Top Gun

6.45 am ... Heavy at the core, like I've swallowed a bucket of cement. All the lights are on in the office. Flip, click, up with the laptop lid and another working day begins. Time doesn't just fly when you're enjoying yourself. Bodies drift in over time, my deadlines are out of my control. I am more or less told to go to a meeting at 8.30 against my better judgement. Thirty minutes later I am out, duty done. By 11.00 there is a semblance of control and the photocopiers are sweating and groaning to get there before high noon. Other people are chatty and in thank god it's Friday mode; I'm not. The sense of cement goes and I finally manage to eat something; a couple more meetings, a walk in the sun (first time in three working weeks), lunch at 3.00 (Sainsbury's microwave spaghetti and tomato sauce), a full frontal assault on the swollen email box, and then, at. 5.40 pm:

The journey home.

Surrey is beautiful. The people are sometimes annoying - what can you do with a county with eleven Tory MPs including one that currently figures heavily in the news and who is his own cockney rhyming slang - but the sunlit roads on a hot May evening are stunning, the shadows flickering on fields of rape and the horses grazing ...

Ignore everything I have just written, it's just an exercise in literary pretension.

This is Top Gun, the man formerly known as The Smiling Giant. Life moves on. He is older, cooler, and definitely classier.

Good news, managed a full half hour on the exercise bike. Had goats cheese salad with balsamic vinegar. Watched Doctor who fighting vampires in Venice. Bailed out on Tom Cruise in Vanilla sky after twenty minutes. It was annoying me, and anyway we now have our own Tom Cruise ...