Decorative Wooden Doum-Ladder

The house is a tip. I feel like I'm living in a haunted junk shop. From my vantage point, at the dining room, table I can see a ceramic hare, a USB microphone, a half empty bottle of Chambord, a pile of CDs, a pritt-stick, an empty ziplock bag, a Co-Op food magazine with some of the pictures cut out, a bottle of sunscreen, a cat toy, nine bottles of red wine and a pirate flag. Everything is covered in a generous layer of dust, made more evident by the fact that four large pieces of furniture are black and someone (could have been me) has wiped their hand across each of them, as if to check exactly how dusty they are, before saying to themselves, 'I must buy some Pledge.'

I don't know how we've got to this state, after all Chris isn't working and I've only left the house four times in the last month. There's plenty of time for cleaning and yet  our bedsheets haven't been changed in a fortnight and there are toothpaste splashes on the bathroom mirror which are certain to require a fair amount of elbow grease to remove them.

I can hear the front bedroom door banging in the wind upstairs. There's a hook on it to prevent it from properly slamming but it's not tight enough to stop it completely and it clatters away as long as the windows are open. Chris has a fixation of airing the house which is why the window in the spare bedroom, much like every other room upstairs, is open in the first place. It's only used as a guest room three or four times a year and the rest of the time it's either a laundry room or somewhere to deposit junk until we decide to either throw it away or officially add it to the hoard.

It's windy outside so the door is banging a couple of times a minute and it's driving me mad. I mean, how fresh does a room we barely use need to be anyway?

I took a little break from work earlier when my eye was caught by an advert on Instagram and I found myself poring over the website of a furniture and interior decor company. Years ago I worked for Habitat and over the six years of my employment I developed an interest in beautiful and impractical things for the home that I just couldn't afford. Back then it was fine because I had staff discount, I knew when the sales were on, and for a while at least, I worked at the company's clearance store so if I was happy to wait till an item was 'last season' then I could get some real bargains.

Most of our furniture is Habitat, with the noticeable exception of the dusty black pieces that are taunting me right now. I once bought a fuscia pink chair designed by Philip Treacy, I don't remember how the hell I got it home because it was huge. A round piece that barely made it through the door and which I had to ebay eventually because it was so ridiculously large. A woman in Belfast won the online auction and sent an HGV to collect it from our little village.

I came home with an oversized paper lantern one day, the sort of thing you'd see hanging from the ceiling in a student rental, only the one I bought was at least five feet in diameter and stood on the floor. It ended up in an attic room of the house we lived in Derbyshire because it just wouldn't fit anywhere else. It was in good company up there standing proudly next to three eight foot panels with a picture of the Queen by some German artist I forget now, which made up an old shop display, a two foot letter E which hung from the ceiling and a massive white plastic coffee table which looked like a ginormous aspirin.

Today's online window shopping found me staring at a decorative wooden doum-ladder wondering if I could justify €74, where I would put it in my house, and importantly what exactly 'doum' meant.

I shared this find with Alison and Nicola on our group chat, safe in the knowledge that they'd not find this out of the ordinary, Alison having recently ordered a portrait of the dog and this morning buying magnetic fake eyelashes.

I asked how they worked, whether you needed metal eyelids or some kind of cranial implant but apparently the reality is far more pedestrian. You need to use some special eyeliner with magnetic properties that attracts tiny little magnets on the lashes themselves. I suppose she'll be alright so long as she doesn't walk past a fridge door with them in. Next on her list is a carbon monoxide detector.

The tech company I work for took a hit today after being told by a large, international client they wouldn't be paying us tens of thousands of pounds worth of outstanding invoices for the foreseeable future. Their business is music and entertainment, and in the case of the work we do, music festivals, and it has all but closed till further notice. This has meant a number of our staff being furloughed and the small team shrinking drastically.

It was expected that future work would take a hit but we assumed the bills we'd already issued would be honoured, after all this is a multi billion dollar company. I didn't realise just how hard they'd been hit until I read today that their value had dropped by more than half in three weeks.

Much of the work we do, day to day, is for individual festivals but they ultimately fall under this one organisation so our cashflow has been clobbered. The Government's furlough scheme is being used to cover eighty percent of these colleagues' salaries while our company will pay the remaining twenty percent. Without the scheme a bunch of them would be wondering how they were going to pay the bills so it's going to be a valuable safety net.

It's all very sad but the light at the end of the tunnel is that eventually my workmates will be brought back and I'm confident that the invoices will eventually be settled. There's no bad blood, everyone accepts that these really are exceptional times.

My job, for the time being at least, is safe. A lot of what I do is administrative, I do some bookkeeping, some marketing and PR, social media and so on, none of which is directly affected by today's news.

While on social media duty today I had a quick check of LinkedIn. There was nothing much to report or note but as I was scrolling through I was reminded of my pet hate - business language. It's not formal business language per se that does my head in, but that type of things people write on social media instead of writing what they actually mean.

The main culprits are words like 'excited', 'thrilled' and 'proud.' Proud to be part of the team that landed a million pound contract to supply goats to Chester Zoo; Thrilled to be working with Team Goat in East Cheshire; and so on.

In more than twenty five years of employment I've never been thrilled, proud or excited about anything I've ever done at work! Maybe it's because I don't work with goats but I suspect people just feel uncomfortable saying what they really mean - Look at me! I just landed the biggest contract of my career and that makes me totally employable! Maybe I'm just too cynical...