Sarah is another account director and sits at the desk next to mine. We just had a fragrance fight. It was PR chemical warfare, with my Abercrombie & Fitch Fierce pitted against her Jo Malone Tuberose.

After we stopped fighting (I won!), her phone rang and she answered with, "Oh, hello! Sorry! I'm a bit out of breath. I've just been having a perfume fight with Christopher."

That has to be the gayest opening gambit relating to me, EVER!

God, I stink and my skin's itching.

Look! Goldfrapp come from Bath! That's so funny because, you know, I also come from Bath!

Huh. Weird!

Yesterday I went to lunch with an old friend from school who is having a few problems with her boss. The problems that she is encountering are not insurmountable objects, which she knows, but they are on top of other, more serious, things going on in her personal life, the main one being that her Dad is receiving chemotherapy treatment for cancer.

Towards the end of lunch we discussed how as we have gotten older our need to discuss our problems and issues with anyone who will listen has lessened. In fact there are lots of things that we don't discuss at all and the ones that we do discuss are usually with the people that we have known for the longest.

It wasn't very long ago that I felt the need to talk about all of my problems, all of the time, to pretty much anyone who would lend an ear. The fact that I don't feel the need to do this anymore is just another example, I think, of how I have grown up in the past two or three years.

When I was younger I lacked experience and I doubted myself and my judgment and I had a total lack of conviction in any decisions that I made. You need other people's opinions to make you feel validated. Similarly, when people had their own problems I was always chomping at the bit to proffer my own point of view and advice, because in a round about kind of way it would make me feel better about the decisions I had made in my own life.

These days the idea of discussing some guy I quite like with a relative stranger is really unappealing. That person doesn't know the person I'm talking about and they more than likely don't know me and all the things I have been through and how those things have gotten me to this point in my life. I don't discuss my sexual exploits with people I work with anymore, not because I'm ashamed of myself or of those things, but because it has become boring to hear girls screech and say things like, "But doesn't it really hurt?" (No. It feels great!)

Don't get me wrong. I love meeting new people and making new friends. But I love the warm blanket feeling I get from thinking about all of the people who have been through everything with me over the past 18 years or so and that I have gotten to the point in my life where when I do need to talk about things, they listen and understand and get me and the situation quick enough for the conversation not to have to drag on over hours and hours of sobbing and nose blowing.

Ok, I didn't die but my Mum's other dog, Poppy, did. Not on the racetrack, but back at home in Wiltshire. She'd had leukemia for a while now, so it wasn't entirely unexpected.

Although how cool would it have been if she had died racing sportsbikes around a racetrack?

I felt a bit sad about it the last couple of days, because those two dogs have been such a huge part of my Mum's house for me. I'm borrowing one of the motorbikes to ride home to Bath this weekend and it's so strange to think that they won't be there. It's going to be really quiet without them.

However, the weird thing with my family and dogs is that almost as soon as one passes on, another comes along by some random coincidence. One of Mum's friends has just found out that she's pregnant, just a few months after getting a dog. She already has two children so has decided that it's going to be too full a house to keep the pooch around so it looks as if Mum's going to have it.

Personally I would have terminated the baby and kept the dog, but that's just me.

I didn't die.

Easy rider

Well, I kinda was already, but now I am officially. I passed my motorbike test!! And now I'm off to Italy to race sportsbikes on two track days. Hopefully I'll be here to talk about it on Monday.

Have a great weekend y'all!

Oh, the comedy of it ...

Apparently being on holiday is conducive to good blogging. That is, if good blogging can be described as posting links to TV commercials.

I clearly remember this from my teens and it's f***ing brilliant!

Last Friday my motorbike leathers turned up at work and naturally I brazenly discreetly tried them on in front of the whole office.

The comments that I received were generally quite positive, but back-handed, in the sense that the girls (and one guy) seemed genuinely surprised by the fact that they made me look hot. One of the girls even said I looked like Maxwell Caulfield:


And another said that I looked like Tron:


And the fact was, they did make me hot. Hot in the sense that I lost about five pounds of body weight in just ten minutes. And that was in an air-conditioned office and not on an Italian race track, where the predicted temperature is in the high-30s.

I started my training today and passed my CBT. On the FIRST DAY!!! Usually you pass by the end of the second day, so this means that I am awesome.

But it doesn't mean that I have passed my *test*, which is on Friday. I'm still convinced that I'll fail, simply because some omnipotent being wants to laugh at me, sweltering in my racing leathers, not able to ride any of the sports bikes, because I failed my test.

Overall, I'm good at U-turns, emergency stops and slipping the clutch (in a good way.) I'm not very good at lifesavers (figures.)