my affairs in the event that I can’t be contacted.

I feel vaguely similar to how I imagine Dorfl felt when he was given a piece of paper saying that he owned himself and was responsible for his own actions.

but England just have – they’ve won a cricket test match against Australia. If they win the next (and final) match, they’ll win the series. A black day.

I begin to understand what losing a loved one is really like. Here’s the

Not long after my final train departed Birmingham for Worcester, I realised I’d left Marianne the Cuddly Pig on the train that took me from Edinburgh to Birmingham. It had been over an hour since that train had terminated at Birmingham – surely by now the train would have been cleaned and Birmingham’s lost property office would have her. Well, no way to find out because they’d closed for the weekend.

I ended up phoning the British Transport Police office at Birmingham. The officer I spoke to took my loss seriously, gave it an incident number and gave Virgin Trains’ numbers to try. However, none of the possibilities could be contacted until Monday morning. I cried on the way from Worcester’s station and could hardly bring keep the bitterness from my voice all this week.

Monday morning brought no joy. Birmingham’s lost property office didn’t have her and couldn’t advise anywhere else to try. I was disconsolate for the rest of the week and getting to sleep was unusually hard. I normally sleep holding Marianne. Without my comforter, with this loss and many other changes churning around my head, in a strange bed … thank goodness for Larry Niven.

Why all the fuss over a cuddly toy? Well, Marianne is more than a toy. She’s a comforter, a conversation piece, a drinking companion and an almost constant companion over 14 years. She is a relic of times when I respected who I was, when I was even occasionally optimistic, from before several failed relationships and a breakdown. There are many, many other good things in my life but all of them require maintenance. Not so with Marianne: she was just there. She asked for nothing and gave me no grief at all.

What’s worse is that the only person I could blame was me. I chose to take her with me, I chose to put her on the overhead luggage-rack, I forgot to check that I had all my luggage when I got off the Birmingham train, I chose, albeit unwittingly, to become dependent upon her. No doubt I can adjust but I don’t want to.

And on the 14th day she rose again
I got back to Edinburgh around noon on Friday, less than happy with the world. Not even seeing an old friend for the first time in ages or a successful shopping session could shake off my foul mood. I found the Virgin office and demanded they look up the train that had taken me to Birmingham would have gone afterwards. After an amount of persuasion and pleading, they found it would have next gone to the Central Rivers depot. Central Rivers staff had found her and will send her to Birmingham’s lost property office by Wednesday. My parents will collect her from there and by Friday Marianne and I should be reunited.

I envy the Blues Brothers their half-pack of cigarettes. As I type, I’m on a Virgin train – and they are entirely smoke-free. Apparently it’s in the interests of my comfort and convenience. Well I don’t feel comforted and convenienced. I’m badly in need of calmness after a disasterous start to a week away from work* and even more in need of inspiration about deal with the poor quality of the photos I’m to use in a Fairtrade booklet**

Fair enough, I understand that smokers are a minority. Even more, I understand that non-believers may not want to partake of communion with Nicotiana. So it may well be right to put us in a ghetto. Also, why should we smokers share our costly manna with you? But to effectively forbid us to exist? Nope, that’s wrong. It seems the nanny state rides high – but the nanny is a martinet in a starched pinafore.

Three slight mitigating factors: Virgin provide powerpoints for laptops and cellphones. Their stops at stations are long enough to smoke half a cigarette on the platform. Their trains are very clean.

*mislaid keys caused me to miss the train I intended to take – so I’m running 4 hours late.

**I took them, so it’s not surprising the composition is poor. However the blurriness is worthy of a Damian Hurst award for utter crapness. I think my camera has finally gone to meet its digital maker. However, for a cheap-and-cheerful point-and-press, it did very well.

Er, I seem to have had a mad moment in the iTunes music store last night: When I woke up this morning, some music was nestling on my laptop:

The Stranglers

• Rattus Norvegicus (1977)
• No More Heroes (1977)
• Black and White (1978)

Pink Floyd

• A Saucerful of Secrets (1969)
• Ummagumma (1969)
• Atom Heart Mother (1970)
• Meddle (1971)
• Obscured By Clouds (1972)
• The Wall (1979)

Stiff Little Fingers

• Nobody’s Heroes (1980)

Today was possibly the most emotionally draining day yet at the fun-palace we know as Leckie Towers. There’s probably no point in reading this because the only thing more tedious than reading it would have been living through it!

