Doofus was somewhat confused that after leaving a message for Mr Behr at the London Institute of Zoology he hadn't called her back:

Doofus: That person you left me the message for didn’t call back.
TKK (for it is he): Which person?
D: Mr Behr.
TKK: Mr Behr? He didn’t call you back?
D: No. Are you sure he was asking for me?
TKK: Well he had your number.
D: Maybe he made a mistake?
TKK: Mr Behr made the mistake?
D: Yes.

At this point one of my colleagues (who was in on the joke) left the room because the effort of trying not to laugh was becoming painful for her.

A couple of weeks ago in the weekend Guardian, amongst the many superfluous extras they insist on packing into it, was a supplement pronouncing the fantastic nightlife of Camden Town (which was later shamelessly cut and pasted into one of the shitty free London newspapers forced into commuters’ hands during weekday evenings).

Apparently, Camden is going through a “revival” not seen since the height of Britpop (Menswear and Powder: where are thee now?), and included a fab guide on how to spend 24 hours in Camden (other than the popular habit of the natives of being slumped against a piss-stained wall with a can of strong lager in your hand)

I’ve lived in London since 1995, and Camden is still the shithole it was then and is today.

Last Friday I’d arranged to meet someone in CT (their choice of location, natch), and in the space of five minutes was offered “skunk”, “drugs, anything”, “puff” (or perhaps the guy was just being offensive) and a bike (one not very careful owner) for £25. And this was just at Camden Market.

What wasn’t mentioned in the Guardian’s groovy supplement was how Camden has the highest suicide rate of any local authority in England.

Frankly, it ain’t surprising. If you can walk down a high street and count more than six 99p stores, an Argos and three Irish pubs then you know you’re in some kind of socio-economic and existential hell.

Spend 24 hours (without topping yourself) in Camden? It's harder than you might think.

You can't beat the classics.

I took a 'message' for Doofus this morning while she was out of the office. When she got back she found out that a Mr Behr (think about it) had called and could she ring back. Being a thoughtful chap he left his number.

Doofus gets on the case, rings the number that was left, which just happened to be for the London Institute of Zoology, and leaves a message on their answerphone asking if "Mr Behr" could call her back.

Well it's almost 1pm and he hasn't returned her call. I guess he must be busy.

Last week some friends finished their psychology exams, and to celebrate got incredibly drunk. Despite my having finished my psych exams just over a year ago, I joined them to celebrate and get incredibly drunk as well.

It probably explained why I was outside Lincoln’s Inn Fields at 3.am. convincing a female friend that climbing into the park wasn’t the best idea in the world, but if we were going to do it the less precarious route would be to climb in via the top of the bins adjacent to the gates.

Instead of sleeping on the lawns we decided to go back to her place and, more specifically, her bed. I was keener to go back to mine, simply because being in possession of a weak bladder means numerous pissing trips to the toilet after an evening knocking back the beers, and being disorientated, desperate and in a strange house can be problematic when you’ve gotta go and, frankly, anywhere discrete will do.

When we got back she offered me the use of a toothbrush in case I was one of those weirdo freaks who insists on cleaning their teeth before going to bed. I neglected to mention that I was one of those weirdo freaks who also flosses, uses interdental brushes and mouthwash while cleaning, but thought I’d save revealing my obsessional nature for another time.

All I’ll say is that it’s a bloody good thing I took up the offer to clean my teeth, because my mouth was the only hygienic thing in that bedroom. Suddenly her desire to climb into a locked park at 3 in the morning became more understandable.

I’m not saying my place is never on the slovenly side, but when it is if it was I’d probably defer on the inviting people back option.

How do I start describing her bedroom? Well the walls were white. Originally. Granted the ceilings were high (although rather disconcertingly low on one side of the room) and would have made the cobwebs difficult to reach, but that’s why stepladders were invented.

I’ve never been a big fan of uncovered flooring, mainly because patches of dust tend to rumble through like tumbleweeds when the hoover is underemployed. Which it evidently was.

There were cables snaking the room like tripwire. If you did hit them the chances are you’d head straight into the booby trap that was the plate of congealed food left on the edge of the table.

As for the bed, there were no bloody duvet covers on the duvet, there was no undersheet, and despite there being eight pillows to hand only two of them had pillowcases.

My friend said she was concerned about the landlord selling the house in the near future. My conclusion within a few minutes of my stay was that there was no danger of that, and that her primary worry should be of the house being condemned.

Nevertheless, I did crawl across the floor at 7 a.m. to email my boss to say I wouldn’t be making it into work as I felt sick and, undersheet or no undersheet, I had no intention of getting out of bed until midday. My female companion joked that the real reason I was phoning in sick was because I didn’t want to go in wearing the same pair of underwear two days running, and that’s why, amongst other things, I decided that the lady was a tramp.

