Concrete Pencil: Looking back

The football seemed more boring than normal (0-0 after the first leg) but on the news the economy looked set for a cracking year.

The baby woke up a bit later to some strange-sounding harp music and filled up two bottles before her bath.

My train had got more packed the closer it got to Moorgate though on the plus side I finally got to grips with that book I was reading (Time's Arrow only makes sense if you read it from back to front.)

Work was where the weird stuff really started. I had a list of about 20 pages I had crossed off my list but during the day I slowly erased the line and undid, and killed off, all the words and pictures.

In the meeting room behind where I sit some HR type scrubbed off all the ranked Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of his SWOT analysis. All over the office people looked broody and angry for hours before exploding into big raging rows, after which they very quickly calmed down.

At lunch I gradually retched up and dropped from my mouth 20 or mouthfuls of beef and cheddar sandwich, then took it back to Birley, who promptly paid me a fiver for it.

Thinking about it, I couldn't keep anything down all day. Water I spat into plastic cup after plastic cup and I got £1.50 for a spewed-up latte.

I think we probably shouldn't go into what happened in the toilet, but I think you'll get enough of a picture if I tell you it was a surprise.

Then my trains home were hellish busy and on them even the ladies seemed to be reading the papers from the sport pages inwards.

I walked backwards down the hill (what is it with that today?) and backed into my home where my wife and child had already gone to bed.

I snuck to the kitchen for a quiet bowl of muesli with my laptop and browsed the newspaper websites (a bit late, but never mind).

Then, for reasons I still don't really understand, I opened this column in Google Docs and then slowly, letter by letter, deleted it.