Our production director had set a target of my team getting files for 40 books (of 70 in this project) finished by our repro-house and into our printer’s hands by the end of today. (That was silly enough since the raw manuscripts for some books only arrived on my desk this week.) As of close of play last night, we had signed off on 33 and the final changes to another 7 had been posted by Special Delivery to arrive at the repro-house this morning.

First hassle: the production director emails to say that only 25 sets of files had arrived at the printer so far: what’s happened to the other 8? Then my immediate boss (who is a very decent bloke) phoned to ask if I knew what was going on and which 8 were missing. I was a bit baffled by his request: how can I tell what X has posted to Y unless I am X! As far as I could tell, only 4 could still be en route from repro-house to printer: the other 29 should have been posted the day before yesterday or earlier and so should already be at the printer.

So I made a quick check through my records for proof that we had indeed signed off 33, and then contacted the repro-house. It turned out that 8 sets of files (4 for books that had been signed off yesterday and 4 of the 10 that had been signed off the day before) were en route by Special Delivery to the printer, so they would arrive by lunchtime today.

Nevertheless (and as instructed by the director and my boss), I told the repro-house to FTP the files to the printer so we could be sure they would arrive today. The repro-house argued against FTPing, which wasted more time. It’s not as if they don’t regularly FTP files to printers. I insisted and my immediate boss diplomatically explained that we were their clients and that we had deadlines to make, so it wasn’t out of order to ask them to use an easily-available faster delivery system.

In the middle of this, the client for whom we publish these books phoned with final changes for a few more. I added these changes to those already noted by our proofreader, photocopied the pages that needed changes so we would have a means of checking that the repro-house implemented them correctly and packaged the changing pages to be posted to the repro-house.

So by noon I was sure that the 33 signed-off titles were at the printer to be able to go out for lunch, all the while hoping that the repro-house would now get on with the final changes to the other 7 books they would have received. A lunch-time appointment with my bank was interspersed by my cellphone voicemail trying to give me yesterday’s news. I would have turned the cellphone off but I had told the repro-house and my colleagues to call me if any further hassles occurred. At my bank, I learned that business deposit accounts pay hardly any more interest than the the cheque account in which the Community Council’s £27,000 currently resides. Considering the major hassle I’ve had setting up an account for the local Fairtrade campaign and changing the signatories on the CC’s two current accounts, I’m not going to bother moving the cash anywhere. I also learnt a lot about mini-cash ISAs and maxi-ISAs.

Back to Leckie Towers: just when I got back, I remembered that today is one of my team’s 28th birthday. He went off for lunch and then I got the other member of my team (that’s right: 3 of us produce 70 books in 3 or 4 months!) to nip out and purchase the a suitable choccy cake and card. Around now, proofs of the final changes for two more books spewed out of the printer that is networked to our repro-house (who are in Suffolk). One one set of proofs, all the final changes had been done correctly but the repro-house had missed some changes on another. By the time I’d checked this, my other colleague had returned bearing bearing birthday supplies, so I got her to phone the repro-house and diplomatically explain where they had erred and that they were to ensure fresh, correct proofs had to arrive this afternoon.

Then I photocopied the repro-house proofs so we would have something to check the printer’s proofs against, emailed the repro-house to say they should FTP this book’s files to the printer and packaged the signed-off proofs to post to the printer. Also, a proofreader had delivered more proofs she had checked so I booked them in, ready to add in any other changes the client might want and the client phoned with yet more changes to another two books.

Next thing, the printer that’s networked to our repro-house started spewing out what they thought were the finished versions of final changes to another 5 titles. Part of the joy of working this way is that pages arrive in random order. If the repro-house sends several titles sequentially through their software and thence to the networked printer, then all the books get mixed up too. So my colleagues and I separated the pages into the different titles, sorted them into order and checked whether the final changes had all been done. On 2 they had: some pages for another hadn’t come through and some changes on the other two had been missed.

So another round of phoning the repro-house to tell them what they’d missed and that they were to put it right this afternoon. My immediate boss then phoned to say that that the repro-house had complained to the production director that we were sending them new changes. Not true (except for 2 tiny changes): the vast majority were where they had missed clearly marked-up changes the first time round. I suspect my immediate boss then phoned both the production director and the repro-house to calm them.

