This article on safe shopping may be useful to you. I'm claiming nothing about my involvement in it... though it feels like someone has put it through a good editorial session.

I'm at my desk, I'm eating two fisherman's friends simultaneously. There is a lot of paper around me, though the desk is fairly empty by my standard. The mouldy coffee cup lets things down a bit. I've got the Dirty Dancing soundtrack in my ears. There's a plate with bits of rubbish and banana skins on it. I'm trying to multi-task and I'm failing.

I've not updated this blog in too long again (though I may do so retrospectively at some point). I can't even use the broken laptop keyboard as an excuse, since I replaced it last night.

I'll be back to work in a second.

I've a gig tonight.

The new keyboard has arrived... this one is dissolving... not for much longer. It'll be a colour change and will require open heart surgery of the computer, but it will be a renewed ability to type.

Of course, if I were wise, I'd somehow find a publication who would pay me towrite up my keyboard changing experiences and, thus, cover the cost of the parts.

Performing to an audience can be a very relaxing experience. How so? Surely the process of getting ready to perform is scary and exhilarating? Well, yes, but once you hit the stage and actually relax into the doing of it, it can be more soothing than just sitting in a chair relaxing. It widens the dynamic range of emotions you're feeling, to misquote something someone said to me today. So, what I'm saying is that a good gig can be a remedy. This was certainly the case the other week when two good gigs was a double remedy for me.

Tonight, at nearly the end of an icky sort of a challenging week, I needed something different. I needed to have some sort of giggle time. I could have probably gotten the buzz from a gig, but perhaps I would have preferred pissing about with beer mats with the boys.

Well, one cancelled gig later, and that's exactly what we were doing. They make a satisfying "punk" sound when you flick them off the top of a glass, and it's even more fun when then plop down back on the rim of the glass. Or you can launch the beer mat at a friend by angling the glass before flicking.

Childish? Yes.

Fun? Definitely.

I ended up back home, just in time to get on with some writing I had half started. I've now finished.

Maybe it's easy to scoff at being awarded something, but I'm proud to have received my Dark Chat special award. It means that someone bothered to enjoy my stuff and agree that they thought it was amusing enough to create a word document as a prize for me. In this instance, it was my shenanigans on a bus and then again in a bar which caught their attention. Thank you. I accept this award on behalf of everyone who made it possible. Sorry, I'm filling up...

This really is the week of the long working hours. Monday ran until 7pm. Tuesday similar - 7pm. Today was a rollercoaster. There was working until about 6.15pm, in a flurry of work-related absorption, a lot of which I can't quite remember, but which successfully managed to take me away from the personal email, gig seeking and blog reading which is a sure sign that I have some spare time to myself in any given day.

Then I rushed out to Tesco to get some refreshments. This was closely followed by a team curry - it was social, but there was a tension in the air. Something important was scheduled for the latter part of the evening. We had our curries and I even ordered a curry whose name "Jeera" sounds like a tool we're going to use at work - "JIRA" - sad, but true. For desert, there were "Punkies". The punky is a toy penguin with a punk hairdo and some ice cream inside. To be honest, the diet has been failing this week - a total write off.

Then the late night work session. We went to an office of a software support company and set about, with their help, going through the process of making some key changes to our main systems. With alarms ringing, as we took the system down, and with a lot of pressure, the procedure was undertaken. I had provided cokes, red bull and a box of Cadbury Heroes - hopefully as a vote of confidence to my team - "Guys, you're the heroes".

Gingerly, the system was brought back up, then it was tested. Then I did some sort of test of my own, which should have stormed it with requests. It was working.

Now it remains to be seen whether the system will survive. In truth it should be a very small change, but time will tell.

For me, it's the "sorry". It's like "I tried to get you work in my dream but I'm sorry it didn't work out"... or possibly "I dreamed you were a failure, sorry". Genius!

I'm not claiming to have had anything to do with it, but you might want to read this if you fancy exercising paranoia in your personal life.

I read a reasonably gripping book recently - Black House, by Stephen King and Peter Straub. In this book, the concept of slippage is mentioned. It's a good word, as is the other ubquitous book in the piece - opopanax, which means a word not found in the dictionary, especially if you don't find it in the dictionary. I mention slippage primarily because I feel like I've been suffering it a bit over the last couple of days. I've fallen from the extreme high of Saturday night, where I felt like the world was my oyster, to a bit of a low.

There are various reasons why this might be. The events of Saturday night included some amazing highs, one obvious one being the way that my silly filthy song damn near caused a riot in the school hall I was performing it in. Saturday night's audience reflected the excellent mood of Saturday night - fun, high, lovely, joyous, etc. It feels like reality has set in a bit ever since... and brought things down.

It doesn't help that work is particularly over demanding this week. I was in until 7pm last night, after 7pm tonight, and I expect a late night tomorrow night, which is spliced with some social event, but it's all work-oriented. I think that I'm in a sort of low-simmering state of stress. There's no major panic, but I can feel the walls I'm backed up against all around me.

Gig-wise, there have been a couple of gigs since Saturday's high. Both these gigs have been fairly low-attendance affairs with an audience that may, or may not, give a damn. I should be able to do well with any audience, and I think you have to calibrate what "well" means based on the crowd in front of you. To be honest, though, although I caused laughter tonight, I was nearly phoning the performance in. I was in an odd mood, let's assume work had an effect on that, and I was either delivering the routine without caring, or I was doing something that's not really a reflection of who I am, nor who I want to be on stage.

