But he has found me all the same.

I hear him knocking on my door

And calling out my name.

My Snapchat settings kept Him out.

On Twitter I did block Him.

His Facebook friend requests were spurned.

Yet still he keeps on knocking.

Court injunctions were sought and filed

But still I sit in fear.

Oh, my mistake. It is not Death.

I think my pizza’s here.

I drew back my bedroom curtains to find Death staring back at me. He was wearing a fixed and maniacal grin of sickly menace. His ghastly eye sockets bore into mine. Fingers, bony and extended, clawed at the glass.

Staggering back, I gathered the courage to look again; it was Marvin’s skeleton. Whether it had been placed there by design to terrify me or whether it had simply been launched up into the air and failed to come back down, I don’t know. I marched next door and pressed the buzzer continuously until I saw a shuffling hooded figure emerge. For the second time in the space of a few minutes, I found myself in the presence of a gruesome Death-like creature. This one was wearing a dark blue towelling dressing gown. I began to harangue it but gave up when it was clear that it was impervious to my ranting, or indeed any aspect of the world of which it was supposedly a part.

Monday January 8th

The Tyrolean air must contain magical, soothing properties. Janice, in an uncustomary gesture of benevolence, has granted me a week’s extension on my report. This is all very well but I am still no nearer understanding what it is that I’m expected to write about; the problem of working in a business that sells ‘solutions’ is that none of us really know what that means and there exists a kind of collective corporate complicity that makes us all too scared to ask.

Tuesday January 9th

Poetry Club

The first rule of Poetry Club

is that we meet each month in the pub.

The second rule of Poetry Club

is that not all poems have to rhyme.

Contrary to popular stereotype, poets are hardy creatures; neither Arctic blizzards nor desert sandstorms, mighty earthquakes nor rampaging tornados are likely to get much in the way of a poet with the opportunity to read their work to an audience with no obvious means of escape. Consequently, there was full attendance at Poetry Club in spite of the evening’s bitter cold.

Mary got proceedings off to a poignant start with a requiem to her husband, Leonard, who tragically died in the Falklands. This was not during hostilities, as it turns out, but falling off a cliff while attempting to photograph a colony of rockhopper penguins. Leonard, as we’ve learnt over the years, was her third husband of six. The sequence runs as follows: Divorced, Bewildered, Died, Divorced, Befuddled, Surprised.