I hauled myself painfully out of bed at only the second alarm, and dragged myself into work for the first time in two weeks.

On the way in I stopped for petrol. My current habit whenever I buy petrol is to write down the details: date, volume, price and current mileage. (This is so that I can later on work out my car's real fuel consumption and compare it with the advertised one, so I can get a genuinely accurate figure for the total cost of car ownership, and generally just in case it comes in handy for any other reasons.) I did manage to write all that down this morning, but then I dropped the pencil into the passenger-side footwell. When I got to work I looked for the pencil and it simply wasn't there. Neither had it ended up down the side of the seat, or rolled into the rear footwell. I couldn't find it at all. I have a horrible feeling it's somehow managed to fall into a vital mechanism of some sort and this evening I'll change gears and hear an HB crunching noise.

Then I walked into the office, sat down at my desk, and discovered that a localised network outage had taken out my computer and about four near it. After all that, I could have had another hour in bed if only I'd known!

Clearly it is going to be one of those days. I also have two hundred and thirty emails to clear out of my inbox from the last two weeks…