The afternoon is less than lyrical

The morning was spent idyllically: working on my poetry and companionably swapping a bit of email with Matty and Kate.

By the afternoon however I was feeling a bit slow in the head. Unfortunately this coincided with Al giving me a complex brief. I had to look at 42 pages of emails, with seven supporting documents to cross reference. After wanting to bang my sluggish head on the table for a couple of hours, I began to piece it all together. Some time later, as I was dealing with a paper jam on my printer, I reverted to a saved version of the file which had none of my work in. So at 5:30pm I managed to erase three and a half hours work in one second. I had to resist the temptation to thrash my laptop and surge bellowing with rage into the Twitten.

After explaining that the work will be a tad late, I slumped dejectedly on my gold sofa, eating the very last of my chocolaty Christmas things and watching Frasier till things felt better. I will have to get up early tomorrow to do it all again. Oh joy.

Received a highly organised PowerPoint presentation of holiday snaps from Romy when she and Toby, Joan and Dick were in Belize. Lovely shot in there of Mayan ruins which I haven't worked out how to steal yet.

I'm still deaf, which is irritating. I need to go back to the quack. But I just returned from a walk down by the sea, which was dark and rough and smelling seaweedy. The sea makes everything seem fine, and it is good to know it is so close.