I’m out of the office way too much at the moment so poor blog is suffering. Must get my home internet access sorted, slovenly dog. Along with the non-existent blinds at my windows. Along with my dust-laden carpets. Along with along with. All these things that I’m definitely going to do now I’ve got no show to distract me.

So today (which was really yesterday by the time I’ll post this) I spent on the train to and fro a client’s office on the other side of the Lake District. It’s a startlingly beautiful train route from Edinburgh, through Carlisle and Lockerbie and Oxenholme and other pastoral sounding places. And the sun was obligingly showing off the green green countryside to best effect. One of the guys I work with said last year en route to a meeting down there that he thought the Lake District should be razed to the ground and I always think of him fondly when I make this journey now.

Anyway it would have been a perfectly inspirational journey for setting to work on my unwritten masterpiece but on the way down there, I had a presentation to write and on the way back, I managed to get immersed, with a sugar and caffeine fuelled intensity, in a (now ridiculously overly prosaic) proposal.

I would mention that when I then got back to my house, the Man At The Bus Stop was walking, Panama Man casual, up the street to the cashpoint and the Man Who Lives Opposite was sitting at his laptop as dishevelled as he was in last night’s caught-out-in-Costcutter trip. But Russell’s brother is apparently becoming alarmed at the frequency with which I mention these fellows, not realising these are purely anthropological observations. So I shan’t dwell on them.