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Tuesday 27th September 2005

Another man came round to look at the cellar. He disagreed with the one from yesterday and says that we just need to remove all the existing flooring and let everything dry out and then put a new floor back in. Should I choose to believe him because his news is slightly better or must I assume he is an idiot without the insight of yesterday's doom-monger?
In his favour today's man had a little Star Trek style hand-held device which he stuck into the wall and floor at certain points and which he claimed told him how damp things were (but surely that is impossible, such a device must come from the future). The man yesterday had nothing but his sour doom-monger countenance. But what if the device was just a pocket calculator with the end of a dart stuck on top and was specifically designed to lure idiots like me into employing this new charlatan to lay my floors?
Of course you might argue that it is in the first man's interest to make the job as expensive as possible and thus it is more likely that the man who says that the task is relatively simple is telling the truth. But man 1 (doom-monger - that would be a good name for a flooring company) said I would need to get a builder in to do the job and didn't offer to do it himself.
It's certainly a quandary having a slightly/seriously damp floor. I am thinking of just getting done with it and flooding the cellar permanently and turning it into a kind of dank and dark swimming pool. This might create problems on laundary days though as my washing machine is down there.
I was hoping to get my poker scripts written today so that I could spend the rest of the week on the sit-com, but I didn't get much sleep last night (dreaming of damp creeping up my walls to find me asleep and then strangling me with its dewy tendrels) and my head was fuzzy and fugged and I only got one of my monologues written. I have to say it's going to be a tough job to come up with a total of ten opening monologues that are about poker.
So the script has not moved any further on. It's like I am standing on a railtrack playing chicken with the train that is the BBC Light Entertainment Department. Does it make me cool that I am leaving this to the last possible minute, or am I going to misjudge it completely and be left mangled and bloody. I don't know. I told some people in the pub about one of the plot strands (which is actually just a verbatim account of something that happened to my dad) and they all laughed a lot. So all I have to do is get the BBC executives drunk and then hope the six sheets of paper I currently have will be mistaken for a script.
It'll be fine. I'll either get it done in time or I won't and they'll give me another fortnight.A nd the agony will continue.

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