THE APOSTROPHOPLURALISER

I had to sit through a meeting this morning in which the presenter had written out all his plurals with an apostrophe. Every slide...

Renewal's

Acquisition's

MTA's

RTM's

Revenue's

Income's

I shuddered in my seat, with a certain recoiling pomposity. Never use an apostrophopluraliser! You can't turn a singular noun into a plural with an apostrophe - not for decades (60s and 70s) not for acronyms (GCSEs), and definitely not for fully written words (Renewals, Acquisitions, Revenues)... 

Sure, it's okay as a possessive (The renewal's date had been set in the 60s)... but not just to turn a single thing into more-than-one thing! Don't do it!

I looked around uncomfortably to see whether anyone else had been riled by it. They were all glumly focused on the content, it seemed. I made a face and folded my arms as if to make a subtle point.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I sneakily took a look. Emmie (currently in Toronto) asked me how Monday was going. I quickly tapped out that I was 'okay' and in the middle of a long presentation, and then I sent it.

Then something really weird happened. I suddenly remembered Rachel talking yesterday about how to manage our bad attitudes. It just popped in to my head - a sermon in church from only twenty four hours ago. There it was, ringing silently. We all get attitudes sometimes. Don't be afraid to deal with them when you see them.

Okay. I get the message. I let the nefarious apostrophopluraliser go. What does it matter anyway? It's wrong, distracting and embarrassing but it's not for me to get stewed up about.

My phone buzzed again. It was Emmie.

"A preentation eh?" she'd written. "Sounds good!" She'd followed it up with a cheeky smiley emoji.

I checked back. Yep. I had sent her a typo... in the middle of lamenting someone about else's grammar. Brilliant.

BLANK

I closed the door behind me and stepped out of my parents' house, into the bright afternoon sunlight. The sun was silver today, low through the trees, casting long autumnal shadows from the cold, blue sky. It glinted from the corner of my sister's car like a hint of some forgotten summer.

I feel very blank at the moment. My skin is bad again - blotchy and cracked like old concrete, probably down to unseen stress. Meanwhile my heart ponders a thousand things inside but I can't figure out how to talk about them. Inside blank, outside cracking up.

I had been playing with my nephew. We have a game where we pretend we're on the radio - Uncle Matthew FM we call it. There's news, weather, traffic, chat and today, music from Fall Out Boy courtesy of YouTube. I like playing with the Niblings. It gives me an excuse to be silly, and unlike some of the grown-ups in my world, my nephews find me funny from time-to-time. But right in the middle of all of that, my Mum turned to my sister and in a quiet voice she didn't think I'd hear, she said:

"Isn't it a shame he doesn't have any of his own."

My heart sank. I suppose we don't always get what we'd like - even when we've prayed for it for thirty years. I would have loved being a dad, honestly. We can though, make the most of what we have. I gulped away a lump in my throat and carried on trying to be a pretend DJ.

More blankness then. I don't have any answers for the world around me - only the cliched things they've all heard before. I am no wiser than anything that can be googled - and no-one has much to add, only sympathy, and sometimes not even that.

"Do you feel like you're too young to be almost forty?" asked Mike today. I felt the need for a careful reply.

"I do, yes. But I'm not really a typical thirty-nine year old so it's a bit difficult to tell whether that's er... normal," I said, whimsically. "Plus I already look much older than forty anyway, so it's confusing."

He didn't say anything. I silently rubbed a hand across my chin and once again felt the thick stubble and cracked, raw skin. What in the world was there to disagree with? I am a dry and weary land, where there is no water.

I reversed down the drive, the cool setting sun blinding me from the front while I replayed all these conversations. Blank, like a sheet of paper - empty of thought, decision or action, yet somehow ready for potential. I gripped the steering wheel, blinked away a tear and drove home.

MARMITE MARKETING

I'm in love. It's funny how it blossomed, and in a quite unexpected way. We met in Sainsbury's, in the aisle with the jams and the marmalades.

It wasn't love at first sight. It happened a little more slowly than that. In fact, it wasn't until I got home that day that I realised what I'd been missing all these years...

