Wednesday 8th February 2006

My work-filled regime got off to a stuttering start today. I was sat at my desk with everything neatly arranged and had already made sterling progress checking the BBC Sport website for the week’s football fixtures and even managed to complete two full games of Pub Pool 3D on my mobile phone – I was embroiled in a hive of productivity.

Then Renata rang and asked if I wanted to meet for lunch. Ideally I should have said “No. No I don’t. I’m trying to work here and have very nearly got to the top of the Pub Pool 3D leader board. Go away.� But I like Renata and haven’t seen very much of her recently so agreed. But to make sure my productive day wasn’t really interrupted, I suggested we meet in the pretentious Korova bar on Fleet Street because it has wireless internet access so I could continue with my work and play online games to my heart’s content.

There is a law about going to Korova that you have to be armed with an Apple iBook computer. If you’re not, they wont serve you a drink, or only serve you drinks in dirty glasses that they have spat in. Or they’ll pour you a drink and then purposefully spill it down you so you’re all wet and have to leave.

When I walked in they eyed me suspiciously, perhaps thinking that I didn’t own an Apple iBook and that I wasn’t setting up my own funky and ultimately failed dot.com business but I confounded them by getting out my Apple iBook and sitting in one of the orange booths with a smug look on my face that said ‘This online fashion outlet selling clothes from the former Eastern Block is going to be great’. My orange juice then arrived in an instant. In a beaker made of solid gold.

Meeting Renata is all very well and good but as I’ve probably already mentioned before she’s the world’s latest person. I don’t know why I let her get away with it because if I had my way lateness would be a crime just like mugging or theft. You should be able to sue people for lateness, after all they’ve brazenly robbed you of part of your life. The trouble being if you sued Renata for lateness she’d miss the court hearing and text the judge saying ‘on my way xx’.

She was, all in all, two hours late today but she did have an excuse that made me feel guilty for getting irritated. She’d just been to the doctors for a check up and discovered she had dangerously high blood pressure. This isn’t drastic in a young person but it certainly isn’t good, you can theoretically just keel over and die at any point. She was told that if she was 50 and had this level of blood pressure she’d be dead. Which means she wouldn’t have any blood pressure at all, I thought, but decided it best not to counter what the doctor had said even though he or she was clearly an idiot. He or she had probably been at work for seventy hours and so you can forgive them the odd mad and illogical statement.

So Renata wasn’t in the best of spirits and we set about discussing what could be causing this. She’s healthy in other respects and says she’s not unduly stressed. What other causes are there? And, more importantly, how does blood pressure rise anyway? If you’ve only got a certain amount of blood in your body, and a certain amount of veins for it to run around, how can the pressure increase? Curse biology and it’s confusing riddles. I wonder what would happen if your blood pressure increased to the highest recorded level by any human ever? Would you burst? If you made a tiny incision in a vein in your hand would the blood spurt fifty meters up in the air? And would that then reduce the pressure? I wish I was a doctor with answers to these important questions. Or not a doctor and just knew.

She’s going to have to go back for blood test results which may provide clues. But I pity her, it’s surely not nice to know your body is working against you. I put my body through hell but it always seems to try and adjust and mend to make me, i.e. it, feel better. We’re a team.

Chelsea football club are a team too and I watched some of their match with Everton tonight. Do you see what I did there? I linked me saying I work with my body to football by using the word ‘team’. You see, this is why I can write books and stuff whilst others can’t, I’m a Goddamn natural. A prodigy if you like.

The state of the pitch at Stamford Bridge has been in the news a lot recently but I had no idea how bad it’s got. It’s a veritable mud bath. This would be understandable if Chelsea were a lowly and rubbish non-league team, but ironic seeing as they have unlimited funds. They could have a new pitch for every match if they wanted. It’s like a Formula One racing team having an incredible car and the best drivers but instead of using a state of the art garage full of futuristic gear, they use the garage where Kevin Webster works in Coronation Street.

It’s like a cool new cocktail bar opening which only serves drinks made in a stupid 80’s SodaStream that taste horrible.

It’s like a great band recording a new album but then only releasing it on cassette.

Ha! Imagine that. It would get you so much media attention if you released an eagerly awaited album only on cassette. Even if you were a modestly successful band it would make you ten times as famous. People would have to try and find old tape players or see if they still sold them in Dixons. You’d be the coolest band in the world.

My question is, why do I sit here suggesting all these good ideas and never do them? I should be in a band and release an album only on cassette. Then I would be cool. I should open a bar that only serves horrible SodaStream drinks. I should set up an amazing Formula One team and then use the fictional character Kevin Webster to service it in his rubbish garage.

I am a fool for not grabbing these opportunities because someone else surely will.

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