First Strawberries
27 June

We celebrated the beginning of summer with a thunderstorm, the start of Wimbledon (which, like Big Brother, I have completely avoided on television) and the first two strawberries from our garden.

It's good to grow your own food. Our plum tree has, this year, produced what should be a fine autumnal crop and the beans are swelling nicely in their pods.

There's also been a host of caterpillars on the Penny Royals in the front garden. As the flowers died off and the seed cases grew, so the caterpillars thrived and have eaten most of the leaves off the plants. Hopefully, we shall have a cloud of butterflies at some point.

The other insects which have thrived are the greenfly which have reached almost epidemic proportions on certain days. They've really eaten into the roses and the clematises.

And we've had our first sighting of the bat which flies around at dusk. In previous years, we've tended to see it a lot but, these days, we are earlier to bed and earlier to rise.

Over at Quakers, we've just begun the Hearts and Minds training course. I did try to join in the first iteration of this last year but was thwarted by the decision to run it on weekdays during the day whilst I am at work. I'm looking forwards to participating in the twelve week cycle and it is likely that at least one meeting will be held here in Crosby.

On Thursday we had one of our non-inspirational meetings at work. The CEO, Colin, is a dab hand at putting the mockers on any enthusiasms. Anyhow, with the loss of Ambition:IT, it now seems that Jobcentre Plus will not be able to fund any interim work for us. They themselves are looking at some 40,000 redundancies nationwide. So, there is a black hole in our corporate finances to the tune of some half a million pounds.

Currently, there are no redundancies planned but the mere mention of the "R" word has put everyone on their toes. There are certainly some hard times ahead and, if I'm reading the sign correctly, there was a hidden theme to the meeting which was that we must all be prepared to operate beyond our current job descriptions and act as salespeople.

Thursday was also the day that Mitch took a gamble and offered himself up as an interview candidate for a demonstration for our Ambition:IT customers. He did very well and showed great courage and heart. It's very difficult to offer yourself up as an Aunt Sally and put your credibility on the line.

I've just finished reading Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho. Like many people around the globe, I really love his The Alchemist. This novel doesn't come close to being in that class. It's a bold and brave move into a very different subject matter, prostitution and the meaning and importance of sex in our lives, but Coelho's lean and simple parable style of writing prose does not sit easily with the novel's thematic content. A meager two stars for this one.

Our DVD encounter this week was Very Long Engagement, a film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. We've enjoyed a number of his films over the years, notably Amelie but also The City of Lost Children and Delicatessen. His films have the quirky attractiveness and command of cinematography that I love in the work of the Cohen Brothers, Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam. This film was about the search of a woman for her lost fiancee after the First World War.

During all of this, my parents were down in Epsom. The highight of their weekend was taking Mary to the local summer fayre where she played on the bouncy castle, enjoyed the donkey rides and entered a fancy dress competition. Linda and Ian meanwhile went to Wimbledon.

In a slightly idle moment this weekend, I've spent some time creating a new gallery of images of colleagues to sit alongside the one I created a few years back. So, now you'll be able to see who I'm talking about when I mention people at work.

I want to mention just one in particular - Steve - who is a complete lust bucket. He sits opposite my desk with his back to me and fills my working days with visions of delight. He is somewhat chunkier than my usual slender objects of desire but he is not overly muscled.

Steve has a pension for Levi 501s and teeshirts. The jeans aren't form hugging but, depending on stance, offer moments of joyful clinging which outline an impressive basket of delights and a well turned, callipygious rump. He also seems to specialise in styles which allow the rear seam to ride right up the crack of his arse.

He occasionally stands and bends over his desk to talk with Ian (who sits opposite him) thus provoking spasms of priapism in me. He also has a habit of sitting with his legs splayed and his back slightly arched so that his buttocks are nicely thrust in innocent provocation in my general direction.

Somehow or other, he manages to dress in teeshirts that never ride up. In fact, in the first four months of ogling, I only copped a peek of bare flesh once when he briefly showed me a nicely flat stomach embellished with a vigorous treasure trail - there was almost an unseemly incident.