Yes, I have done a post on nightmare trips to the hairdresser before. No, you haven’t heard it all before. Quite possibly I may moan, moan, moan (I do state this is one of my interests in my profile, so you were warned).

But digression over, allow me to proceed.

In many ways, haircutting should be a doddle. The majority of people hardly change their styles for decades at a time, which can be rather unfortunate when the raw material that initially made it work has thinned a bit.

What most people pay their money for is to have their customary style neatened, the ends trimmed and nothing more. Yet the fatal phrase “just a trim” seems to send everyone who cuts my hair into improvisational mode, and gives them carte blanche to cut and style it exactly how they want it.

It totally pisses me off, and also explains why I’ve started packing a hat in my bag the day I’m going to the hairdresser.

I’ve been going to the same one for six years, and since I grew my hair out approximately eighteen months ago I’ve pretty much adopted the same style.

It’s never the one that’s on my head and under my hat when I leave the hairdresser.

Two weeks ago someone new cut my hair and although the phrase “just trim the ends and layer the back” left my lips, it entered the stylist's ear canal and was decoded by her brain as “do whatever the fuck you like”.

Now my hair normally grows out particularly fast, but almost three weeks later it can’t outpace the style it’s been cut into into.

While watching an old episode of The Larry Sanders Show a week ago and double-taking at the featured singer, I suddenly realised to whom I bear more than a passing resemblance at the moment.

KD soddin’ Lang!

I know there's always a rush to pair something with 'gate' whenever a mini scandal of sorts is running, but is Yapgate really the best the punmeisters of the press could come up with? Surely Collargate (Colgate) would have been more, er, fitting. Ahem.

And how did the police find out in the first place? Did they receive a mysterious phonecall in the middle of the night from a gentleman with a Scottish accent?

In a demonstration of grammatical geekiness that would make Lynne Truss blush, I’ve noticed that confectionary gods and bete noire of dentists worldwide, Haribo, have finally inserted a comma into the somewhat awkward slogan emblazoned across their products.

Being a man who will kick kids out of the way to make sure he gets the last available packet of Haribo sour mix in my local shop, the only thing that has bothered me about their products, besides the rabid salivation that follows the consumption of their wares, was the lack of a comma in their slogan.

Previously, it read as below:

“Kids and grown-ups love it so the happy world of Haribo.”

Not the attention to detail that their Tangfastic products deserve.

Finally, they’ve inserted the comma:

“Kids and grown-ups love it so, the happy world of Haribo.”

Now all the slogan needs is an exclamation mark and it’ll be perfect.

A couple of weeks ago I met a friend before a gig, and in the bar we were debating who had the weirdest co-worker. My friend works in the civil service, and this gave him a false sense of security because civil servants are goddamn weirdos. If you’re reading this and you happen to be a civil servant, you’re a goddamn weirdo!

A few years ago I was working in Victoria and arranged to watch the Ingerland vs. Argentina game at the 2002 World Cup at the civil service social club with my aforementioned friend.

Any image you may have of a room full of Sir Humphreys sipping port, dispel it now. It was pretty close to a BNP rally, but without the bomber jackets and slightly more women.

My friend’s co-workers sounded weird. And socially incompetent. And were probably still virgins. So in many ways they were remarkably similar to Doofy.

However, a hand with Doofus in will always trump everything.

Besides having the social skills of a rock, Doofus has all manner of anxiety-related issues, and lately I’ve had to put up with her rampant kleptomania.

I work four days a week and have Wednesdays off. However, whenever I returned on Thursdays my desk would be a few items short of stationary. This went on for a while until I affixed a pipe to my mouth and put on my best deerstalker. A furtive search through her desk drawer revealed a stationary collection the size of WH Smith.

On further questioning the suspect defended her Aladdin’s cave of officewear by saying the stationary “didn’t have your name on it”. Pointing out that it didn’t have her name on it either, and having eight staplers in a drawer is slightly excessive, I warned her not to do it again. Did it work?

Fuck no.

Reaching breaking point I revealed her rampant klepto to the office. In my absence last Wednesday, one of my colleagues blu-tacked my stapler to the desk, and attached a picture of a guard dog onto it. It clearly worked. My stapler has not moved, mainly because it’s stuck down so well by the blu tack that even I can’t shift it, rather than due to the protective instincts of the paper German Shepherd that’s guarding it.

But hey, what’s a little kleptomania between co-workers. It’s not as if I’m sitting next to someone who’s been sat at her desk with her coat on all day.

Patrick Moore: ain’t bonkers old misogynists just crazeee?!?!

Amongst Mad Moore’s frothings were that men and women need separate channels.

Er, hello?

