I experience the calm before the storm.

Wednesday 10th October

By an incredible stroke of luck, I managed to remeber to get up and make my appointment with the Physio at 8.15 this morning. At the beginning of August I underwent an operation to have a huge sliver of cartiledge removed from my left knee, which had stopped working as a knee should, and consequently I now have the task of building the knee back up to its former strength. Its former strength being fairly inconsiderable, I thought this wouldn't take too long, but it turns out I used to have more muscle in my leg than I ever would have believed, and it's taking quie a while. Rebuilding it involves a lot of squatting and bending around on the stairs.

Given that I'd been expecting this month never to let up for a moment, I'm slightly confused by having spent two days this week largely in my own house. This has allowed me to eat real food that I've made in my own kitchen twice in one week (a thing almost unheard of at Leonard Mansions). I've also written one complete class log on time and learnt around half of the script for the new Seagull show, which we start rehearsing next week.

This evening to my third place of work: the bookshop of the National Theatre. This momentously unattractive building on London's otherwise funky South Bank can only be understood if considered in the same light as other iconic offspring of the Late Seventies, say Blake's 7 - which may have seemed daringly modern and edgy at the time but now look hopelessly wrong to the point where they can no longer be taken at all seriously. In this way, I suppose Denys Lasdun can be seen as the Terry Nation of architecture. Inside, as many before me have noted, the National Theatre resembles in almost every respect a car park, the only difference being that fewer of the corners smell of piss and it is marginally cheaper to park your car for a day than it is to buy a drink at the NT.

I originally jopined the NT bookshop as Deputy Manager but knew within a week that I'd made a terrible mistake. I held out for a year before bailing out to work with Sian, but stayed on the books as a casual bookseller, thus achieveing the unusual distinction of having effectively demoted myself. The bookshop itself is unique in many respects, most of which can be traced directly to the all-pervasive influence of its manager, a man so extreme, so absurd as to be a phenomenon in his own right. To attempt a snapshot summary would not do this monument to pomposity the justice he deserves, so I'll drop things in as they happen.

This evening's shift was in the gloomier of the two satellite bookstalls, where the dinge of the surroundings is offset by the opportunity, away from overseers, to get on with your own stuff or more often than not just dick around on the internet. This went on until 10.15 - an early finish for an evening shift, so I was back home before midnight. Just.