SQUEEZY MARMITE! Oh! What an invention you are! What a dream! For years I've been scraping out the bottom of the jar with the tip of a buttery knife, scratching around through the thick brown glass. Not anymore! Now it's just a good old squeeze and out comes the Marmite - love it! I've got through two loaves of bread in the last ten days!

Whirwlind romances with household condiments aside (and I am sorry if I scared you), I actually really do like Marmite. I'm unambivalent about being a massive Marmite fan. I'll put it in a spag bol, deep in the tasty heart of a lasagne, or under a poached egg any day. It makes my mouth water even writing about it, actually. If there is a Marmite fence, I am clearly way out of sight of it.

Famously though, not everyone's over this side, eulogising a yeast extract. For some people, being in the same room as an open pot of the stuff is the equivalent of cracking open a jar of ammonia. That tangy, tasty smell swirls around their sensitive nostrils... and makes them want to retch. Believe it or not, I do sort of understand this too - there is something about that (delicious/vile) smell, that I agree is potent enough to push you either way. So far, either way in fact, that it's literally become a cultural meme to describe anything that broadly divides opinion as 'Marmite'. You either love it, or you hate it.

The people who make Marmite have strategically marketed it on the back of this inherent dichotomy. Imagine another product that was roundly despised by around half the population! Imagine Coca Cola actively promoting itself as 'tooth-rotting obesity juice', or Apple, bringing out a new iPhone with the slogan "iPhone XI - Half of you will seriously wish you stuck with Samsung."

Yet in this world of ever-widening divides and dividers, Marmite straddles us all. Their latest campaign offers free samples to find out whether or not you were 'born a lover or a hater'. Marmite, it seems, like a lot of notable dividers, doesn't mind being talked about - even if half of their strategy is displaying people who look like they're about to throw up having just eaten it.

Clever stuff.

Meanwhile, my 'love affair' continues. Though I think I should probably try cutting down on the toast.

UNCOMFORTABLE HARD WORK

My Dad helped me to start digging my vegetable patch yesterday.

He brought a spade, a half-moon shovel, a gardening fork, and a rake. We mapped out a square area by the fence and started digging.

It felt so good to be doing something with my Dad - especially something he enjoys. I flung the shovel in and poked around at the edges while he dislodged enormous clumps of earth with the gardening fork. 

My soil isn't great - there are loads of stones in it, and it seemed really dry and earthy. It will be hard work digging it all up - and my Dad says there is lots to do. However, he seemed really confident that this would be the hard bit, and that next year I could easily be pulling onions and carrots out of that same square of earth.

It is true that the preparation is sometimes the most difficult, yet the most important, bit of anything. Over the years I've come to realise that as a principle, you just can't skip it, even with talent. I've also come to realise that God doesn't skip it either.

There are lots of stones in my garden. The untended earth is dry and desperate for rain - and nothing will grow in it until it has been sifted, shaken, turned upside-down and tilled. That will be uncomfortable hard work. Meanwhile the roots of old plants and weeds criss-cross under the surface, long and ancient, hidden where no-one has seen them grow all these years. They must be uprooted, and the stones that have pervaded the earth must be removed and dealt with.

"It's got potential though," said my Dad, leaning on the fork. "Root vegetables are okay in sandy soil, so long as they go deep."

There were specks of rain in the air, so we packed the tools away in the shed, and I took him home. He comes to life when he's talking about how to help things grow. And I think to some degree, I come to life when he does. I love my Dad.

BEST COVERAGE

"It's official, you're getting the best coverage in South East England!" said the message, popping into life on my phone.

Thanks very much, EE. I wonder why me though, and not someone who lives closer to a radio mast or something.

Maybe Bob the Telephone Engineer? You know, the guy who has to climb up telegraph poles every now and again - surely he's getting better signal than me?

Or what about Kevin Bacon? He's got so much signal he keeps going on about it on actual television! It seems unlikely that I'm better connected than Kevin Bacon!

Well done if you got that.

Anyway, how do they even calculate these things? I'm sure I heard somewhere that there is entirely no-one who knows what 'two bars' of signal even means! How can they locate the person with the best coverage if they can't even define the scale?

'Two bars.' It's been dots for ages anyway, hasn't it? At least it has on the iPhone. So how 'official' is it?

I carried my phone off into the lobby and out into the car park. 3G disappeared and the dots were replaced by the familiar 'No Service'.

