Not so Keane on Jesus

Okay, so no Keane. They have decided to cancel their concert in Princes Street Gardens on account of exhaustion. Big bunch of girls. I prefer Snow Patrol anyway - so there!

This week has been busy but not necessarily with anything particularly exciting. For that reason I should probably stop this entry right here. But I won't because, well, it's never stopped me in the past and I'm here now - writing stuff.

Work has been good. Very busy, which keeps my mind off fun things and my eyes off the clock. I've designed a suite of posters to promote the marketing department internally. I wanted to get across the idea that the department now had the staff and the time to do some proper marketing. That we are 'open for business again', so to speak.

The first poster I came up with said 'Back again' with a nice smiley picture of Jesus. I loved it and think Jesus is an underused marketing tool in the financial services sector. However, I opted for self-censorship and relegated 'Jesu' to my drawer. He has now been replaced by Dirty Den in one poster and Bobby from Dallas in another. Quality.

I was asked to come up with some creative ideas for a short movie file promoting pensions. I'm actually quite excited about this, which is now depressing me. How bad must it be when I'm excited by pensions? I think I'll go slash my wrists with my Coldplay CD. (Repeat to self: my job pays the bills!)

Leanne and I had dinner at David Bann on Tuesday night. It was so good we didn't bother going to see a Festival show as planned. Instead, we ordered the Amaretto Marscarpone cheesecake and took our time over it. It was an excellent night made more so by the realisation that food, wine and chat with a good friend is preferable to a professional comedian.

On Thursday evening, I endured my first hockey training session. Two hours, three minor injuries and a static wheeze later I hobbled home. Truly knackered, I immediately drew a hot bubble bath and indulged my desperate muscles. Hopefully, the addition of fitness training on Tuesdays will mean the sessions get easier. I live in hope.

I treated myself to an afternoon showing of 'Easy Living' at the Filmhouse during my lunch hour on Friday. I expected it to be quite empty, but Cinema 1 was rammed. It was top-quality screwball and I loved every minute of it. When the boy and the girl get together at the end, his long disapproving father gives him a job. He tells the girl she has a job too - "cooking my breakfast." What a proposal! I returned to work in a delightful mood for the rest of the day.

The office summer BBQ on Friday night was really quite pish. It was pouring with rain, there was a poor turnout, I was about the only one dancing and I left my umbrella in the club at the end of the night.

Saturday was much better. Another great film at the Filmhouse (The Laughing Policeman) and dinner with Sinead afterwards. I was ravenous and longing for a steak, so we eventually ended up at the Smokestack in Leith. My medium-rare fillet steak and chips went down an absolute treat. We chatted deeply for hours until we realised that Sinead might miss the last train. A taxi to Waverely meant she was just in time for her rowdy journey home.

Today I depressed myself by reading all about the Horn of Africa. (How much for that Russian AK-47? Why sir, that'll set you back three cows. And the US M-16? Oh, that'll be five cows. Well I'll take that then since there's no vegetaion to feed my cows and an M-16 will do a better job of shifting the 6,000 desperate souls who are sleeping on my football field-sized plot of land. Maybe it'll convince them to head for the port and try to secure passage to the Yemen in a death-trap steel container on a rickety ship that's likely to sink with the loss of all life before the appearance of the Yemeni officials forces the smugglers to toss their human cargo into the carnivore-infested waters or maybe they'll join me in a war with the Ethiopians across the desert. That Bin Laden guy sure speaks a lot of sense.) It's a mire of such complete desolate hopelessness that I don't think there's even the hint of a solution. Governments aren't talking about it - not so much because they don't care (which they don't), but more so because their shocking impotence would be laid bare for all to see. The Middle East is child's play compared to this.

But that's too depressing a note on which to end this entry. Sinead said to me last night: "When something doesn't go to plan, people have a tendency to set themselves in a pessimistic frame of mind. They think things can only ever be worse, but a lot of the time things turn out better than they could have imagined." From the long list of personal success stories I've been acquiring, I know that's true. She was talking in the context of a personal issue rather than a global one, but it would be pretty damn skippy if the world got a break too.