I'm quite good at my job. (That's a lie, actually; after almost a quarter of a century I can do this job with my eyes shut. And quite often do) I'm actually quite good at a lot of jobs, which is why, when other members of staff go on holiday, I wind up covering for them. This tends to limit the periods when I can have a holiday. What with the recent builder-based frolics, this hasn't been such a bad thing because it's left me with tons of time off in hand to take days off at short notice to deal with things. On the other hand, it's meant that for the last four or five years I've got to December without taking my full holiday entitlement and I've lost it.
This appears to be changing. An email went round last week exhorting those of us with holiday still to take to damn well take it before mid-December. So as of tomorrow evening I will be on holiday for a fortnight.
Now, before you all ask me where I'm going, I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to spend a large percentage of the time asleep rather than dragging my weary arse up and down on London Transport. I am going to sort out The Little Room With All The Boxes finally. I will play with the cats. I will finally catch up on my DVDs. I may not leave the house for days at a time, except to buy cigarettes. I may well write. You never know. It will, my very good friends, be bliss unconfined.
The glad tidings, of course, have a sting in their tail in that I've had to cover all the stuff I'm responsible for over the next two weeks, which has meant an insane amount of writing at work this week. On Monday I didn't see any way I could get it all done without handing work over to other people to deal with, which I don't like to do, but I got the worst of it out of the way today and I may well leave work tomorrow with a clear conscience. Well, apart from the usual stuff.

This evening I popped over to Forbidden Planet for Neal Asher's signing of his new book, partly to say hi and partly to get him to sign my limited edition signed contributor copy of Subterfuge which we both, along with our very own altariel and many other excellent writers, appear in. Our very own danacea was there, and it struck me how few of you, whose company I cherish, I've actually met in the flesh. altariel and I shared the platform at NewCon, Thog and pds_lit I know well. I first met camies longer ago than we'd probably like to remember, and brisingamen and peake, for their sins, are actually my oldest friends in the southeast of England. Of course, I've known the (still sadly-LJless) OJM since the wild days of 1981, when we were young and foolish. I thought about that, and then I thought about the qnotku, who I'll never meet now, and I got a bit blue.

Anyway, this was my first venture into the West End for quite a while, and the lure of Zaavi proved too much, although I thought I demonstrated admirable restraint and only bought a copy of Dave Gilmour's concert in Gdansk and two albums by an Austin band called VAST, to whose work I was introduced a while ago by a commentor over at Lili's place and which I have become somewhat partial to.
It has been a very busy week, but against expectations I've managed to hit my marks, I've done what I planned to do and I managed to score some excellent albums. And after tomorrow I don't have to catch the fucking train for another fortnight.