So what's been happening with me at the moment?

I have a new job, still at the University of Nottingham, but I am now at East Midlands Healthcare Workforce Deanery - an NHS kind of gig - on the King's Meadow Campus opposite the Showcase, if you know Nottingham. I get the same bus to work as I used to, but I get off about fifteen minutes later.

EMHWD is a strange kind of place to work. I am technically doing two different part-time jobs at once, in the same office. (I don't use both desks at once.) The first job is in the Unit for Professional Development, where I administrate a collection of about a dozen different courses which the Deanery runs for the continuing professional development of doctors in the East Midlands. It's unbelievably simple work - I book venues and catering, take applications, maintain both the database AND the paper files (WHY DO WE HAVE BOTH?!?) and distribute course materials by post. I was taught all the ropes by the previous lady over the course of about three days - the pace was high, but I got the gist (and there were helpful handover nodtes) so I figured out the whole thing within a few days of taking over. There's more phone work involved than I've had in previous jobs, but apart from that there is nothing here to challenge me. Anyway, that job takes up about 40% of my working week. The other job is odd admin work for the Public Health department, which deals with... well... quite frankly, when I arrived here, I was not given an especially clear picture of what actually goes on in this organisation and I still have only dim ideas of what the structure of this place is. I photocopy stuff and print reams of stuff off from their online applications database. Sometimes. When my line manager remembers I exist and has something for me to do. The rest of the time, there is nothing to do.

In other words, about 60% of my working day is spent doing nothing.

I still get paid, and I can write and work on other stuff-in-progress of mine in the meantime, but I'm sure you can understand that it feels like I'm very much wasting my time in this job and certainly not contributing anything of note to my CV. It's demoralising and tiring and lonely.

On to good stuff: Two weeks ago (24 March) I was at what will probably be the final party (housecooling?) at James/Dan/Julian's flat in London since they are all moving out. The nominal purpose of the party was to drain it of a large amount of leftover wine and spirits - something which I failed to contribute to, as I spent all evening drinking beer. This was excellent fun, but the clocks went forward that night so I missed my train home - got the next one, luckily.

I had a telephone interview on 10 April with Ericsson about joining their graduate scheme in September. Having done my homework I breezed the (remarkably specific) early questions such as "How many countries does Ericsson work in?" (140). "What are Ericsson's competitors?" gave me pause for thought, because all the telecommunications companies which sprang to mind - 3, T-Mobile, O2 - were mobile phone companies who would almost certainly be working WITH Ericsson, not against them. Sony? BT? NTL? Eventually the interviewer had to give me a clue - mobile phone handsets. I get VERY little use out of my reluctantly-purchased mobile phone and Sony Ericsson (the handset-making part of Ericsson) is a small part of the behemoth (they do a STAGGERING amount of other stuff) so naturally I'd forgotten about that whole angle and was trying to think of competing telephone exchange router manufacturers. DOY. The answer was Nokia.

Later questions were unbelievably formulaic and I had what a friend of mine (who has coached me in this sort of thing) calls "success stories" lined up for each one, though I was uncertain as to how applicable each one was. I needn't have worried, I was told at the end that I'd got through. So I have an assessment at Basingstoke coming up at some point. Huzzah!

One last interesting thing. Don't tell anybody I said this, because as soon as I announce online that something like this has happened, it dissolves: I was contacted by someone from LJK Literary Management saying: "We've seen you're writing a book on How To Destroy The Earth. Can we help?" We've been sending emails backwards and forwards for some weeks and I'm currently working on a proposal to show to them on Monday. So, that is also good news!