So let's just say I was posting something of considerable importance. It wasn't a spy code or anything but it was important. And what's more, it wasn't just what was inside the brown envelope that was important, I also wanted it to look good from the outside, not to the extent that I wanted it gift wrapped, bowed and scented but I didn't want it to look like it had been addressed and sealed by a messy child with three hands. If I was trying to compare it to something, it would be a job application: chances are, it's going to be ripped open by some temp-slave like you or I who might chuckle at a really disgusting parcel all slewed over in tape and spat on but they're not going to ruin your life are they?

There were some things inside that I needed to get photocopied. I went to the place and Wayne did my photocopying, but he stopped doing it for a while to talk to two girls who flounced in on off the streets and one of them was going away for a while, so Wayne said wow, why don't you write down your number and when you get back we could...? And she said yeah have you a pen? And Wayne said yeah I've got one, write it down here and laters I'll have a butchers and the girl said, by the way have you met Leanne? And Wayne said, oh, nice to meet...

I didn't get pissed. I'd left plenty of time for the photocopying but Wayne did barney on and let his mind wander so when I got home and pulled out my warm, coy, flat and bulldog clipped papers they all had a big black line down the middle.

Back to Wayne and the place and his boss who looked like a thief. I've been in there before and the boss is not good. He's got a beard which isn't a beard. If a beard is a bush or a shrub or, if you're someone dead fancy, a flower, the thief-boss had a beard like the grass in your local park, short, tough, grey, brown. So the boss does the copying and sells me a shoddy envelope which doesn't stick.

With the weather like it is, I don't know how people are always dressed right. For me, the clouds arrive. I reach for my jacket. I step outside, the clouds are blasted away by hot air and suddenly I'm disgusting. Many other people I see are dressed better, cooler, closer to the temperature. They all look very relaxed. Do they walk around and work closer to home? Do they just nip home and adjust? Lay-er off please. Thank you.

I was heating up when I dropped a pound coin outside the post office. I didn't have much change and post offices are difficult like that. But the coin didn't bounce and skip down the road. In fact, it barely bounced at all, which was not very annoying but still a bit scary. I walked into the post office to send my parcel and I pulled it out of my bag just have to one last check of everything. Because the envelope didn't stick and I hadn't been concentrating in the photocopy place, all my papers just rushed out of the upside down envelope with a whoosh and fanned out, swinging to the floor and settled. Someone skipped past my kneeling form to move up the queue and my god was it hot in there. Bag restuffed I lounged against the wall and then heard a voice, "Why are you standing there?" I ignored it. It was a woman's voice, she couldn't possibly... I am not doing anything wro.... I am trying to recove.... But no. Things being how they were she was talking to me quite definitely. I looked round and saw her, head under scarf, glasses with a separation for her different eyesights, craggy, make-up-horrible face and very deliberate look in her wierd eyes. I did what she wanted me to do, which was move six inches to the left while she tutted at me like I was a moron.

Then to the booth and I borrow some sticky tape to seal my bashed parcel. The helpful grandfather figure behind the glass pushed it through on the tray and I made a little prayer, "please sticky tape, be easy on me..." No. Half a minute later there I was, at the end, on my own, in a quiet corner, trying to rip and bite my way through the sticky tape as it hysterically twisted into sticky twine, ratty and covered in my greasy fingerprints. I tried cutting it with my keys, hunched over, begging, and all I got was a bundle of metal in glue, adhering strongly to my fingers and t-shirt. Finally, I posted my parcel, laid it out in the metal serving hatch. There she lay, strips of sellotape wrenched across her, petering out pathetically at the edges, whirled into horrible straws by hot and exhausted fingers. Then I walked home and saw all the tramps on street corners, one with a hand deep in his pocket, old sports jacket buttoned up, back arched improbably, looking up at the sky like Nelson at a cocktail party, dirty hand wrapped round some Pilsner. Then another one, on the bench, face between his knees and his friend next to him with a supportive hand resting lightly on his doubled over comrade, legs crossed camply and eyes quizzically looking out.

