Il bloggo

Forty years ago today, man first set foot on the moon. I’m slightly envious of people like my dad who stayed up all night to watch it on a fuzzy black-and-white TV. He thought we’d be on Mars within a few years and have conquered pretty much the whole solar system by the end of the century. The Apollo 11 moon landing came at the end of a revolutionary decade, when there were no limits. Boris Johnson, who was five at the time, doesn’t think he’ll live to see a man walk on Mars, and despite being sixteen years younger than the Mayor of London, neither do I. By the way I think Boris is absolutely priceless – just watch this wonderful Youtube video of him talking about the Olympics.

I’ll never ever put other people’s stuff on TradeMe ever again. Ever. At the weekend things went horribly wrong. Fortunately the mess seems to have cleared itself up, and Julie now has a useful pile of cash, but working as a middle man is fraught with all kinds of difficulties I’d never even considered.

I felt down on Saturday, and with all those TradeMe shenanigans I couldn’t face going to the Bastille Day thing. Besides I was supposed to make something edible to take along, which I hadn’t done. I baked a quiche anyway, just for myself, but while the insides turned out fine the pastry was completely leatherised, and certainly not edible by anyone except me.

I broke my promise of no poker till September but I think I have an excuse. I got an email from PokerStars telling me I’d just received $2 but that I had to play at least one hand of real money poker in the next week or else I’d lose it. So I played five hands of ultra-low-stakes hold ’em and logged out. I still spent a fair chunk of the past week thinking about poker, even dreaming up new games that I know I’ll never play because who will I play them with?

Tonight I had my first Italian class. I got lost on the way there, and when I did arrive at the class I just wanted to go home. Everybody knew everybody and they all had worksheets that were full of complex Italian. It was all very intimidating. Eventually the teacher arrived - she was clearly not the Matteo I was expecting. It turns out they run three classes at the same time and I'd got the wrong one. When I found the right class, the real Matteo was great and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was very rusty but hopefully it'll start coming back.

I’ve got no idea what I’m doing at work any more, and even less idea why I’m still there. My colleagues are writing board papers and designing sophisticated computer models while I’m sitting at my desk trying not to go insane.