Went to get my car MOT'd yesterday in a place next door to the gym (which may be truly living in 1974) - it took three hours to do my MOT and change two lightbulbs (sample conversation: "there's no such thing as a quick job, love"). Compare that to the 23 seconds it took Marcus' guys at Wembley Tyres to swap over my spare tyre, put on a new one, balance the wheels and all that (sample conversation: "don't mean to be rude, love, but I don't want yer 'ere. Quicker we get the job dan, better the business"). I'm better with the high-speed types.

I've been wondering about the word avuncular (in an uncle-like way, or something like that) - why isn't the word uncularity?

Do you know that if you call Direct Line Car Insurance, they can only give you an indication of the cost of car insurance, not an actual quote?

Word-up.

Now that murderous bloke isn't even from Camden any more, he's from North London. Soon, he'll be from Hertfordshire. I don't really get how news works: do they think we forgot?

Resolutions
If Mike can do it, I can too, right?

So, like the rest of the country - and uncanilly like Mike - these are my resolutions:

1 Be in bed by midnight
Shouldn't be so hard, right? I spend a huge amount of time faffing around because I'm a night person, and it has to stop...

2 Go to the gym before work three times a week
... because I have to get up early now

3 Eat healthily
although the year started off badly yesterday with a Pret a Manger sandwich followed by salty sweets

4 Keep writing
self explanatory, really

5 Do the work...
... and other such dictats, too numerous to enumerate

Yesterday, on the desk next to me, there were a bunch of cutely wrapped Japanese sweets - H and I tried one. Within milliseconds, we were spitting them out: they were like that stuff you put on your nails to train your mouth it doesn't like biting them. "Oh," exclaimed H, "those are those salty sweets everyone was talking about before Xmas".

Pavlovianally, trained me not to eat sweets for...at least a fortnight.

Salty sweets, I ask you. What is the world coming to?

There are people in my office who received letters to "Dear Fred Smith" - is this considered regular business practice now? (Obviously, they're called Fred Smith or whatever).

SAY NO TO STEP-CHANGES. All of them.

Word Up
Been a day of wordage: oddities, the BBC's e-cyclopaedia and "Lake Superior State University's annual list of words that should be banished for "mis-use, over-use and general uselessness"".

Or maybe just a slow news day all round? What's some body parts in Camden and murdered teenagers in Birmingham? Just a regular, twenty-first century day.

OK, OK, I'm going to work. I'm not skiving - it's just that because I'm doing business with the States, there's not a lot of point in getting there early.

Do you think it's possible that Tony Blair's a depressive? He's just not very Pollyana, is he?

I've often said of Jonathan Sacks - the Chief Rabbi - "he's not the messiah, he's just a very naughty boy", but this morning he excelled himself on the Today programme. I think this may bode well for the fact that - conceivably - I'm going to spend the rest of my life in an office. Don't know why: some kind of karmic-canonical-rabinnical thing.

Can't say that when I come back, I don't come back in style. Or at length.

And another thing...
I wrote another story: a satire on Anglo-Jewish life. I can never tell if it's good or crap; so far the votes from my readers are 2:1. Me, I'm ambivalent.

Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It's Back to Work We Go
There's a Jewish concept, which I can't be bothered to google about, called chol ha-mo'ed, literally, "days in between" and a couple of major festivals and big starts and finishes, and then a few days in the middle where it's still the festival, just less so.

You know where this is going.

So it's really felt for the last few days that the whole country is doing chol ha-mo'ed, and this can only be a good thing.

Tomorrow, I'm back to finish my derivatives contract, and I'm fairly sure I'll be one of a handful of people in the office, and I'm desparately hoping that when my para-boss left on Christmas eve, promising all the stuff I needed would be on my desk 2nd January, he didn't forget. Otherwise, I'll be back here. Or, er, getting my life in order before my real job starts mid-February.

The Bloggies....
... are open for nominations. Not that I'm hinting. Or anything.

Hey Chitty, You Chitty
Just got back from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at the London Palladium - fantastic night. I wouldn't naturally choose big-sound musicals, but I came out singing along and full of beans. My preferred choices are earnest, intellectual fringe things, and you always come out of those suicidal. M took me with S&B, his niece and nephew, and it was a real kids thing: great atmosphere, everyone clapping along, the car flying out over the audience.

I couldn't help noticing some sheitel (religious Jewish women cover their hair) wearing frummers, and when the Baroness stripped down to her basque, I kept thinking "look away, don't sully yourselves". Not sure their ESP was up to much, though.

That DNA/Raelian Thing?
Remember I told you about how I met a cool guy at a party and we talked about haircare products? He had curly hair, like me? We communed, on a hairproduct platform?

So last week, the story broke about the Raelians having cloned their first human child. And I'm interested in religions and the like, and I'm watching the story on the news, and then they say, "let's hear from Glenn Carter, the leader of the British Raelian movement." It's him, it's the bloke I met at the party! For some reason, he never mentioned he was a Raelian - but then, I never mentioned I was Jewish. Perhaps he was worried about anti-raelianism?

I am a celebrity magnet. You heard it hear first.

OK, OK, I'm back. Back with a vengance, back with the new year. Back from the brink. Back in town.