Greg's Helpful Contribution to International Relations

I was too cross about what happened when Greg and I went out last night to write about it at the time, not to mention too tired. I'm still really pissed off with him, though he is looking a bit shamefaced this morning, not to mention very hungover.

I feel surprisingly alert, though, which I can only ascribe to the adrenalin that went pounding through my body while we were being thrown out of the restaurant.

Suffice to say that now we are banned from The Star of India because Greg decided it would be funny to order an "Osama Balti" and a "Semtex Surprise."

God knows how we escaped with our lives. I was so embarrassed - and that's my favourite Indian too. Now I can't ever go there again, thanks to bloody Greg, who spent the rest of last night in a collapsed state on the couch in our living room, demanding to know how "any ordinary, educated, hardworking family" like mine could manage without Imodium in the medicine cabinet.

Luckily, Max was finding Greg funny. I wasn't, which is why I went to bed in disgust. I knew we shouldn't have had all that gin before we arrived at the restaurant.

Greg's being no help at all today, either, even though we're so behind on our work now, that it's going to be a nightmare trying to catch up. I do wish that TheyWorkForYou.com would acknowledge that, sometimes, delays in responding to constituents are unavoidable. Recording our response times is so horribly unforgiving.

Maybe I'll write to them and suggest that they start taking account of some of the challenges we face before they give us our ratings. After all, I bet even they couldn't write letters while being hosed down in a public place.

Honestly, I can't believe I thought this week was going to be bearable. It was next week I was dreading, when the full horror of Recess will be upon us but, now, joining Mr Ellis in a sky-dive is becoming more and more appealing - if he ever gets round to throwing himself off the multi-storey car park, that is.

Come to think of it, I probably should have suggested that he try a practice run while the bouncy castle was still there to provide a nice soft landing. Which is more than Greg got when the owner of The Star Of India pushed him out of the door last night.

After This Evening's Celebration of Life - An Update....

The rest of the day is spent trying to find ways to explain to the usual suspects why we couldn't answer the phones yesterday. We can't tell them the truth, because that'd just give them ideas, and I don't ever want to have to go through that again. We just say that there was an "emergency" in the building and try to leave it at that. This works, until late afternoon, when Mr Beales rings back.

"You lot can't keep nothin' from me," he says, apropos of nothing in particular.

"Excuse me?" Now what?

"It's in the paper. 'Terrorist fears spark full-scale evacuation of local office.'"

Does he have to sound quite so smug about it?  Mind you, I am impressed he can read such long words. Then follows the verbal equivalent of a particularly ungraceful fencing match, as I try to side-step Mr Beales' attempts to extract the juicy details. By the time I've got him off the phone, I'm as keen to get drunk as Greg is. We decide to go straight to the pub from work, and then on to The Star of India.

This proves to be an exceedingly unwise decision, but now it's very late and I'm far too distraught to even write about what's just happened, so it'll have to wait until I'm calmer. We could've sparked an international incident, for f*ck's sake. Thank God that poor waiter has no idea who we work for, or that'd be all over tomorrow's bloody paper.

Fall-Out, Preventative Measures and Unforeseen Hazards.

Bloody hell, I don't even get a lie-in this morning. Am hoping the office will have to stay closed all day so I can lounge around relaxing - as far as it is possible to relax while waiting to hear if you're going to die - but instead I get a call about 9:30am saying I can re-open the office, oh joy. The results are back from Porton Down, and it turns out the powder wasn't harmful to breathe in - though it was potentially explosive. At least we don't have to keep taking the tablets now.

Then Fiona phones to say she's changed her mind about working here since hearing about what happened yesterday, so that's another intern we've managed to lose within their first week. Can't say I blame her for being nervous as, when I see today's mail sitting on my desk, I don't actually want to open it. I consider sticking it all in one of the big grey plastic HOC* envelopes and sending it to the girls in the Westminster office, so that, by the time they send it back to me, it'll at least have passed through the scanners at the House of Commons. But then I realise that this will slow down our turnaround time, and The Boss won't tolerate that. Not for the first time, I wish death and destruction on both him and TheyWorkForYou.com.

So there is nothing for it but to open the bloody post myself. I hold each envelope out in front of me as if it was a bomb, then poke a letter opener into one corner before turning my back and ripping the blade through the top of each one. This achieves the dubious benefit of making me feel better while I'm doing it, but the results then irritate the hell out of me, because I seem to have cut through the top third of every letter in the process. I have to get Greg to stick all of them back together before we can even start to reply to them.

Greg says that he is so traumatised by having had to expose his body to a "bunch of gym-toned civil servants in a public place" that we are going out tonight to get drunk, in order to obliterate the memory. This seems like a good idea. At the time. When will I ever learn?


*HOC - House of Commons, as usual