Earth to Fat Man, Earth to Fat Man: they already have their own channels.

Patrick, head over to whatever Sky channel Men & Motors is on, get some tissues ready (for his monocle, natch) and consider whether this channel might just have a male demographic in mind.

Once you’re done with the ol’ M&M, reach with the other hand for the remote and switch over to Living TV, especially when Derek ‘Degsy’ Ancona is on. Can you seriously imagine any man watching this channel? (aside from Degsy).

Patrick was of course completely wrong about women running TV. Everyone knows gay men long ago infiltrated the Beeb and took over, as can be evidenced by the pink propaganda that is Any Dream Will Do. Absolutely shocking stuff!

Long ago there would be disappointment in households when the male heir announced the end of the family genes was nigh. Now there is complete abjectness when sons break it gently to their mothers that they are completely heterosexual, and no amount of re-orientation therapy will work.

Sorry, mum, but you will never, ever get to appear on the audience in a TV talent show and jump up and down in a white t-shirt while holding a badly written banner up. Love me for who I am!

What does a man have to do to get a third date in this town?

I did think the advantage in meeting a certain someone who lived a stop up on the Piccadilly Line from Chez TKK would be cutting out trekking across London, saving energy for more productive things.

Well just as well I hadn’t ordered online a generous-sized box of condoms. Shit.

Our date for the evening has been postponed due to her “drowning in work and generally having 2 much on at the moment”.

“Another time?”

*Checks little black book*

Well when you’re a beggar sometimes your delicacies are stale by the time they reach your lips.

I thought after our last date when she told me she loved me (he shoots, he scores) that the following date would be somewhat closer.

...

Anyhow, as I now sound like ‘Confused, 13,’, from a problem page I’m going to shut up.

I have just eaten an entire packet of Haribo sour mix to aid this process. I now no longer speak; I merely salivate.

The health trust I work for is currently up a certain financial creek, and it appears ever more evident that they’re going to have to sell the paddles.

The administration staff have been “cascaded” the latest management doublespeak about their plans to trim fat from the already anorexic clerical body, fantastically titled the “Cost Improvement Program”.

The Trust needs to save £8,000,000 over the next three years, and helpfully points out that the admin budget is currently a whopping £3 million a year. However, if they fired all the admin staff that would only contribute to 37.5% of the total savings needed, and there would also be the unfortunate side effect that mental health services in the borough would grind to a halt.

Yet again, another reshuffling of the deckchairs on the Titanic is being proposed; consultations and reviews are being planned. It turns out that I am now officially a SABC (staff affected by change).

Still, not that middle management need to worry. It turns out project managers are needed to oversee the entire process, which will take 2-3 years to implement. They’re also looking for a staff member to perform a six-month secondment in this whole redundancy cost improvement process.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

“Doofus: you’re fired!”

As much as I’d like to continue reporting on the social abyss that is Doofus (dressing ever more like Mrs Bates by the day), my first hand experience of the woman will soon be ending. Redundancy is stalking the corridors in the NHS site I work at like Death on a Baghdad roadside. I can see a leaving card and a collection winging my way in weeks rather than months.

This means I’ll have to get on my bike soon and start looking for work.

Fuck.

Due to having spent most of my 20s taxiing along the employment runway and failing to take off, job hunting is one of the things I find most depressing in life. Whenever I look, all I see are jobs I could do given the chance, but can’t quite match the person spec in the listed recruitment conditions. It’s like going up to a succession of girls at club and each one of them rejecting you because of your “lack of experience”. But then how else are you expected to gain the experience in the first place without a few preliminary bra-fumbling sessions?

On Tuesday I spent an hour looking online for jobs, and only two caught my eye. One of those was for the post of Roman Catholic chaplain, although I think my planned introductory sermon that “God is dead!” would mean I’d be filling the post only on a temporary basis. The other position is as a research assistant at a mental health charity aptly named Revolving Doors, since the position is only a six-month contract.

In many ways, apart from the short lunch break and the social retard I sit next to, my current post would be fine until I reached the promised land of assistant psychologist / primary care mental health worker. Granted I did come close to threatening to chop Doofus’ hands off is she continued to keep moving my stapler from its rightful place on my desk and into the wrongful place of her drawer (the rampant kleptomaniac dullard bitch), but as in-betweener jobs go this place ain’t bad. If I’m honest, at times the ad for my job could run as follows:

Vacancy for a person to not do a great deal over four days. Phone might ring once a day, twice if things get particularly busy. Must be able to tolerate junior doctors’ lack of social skills and delusions of grandeur. Reasonable punctuality is preferred, although coming in late most mornings and leaving early will pass uncommented. Applicants who keep a personal blog are actively encouraged to apply. PS - You will be sat next to a complete moron.