Right, so, just to recap the longest two weeks I've ever had:

• Tuesday 10 July 2007: Phone interview with Fujitsu (successful), followed by trip down to Horlsey
• Wednesday 11 July 2007: Final assessment for Allianz Insurance (failed), followed by trip home
• Monday 16 July 2007: Trip down to Bracknell for half-day Fujitsu pre-assessment (successful), followed by trip home
• Thursday 19 July 2007: Trip down to Bracknell
• Friday 20 July 2007: Full-day Fujitsu assessment (failed), followed by trip home
• Saturday 21 July 2007: Trip down to London for barbecue at Mike, James and James's house in Northwood
• Sunday 22 July 2007: Trip home

Overall, that's eight train rides to and through London in less than two weeks.

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Quick debrief on the barbecue: well, you know those FastTicket machines? Nottingham Station has them, other stations may also have them. You book your tickets online and then collect them from a machine at the station, saving the cost of postage. Well, it turns out (despite previous evidence to the contrary) that booking them online and then collecting them less than an hour and a half later doesn't work.

I asked one of the railway guys about this and he said it takes four hours to go through.

Now, since NO automated, computerised process in the world should take that long, I can only assume that this is because the machine only updates itself every four hours, but even that faintly plausible explanation is still ridiculous. Why would thetrainline.com let me buy a train ticket which I couldn't possibly use?!

Rather than pay the £10 cancellation fee and buy a new ticket, I opted to read my book and wait it out. How indecisive and stupid of me. Three hours later, it STILL hadn't gone through. I wondered if this was a practical joke on the part of the railway guy as I knuckled under and angrily bought the second ticket.

It takes about two hours to get to London from Nottingham; what I didn't realise was that, because Mike lives in Zone 6 and the Metropolitan line was closed some distance before his station, it takes an additional hour and a half to get to his house from St. Pancras. I arrived around 9pm, only managing the briefest of conversations with Sarah and Juliette, whom I met coming in the opposite direction - they were leaving.

Still, some burgers were whipped up on the spot, followed by a series of seethingly alcoholic drinks, both of which (burgers and drinks) I hungrily and gratefully downed. And finally I managed to catch up with folks. "Everybody seems to be okay." Well, that was easy! A haphazard attempt at a drinking game was made, personally I thought the rules (involving hopping and spinning) lacked punch, and I introduced a new rule doubling the drinking penalties to compensate for this. Bit of a blunt solution but hey ho. One of Mike's American chemical engineer friends asked if I was THE Sam Hughes, after which the Sam Hughes Neighborhood in Tucson, Arizona is named. I'm not, but I am aware of this hamlet/village/settlement - in fact, I'm a member of a group of Facebook called the "Sam Hughes Neighborhood", consisting entirely of people named Samuel or Samantha Hughes. Still, what are the odds? Small world.

I seem to recall getting fairly drunk a little after that. And singing. Hmm. Best not dwell on that.

So anyway, a sleep on slippery, slidey leather cushions and an episode of Scrapheap Challenge later, I was on my way home. Didn't, alas, get much of a chance to discuss the Belgium Thing with mastermind James Browne (who, by virtue of his work for the IFS, got quoted in a BBC news story exclamation mark!), but did at least establish that 1) I need to buy a guide book and 2) I need to learn some Flemish. Erk. So overall, plenty of alcohol was consumed, which was the main thing, thanks v. much Mike/James/James, your house is very nice, but not a terribly productive meeting otherwise.

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If you're sharp-eyed you'll notice that I mentioned above that my final Fujitsu interview effort has been rejected.

At this point I don't really know how to respond to such emails anymore. I don't know what it is about me. Maybe someone quietly phones them every evening after I've left and says "Hey, don't hire this guy, he's an evil criminal". Maybe potential employers let me through the earlier rounds as a joke. I don't understand what I'm missing, how many dominoes need to fall my way before the job will be mine. (They had extra spaces! They NEEDED more developers! Plural! There were only two of us at the interview anyway!)

Every time I go for an interview I have to research the company. I find out who they are and what they stand for and convince myself that THIS is the opportunity for me, and that this is the single job I want - because, well, "Why do you want to work for us?" is an inevitable question and you have to answer it convincingly. And then, every time I come out of an interview I ride the train home feeling upbeat and positive, chatting with my fellow candidates, feeling that it went mostly right and I stand a good chance of getting through. I make some cool plans, up in my head, to quit my temp job, take a break from work between now and September, maybe finish off my driving lessons, work on my book... at the very least enjoy my Belgium holiday.

And then it all goes out the window and all I can do is sit here at my desk, with my big pile of paper to shred, and be unhappy.