I dread to think what's happening to everyone else in South East England!

Except Kevin Bacon of course. I bet he's alright. 

THE BORG ASSIMILATOR

The other day, the Nestle 3000 went into meltdown and threw coffee all over the floor when Jamie tried to use it. He made a point of talking about clearing up the mess.

"For a while I was promoted to the job of 'cleaner'" he joked, as though he'd been reading the Big Book of Kitchen Chit-Chat.

Anyway, whether specifically because of that, or because for a while it's been chugging and spluttering an awful curious brown liquid (other than coffee), the famous old Nestle 3000 has finally gone the way of old coffee machines.

You thought the weird sky was apocalyptic? The destiny of the coffee machine seems much more significant. No more Nestle 3000? After all these years? Isn't there something about that in the book of Revelation?

The developers need panic not though, my caffeinated friends. For the ancient Nestle 3000 has been replaced...

By the Borg Assimilator.

Seriously, this thing has a touch-screen, blinks like a transporter beam and is almost sentient. It sits in the corner where the old vending machine was, like a colossus - quietly working out how it can take over the company. It has no buttons, just a smooth glass front - a skyscraper, a giant smartphone, projecting cheery animations of cups of mocha, americanos and espressos, ready at the swish of a finger and a flickering flash of bright blue light.

"New coffee machine! What are your thoughts?" I Skyped Eloi across the room.

"Hello! Much more nicer than the previous one," he said. Eloi's from Catalonia. "The coffee is a bit light (+water) but it is fine so far. I just do 2 espressos now!"

He's cut down from three then. I have no idea how he drinks it. I told him that that much coffee would keep me awake until Christmas. Imagine that, working away, typing faster and faster and filling every minute with caffeine-fuelled, rocket-powered emails and text files and spreadsheets. I'd be a wreck.

But perhaps that's the Borg Assimilator's plan, after all?

KLONK-DOIIIING

Here's a genuine Whatsapp message I sent to my buddy Chris while I was walking home, past the Himalayan Hotspot the other day.

"Hey man - how did the logistiCatch-up soon?"

I'm not normally so illiterate. At least, I don't think so. What happened? Did I time jump in the middle of a thought? Did a future version of me leap backwards by a few seconds and interrupt the me of the present? Perhaps I was kidnapped by aliens? You know the kind of thing - dark alley by your local Nepalese restaurant, bright light, blinky blinky, pokey pokey, flashback ray-gun and there you are with no memory of it, a slightly longer beard and a temporally displaced text message?

Well. None of that. What actually happened was that I was so engrossed in my phone that I had accidentally walked into a fence... and had pressed send on impact.

It went proper klonk as well, the fence did. You know that cartoony thing when Wiley E Coyote steps on a rake, or drives straight into a wall that's painted like a tunnel, and then he reverberates for a few seconds like a tuning fork. I'm sure I made that noise. A sort of a klonk-doiiiing sound while I processed what had happened.

There was no-one around to see me hold my head in my hands. No-one to fall about laughing or to tell me to watch where I'm (expletively) going. No-one was there to make a comment about anti-social media and the youth of today, and of course, there was nobody asking if I was alright.

I was okay though. I clarified what I meant to Chris, asked him about the 'logistics' of something or other, and the conversation moved on. He didn't need to know what had happened to me, mid-sentence, so I didn't tell him. I just slipped my phone into my pocket and walked home.

OPHELIA'S DUSTY APOCALYPSE

Well the big talking point today is (believe it or not) the sky.

It's currently orangey-green, which makes it look like we're working on Venus. Only not as hot, I suppose.

Apparently on Venus, you could leave a frozen pizza on a windowsill and it would be cooked within 9 seconds.

Not sure where I read that - presumably in Venutian Monthly's Notable Window Sills Feature Magazine*. Or maybe I made it up and I've forgotten.

Anyway, the sky's gone weird and there are jokes about it being the end of the world (as there always are when the sky goes weird).

Now, I love a world-ending cataclysm as much as the next man, but this is clearly just dust in the atmosphere. A little research proves it - Ex-Hurricane Ophelia is kicking up sand from the Sahara desert and swirling it over half of Western Europe.

But it's fun to play along.

"Looking odd out there, isn't it?" asked Mark, in the kitchen.

