Day 386

That tennis player Monica Seles, who turns out to be Serbian, got stabbed in the back (how appropriate!) on court in Germany by an East German, no doubt a neo-Nazi Ustashe fanatic.

Day 385

M came round with Colin, told her about the Great Abstinence. I pointed out I didn't intend to start till after my birthday, on June 1st, in fact. Colin said, 'So you're going to drink yourself silly till then?' Nice bloke! Wish I saw him more often.

Day 384

Went to the behavioural therapy appointment. After 45 minutes' talking, he told me I was not paranoid as I knew my fears were unreasonable. He said I was suffering from an 'intrusive rumination' - nice phrase, sounds about right. He also told me, basically, that it would go away if I knocked off drink for 3-6 months. I told him his words were hard but clear.

Lovely weather, btw: sunny and windy. More Latin in the afternoon, did a bit of pondering about the possibility of a Great Abstinence. I thought about waiting till after my birthday and perhaps doing June 1 - September 21 - 112 days, over 3½ months and with only one drink-likely anniversary, July 4th/6th. And I could celebrate Bilbo's/Frodo's birthday at the end of it. (!) But a GA would be 6 times as long as my Finals abstinence and probably pretty hard, certainly at first. Sounds like a good idea really though.

Day 383

Got the paper early instead of at lunchtime, for a change. Didn't notice the lack at lunchtime. Also for a change, didn't watch the news at tea-time - completely sick of David Owen's face.

Day 382

Rang up the behavioural therapy people - appointment on Wednesday as I suspected.

There was a thunderstorm at 1 pm and a triffic 2-hour version of The Eagle Has Landed on Radio 4 an hour later.

Day 381

Recycled French lager bottles at Asda. The car park was nearly full: evidently Sunday shopping is more popular than the Christian fanatics would have us believe.

Lots of fuss about yesterday's bombs. Why? Only one person died - bad news for his family of course, but the Tories have killed off far more people than the IRA ever will: by homelessness, starvation, freezing to death, despair and (most infamously of all) the Falklands. Any group who'll callously kill thousands in support of their election campaign are beyond condemnation. It is that crime that is the worst in Th**r's long list of evil deeds.

Day 380

It rained all evening: 'not even to wreak vengeance would a Trevanyi set forth in the rain'.

Big bomb in London today, after that small one at the oil terminal on Tyneside in the week.

Day 379

I see the Croats have committed a terrible massacre in Bosnia; hope Chancellor Kohl is pleased with what he's sponsored.

Haven't been to the pub for 5 weeks, I've gone right off that sort of thing.

Day 378

Giro came - increased to £68.40 from £67.20, ie 60p/wk - wow. Foolishly mentioned this when M came round to return my rucksack - had to pay her £3.75 for petrol on Monday.

Watched The Comic Strip: quite a good one about telly detectives, unfortunately with the same dull running joke about the Professionals that they used in The Bullshitters.

Day 377

No Giro today owing to signing on late yesterday. In the afternoon did a spot of astrological research on Hitler.

Day 376

Went to the DHSS. They kept me waiting for ages but it was OK. The woman behind the desk was German: I felt like saying 'What are foreigners doing working with 4½ million unemployed?' but didn't.

Day 375

Up at 5.45 am: M picked me up at 7.30. Got the ferry at Dover, had a calmish but windy crossing. Drove to Saint-Omer, got 49 bottles of beer and wine for my parents. Then to Dunkirk. As I said to M, it didn't look as if the beach had been strafed 53 years ago during Britain's most successful failure. Saw the memorial. Then drove to Cap Blanc Nez to look at the bunkers and shell craters; we could see England across the sea and I speculated it was where Hitler, and Napoleon before him, came to look at the 20-mile stretch of water that halted both their conquests. It was quite impressive. I got a bit of chalk off the ground.

Back to Calais for the ferry: sat in the bow bar watching the lights of Dover approach. Home by 10.35pm. Thanked M for persuading me to come.

Day 374

Listened to Monday's episode of The Archers (which I missed) in the repeat. Read the paper

A very good day for a Sunday. Of course the winter Sundays are long over and that improves things. Worked on fancy screen clears for my C screen savers.

Day 373

In the afternoon successfully converted my Pascal EGA dump program to C, first time. Watched a bit of You Rang M'lord, listened to Week Ending.

Read in the paper how good they think Th**r is in E. Europe, they must be stark staring bonkers. In the corner of the same page it said that a sixth of Britain's people live on income support, that is the achievement of that vile, evil, thieving, lying hypocritical excuse for a woman the spiv nations ought to bear in mind.

More unpleasant events in Bosnia; being on the Serbs' side is rather like liking Reb in Pris: both are entitled to restitution for past suffering, but they will keep going too far. But how anyone can line up with the Germans like the US and the Croats have. The Croats, they were Nazi puppets after all.

Day 372

Nice-sounding date. Went into town, sorted out the excursion document. Made another attempt on FORTH, using A86 this time. Why do I keep trying to write things from the keyboard when forward planning works so much better?

I got very bored in the afternoon despite going round to my parents' and helping restore the front room to pre-fire state by carrying books downstairs. Exactly a month since the fire. Quickly I've forgotten.

Was depressed about 7.30pm but cheered up after a walk, and good progress on a C 'analogue' clock prog. M rang about 9.15 to ask if everything was sorted.

Day 371

Went into town. Got forms for an excursion document (I thought you could only get them at ports) and visitor's passport, and 140 francs for £20. Searched fruitlessly all day for my birth certificate: M rang to give details of the ticket, which you need to check for excursion documents.

In the evening went round to Dad's teacher friend Mr B to get the document signed. Exhausting day!

Day 370

M came round about 4pm and spent about 2 hours trying to persuade me to come to France with her next week for a day-trip.

