If you like pina coladas

My internet connection stopped working yesterday, and when I phoned them up they arranged for an engineer to come round this morning. Then a few hours later it started working again, and I told them about it, but nobody specifically said they'd cancelled the engineer, so I realised this morning there was a chance he'd still be coming round at some time between eight and twelve. So I had to get up early. Then I remembered that as well as the probability of the engineer, there was the certainty of the landlord coming round today to do the annual gas safety check. And the likelihood of people phoning me about the press release that went out yesterday describing the speed cards record. And the sporting chance of calls from three different accountancy recruitment agencies about job prospects. And the woman from Radio 4 who hasn't yet managed to talk to me despite our best efforts to arrange a mutually convenient time. And the TV documentary people who are determined to chronicle every slighest movement I make. All in all, it looked like being the kind of day when I'd constantly have people at the door, on the phone or emailing, and wouldn't be able to get anything done.

I'm not sure exactly what I was planning on 'getting done' today. But I would have been annoyed about not being able to do it, I'll assure you. So I decided to take the mature route to happiness, and run away. I went to Nottingham for the morning, and Peterborough for the afternoon, just to see if they'd changed since I last saw them. They hadn't, but I still had lots of fun browsing the shops and enjoying the feeling that people might be trying to contact me and wouldn't be able to find me. I bought a collection of James Kochalka's sketchbook diaries and two of his CDs, and admired his lifestyle, not for the first time - I'm only a memory champion because I can't draw, write children's books and cartoons and record songs with my band, you know.

Of course, when I got home, everyone was lying in wait for me. The engineer had indeed not been cancelled and had left a card, the landlord had let himself in and presumably found the flat not filled with carbon monoxide, I had oodles of emails to read through and the phone was ringing constantly - two job prospects, one of them sounding good and the other not, an interview on Radio Derby for Thursday morning (did I mention I did Radio Shropshire yesterday? I don't remember) and even a call from Tony Buzan to say congratulations.

The TV people want to film me at a job interview. This doesn't seem like a very good way to go about getting a job - if I was the financial controller of a company and wanted a new accountant, I'd go for one who didn't bring his own film crew to the interview. It kind of gives the impression that I care more about being on TV than I do about being an accountant (which, scarily, I really don't) and would be constantly dashing off to give interviews and autographs instead of preparing the monthly balance sheet reconciliations.

On the other hand, they also want to film me going to see Grandma on Friday, which might be fun. Hopefully they won't cancel it, because she's promised to beat me to death with her stick if it turns out that I'm just winding her up about the film crew. I think she's looking forward to being a TV star. She'd make a great one - there's nobody in the world who's a more natural talker, and she's got a heck of a lot of interesting stories to tell.

All in all, I find myself quite liking the idea of escaping from all the people who want to talk to me right now. Maybe I'll go into hiding somewhere until all the excitement has blown over.