hemingway felt this tired

I've been working sixty hour weeks. The problem with a new business is everybody gets the burn out at the same time, and they all start talking in strained and long-suffering voices, and opening conversations with such red rags as: 'Katrina, could you do me a favour?' Yes, almost certainly, but your chances will be better if you avoid prefaces like that.

There is, however, a world outside the office. In it, I have recently seen:

A very, very small child with a very, very large umbrella. Looking a lot like a toadstool, if toadstools wore gumboots.

Persimmons glowing like little suns on leafless, rain-blacked branches.

Bicycle lamps through the poplars and the gathering fog as I ride the path along the river at the end of day.

A puppet show. Where I work, this is called research. So my job is still classifiable as good-to-excellent. I am starting a reading group for bilingual boys soon. I'm thinking Paul Jennings, Roald Dahl, Lemony Snicket, Gillian Rubenstein. What do you get for the kid whose voice hasn't broken, but who has already completed Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas?

And I have played coin soccer, coin rugby and a Spanish card game I don't know the name of. And pictionary with an Italian word deck and a Swede, a Spaniard, a Belgian, a Brit and a Sicilian. There were four dictionaries on the table at once, and loud maledictions in as many languages, but we did get words like 'regatta', 'suburbia' and 'infiltrate'.