Time to go.

Testing the rad new site meter.

Yup. Yesterday was my first time on a dual carriageway. My god the mad excitement. We were howling back from Somerset in the bright sunshine with all the windows open and the wind buffetting like a typhoon and I was driving. I was driving with my glasses on so everything was incredibly clear and the road was white and we were piling and thudding through it all, just ripping along with the wheel slightly sweaty in my hands but no way was I going to let it go! Many times we flashed by the dead bodies of rabbits and small beasts that had stepped out into the road and been annihilated from some commuter, or worse, a heavy goods vehicle or a caravan. Just smashed out. Death by caravan must be the worst. Imagine being pasted by the motorised equivalent of a capri sun carton, with dad up front in his driving gloves, mum at the table playing out patience or sliding her way through a patch of stitching and the warm smell of carpets and old people just bombing through your rabbit brain and switching the lights out. We racketed past the dead on that A-road, piled through the clouds of ferment and ghastly smells that plumed up around them.

I mustn't be so distracted when I drive. It's too easy to let your mind out of the roaring open window and up into the air and rush off to think about the story that led me, at one time, to find myself steering bravely through a heap of children's toys and clothes that had been grandiosely sprinkled over this great fast road. And I must control the death thoughts, the intermittent, unstoppable fantasies that pop into your mind, innocent as a canape, and say, what if you... what if you just.... what if you just wrenched it, yanked that wheel and let us fly and everything would taste of metal. Christ. Stop it. These thoughts are a wonder to me. Which part of us wants to undo all the hard work, unstitch the manners and the relationships and all that we've made? ...On the bridge (let's jump!), holding the baby (would it bounce?), at the tube station (should I surf down the barriers between these good escalators?), in church or the quiet hall with the programme starting to melt in your bored hands (now? now? stand up? yell it! yell what? IT!). Mysterious.

Meanwhile, you should see this. (I love the guy with the broken window and the woman who "can't take much more of this"). And p-lease notice the sexy "Contact" button on the bar above, my god the technofreakery path I trod to make that.

It's been so long since I did anything here. I'm trying to be better. Here is a thrilling extract from a thing I wrote recently about a man who works at a toll booth. Get in touch if you want more:

"The vehicles come towards the booths when the main road opens out like a fan into a great mile of concrete so wide you can’t believe it and sometimes when it was empty and perfect, normally at dawn, it would make Cornell smile because it was so big. The cars come to the end of the main road and swill out over the great wide patch and then start angling towards the booths they want. Some just bomb through in a straight line to booths 6 and 7 where Gail and Michael work opposite each other, or should I say Mr and Mrs Daly because they got married fell in love at the toll booths, swapping magazines and smiling. We were all invited. Working third from the end, Cornell’s booth got the ones which peeled away, thought it faster to whiz out wide, enjoy the run of tyres on the concrete runway and pay a visit to the edge of the road where you can see the fence which cuts off the wasteland and the bottles and papers and packets that litter the blasted ground like so much old junk. Maybe that meant that Cornell got interesting types out there or maybe it didn’t. I tell you, people at the booths have talked about this, but the thing is, there’s no rule, things balance out, I reckon Cornell’s people weren’t so different. And things working how they do, when not all the booths were open and Cornell’s was, people had to go out there and he would have got a regular crowd. When you work in a booth, you look out and see who’s coming your way – unless it’s crazy and there are lines and people are sitting low in their cars with the fumes rising around their windows or the rain making everything wet. But when it’s flowing through you can look out and watch them coasting and then see them decide. They pick you, and then pull through in your direction. Sometimes it’s a long way out, sometimes they choose a bunch and then slide in right at the end and other times you just KNOW, sometimes before they do, that they’re going to come right at you. It feels funny when that happens but what can you say? Try and smile maybe but they don’t want to hear it, do they?"