After watching QED I remembered that I had to sign on on Monday, when the trip is. I rang her up to discuss it, I decided to pretend I'd forgotten and sign on on Tuesday instead. So I will have to get some French money and a visitor's passport AQAP. Set things in motion tomorrow, in fact. I just hope it can be done in time.

Day 369

Worked on an assembler version of the disc free space program - tricky multiplication. Sorted it out: even conversion to K (SHR 10) and to M (SHR another 10) - the latter scaled up by multiplying by 10 before the divide and putting in a decimal point. Sophisticated stuff. Format leaves a bit to be desired, but content before style. (Important to remember that in this false age).

Not seen M today, she reckoned I was making 'a big mistake' in not coming yesterday.

Day 368

More assembler. In the evening I was watching a documentary about hares and Eostra when M rang up wanting me to come down the Green Man with J and her and her brother and 'loads of his friends'. I declined on the grounds I'd had it with the Green Man. What an enantiodroma.

Must post that mentalness questionnaire. I really am feeling down at the moment, which is odd as I'm drinking less than I have been. How did it happen / And who was to blame? And more importantly, what can I do to change it?

Day 367

Did some computing. M rang after dinner, went round and stayed till 6.30 doing lots of computing. Evocative Blue Savannah being played by her brother.

Day 366

Sorted out the file handle problem. Worked out the formula for distance and angular size: distance = ½ width/tan ½𝜃 .

A letter from the behavioural therapy people, offering an appointment on the 29th (nearly 2 months after I first went). Also a 'How Mental Are You?' questionnaire to send off. (Actually anxious people are less likely to be mental).

Day 365

Today being Good Friday it was hardly the same as usual. Got up in time to catch the end of Way Out West. It rained all day: didn't go out. I just don't seem to get the urge to go out at weekends any more. I think I appreciate Tuesday and Thursday more than Friday and Saturday these days.

Wrote a 500-byte .COM file for date/time report. Now moving on to file buffers.

Ate a large tea, watched Red Dwarf V, drank lager, carried on reading LotR.

Day 364

Got the TBASIC working. S came round and we had a good talk. I told her about the language library placement, and our night out with Stacey and Gemma - the latter, I said, earning more than Roberta F and twice as well off because she hasn't lost all her friends. 'No, Gemma never had any friends in the first place' said S wittily.

In the evening wrote a neat 180-byte available memory program using my general-purpose BIN2ASC routine.

S rang up about 8.45 to invite me out with her and Roberta (!), but I declined, wanting a quiet evening. An hour later Roberta phoned with the same request! To which I made the same reply.

Day 363

Finished typing in that C titchy BASIC interpreter: worked hard all day debugging it. Listened to Charles Augustus Milverton - especially good, particularly Holmes and his 'hated rival'! Went to the recycling place with 8kg of cans, got £3.20. That's 23kg so far.

I have been unemployed 21 months 1 day. 33% of the unemployed blame Thatcher, apparently. 81% 'hardly ever go out'. I can well believe it.

Wednesdays aren't usually very exciting. A Giro came today but being in funds I left cashing it till tomorrow.

Day 362

ELVES' NEW YEAR. Assembler experimentation (successful).

Day 361

Did some graphs for the presentation Carl's got to do for his interview tomorrow.

Came across a triffic and easy bin-to-hex routine in that old ZX81 m/c book: simply get each nybble and OR it in a byte with 30h to get the hex digit. The success of this encouraged me to rationalise my bin-to-dec 32-bit routine, first to fill a buffer from the left and then to work with pointers. Works well.

Monday never is very exciting but at least I achieved something constructive today.

Day 360

Out all day with M on bike ride to Raindon, didn't get back till 6.20.

Still in difficulties in m/c over binary to ASCII conversion - I want a simple routine to take 4 bytes at BVAL and produce up to 10 digits at STRBUF.

'I build people's houses - I expect I know what I'm doing and I have a house when I've finished' - that's what an Irish bricklayer said at that peace rally in London today. But what the solution is in N. Ireland is not an easy question to answer. I suppose some sort of joint sovereignty might be a step in the right direction.

Got to sign on tomorrow.

Day 359

Grand National. Mercury setting at the start time, so I had 50p each way on Won't Be Gone Long, a Mercurial name with orange colours. The race was a fiasco, with 2 false starts. On the second most of the riders weren't aware of the false start and raced all the way round. In the end the race was declared void, all bets to be returned. Mercury is of course patron of tricksters and thieves!

I see there's some crackpot plan to give $1,000m of aid to Russia. Half of that'll go to the Mafia, the other half to 'entrepreneurs' who are after all much the same thing. This is a difficult time for socialists, still the imbalance of wealth world-wide will go on increasing.

Day 358

M came round and gave me interview advice - 'think shops' she said as she departed.

Left at 3.30, unnaturally clean and smart. The interview was quite short but there were no unnecessary pauses. Back at 4.50: M came round for a post-mortem. She reckoned that only 3 people (including me) went for the job. But interviews are like exams, you don't know the outcome till you get the letter

Did some unusually effective graphics C and text-'collapse' assembly programming. Everything sweet as a nut, woman and computer in perfect harmony.

A good day, beautiful weather too.

Day 357

It rained solidly until dinner; watched a Norman Wisdom film at my parents' with Carl.

In the afternoon to town, got a shirt from C&A for £12 (instead of the usual £6, felt like something of better quality for a change) and a good C book from the library.

Watched the last Minder: feel the Australian episodes weren't up to the excellent standard of the rest of the series.

Wonder how things'll go with the job. There could be zero or more other applicants and zero or more of them could have better chances. I rate my chance as zero or greater, or as we ought to say, nought or greater.