Last March I trooped down to Ealing in the hope of landing a job in a psychiatric crisis outreach team. Desperate to get away from my desk job (and Doofus), I was ready to face an hour plus commute to work before I snapped and threw a coffee jar at my colleague’s big-nosed head.

During the interview, I was asked the obligatory question of why I wanted the job. Tempted as I was, I didn’t give the answer floating through my mind at the time that I was hoping for enough jarring clinical encounters to write my own noughties version of The House of God.

Maybe the interview panel read my mind (or had read my blog), as I didn’t get the job. However, I did land a job in a psychiatric rehabilitation project a few months later, and thought that the material gathering for my forthcoming book would begin in earnest.

Since then I’ve uploaded one post based on my new employment, and that was about my boss’ secret Santa present from me, when I got him Nothing.

The material I have to some extent, but the time to write it up is something else.

Blogging is nigh on impossible to do in work, simply because it’s nearly impossible to get on a computer at work. We have three office PCs at work, and the chances of getting to use them without someone else being in the same room is up there with Safriz having a threesome with Kate Winslet and Kelly Brook. And blogging at home is like making tea in the microwave or eating a Quorn pork pie. It just doesn’t feel right somehow.

But if I do ever write that book, the focus would probably be more on the madness of the company I work for than its client group.

After studying the Soviet Union extensively during my first degree, I have some insight into an ossified bureaucratic centre that attempts to rule by decree with little insight into conditions on the ground. And our chief executive is a dead ringer for Bubbles Devere.

I’m not saying we’re a cowboy outfit, but ‘management’ has an over-optimistic sense of our ability to rehabilitate some of the referrals we’ve accepted. The primary care trust in the London borough we’re based in would quite happily see us closed down (and had a good crack at it a couple of years ago) due to our practice of importing in clients from other London boroughs with severe and complex needs, and having them use local psychiatric services. But when a category 3 resident can command a fee rate of over £1000 a week and the project’s finances are in the red, how can that not sway a manager’s thinking?

The residents are generally settled at present, although we do have one resident who would fit a Cuckoo’s Nest archetype of an institutionalized mental illness patient. At around 6 foot three and thirty stone HM is difficult to miss, particularly when he’s responding vocally to his auditory hallucinations and breaking things (on a good day a mug, on a bad day a larder door). I remember in my first couple of weeks there his responding to his auditory hallucinations at the dinner table (staff and residents eat communally) by aggressively shouting “You want some! You want some!” before storming out. I attempted to lighten things with a deadpan “So how’s the Bolognese?” once he was out of earshot.

Then there’s the resident with the conviction for rape and a somewhat unhealthy obsession with the Royal Family, but who makes a seriously mean curry.

OD I will probably post about again in future if I ever get the time. He is a book in himself, as his daily notes would demonstrate. He’s like a form of manipulative virus that is constantly trying to infiltrate its way through the team's firewall.

Then there is the resident (OC) who was once a doctor in Nigeria but now suffers with HIV-associated early onset dementia (quite how we’re supposed to rehabilitate him is another story).

Thankfully, working with OC has not provided to be the challenge it might have been.

After all, it’s not the first time that I’ve spent my working day with someone who stares blankly at a screen for much of the daytime, mindlessly repeating the same actions day after day with little reflection, and appears to have little sense of what is going on in the real world.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose, eh?