HORSES FOR TOILETS
Swooshing into work on my bike this morning, I rode over evidence that dozens of beasts of burden had clippety-plopped their way along this route earlier.

Smeared in ten foot by three foot clumps, horse shit stained the road surface, glistening in the sun. I tried to avoid it, but in places it was unavoidable. Inevitably, some of the shit went onto my wheels. More worryingly, after being ground into the hot tar, the horse shit had been pulverised into dust, and was now dancing in circles as the wind blew in. I feared for my airway; I closed my mouth and did my best to shut my nostrils like a camel does.

So not a pleasant journey. But it occurred to me that if your dog poos on the curb, you get fined. If you drop litter on the ground, you can get fined. Yet if you're a police horse, you can plop equine excrement all over the road without so much as a "oops, I've shat myself". How can this be legal?

BETTER
I feel strange. I have a girlfriend - off to see here now for a shwarma and a shag; I feel positive; and I received an e-mail from my Balkan beauty telling me that she thinks of me, looks forward to my mails, and that the only reason she hasn't given me her number is because her life is in a "bit of a mess" right now.

L has always been something of an enigma to me. She never gives anything away. If only she knew how much of a hold she has over my emotions, how much of my day-dreaming she occupies. So she cares, she thinks of me too and...Well, who knows? Deep down I just still feel that she's probably the one, which is either very romantic romantic or just plain daft. (I do like Z, and I don't see how my feelings for L contradict this).

Job-wise, a new post has been advertised which would be right up my alley. Forget being embedded in Bogota. This one would involve living among the nomadic, curious tribes of the south and eastern provinces of London. Thank G-d I've done my hostile environments training!

FOOTBALLITIS
It's 11.40pm. My eye-lids are sagging; my mouth cries out for water; and my bed is calling my name. Yet still I sit here, staring morosely at the tele, dividing my dwindling concentration between my computer screen and Match of the Day.

Spain v France is about to start. I missed the game itself - one of only about three so far - in order to share a kosher Indian meal with my friend D. Like a reindeer burnishing his antlers, I went for the spiciest dish on the menu and promptly self-combusted. Only now am I beginning to chill again.

Didn't speak to Z today, but I'm seeing her tomorrow. Work still exasperating, but social life showing signs of vigour for a change. I need more sleep.

ONE MORE SLIP

I slept an uncomfortable five hours today. The hot wind gusting in under my brown, faux-leather blinds disoriented me; and the nervous tension that had been with me from the previous night's shift ate into my heart. I turned off my alarm, preparing to rise, only to nod off once more, awake, switch the alarm back on, and then sink into a renewed unhappy slumber.

What I'd been dreading most of all - aside from an England defeat - was the e-mail waiting for me in my inbox, from my boss.

By the time I read it, I was already at work and England were 1-0 up. It was short, devoid of emotion and sympathy, but it's message was clear: one more slip, and I'm sausage-meat.

By this time I had in fact steeled myself for the worst. I'm pretty sure I'm going to quit. I know I can't stay in my department - whatever my boss says I really can't see how I'll ever regain his confidence again.

And if I leave? So what! Thank G-d I've got a small mortgage, I've got a brain, my health, contacts and - when appropriate - I've got more passion than a horny Patagonian beaver. I just need to regain control of my own destiny and maybe be my own boss.

LOWER STILL
I've always been a little bit clumsy: tripping over paving stones here; banging my head into a wall there; slicing my finger with a knife while using it as a screwdriver, even though I already warned myself that it would end in blood and tears.

Silly mistakes, though, were never my leitmotif, not at work, not at school. So why does everything I touch right now seem to go more pear-shaped than a ton of conference pairs laid out in the shape of a pair? It's like I've acquired a deranged, spiteful form of the Midas-touch: turning everything to shit, rather than gold.

Last night was a case in point: when attempting the Herculean task of printing out some scripts I contrived to drag the aforementioned stories into the (non-retrievable) waste-bin; stuff went to the wrong computer, and now my boss wants "my version" of events!

I'm all for going out with a bang. But my subconscious seems to have taken things a little more literally than I would have liked.

So, instead of dreading coming in to work because it's unchallenging, I now dread it for my boss's next note. He's clearly watching every move I make right now. And believe it or not I am trying to ensure that nothing I do catches his beady eye. It just seems that the more I try, the further into the quicksand I sink. I'm currently up to my left nostril.

OH PARAGUAY!

Many's the time that someone has cut me down to size with a witty put-down only for me to retaliate with an even more devastating blow of immensely brutal-yet-humorous proportions...five minutes after the other person has turned around and disappeared. "And that's what I would have said..."

Well, that didn't happen to me this week. What did was that England beat Paraguay - hoorah! - and at the time I failed to capitalise on my position as possibly the only Briton to have recently gone out with/shagged/broken the heart of a Paraguayan.

A was 21-year old nymph with minge more ginger than a gingerbread man's and more freckles than join-the-dots puzzle. She was sweet, but not for me - when we went out I actually declined to sleep with her on the grounds that we should wait. The relationship soon disintegrated and it was only then, free from emotional attachment, that I felt the obligation to give her a thoroughly good seeing to.

Anyway, so I sent her a brief mail, whose contents can be summarised thus: ahhhhhhh - we beat you. 1-0, 1-0, 1-0, 1-0.

She wrote back to tell me that she's getting married in December. What? Another one. In the past 12 months not one, not two, but three ex-girlfriends of mine from the previous year have got engaged and/or married.

Avid readers of this blog will be aware of the theory I posited several weeks back, that going out me was a guarantee of marriage with someone else within a year. Well, here's yet more proof.

Luckily for me I'm still going out with Z the sprinter, and we show no signs of running out of puff...

NUMBER 69

Hard to believe, but this is my 69th post since I began my ramblings in the run-up to my 30th.

So, without further ado, I'd like to thank Fifi for bothering to read this regularly; for the five people that have felt compelled to leave their comments; my parents who are technophobic enough to ensure that I never have to worry about them reading this; and of course the ladies, bosses and faceless HR girls who spice up my life with enough chaos, confusion and false hope for me to write about whenever I feel the need to vent my spleen.

*****
Today I received a mail from my beautiful Balkan ex-belle. As it popped into my inbox my heart skipped a beat. I'd written to her the other day, but she rarely writes back so promptly.

She was well and happy to hear from me, but typically coy about revealing anything meaningful about her or her life. She seems to be going through her own turning-30 crisis, not knowing where her life is heading or where she wants it to go. All she knows is that she isn't happy where she is.

Reading between the lines I can only infer that she's still single (still hope for me?) and may soon leave her homeland. I think now could be the time to launch another kamikaze request for her phone number, with a view to going out there some time in the near future.

I know my obsession with her is unhealthy. She's exotic and kind and I've never met anyone who matches her. I've built her up so much in my mind - stunning, slender, savvy and serious about her roots - that it's nigh on impossible for her to live up to it, even if she let me see her.

So where does that leave things with my Israeli? Not too badly as it happens. Contradictory as it may sound, I enjoy spending time with her: the smooching, the eating and the whipping her at backgammon. And with L in the Balkans and Z over here, I see no reason why I can't give all I need to give to both of them. Loving two women when one of them is not in the same country is really not that tricky.