Sometime ago, I had dinner at someone's house. They had questions and wanted advice on a topic I have reasonable knowledge of. We worked through what it was they wanted to know at the same time as they prepared the meal. Clue to genders perhaps? I'm talking, they're talking and cooking. Men are n't gifted multi-taskers....

I know my friend does n't look on herself a great cook. Nor does it probably help that she hails from a tradition where the assumption is everyone can whip up a three star meal using locally sourced ingrdients in minutes. I'd like to her know this: you could be a Cordon Bleu chef, or find it troublesome simply boiling an egg, but, really, it's all irrelevant to me. You're a lovely woman, a great friend. That's why I like you.

Today was the last day in the office for someone I work with. Tuesday, they start with a very well known bank, and it's been a long road they've walked to get there. Altogether it took eight interviews. Why this number, no idea, nor do they probably, and I certainly don't know what went on in each of them. But after eight, you'd think the interviewers had pretty much got through to the core of the person they were hoping to pop the question to.

But what kind of questions did they actually ask? Job interviews, after all, are unreal; they're artifical states we enter willingly, or not in many cases, to get something. One side wants the job, whilst the other, it's the plain, simple reassurance they're going to get that ace for that particular place. In a sense, everyone involved wants to please the other (one more than the other, I'll agree).

Certainly some tough interviewers out there; I've twisted and turned in the wind limply, faced with some the things that have come my way, but they were n't real questions. Nothing based on what actually happens in that cockpit called the office. All the theoretical: "how would you deal with…if x happened ?" set-ups are easily batted away by the interviewee dipping into a portfolio of sanitised responses. Where's the upfront interviewer asking this: "your idea that you've sweated over for months has been casually stolen and passed off by someone else as theirs. How do you feel, no, how do you feel, tell me the mood, describe exactly what you would like to do? Don't hold back now. All out please"

An honest answer to a real question might stop some company hiring a dissembling sociopath who's memorised some form book on stock answers to standard questions.

In between the long idle moments in the office, there are work moments. But I always prefer the idle moments every time: I'm simply more productive. That's when it all comes together.

Somehow, I got wrapped into a conversation on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Took some work trawling the 'net before we eventually pinned them all down: Famine, War, Pestilence, and the Anti-Christ. As stark and as austere a set of symbols as you would imagine given they're key dramatis personae from the Book of Revelations.

That long idle moment spread a little longer, and I started to wonder what they might look like today. Who's going to be today's runners and riders in the Apocalypse Grand National ? What would represent today's great dilemmas, our collective aches and pains? And how would they look?

It's taken a bit of time, but I think I'm there. Here goes, here's the race card: Binge drinking; obesity; the ASBO; and finally, our dear friend, the Hoodie. The first too pissed to ride; the second, too fat to mount; the third, banned from going anywhere near a horse; the fourth, well, not much going to happen there, if even the horse crosses the road every time it sees you.

Are these good choices? Let me know.

Only a day away, but I don't think I can wait any longer. No, really, I can't. We're not supposed to go so long like this. Not today anyway. It's unnatural. And I'm a man as well, it's not good for us. I've got needs, I have an appetite. If I don't get it...God knows what'll happen. Even the guys in the Big Brother house get some relief. What about me!

I've gone a month without it. The hottest month, by the way since 1914, if the record books are right. It's not testimony to my survival skills either, more the primitive way I live, that's helped me cope. But I've found the end of my tether now, had enough.

Please deliver my fridge on the day you say you will. You don't know what it means to me. I want to stand in my kitchen on Wednesday, the proud owner of a sleek fridge that's packed to the gunnels with all the stuff I've not had for weeks: milk (skimmed, semi-skimmed, full fat - really I don't care); cheese, soft, hard, smelly; yoghurts packed into the door compartments; oh, and Butter, only convalasecents in 19th century novels live on dry toast, not 20th century office workers, waking up late. I want to hear a humming fridge on Wednesday evening happily cooling all of the stuff I've crammed it with.

Come on, Delivery people, make me happy.

Swine into pearls. Is it possible to spend an hour or so walking the busiest and blandest streets in any city, then go back to your hotel to write hundreds of pages of impressions, and pass it off as an image of the entire city? Magicking the most mundane street into a candidate for a World Heritage route. That's just the notion that a friend and I amused ourselves with wandering around Oslo. No, can't be done, it'd be something beyond waffle... and you know by the fact I've just written that, that yes, it actually has been. At least in a sense.

I found out today in yet another idle moment that DH Lawrence often rode into town, got the gist of the place, then holed up in a hotel to thrash out pages and pages; mostly as a method of exorcising his own demons.

And I thought this was a novel idea we'd had in Oslo. There are no new ideas. Confirmed.

There's a place even more expensive than London. I've just come back from there: it's called Norway. I was there for a long weekend with three friends, all of us hard core Londoners, steeled to high prices, gazumping, exorbitant costs when it comes to anything. But Norway stuns; it's impossible not to wince out loud at the eye watering expense of everything

The cheapest bottle of house wine - the very cheapest, the vin ordinaire, the stuff that you would take home in a plastic box from the corner shop - was £30. Maybe I'm picky, but for that price, I expect some theatre when the bottle is opened. I want to see flourishes, drama, that price insists on the cork being popped with some gusto, not unscrewed like a two litre bottle of diet coke being poured at a picnic.