"Yes. Very peculiar," I replied, sipping tea and gazing at the lake. I was noticing how clear it looked after the green-dye incident a few weeks ago. "Still you know what they say," I said, "Green sky by day... end of the world."

He laughed, which was a relief. Well if you can't laugh at the end of the world, what can you laugh at?


*Check out their feature on Venutian blinds.

THE FOUR STAGES OF LOSING THINGS

I lost my wallet this morning. I went through my usual four stages of loss - puzzlement, panic, prayer and pragmatism. Then I found it down the side of the sofa.

Puzzlement is that head-scratching, must-be-here-somewhere feeling. A stage one loss can be very short - even a fraction of a second while puzzlement gets you solving the problem of wher... oh there it is. It can also last longer.

I bet there's a formula that you can use to calculate how long puzzlement lasts before it becomes panic. Panic is stage two and it takes over, sometimes completely. It's panic that gets me upturning shoeboxes and turning out drawers. It's panic that makes me leap from room-to-room and it's panic that makes me clutch my hair in desperation while I sit in a pile of jumpers and paperwork.

I don't know how you calculate the end of stage two. I'd guess there have been studies done that might prove it's less likely you'll find what you're looking for while panicking. I could believe it: you get blinded into a whirlwind. I was glad I live alone this morning.

My brain thunders through the options. Check the car? Drive to Sainsbury's, retrace my steps? Phone my Mum? I turn these options down while I flicker around the flat in a cartoon tornado. Nearly always, my head whispers the 'prayer option' and reminds me that it has 'always worked'.

It has, too. In the end I took a deep breath, switched out of stage two, sat down, closed my eyes and went straight into stage three. I prayed. I'm a little ashamed to say that these stage three 'help-me-find-my-stuff' prayers are probably some of my most sincere prayers. Afterwards, I thought about that a lot.

Anyway, stage three doesn't have to be long. But it does focus the mind. Within moments, my calmed mind was thinking about exactly what I did when I came in last night, and a picture of me with a cup of tea on the sofa came swimming into view. Stage four had already begun.

Stage four, the pragmatic approach is the one that usually comes up with a solution. Thankfully, this morning, the solution was finding the wallet, wedged between the bits of sofa that connect together. But it might not have been that - it might have been phoning the bank, phoning Sainsbury's out of purest hope, or finally asking my Dad for advice.

I slipped the wallet into my pocket, picked up my gym bag and swung out through the door.

'Now then. Where are my keys?' I thought to myself.

BOMB DISPOSAL TRAINING

I've never really been able to figure out what to do when I'm in a gloom.

I don't mean what to do to get out of it; I mean how to behave when I'm in it, which may, I suppose be sort of the same thing - but often it isn't.

Here's what I mean: I don't want to annoy my friends or my family. They are lovely people - patient, wise and long-suffering. But when I'm down, I know that for every ounce of patience, wisdom and long-suffering...ness... that they bring, I seem to have brought along a bucket of doom. And that has to be infuriating.

Even I can spot the signs though. I think someone used this phrase in a conversation with me recently... "I can see you're in one of those moods so..." ... and an alarm bell pounded inside my head.

But the real whimpering horror of a black-dog day is that the big black dog then tells you that because of this, this dreadful 'weakness'... you can't talk to anybody, and you shouldn't even try.

And that's what I mean by not knowing what to do. It's like being strapped to a time-bomb: you need someone to be with you, and you hope that they might help you feel better, but most people run away when they realise what you're carrying. So the black dog takes you home and you tick tock in the corner, protecting everyone you love by blowing yourself up instead.

I hate that dog. And mostly because it wants me alone with a bomb.

But what it forgets, and what it wants me to forget, is that there are bomb disposal experts out there. And that its own days are numbered.

So. Here's the deal - and you can consider this bomb-disposal training if you like.

When you spot the signs and you think I might be about to go into a terminal countdown, please try two things to diffuse me.

1. Cut the wire: tell me off and be firm about it like my friend did. Be honest, don't be nice. Seriously. Tell me I'm in a mood, that I'm being a so-and-so, and I will probably get the message. Snippety snip.

