Ninety nine percent perspiration

I filed my 300-word (phew) book review a moment ago, and the relief is palpable.  No, really, I could have weighed my anguish this time yesterday, such was its scale.  I shouldn't get too comfy I suppose.  There's still time for it to land back in my in tray with "not fit for broadcast" stamped across it.  However, I think I've cut my journalistic teeth sufficiently now that I could churn out another review that comes to precisely the opposite conclusions to the first.  I wouldn't lose any sleep over this mercenary about turn either.  I've been a hack (unpaid) for less than 5 five hours and I've already turned into Pol Pot.

I've now been overcome with that physical slump that follows moments of crise like these.  My ordinary duties look even more anodyne and pointless than they did previously.  I feel like a character in an earnest but shit modernist novel. 

I also feel hugely tempted to take my foot off the gas, but this is fatal for me.  I can in a fug and get depressed.  I need to apply myself.  I know all this stuff, and yet will I buckle down?  Almost certainly not.  There's a masochistic streak at the heart of the Irish male.  This explains the violent temper and drinking.

You can run from that gene pool, but you cannot hide.

Hold that thought

As I probably always knew it would, having to write a review of Chris Froome's autobiography is proving a real headache.  On paper the task looks surmountable:

1. Read the book

2. Write 300 word review of book

I finished reading it today (Wednesday), and I've got until next Tuesday to file my copy.  In spite of these generous margins, I'm absolutely sweating cheddar.  I keep mentally rewriting reviews in my head in the small hours when, without wishing to sound like my mother, I should be asleep.  I'm going to have to nail my courage to the sticking place (whatever the fcuk that means).

Notwithstanding the fact that I'm pathetic - please wish me luck.

Mustn't grumble

There's a chap who works in my office who habitually looks under so much pressure that the expression on his face alone is enough to give me fantom shooting pains up my arms.  He's very ruddy of jowl too and some 14 stones overweight.  

His job requires a lot of travel, and he's never without his trusty Samsonite wheeled suitcase by his side, least he be sent to South Georgia on business at a moment's notice.  It's like a faithful hound, this case.  It's even stands guard when he's at the urinal in the executive washroom.  I dread the day I see him without it, for fear it might have been run over or put down by the council for having attacked a Lollipop Lady, and he bursts into tears telling me.

The strange thing is that despite all the effing-about he's forced to do, and the manifest damage this is dishing out to his chassis and psychological well-being, he really appears to enjoy his job.  It just serves to illustrate the truth of the old adage that pain and pleasure are but two sides of the same coin.