July 29 (Thursday): Good morning, good morning. I check out just exactly what it was Syra said to me on MSN, it reads "bog off then!". Mentalist. I find myself on MSN with both Sara and Toronto Phoebe, which almost makes me late leaving for work but only almost. When I switch the radio on, it's 1980 by Estelle, I think today is going to be a good day.

And it could have been a good day were it not for a certain partner and my firm being disorganised and messing about everyone involved in his work. Today Mah and I are supposed to be going to Acme Steel on audit. Originally it was supposed to be Stevo and I but he is up to his neck in the Acmega situation. It was intended that we go there early in the morning but come heading towards 10 AM I find myself sitting around waiting for him to show his face. Mah is supposed to be leading the audit but this is a job in the construction industry and she comes over as a person who won't say boo to a goose, so I can see myself getting the opportunity to be involved more than in the audit than usual (just the R section which is the most basic of testing tests). When Melchard finally shows his face he comes stomping into Chernobyl and goes to me “what are you doing?�. I look him straight in the face and go “waiting for you�. He shakes his head in disbelief commenting “I am very disappointed in you Mr Graham�. A pregnant pause and things turn awkward and icy. What’s his problem? An audit meeting/consultation of sorts occurs with me being completely as a result and I am made to feel sub-junior and small, way to undermine and discourage looking to work hard and shine. However this is kind of atypical of the sort of thing I face here these days and why I genuinely feel working life is made ten times more difficult than it need be.

Mah and I grab and bubble car and drive to the clients while Melchard toddles off to there in his midlife crisis mobile (his socialist silver Porsche). The client is on the Whitehall industrial estate and is a stones throw from an old client I used to work at/visit and another stones throw from Sextons, dad’s current “employers� who are balking on some holiday money they appear to have failed to pay him. Once underway, the job itself goes pretty well. Stevo pre-warned me that the job will be “easy� due to the excellent standard of books kept by the bookkeeper. For today’s job I have grabbed Iran's laptop and I set about doing the R section (profit and loss testing) in realisation that I will probably get it done in half my allocated time on the job and I will have time to do a really good job on it also. Mid morning they get a customer in, some big arse builder whose wife is a big headed midget. I snigger at the couple along with our client and begin to enjoy myself. The whole situation smells though, poor old Mah has been dumped in the job right at the deep end and, as I tell the bookkeeper, we have been drafted in at the eleventh hour (“so please bare with us if/when we ask stupid questions�). And this really isn’t a fair environment on which to send a girl out to work. Its construction and male dominated. When she needs to do the inevitable bathroom trip, she is faced with a toilet the spitting image of the one from Trainspotting, complete with inch of water (piss?) on the floor. And add to this that up on the wall facing the person on the toilet is a calendar of women with their cunts stuck out. Is this a test to see if she can be offended? When I do the bathroom trip, I find myself flicking through the calendar like a perv, unfortunately with the nail in the wall holding the calendar up, falling to the fall. Rumbled! Not before time, the working day ends.

Upon returning to the office, Stevo remains appearing to still be tearing his hair out over the Acmega job. He asks me if I want to go for a drink and it is a fantastic evening. I tell him however I have my session I can’t but he tells me to call in afterwards. Maybe.

In the evening I have my weekly session with the good doctor and it is more discussion into my fitting into the family dynamic role which becomes the threesome dynamic and how I seem to be regularly propelled to the bottom of groups, both social and work and how it just seems to be my given natural standing it appears, the role is naturally slide/slip into. I pull out the example of the weekend and how I felt almost “demoted� when sitting/drinking/talking in the Hogshead beer garden. We move into the grounds of talk of me “finding myself�, which in my opinion I feel appears may have been left a little too late to do. A big suggestion coming over is my doing the uni thing, something I also feel now has been left a little too late. She tells there are access courses and I tell her that “I’ll look into it� and I tell her about the English evening classes I have seen, an idea to which we mutually show enthusiasm. I continue going on, telling her how I am agonising tonight as to whether to go to the Mutebox music event or not. I tell her I like being part of the scene but do not really feel fully accept and to be honest, pretty much hate the music. I show many signs of procrastination, exercising a general air of “I can’t be arsed� when really it seems I/we should be celebrating that I actually have somewhere to go and people to be with. By the end of the session I am bored of complaining and I have a quick two minute recap of what I have done in the last week: pissed around bosses until 2.30, Newmarket, DJ, cricket etc. I feel I blow her mind with too much information at once and it all ends with a general air/feeling of, just what AM I complaining about.

As soon as I get back into my car, Stevo is on the phone. Dick has phoned up and asked if we can both play football tomorrow night. Ouch, three sporting events in four days, killer. I say yes though and that I will meet up with Stevo in ten minutes for drinks, first I have to pump up the slow deflating tyre on my car. When I get back to Chernobyl the evening is still fine fine fine, summer evenings are some of the best things known to man. I phone Allen in a last ditch effort to see if he is at the “gig� tonight. He isn’t and has no plans to, I am calling him during a leaving meal.

When me and Stevo finally get to the Hogshead we booze up and sit outside in the garden. There, there are a group of girls who are captivating. I then look closely at one and it looks like one of the dancers from Club Acme wearing the latest in fetish chic, very nice. Regardless, it kind of beats hearing more football stories from Stevo on re-run. That said though, it is just so nice to be seen, feeling to be making the most of these summer evenings, sitting outside in the sun until 9pm is such a great feeling. Slowly the garden gets busier and busier and a guy turns up who looks the spitting image of John Belushi, it is sick. I am truly in awe, this is a good looking fellow. Steve and I linger on two pints for a long while, knowing that any more will take us past the limit. We leave not long after 9pm and Stevo appears incredibly reluctant to return home, even semi suggesting that we go get something to eat but really neither of us are hungry, its just an attempt to find something to do.

As a bonus I get home in time to copy all my Manic Street Preachers CDs onto my hard drive and watch the re-runs of Little Britain on BBC2.

np: Manic Street Preachers - Yourself