No not fireworks. There’s a banging noise coming from one of the neighbouring flats and I can’t tell whether it’s DIY or sex. The fact that it’s nearly eleven o’clock on a Friday leans towards sex, but the duration is beginning to suggest DIY.

I crossed a picket line to get to work today. Of course, it being a civil service picket line, it was barely noticable and had packed up and gone home by lunch time.

But I suppose I’ll have to hand back my Stakhanovite of the Month award now. (Gosh, I look young and slim in that photo, taken in Boston in early 2000, what’s happened to me over the past four years? I blame George W Bush.)