Writing for the sake of it

I've decided to exercise my writing muscle a bit more, and start posting every day (well, every work day at least). It's the only thing that will keep me sane in what is, at times, a very frustrating job. I am counting down the days to my Egyptian holiday and then Australia. Three months with no work is going to be the best thing in the world.

What if no one worked? What if we all worked on the land, ploughed the fields, milked the cows, drank the cows milk and lived happily ever after? There would be no offices, no mobile phones, no need to slave away day after day at what is a completely pointless job, if you really think about it. Sometimes I'd really like to live in a commune. And with rising oil prices, fuel poverty and the credit crunch, it looks like it may even be a viable option.

But then I think about it some more. What, no facebook? No endless updates of who is doing what, who is enagaged to whom? No Ebay? No pointless searching for concert tickets that I can't afford, no selling of things that I have no use for (and probably no one else does either). And most importantly, no mobiles? Yes, I know I've just wished for an existence without them, but the truth is that my relationship with my mobile is a love-hate one. I feel helpless without it, yet hate that I am contacable at all times.

Switch it off, I hear you say? Well, see, you don't have a mum like mine. She'll assume the worst (car accident followed by kidnapping, then rape, followed by being hung naked from a cliff on the Isle of Purbeck) so I need to have it on. At least if it rings she assumes I'm alive. Then again, if I take an hour to reply to a text, my boyfriend worries about me too. I'm obviously someone likely to have got myself into some kind of predicament of some sorts, with all these people worrying about me all the time.

I seem to attract this kind of attention actually. For example, take this morning. My friends mum (and my landlady as it happens) insisted (by this I mean she practically dragged me by my hair to the kitchen table) that I eat pancakes. 'I give you lift to work. You eat,' she said, beckoning to the stack of pancakes. It was hardly an offer I could refuse. I think she thinks I don't eat.

Anyway, back to the mobile phone debate. The worst thing is, when you get back to your mobile phone after leaving it on its own all day (poor thing) to find that NOT ONE person has called or sent you a pointless text message. NOT ONE! That is the definition of rejection. But then again, mobile phones have other ways of making you feel rejected too.

Lynne Truss (the best, most grumpy author ever and I hope to be exactly like her in about ten years) in 'Talk To The Hand: The complete and utter rudeness of everyday life' sums up my feeling about mobiles in about three pages (I have a lot of feelings about them)when she explains the problem of them ringing when you're with someone else. It's just plain rude to have a conversation when someone else is there. It's like saying 'I'd rather talk to someone I can't see than have a face to face conversation with you'. Now that's rejection.

Speaking of which, I have to go. My phone is ringing.