I can actually sleep at night. I said I’d do some bar shifts this weekend, as payday is still far away, but my working week has halved to a manageable forty hours. I should be brimming with energy. I don’t understand why I’m not leaping out of bed, raring to go, powering through the day and then doing an hour of yoga as soon as I get home. (Well, I suppose that the only pose I can do is the one where you pull your legs up into your chest and squeeze—I don’t have the bedroom floor space for Downward Dog.) Why does my whole body feel as though it has been stuffed with damp sawdust? How can the gaps between my toes be aching?

I think it’s Friday, but who knows? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if The Girl observed some sort of eight day week, just to spite me. It has honestly felt like the longest week of my life. Harri hates three-quarters of my ideas, and expects me to come up with twenty, every hour. Tabitha won’t even respond when I smile and say good morning—also she hates four quarters of my ideas and mutters every time I say something in a features meeting. At least Louise is nice. Akila is always running in and out of meetings, but she’s great when she’s there. And we have a new boy, Kim, on design, plucked from obscurity—well, Wooden Flooring World—by Harri.

Kim is brilliant fun—and filthy. I used to be filthy, I think, gazing out of the window, as suburbia speeds past. Maybe someone will have pinned some really great features ideas to a tree. Sex…sexy pylons…sexy fences…on the sexy fence? I really need to have sex with someone other than Sam Strong soon, if only for the content. The trouble is, he’s so handy. Meeting someone, establishing some kind of chemistry with them, and finding a place to have sex with them other than my box room—there are just so many variables to worry about. Sam is an idiot, but he makes me come every single time and there are always sheets on his mattress.

Sighing, I look at my phone notes, and search for my lacklustre features list. Sex, sex, sex…oh! And work in progress.

I had almost forgotten about this piece. I’ve been on the brink of posting it to my blog, tweaking it, rewriting it, and wondering whether or not I could pitch it to an actual magazine. Strangely, it was Harri who inspired it. When she took me out for coffee before Christmas, and started talking about my blog, I kept thinking about her word, ‘raw’. I wanted to write something really raw, for once, and be emotionally, as well as sexually, explicit.