2. Submerge me. I mean, if you can, change the subject, make me laugh, switch gears, interest me, change the atmosphere, ask me what the capital of Somalia is, dunk me in something new and hold me there for as long as you can. Snippety snip, gluggity glug.

Meanwhile, I also will do the same if I see it. And, what's more, I'll keep trying to fight off the black dog days too - something which God is helping me with. And what I definitely don't want to do is to sit at home listening to the tickety tock and the festering thoughts while everyone I love is petrified I might blow up if they push the wrong buttons. No! Cut the wire. Push me underwater.

And then if anyone's getting it, it's the dog.


PS. Mogadishu.

WHAT REALLY MATTERS?

One of my sisters is five years older than me. She has three children, an ex-husband and a lot of life. She's funny and smart and kind and she's always looked after me. I love her.

"I met someone who knows you," she said, yesterday. I sipped my tea and looked inquisitive.

"Well... people know me," I said, trying to impersonate Ron Burgundy. The reference was lost though, and it just looked like I was being smug. I went a bit red.

"So, who?"

"Oh a lady called [Sandra]," she said. The lady's real name is not Sandra - I've changed it. "She goes to your church, I think."

"Okay. I know her," I said. More tea.

"Can you believe she actually thought I was younger than you? Ha!"

The implication of that hit me suddenly as though someone had thrown a bomb into the conversation.

Three things rang in my ears while I processed it.

Firstly, the conversational logic showed my sister was implying that she looks ten years younger than she actually is. Never really thought about that but okay.

Secondly, there is a chance that [Sandra] is terrible at discerning ages and her view is not reflected across the general concensus...

And thirdly, uncomfortably, that conversation in the kitchen floated back to me - the one where my colleague guffawed when I told him I couldn't remember a TV show from the seventies because I was 'still in my thirties' and he simply refused to believe it.

My fingers shook as I held the teacup. "Sounds about right," I said, in a melancholy fashion.

I have a weird feeling it might be all three of those things - though obviously I can't speak for [Sandra's] ability to determine how old a person is. It is quite likely then that I do look older than my older sister, and she looks younger than her younger brother.

The whole thing seems something trivial now, but I'm writing about it because yesterday it sent me spiralling into gloom. I need no assistance from people to figure out the enormous difference between the way I see myself and the way other people see me.

The question is: what really matters? And it's a deeper question than it seems, even if your heart has already leapt to an answer.

But I'll leave you, the rest of the discerning world, to think carefully about that.

ADRENALINE

Well, day 4 of the Malaise and I'm exhausted. My nose is on fire, my eyes are drier than a pack of old biscuits, my head is heavy, like a mucus-filled balloon, and I am more than a little bit bored.

Seems the office is half-empty too. Erica's sick - she must have caught a virus from... somewhere or other, I suppose. Junko's coughing from home (isn't it weird how we've all got colds at the same time) and I'm chugging through things here, in the quiet, interrupting myself with a phlegmy rattle and a volcanic sneeze every now and again. Like Mount Snottymanjaro.

I'll tell you what though - don't discount the power of adrenaline. I went to the gym this morning and for a brief moment, I felt completely clear. No sneezing, no coughing, clear airways and a striaght head. It must have done me at least a little bit of good. Though by the time I got back to the car I was off again.

Maybe that's the answer. Perhaps I should get some adrenaline going by running round the lake?

Although that's not even possible I think. For some reason, they're putting a floating meeting room in it and the path is blocked off by a crane.

Nope - I shall have to get my adrenaline boost elsewhere. Drugs? A carefully stage-managed fright by a surprise accomplice? Perhaps.

Or perhaps I'll just get on with the day job.

THE TECHNICAL AUTHORS' VALLEY

Well, another day, another presentation in which I look dolefully at my boots and wonder what in the world is going on.

I don't think it's down to presentation skills. I think it's down to content. And so while the roomful of developers watches a black screen with white digital code flashing by, accompanied by a narrative that might as well be in Swahili, I wonder once again what a Rest API is, how to generate unit tests and why I'd want to output JSON or XML files and (crucially) why I'd care about it. It's a mystery, but as a technical writer, it's my...

professional duty

... to remain as distant as possible from the cogs and levers and commands and plugins. And so I should. Probably.