If it were a year ago, and I was still in the darker places my mind inhabited then, then I would understand why I am behaving the way I appear to be. As it is, there's a lot going right in my life at the moment. I should be giddily exclaiming how good it is that I got an email tonight giving me an award from the very nice people at Darkchat for the performances they saw me at in Edinburgh. I should be thrilled that my mortgage payments are being affected in a good way by the current financial shenanigans. I should be excited about the new arrival in my life (hopefully tomorrow) of a replacement laptop keyboard - one where the T key doesn't come off every few seconds. I should be happy that I've got people to be close to and spend time with (a vague hint at stuff I'm not going to detail on here). In short, I shouldn't be making airheaded american blonde girls nearly cry in the front row of a gig because I was a little too caustic with my handling of them.

Oh, the irony. You wait around, blethering about how comedy is done, receive the email of your award, and then bound onto stage and confuse an audience for a bit until you call it a draw. And when I say "you", I mean "me".

Today's not been the best. I couldn't wake up and I didn't spend much of today glad that I managed it in the end.

However, tomorrow may well be better. I think I'm just feeling a bit run down. Like road kill.

I should have known how today would go from the off. I received a phone call in my morning bleary state. I spoke for a short while and then my phone died. In my attempt to reset it, by removing the battery, I managed to drop the battery down the back of the bed. Before I knew it, I was pulling a big mattress around and cursing the foolishness of morning butter fingers.

Work wasn't the best fun today as we continued our trawl through the "bucket of shit". This was followed by something which is neither fun nor non-fun - personal reviews. In this case, I was conducting them. I did three. Back to back. There were 30 minute buffers planned between them. These buffers were used up. In the end, it fried my brain. I think the process was given due attention, but my brain melted.

I left the office late, went to the supermarket, ate some food, tried to get started on the DIY - it wasn't going well. In the end, I successfully cut a piece of MDF to exactly the wrong shape and size. That's that stuffed.

I then had a tantrum. It was a fairly silent tantrum. I just had to get away from the task in hand, rather than scream and shout and break things. So I did. I was wrung out and miserable. The day was totally broken.

In an attempt to fix something in my life, though, I managed to order a new keyboard for my laptop. At least I'll be able to type comfortably again soon, provided I don't bust the computer when I try and fit the thing. It will involve prying expensive equipment open... Oh dear!

Is there an up to this down down deeper and down tale? Well, a little. I recorded a draft of a song I'm working on. It required some computer-based multi-track recording. I didn't need to think too hard about production quality, just make enough of a demo to show how the song fits together. I showed it to a friend. It's still too long. It can be sped up, but then it sounds a bit weird. So more work to do. The side effect of this process was that I got the song stuck in my head again! Why why why!?

A final up to the day - I read a couple of scripts I either wrote or half-wrote a while ago. They had some definite funny bits in. I enjoyed them.

It's odd being me.

A week is a long time in Politics, so someone one said. I should find out who said it... Ok, it was Harold Wilson. I probably knew that. It's also a long time in my life. I do loads in a given week. Even this weekend had loads in it.

I would say I spent a lot of today washing up. This is because there had been a lot of cooking or baking or general use of the kitchen. Use of a kitchen is a sure sign of a busy household, so clearly I've had a good time in the house this weekend, which I did.

I can't think of anything wrong with this weekend, except that it was not longer and that it was cut short so I could attend tonight's gig.

Tonight's gig was in the category of box ticking. The audience turned up since they may as well do. We all did our sets because we were there and we might as well. When laughs happened, they happened more out of the same spirit. Well, it's alright, we may as well laugh.

Occasionally, though, something can peak. A cracking set from the very wrong Liz Carr, coupled with a little audience interaction in other people's sets, and some of Richmond was converted into belly laughs. I think you learn more from these nights than it first appears.

Highlights of today include (but are not limited to) making fresh pizza and doing the gig. Both of these events were fairly good examples of their ilk.

The pizza, the first I've made in a couple of years, required me to sterilise and clear a large section of worktop in my kitchen. Then the good times began. Dough kneeding galore. I think the dough creation was a highlight of my recent culinary skill rediscovery.

As the dough rose, there was time to create a nice tomato sauce for the pizza topping and to prepare vegetables and cheese for the topping. Other products were also used.

Then, after showing off with dough rolling and general flinging, a hefty creation went into a hot oven, what emerged was gastric art.

With a happy belly, the gig was attended. A good audience can make any act look brilliant. I had a nice time with these people and left having done 31 minutes of laughter creation, with a few songs left not performed. They had a good time, but then they had intended to have a good time. Thus, they only required someone vaguely comedian-shaped to be present and they could have their inevitable fun.

That sounds almost disparaging, but it's just a bit of over-simplification of what is, basically, the truth. You can tell when the audience are there to make it work. It's a pleasure to do those gigs.

Today was day two of "Bucket of shit day". Apparently, our bucket runneth over. It wasn't fun and I got a bit barksome. However, progress was made.

Rather than hang around to complete the task, which would have required end-of-hard-week-unnecessary-overtime, I went off to my gig, which was a last-minute MCing slot in Totton, which is near Southampton.

Overall, it was an interesting gig and I messed about on stage, finding my blethering to be received less sympathetically than the previous night's. Still, the audience did my bidding and I did a reasonable amount of material with them. The combination of the excellent closing act and the fairly reasonable end-time of the gig meant that I got home happy and relaxed, ready to sleep away a troublesome week.