Just sat on the loo for ten minutes eating walnuts. Ran the tap a bit to obliterate the sound of crunching. Thankful to Mr. Corporate God for creating individual cubicles with sinks so these moments of respite are private – cell-like but still, we must count our blessings in these long, drawn out days where one feels like the innards of Robocop – not the good bits, not the fun, cool, action stuff but the mechanics that make his elbows move. Basic, essential and boring.

When I first started my stint in this office, I felt like I warded against being sucked in by this vacuum of worn out walls, heavy and regular with their grey disposition – grey stairs, grey chairs, grey cupboards, grey floors – why grey, by the way? Who decided that? Why not a kaleidoscope of colour, bursting with beauty, vibrant – to make it more interesting, yes, but also to keep us ALIVE, rather than slipping into death unawares. Sometimes I think I’ll hear the odd, sudden thud, of office workers slumping onto their keyboards – Death By Dullness.

Yes, I thought I warded against all that, with my gauche lipstick and dangly earrings sashaying their way along the brown carpeted corridors like an African mother pacing the earth with buckets hung on her shoulders taking nutrients back to her tribal brood. Oh little me, oblivious to the function of the binder, oblivious to how the Chairman takes his tea, oblivious to where the paper clips are kept. And now I know it all and have gone from a modicum of zany to full-throttle zapped. And I can’t be bothered to wear earrings and it’s too tedious to bother with lipstick the colour of a bruise. And whether I was aware or not, my last several outfits have been 50 Shades of Grey. Apt in many ways – colour, mental state and how dreary and sexless office life is – just like that godforsaken book.

Still, it’s my last day here today, so come Monday I will be back to being a hand-to-mouth-Moaning-Minnie-actress-writer-wannabe-type drooling about all the things I want to do, panicking and perspiring and desperate to get back to the office so I can afford to spend all my wages drinking in the pub and checking my phone to see if The Call has finally come through.