Got those No Post Today Blues

When you work from home as a freelancer, life becomes a series of tiny rituals and habits, signposts that help you navigate a way through the day. Once you become self-employed, it's all too easy to let a day fritter away into nothing. You surf the web, you read your emails, you surf the web again in case anything's changed or happened in the last ten minutes (inevitably, nothing has), you plan lunch, you agonise about your procrastination (a particularly self-defeating form of procrastination, if ever there was one), you decide to have a mid-morning snack, on and on the last goes, all to stop you going quite barkingly insane due to the absence of having anybody else to talk to. (You also find yourself writing endlessly long sentences without aid of punctuation, and using brackets and sub-clauses like this one far too much - see what I mean?) Infinite recursion beckons like two mirrors facing each other in a confined space. Eventually, you'll reach a point where you can remember what the point of what you started writing in the first place was...

All of that is a terribly long-winded way of saying I didn't get any post delivered today and feel utterly bereft as a consequence. Is that how you spell bereft? It doesn't look right now it's in front of me. Hang on, I'll check the dictionary... Yes, it is. In fact bereft appears just before beret in my dictionary, a piece of headwear that only looks good on Frenchman and particularly cute women. Claire Grogan in Gregory's Girl - now that was one saucy use of a beret. I once interviewed her when she was a present on BSB, in the days of squariels and the like. Didn't have the nerve to say I fancied her something rotten as a spotty teenage youth growing up in New Zealand. Probably because I was a spotty journalist in my twenties when I met her. Plus she had a scar on her face (from a car crash, I think) and I spent all my time trying not to stare at it while singularly failing to do so, like Austin Powers meeting someone with a mole. Bollocks, I've wandered off the point again.

My dictionary has two words at the top of each page, the one on the left telling you what's the first word defined on that page and the second word telling you - well, you've guessed the rest by now. On the same page that features beret and bereft, the last word is beriberi - a disease that seems to have fallen out of fashiion. Do diseases have fashions? You could have Paris Disease Week. Models parading along catwalks, displaying the latest, coolish trends in ill health. This season's hit tip - leprosy is the new bird flu. Or maybe not.

The first word on this page of the dictionary is bentonite. For you long-serving Doctor Who fans (I refuse to call them Whovians, what a crap word that is), bentonite is not some obscure reference to Sgt Benton from the UNIT years. At least, I don't think it is - you be the judge: bentonite n. a clay that swells as it absorbs water; used as a filler in various industries. ORIG after Fort Benton, Montana, USA, where found.

Sorry, what the hell was I talking about? Oh yes, got no post today blues. So, yes, I'm feeling the absence of my daily delivery of platinum credit card offers, pointless catalogues from stationery suppliers and the life. I've been trying to console myself with Poor Man's Bruschetta: toast two slices of bread, spread them liberally with butter, slice some tomatoes that actually possess flavour (unlike the vast majority of fruit and vege found in supermakets) on top of the toast, then sprinkle with fresly ground salt and pepper. Yummy.

Am now eating a banana. Ho hum.