It often seems that we work in the valley between two tribes out here in the docs team. And these two tribes know exactly what they're doing of course, but have entirely no empathy for the other.

Like dutiful mediators, we technical authors saddle up to Developer Land with our notebooks, and we carefully scribble down exactly what they tell us. Then, we scurry back and write it out properly, before scuttling up the other side to Customertopia, where a baffled group of people try to make sense of it without looking cross.

The Customertopians of course, send us back with lots of questions, some of which might just turn out to be risible on the yonder hills. Wearily, we trot back down between the lengthening shadows.

Then at night, next to our wooden huts, struggling to keep warm by the firelight under the stars, we hear the sound of wailing and we suddenly realise that we can never quite tell where it's coming from.

-

Er. I might have stretched that metaphor a little too far. But that's what happens in meeting rooms where you don't get a single word of anything that's being said! You end up drifting! Wittgenstein was right - if a lion could talk English, there's no way we'd understand it! And in a roomful of developers, me and the lion would be lost together.

Though, I bet the lion would be a bit bolder than I was about getting out of it.

"Any update from docs, Matt?" asked someone, suddenly rousing me from my daydream. The presentation had ended and they were circling the room for our team news and status.

I blinked and then started talking. I've got no idea what I said but it must have sounded good.

Bring on the lion, I thought to myself.

WHY MAN-FLU DOESN'T EXIST

Oh! I forgot! I forgot that I get colds one day at a time. Yesterday, the throat and the barrage of sticky strepsils, today the chesty cough.

That means tomorrow I'll be exploding with mucus like a snotty volcano, and my little red face will spend most of the day buried in tissues. I'll probably wake up with a face like a scene from Alien, and a head that spins on the inside as though I've just driven four times around a mini-roundabout.

Now then. Yesterday, while we set up the stage for church and I spluttered like a tommy gun, someone I know (who will remain nameless) had the cheek of describing it as 'man flu'.

'Man-flu', as you know, is a term invented by women to describe actual flu, as they perceived it, encountered by men. The theory is that men can't cope with sickness as well as women, so hilariously, a sore throat or a chesty cough knocks us out of action, where a woman would simply blow her nose, ask what the fuss was, and get on with things.

I don't think there's any scientific evidence for this, ladies, but even if there were, don't you think it a little sexist to point it out?

A friend of mine (a girl) once wisely said,

"There's nothing good or bad that happens - only our reactions..."

Which did get me thinking a lot at the time.

Well, there is no man-flu either then: there's just flu, and whether or not we complain about it from what feels like our death-bed... or we bravely march on with the day. That's it.

If we do manage to soldier on though, lads, like the hearty warriors we are, what should we call it? Presumably, we should call it what it is: a cold, the flu, or (if we want to be as dramatic as the ladies seem to expect us to be) 'influenza'.

Though I admit, it does sound rather Victorian, imposing and serious if you answer the question: "What's up, are you okay?" with "No not really, I have influenza."

So that's why I don't believe man-flu really exists other than a cheekily sexist construct.

If I really had man-flu I'd be whinging about it to all and sundry as though it were the end of the world.

Good job I haven't gone on about it then.

ON THE STREPSILS

Well, I've lost my voice. Don't get too excited; I do expect to find it again,

Meanwhile I'm on the strepsils.

Funny things, strepsils: little sweet tablets you only eat when you're ill. They're actually making me feel a bit queasy today, which is ironic.

So perhaps I wasn't as immune from that 'irritable virus war zone' as I had hoped! Or perhaps I'd be a whole lot worse if I hadn't been praying or if I hadn't been gymming.

Well, we don't get to know the what-ifs so there's not much point in speculating is there?

Is it possible that strepsils are just placebos? They seep stickily down the throat and soothe the inflammation for a while. But do they actually do anything else? I mean a teaspoon of honey does exactly the same thing. 

They are well-marketed if they don't - much like those probiotic drinks which used to bamboozle us with the 'science' of 'friendly bacteria' rebalancing the bacterial culture in our stomachs, which, I now understand... is altogether hokum.

Anyway. I've lost my voice - which I can't say out loud at the moment, but there it is.

In hindsight, it might also be due to pushing it in worship on Friday and today. I had intended to leave most of the singing to Rory today but when he arrived, it turned out he had a sore throat too. I smiled in wonder and popped in a strepsil.

