Hounded by Trolls

Things have been strange in a dull kind of way recently. Or maybe dull in a strange kind of way. I went singing in Devon, which was lovely, and to stay with a friend. She has an idyllic house in the deep country, two lovely children, a nice husband.... but this time round I had the honesty to admit to myself that her life would bore me stiff. So that was good. I always thought I wanted children, domesticity, the whole nine yards: I'm not saying I don't, just that if it doesn't happen, it won't be the catastrophe I used to think it was.

Work has been vile. Very busy, but with very little to show for it. I am working for a madman, and with several Norwegians. I had a six and a half hour conference call yesterday, during which at one point the Norwegians started singing a folk song. I am doing my best to think of myself as an unwitting participant in some management consultancy version of Big Brother: certainly, the pointless tasks and the yoking together of mutually antipathetic personalities is a big feature of my weekday life at the moment.

The strange thing is that I am writing a proposal. I have terrible trouble with writing stuff for work - none at all with this sort of stream of consciousness nonsense. I can witter on for hours in an email or on MSN (if your firewall bans it, try WebMessenger by the way - works for me) in a relatively literate and joined-up way. But I cannot write the sort of stuff we are supposed to write in proposals. I have just spent about four hours agonising about some total BALLS about change management: quite ridiculous. I don't care in the slightest about it. What I do care about, I am ashamed to say, is people who I think are less clever than me being able to read what I write and pick holes in it. That's why this sort of writing is OK and the proposal sort isn't. Well, it's part of it, anyway. There's also my sneaking conviction that this sort of writing is actually more worthwhile than going on about leveraging synergies.