Monday

Wake up several times in the night and stick the light on. I dream about, among other things, staying on the bus longer than usual and ending up in a part of London I never knew existed - and not just another residential part of the city, this area had monuments, palaces and wide open squares. I wonder where my brain got this from. Probably another city I've visited at some point, maybe just a random composite of generic European cities. Either way it made for an anxious dream as I stumbled around looking for familiar faces and locations, at one point wandering down a narrow street to find it was actually the entrance to a restaurant. The diners laugh at my confusion and I wake up less than refreshed.

It's safe to say today isn't the most productive day I'll have in my professional career, but I suppose I turned up in body if not mind. I'm not feeling particularly motivated at work at the moment and I suspect that my efforts and those of my colleagues are not being fully appreciated. I'm sure this is a common complaint, however.

Perhaps to stave off the dark mood I decide to fire off a couple of hopeful emails to a couple of friendly contacts regarding doing some more writing work, freelance. I have a feature idea I'd like to pitch to one of them so hopefully things might develop on that front soon.

Later on K gets home and I cook us a tasty Chicken Saag Masala. We then watch the first episode of Professor Brian Cox's new documentary Wonders of the Solar System on iPlayer which is so fascinating that my head hurts with the hugeness of it all. I say it every time I watch a great new science documentary, but when you can see science in action like this on such a huge scale - for example Cox shows how we can predict a solar eclipse to the exact minute it will begin - I'm amazed that there are people who doubt its truth. I also fail to grasp why, in a world this beautiful and with all its machinery on show people need to believe in anything they can't see. Maybe it's just to cope with the scale of it all.

We also start watching the much-recommended Mad Men, which seems to be this year's The Wire in terms of word-of-mouth hype and, hopefully, in quality too. Set in a New York ad agency in the 1960s it is incredibly slick and well-written and makes me wonder why British television-makers find it so hard to make drama this good. Mad Men is like The Wire in that it does not patronise the viewer and feels no need to over-explain itself - and watching the first two episodes feels like settling into reading a novel which you're enjoying by page 10 and already wish it wouldn't end.

The other main thing to say about Mad Men, though it's been said plenty already, is the sheer amount of smoking on screen. I don't think there is a single scene in those first two episodes where someone doesn't light, finish and light a cigarette. The floors must have been covered in a thick layer of ash in those days. In many ways it looks like a dream scenario to a smoker - but my lungs and I are immensely grateful that I can't live like that now. Nipping outside for a few fags a day is just fine for us both.