ART OF EUROPE

Week 1 - Friday

Lillian's cake was too nice to poison. Actually, I have decided I'm not going to go on with planning the systematic murder of my workmates, even as an abstract exercise. I like them and they're mostly women and I suppose there's a slight chance one of them might find this and it's too creepy. Instead, I have decided to set myself the challenge of constructing an elaborate and plausible sex-fantasy about each of them in turn, and will post the results here.

To get the most difficult one out of the way first: Reg the boiler man.

Reg would be coy at first, I imagine. I would have to spend quite a while warming him up. Hours on end in the basement with him talking about boilers; I show a keen and intelligent interest and become like the son he never had. Reg's real son, he admits, was a sore disappointment to him, an effete computer programmer who never wants to talk about boilers. Even stoking a little coal fire at home he would shriek and cry with fear and hold the poker like a girl. I ask Reg if he will allow me to stoke the boiler. Gruffly, he mutters his assent, not looking me in the eye. We both know what is at stake. We have taken our shirts off because of the heat. I stoke it good, real good, eyeing him knowingly as I pack the coal in and the flames leap up, working my tool in and out like an expert. 'Is that hot enough for you?' I ask. He is overcome and we grapple and wrestle in the ruddy glow from the boiler, rolling around on the -

Urgh, stop though. He doesn't even shave his back.

While I was scribbling notes for the above, during a slow hour at work today, and was muttering 'We wrestle in the glow from the boiler' and sniggering, someone came in and heard me. Hey ho.

Came home too bloody tired to feel any elation at the end of the working week or to mark it in any way. After tea started to deal with my other current distraction, arranging for my, or Ulrich Haarburste's, 'Roy Orbison in Clingfilm' novel to be self-published. This is something that Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time (a phrase which originated in the film 'The Last Flight', by the way, my tape of which I just stumbled across and which everyone has to see when they can.)

The idea was that it would make me filthy stinking rich and more importantly give me the confidence to write whatever the hell novels I want in future secure in the knowledge that I could publish those myself, too, and so wouldn't be hampered by considerations of what the moron publishers would like (Da Vinci Code meets Harry Potter right now, I imagine, written by a reality-show contestant or a writer who is already bloody published). Unfortunately it has all gone pear-shaped. The cheap printers and distributors I intended to go with appear to have gone out of business, and so far I can't get any others to even respond to my mails. I don't think I should bore you with this, though, and besides I am too tired. The Avengers and bed, I think.

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