A wee pause ensued. My colleagues who haven’t been involved in this project had emptied their offices so that they could move to new offices in Edinburgh. Our finance manager, administrator/receptionist and two dispatch/customer-service colleagues are hanging on here with my team until the bitter end but the publishing team are away. I tidied up the cables and other bits they’d left left behind and tried not to be affected by the near-empty Leckie Towers. After all, I’ve worked here full-time for only 11 years, preceded by 3 years of part-timing during the latter stages of my PhD. I’m so looking forward to commuting to Edinburgh for the next few months!

Around 4pm, new versions of the pages our repro-house hadn’t previously got right started coming through: back to checking, signing off, photocopying, posting and recording progress in a spreadsheet and a word document. Around 4:20 all but 2 books had been signed off and it was time for choccy cake. More fun and games getting “birthday-boy” out of the way while other colleagues gathered and candles were lit. Then I called my colleague down to our meeting room by saying that more proofs were emerging. As he came downstairs, true enough, more proofs arrived. We ignored them for 20 minutes of calm and calories, then my team and I went back to checking, etc, while all but one of the rest of our colleagues finished for the day. My dispatch/customer-service colleague took the signed-off proofs to the post office and then he too finished for the week.

Around 5pm, the lead worker on this project at the repro-house phoned to ask whether the titles we’d signed off had been actually been signed off. I’d erred and emailed the sign-offs to her boss, not directly to her. I confirmed that all but one title had been signed off. This took much longer than should have necessary because our email system can take up to 3 minutes to open an email – or any other file – on our local server. (It’s in the room next to my office and is reputedly connected by 100baseT ethernet, although it often feels like it’s serving files by semaphore through a white-out. Step forward any Windows 2K or Microsoft Exchange experts who can offer a solution, please before I put my boot through the Dell box that claims to be a decent server!)

Around 5:30 the final corrected page arrived. Birthday-colleague had left for the evening – he has a 90-minute drive to his home. I phoned my immediate boss to let him know we’d made the target and emailed the repro-house to confirm they had done all that was needed today and that they could FTP this final book’s files to the printer and up while my remaining colleague photocopied the proofs and packaged them for me to post tomorrow. She then departed and I updated my records, then emailed a sitrep to my team, my immediate boss and the production director and emailed the repro-house’s ‘to-do’ list for the weekend.

I took a final look around Leckie Towers and came home, almost in tears. The difference between yesterday and today was that these were tears of relief, not tears of mourning for my laptop or from stress.

I’m going to work tomorrow morning to check any more ‘final’ versions that our repro house might get done tomorrow and to post out any first proofs to proofreaders and our client, then I’m going to get hammered!

Life goes on its usual round, namely work and Community Council getting in the way of other things I need to do (and as for thing things I want to do…)

Today was a good example:

1. no lunch (a) cos I’m a fat git, (b) cos stuff coming in thick and fast.
2. Got out around 6:30.
3. Went to local store.
4. I have no cash on me and their card machine accepts neither my credit card nor my switch card.
5. panic-struck phonecalls to bank and credit card company confirm that I have the amount of cash in the bank that I’d calculated and under £100 owing to the credit card.
6. home, “cook” a quick sausage sandwich
7. trudge to CC meeting, where we discuss yet again how to sort the Hon Cit scheme so that the Jack Nicklaus scenario has much less chance of recurring.
8. Since this is only a committee meeting, we can’t make any decisions, just recommendations to full CC
9. Then we discuss other stuff but again, can’t come to decisions.
10. Then Chair, Secretary and I launch into paperwork to do with one of our bank accounts
11. This reminds me I still haven’t replaced the main account’s signatory who has resigned from CC
12. Finally escaoe before 10.30

Now I’m home, trying to sort out other random crap but seeming no nearer to being ready for the massive changes that are coming up. Oh well, maybe some sleep will help. G’night

I wrote my second-biggest cheque ever tonight: £1850·04 for the new boiler. All that remains now is for me to paint the surrounds.

(The biggest cheque I ever wrote was for £2300: the deposit on Mycelium Mansion.)

Why do I feel so underwhelmed?

Finnally got around to putting up pix of the MAKEPOVERTYHISTORY rally and march.