IN THE IRRITABLE VIRUS WAR ZONE

"Could you er, refrain from coughing the lurgy around please?" asks Software Developer A.

"Er, well, I'll try," replies Software Developer B, a little helplessly. I'm with you, Software Developer B; I'm not sure what I could do about it either.

Nonetheless, Software Developer B is not alone. I'm in the cross-fire of sneezes and wheezes and coughs and diseases today. From the usual galumphing snortles to the earth-shaking death-rattle, from the slimy shudder to the rapid-rate phlegm-clearer, all the pantheon of disturbing coldy noises are here.

"I'm convinced that going to the gym has prevented me being ill this week," I said, turning to Erica.

"They do say exercise builds your immunity," she said.

I'll be going tomorrow morning.

Meanwhile, the malaise spreads all the way beyond the physical symptoms, to attitudes too, it seems! There is a distinctive grumpiness in the air. If I close my eyes, I can almost feel it, like Yoda and the Force.

It's becoming harder and harder to maintain my own atmosphere though, sitting here with my eyes shut.

"Matt, what are you doing?"

"Oh. Just thinking." I flick them open. It occurs to me that the dark side is stronger than the light, while my eyes re-adjust.

I was very affected yesterday - properly grumpy. Being grumpy is a bit like being a volcano - the only way people know it is if you erupt at them. And I decided to bottle it up, deep within as though I were just another mountain-with-a-hole-in-the-top.

I got the feeling though that people could tell. I'm not exactly brilliant at hiding my emotions. Then I snapped at Winners while we discussed gun control over WhatsApp.

Today though, despite the irritable virus-war-zone, things are much brighter. The dentist was happy with me (and notably quick!), the sky was blue and cloudy instead of windswept and rainy, and I made people laugh in a meeting again, oh, and even the tea tasted better!

Hope I'm not a yo-yo.

Plus, in more magical news, the Lawnmower Wizards cut my grass! I couldn't believe it as I stood there, curtains in hand, peering out from my bedroom. I beamed to myself, almost uncontrollably, and then laughed. The Tale of the Lawnmower Wizards is one for another day, I think.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to work out how to protect myself from the barrage of infections that rolls like thunder around the office, while keeping myself alight like a little beacon of hope in the grumpy war of sneezing software developers.

With a fair wind and a good old workout, hopefully I'll be just as chipper tomorrow.

COMPOS MENTIS

1215. Runnymede

"Sorry your Majesty, but don't forget..."

"Don't forget what? I've already agreed to your contemptible terms, De Clare. What on earth could you and your band of scurrulous... noble...men... possibly wish to add?"

"Sire, you must sign to agree..."

Richard De Clare looks furtively to the other barons. There's an uncomfortable shuffle between the spears and flags while they try to avoid eye contact.

"... the tank clause."

"The tank clause?"

"Yes, Sire. Here. Every man in England... shall be entititled... to his own... armour-plated vehicle with large-bore cannon and rotating weapons turret."

"What?"

"A tank, your Majesty. It's a sort of moving castle."

"Every man in England. Are you insane? And is there such a device?"

"There is, Sire. Just here, Your Majesty, above the line."

--

England, 900 years later...

"It's just a tool really. I need it for off-roading."

"Have you thought about a Land Rover?"

"A Land Rover? That'll get stuck in the mud before you can say 'fire in the hole' old boy. Look, I'm not a madman. I'm not going to drive it through some shopping centre. I'm going to use it in the countryside, you know sensibly."

"But what about if you lost control of it or..."

"I'm still compos mentis! And I know what I'm doing."

"But not everybody does."

"You mean... what happened..."

"I mean what happened. Well it was awful."

"It was. Of course it was. But that guy was mentally ill. He had serious problems at home!"

"He had serious problems in the tank too."

"If I'd been there, in mine, I'd have blasted him clean off of the road before he'd had a chance to breathe."

"I'm not sure you are compos mentis."

---

"Listen, mate. It's our constitutional right to own a tank. You ain't gonna come an' take my T-90 off me. You'll have to prize it from my cold, dead... er... garage."

---

USA, some time in the future...

"You wanna go where?"

"England."

"Oh my."

"I want to see the sights."

