Just sat on the loo for 12 minutes again, wondering if when I returned to the office they might all be dressed as the cast of Disney’s Dumbo. Just for kicks, or a bonding exercise. The CEO leaping about as Mrs. Jumbo with a pink bonnet on his head, and everyone fashioning trunks from rolled up invoices from PWC. The Finance department tethering themselves to the fans overhead to conjure The Crows, and the HR department jiggling rhythmically as the Pink Elephants and taking turns to stick their head in a cake (nothing changes there then). Quite why my brain has muddled together this effervescent scene is curious but I suppose it is just another way of passing another few godforsaken minutes, desperately holding my imagination intact and trying with all my might not to rip my way through to insanity, the only barrier being as skinny and frail as cling film from Iceland. I play this sequence out in depth, and get quite heady. I wish I had a snack.

When I eventually return, lo and behold they are all still sat in silence and the room continues to feel like Hitler’s funeral. I go back to my desk and sulk. Then a moment later, the CEO bursts out of his private little fucking den with all the glee of finding a singing dodo on his shoulder, and I think maybe this shit could get real and so slowly start rolling up a sheet of A4… Turns out the only reason he felt the need to leap from his throne was to ask one of us sickly secretaries to make him a cup of tea. The mildly eager one of us scraped herself up off her steadily forming roadkill state and schlepped the two metres over to the communal kitchen to do the arduous task. Quite why this fully grown man with a modicum of intelligence and actual hands for hands, not potatoes or anything as cumbersome, couldn’t have made his own cup of tea is beyond me, particularly as he then sits in the eager one’s chair to have a bit of a swivel round regaling the team with some tale about his journey in that is about as melodramatic and hair-raising as a ham sandwich. He manages to spare exactly the same amount of time swivelling like a schoolboy that’s just had his first blow job, that it would have taken him to make his own cup of fucking tea and I feel like I have just boiled to buggery like the poor, enslaved office kettle – the only one here I have sympathy for, apart from my own emaciated brain. The eager one drags herself back over and sort of hovers around not daring to ask if she can please have her chair of the damned back. He takes a sip of tea and comments on it being hot – I feel like I am going to stick my head into the scissors – and then he eventually prizes himself up with a big stretch as if this whole five minute episode has worn him out the most.