HOT ROCKS
Five beers and a curry into the evening and the James Bond credits are rolling in front of my bleary eyes.

I've just come from Le Grand Hotel d'Angkor, a unashamedly pompous palace of a hotel in Siem Reap, Cambodia, where the doormen are so posh they wear ivory-white Prussian-esque Pickelhauben. The architecture was French colonial in style, the pool was Olympic in size and you need a mortgage for dinner.

Yet this isn't even the most impressive hotel here. Everywhere I look, I'm blown away by the builders. Sipping beer alongside the FCC's saltwater pool I felt like a sweaty, French civil servant from the 1930s.

Even the new hotels, which could have ended up like a tacky version of Las Vegas, are mind-blowing. If ever I come to build a gaudy mansion on The Bishop's Avenue, I'm going to ship over boat-loads of Cambodians.

Ealier today I had two of them catering to my every muscular need, kneading my folds of flab and aching limbs with their hands, elbows and boiling hot stones. The chef d'oeuvre involved one of them leaping on to my torso and pressing down hard on my groin. Needless to say, I finshed myself off back in my room.

Soon after, I sent L a mail that I began writing the night before. It was one of the toughest things I've ever composed. In it, I fessed up to five years of obsession; that I'd always felt a deep connection between us; and that I'd never met anyone like her nor felt that I ever would. I told her everything. Why? Because she asked. Now I have to wait for her reply. I dread to think what it might say...

PERFECT DAY?
Eight am. Time to get up. Phone interview at 11. Must prepare. Why do I want the job? Why do I want to leave my current post? Think, THINK!

For three hours I stared at the computer screen, writing and rewriting my answers to the inevitable, yet still hypothetical, questions I expected to be asked.

In the bathroom, my builder was cutting tiles in half with a diamond-cut blade borrowed from an Irish hardware store up the road. I told him to pause. Five to 11, time to call...

Two minutes later it was all over. I GOT THE JOB! I felt like crying. It was the first bit of positive job news I'd received in over a year. The demoralisation, humiliation and depression of my current position would soon be over...

Within a few hours, my builder had finished the two-week job he'd begun a year earlier (all it took was a threat not to pay up). My flat was now finished with a glossy-white finish.

That evening my parents joined me for a celebratory dinner. I ordered a chilli chicken Balti. Or is it a Balti chilli chicken? Or perhaps a chicken chilli Balti, even? It was the hottest thing on the menu. I washed it down with several Cobra beers, went home and then waited for S to turn up.

It had gone 1am by the time her booty call materialised. And this time I kept the lights on.

Now I like to think that I've seen a fair few front bottoms in my time. Fluffy ones, well-groomed ones, even shaved ones. But I've never once come across a tufty one - if Hitler had been a cunt (and I'm sure most people agree he that he was history's biggest cunt) he would have looked like S's muff. In fact, now I come to think of it, looking down at me while I was going down on her, I must have looked a dead-ringer for the genocidal anti-Semite. Thank goodness I don't have a side-parting.