"Only sights there are in the cross-hairs, buddy. It's the tank capital of the world. You can't move for the things. And the country's like a construction site - no, wait, a war zone. Stay here where it's safe won't you?"

"Where it's safe?"

"Sure. Where it's safe."

THE AUTUMN OF THE LAST CENTURY

I stood there for a moment, lost in a memory. A gentle breeze rustled the trees and disturbed the golden path in front of me. Dappled shadows fell gently across the crispy leaves of Autumn.

The memory was old. I was kicking leaves through Sainsbury's car park with my friend Jacqui. She thought it was a funny thing for two newly enrolled Second-Years to do. I was less stuffy in those days I guess. She was just one of those people who couldn't care what anybody thought.

How has the season changed so suddenly? Summer blinked, it rained for a few days, and now it's Autumn again - silken spider webs, cool blue skies and long shadows on glittering grass. I'm not complaining.

Seasons do have a habit of changing without warning. You look around you and realise that everything is the same, but sort of different - changing while you watch. It isn't anything you can stop. It is how it happens.

Jacqui lives in San Diego now. At least she did in the days of Friends Reunited and I've lost touch since. That's how long ago university was - not just pre-fakebook but pre-Friends-Reunited! Her and I were kicking leaves about in that supermarket car park, in the Autumn of the last century.

I walked along the path and scuffed the leaves, this year's leaves, with my trainers. Crunch, swish, crackle, shuffle they went underfoot - a tiny tide of yellow, crispy remnants of a leafy green summer. No less beautiful, I suppose. Just different.

OXBURGH HALL AND THE PRIEST HOLE

It's hard to imagine the police force raiding a stately home, looking for baptist ministers, hiding in blocked up toilets.

But that's exactly what happened. 

Well. Okay, not really. There was no police force, but certainly officers of the king (or perhaps the Tudor Queen) in this case. And no, not baptist ministers of course. But it may as well have been! They weren't looking for the ends of snapped nylon guitar strings, rainbow straps, half-drunk cups of dishwater tea, or sock-clad sandal wearers. They were looking for catholic priests, who, at the time, were so illegal that they had to be hunted down and rounded up.

And in grand houses, like Oxburgh Hall, where I was today, you had a nifty mechanism for hiding your local priest should the mafia pop round. Pop open the trap door and squeeze him into the priest hole. In you go, Father.

"Do you reckon they got down here with all their robes on?" I asked Anita and John as I slid through the hole in the floor. I imagined the mitre and garment slipping over the cool stones, the priest athletically collecting up his skirts and then lighting a candle while the wooden door creaked shut above him. Then the footsteps.

Oxburgh Hall has been the home of the Bedingfields since the Fifteenth Century - a magnificent moated pile in the flat green fields of Norfolk. It's an unusual combination of grand and cosy - two things that I don't think should be exclusive of each other, but often are in these places. I rather think that might be because to some degree or other, the Bedingfields still live there (presumably still writing cheesy pop records as if it were 2003).

I sat on a narrow wooden bench. There were cubby holes for bottles, plates of cheese, a cold ham and a statue of the Virgin Mary, though all empty today of course. She'd long gone. But a priest could have been quite comfortable down there while soldiers rattled around for rosary beads above. Although very dangerous, I did wonder whether it made being a priest a whole lot more exciting - a persecuted minority, underground, practising a secret faith that was treason to the law of the land and its greatest ruler. And all that was only four hundred years ago - relatively recent, given where we are now!

I wonder. Would I hide a baptist minister in the airing cupboard if the intolerance police popped round for a visit? 'Singing,' you say, officer? Kum-by-ya? No, I don't think so. Could it be the wind?

Or more daringly still, would I be the minister himself? Not necessarily baptist but maybe, say, a hip charismatic with a funky old beard, skinny jeans and pair of Converse? Or perhaps just that bold old integrity and radical kindness that set early Christians and ministers apart.  If it were illegal to be such a minister, or a priest, would there be enough reason, enough about my life to say I definitely should be down that priest hole with Father Trendy?

The guide told us that Oxburgh Hall had been searched twice, according to records in London, but no evidence of priestly ministry was ever found.

As I hauled myself up and out through the stone floor, I wondered just what exactly might be visible in my own house.