October 7 (Thursday): Eat Rotten Fruit From A Shitty Tree. Today, I find myself back on the road again, heading up the A14 towards another one of Cris’ clients, this time, today the lucky company is Pipeline Maintenance in Mildenhall (home of a very prominent US airbase).

I wake up as per usual at 7AM and have the best intentions to leave at 7.30AM in order to arrive at my destination for 9AM. However, this does not quite happen, instead I just about make it out the door at 7.45AM, still half asleep.

Just like Tuesday, I drive up the A14 listening to my BBP/ACCA tape/cassette, ragging the tits of the bubble car Micra, a loser mobile for poor women if ever there was one. Today I also listen to Light & Magic by Ladytron and laugh my arse off at the distortion of the stereo speakers when I max it.

Against the odds, I make great progress and arrive at the clients at 9.20AM. When I arrive, people here act happy to see me, I feel liked at this client/company and I like them back just as much, we are lucky really, we have many nice/cool clients.

The day begins healthily as bacon rolls get ordered all around and I get treated, people just seem to love to buy food for me. I begin showing the boss’s daughter (who looks like Martin Fowler’s stalker on Eastenders) what to do until Cris gets involved and tells me to do something else.

It turns out to be a really long day, I work through lunch as I observe what she does. And it is processing/inputting that I could do in half the time. And then another lady turns up to observe, it turns out that she will be doing/taking over the Sage in the near future. What is going on? This is definitely a case of too many cooks here, why on earth are there three of us gawping at Sage, especially with the slowest of the three putting the actual information on. Bad management/organisation baby.

I leave Mildenhall around 4.30 and get home around 5.50, in time to get ready for my English class tonight.

English class tonight is semi hard work, after my day running around East Anglia, I am shattered and the last thing I want to do is sit through a class until 9.30. And extra woe, Emma isn’t about tonight. Once more, we are studying Christina Rossetti and tonight focusing on one of her longer poems called Goblin Market. After break, we get paired off into groups to do mini talks to the class. Nightmare. I get paired off with the Ipswich fan called Rob who actually turns out to be really cool and was telling me how he’d smoked some pot before the lesson and what considering finishing off his joint at break time. Excellent, I’ve found the stoner of the group, my new drug buddy. Teacher gives us two pages to analyse and review to the class and me and him tackle the poem with about as much sensivitivity as you could/can expect out of two young males into football. And then it doesn’t help when we go and critique the wrong two pages. Whoops. However, the class is pretty cool as I finally hook up there with someone that isn’t Emma and, as childish as it sounds, make a new friend.

It doesn’t however stop me from going home utterly shattered, almost falling asleep upon arrival at Hollytree Court.

I do however receive an email from Eva tonight, not saying much but wishing me well in my upcoming “snip�.

np: Ladytron - Fire