I’ve just finished the last piece of my Christmas cake, it was very nice. This was the first year that I’d ever made a Christmas cake – or any cake for that matter – and I ended up making two. I guess it’s fitting that the final piece of cake is finished on 6th night. It’s a symbolic end to the festive period along with the putting away of the decs (and associated pulled back as I try to shift heavy furniture to gain access to the loft).

Of course the end of the festivities also signals the need to get my lardy arse back to Fat Fighters in an attempt to shed the flab that appeared out of nowhere over the past couple of weeks. When I say “appeared out of nowhere”, I actually mean it appeared from: 2 Christmas dinners; Christmas pud; panettone and other Christmas cake; kilos of salty snacks; pounds of chocolates and about 40 sausages of varying flavours that were knocking about (albeit briefly) at the Boxing Day running buffet. Not to mention the general overeating associated with December – all done with the “It’s Christmas” justification – and general lethargy that comes from mid-winter.

I actually went to the gym the other night and it almost killed me; I only managed 2.5km running (that’s about a mile and a half). Awful.

These weblogs are a bit weird because you never know how much to information to inflict on an unsuspecting (and probably non-existent) audience. Then again, I hope I’m protected by near anonymity and, amongst those who know me, only people I choose to tell will get to know about this. I can’t figure out why it doesn’t get a hit when I do a Google search for it though. It’s probably for the best…

I have my own office here at work, but on the corridor there are a couple more “multi-user” offices: the one opposite my own is occupied by the most insane woman I’ve ever met (I’ll call her “Carmelita” to keep in with the cakesniffer theme*) and her poor, long-suffering colleague; the other office has 4 occupants who seem to talk endlessly about the latest bargains at Aldi or Matalan, or kids, or general crap.

I seem to spend my time here being tortured mentally by these people – and a lot of the time they ignore me, which is pleasant of them. Better that than being spoken to in a patronising manner. I’m 34, I’ve got a PhD, I’ve seen and done a fair few things in my time, but I’m often spoken to as if I’m retarded. I guess it’s just a reflection of their own lives and the things that are important to them. I suppose it’s harmless and they’re all decent, nice people, but we don’t have much in common.

There’ll be more tales to tell of my adventures here – I’ve got plenty archived and no doubt each day will provide more – but I’ll leave things for now because I need to go out to the local shops to get warm: it’s not particularly cold here today, but it’s not that warm either and Carmelita has just opened the window in her office and it’s drawing the heat out of mine. I’m surprised to find that she hasn’t turned my radiator off to tell you the truth.

Bonkers. They’re all mad!

*I’m tempted to use character names from the Unfortunate Events books as pseudenyms for all my colleagues – keep reading.

This is just a bit of a mess while I get started. I’m obviously not too sure what I’m doing at the moment, but I’ll get there in the end… I hope.

Are these blogs copyrighted I wonder? What if somebody puts something in a blog and it’s a fantastic idea for a book or something, do they get credit if somebody else picks up on it?

Anyway, I’m actually at work at the moment and I’ve just been playing text tennis with my friend who’s still off work after the Christmas break. She doesn’t want to go back and I’m not too keen about being here and we’ve been thinking of things that we can do with our lives. She mentioned starting a business, but I haven’t got the skills, motivation or money for that sort of venture. However, I’ve always been told that I write quite well and that I should write a book. Most of what I write is actually just cut and paste stuff from official documents, but I seem to get away with it.

That’ll do for a start I think. I just want to see what this looks like before I do something else.