Wednesday 25th August

It's the time of year when my company puts out it's biannual new titles catalogue, which involves producing a list of all the books that we'll be handling for the next six months, along with the fully-edited and proofed blurbs for each title. Producing this catalogue falls to our department – and in particular the proofreading element. Slightly annoyingly, it needs to be done on top of our normal workload, so the proofing has to be done as overtime. Hence tonight I'm taking home a wedge of paper containing the blurbs for around 200 books which need to be gone through thoroughly and using every inch of my eagle-eyed proofreading skill. Happily, being at home, I can also put Monsters, Inc. on in the background and take a break every time I get suicidally bored – not something I can really get away with in the office. Though I think if I were allowed to watch bright, colourful Disney films while I was working I'd be at least as productive as I am now, if not more. This might not be the case.

I want to get the work done by the time K gets home, but it's a bit of a slog and when she does, in fact, get through the door I'm still knee-deep in paper. Luckily for me this means she can crack on with making dinner – a rather delicious curry – and I finally get finished at around 8. Utterly bored of work, I'm in the mood for some light-hearted, facile television – but unfortunately K manages to find a documentary on Channel 4 I can tell from the start is going to be hard going.

Titled My New Brain, it tells the story of a 20-year-old boy (or man, as 20-year-olds are inappopriately referred to on the news; I wasn't a man when I was 20!) who, while out getting drunk with friends at university, fell off a 20-foot wall and suffered a severe brain injury. Having been in a coma for five weeks, the film joins him six months into recovery, when he is making admirable progress. His speech is noticeably affected as is his movement, and he seems perpetually confused – though he is capable of having conversations and seems mostly lucid. His family are heartbreakingly strong – particularly his mother – and do their best to cope with his mood swings and the things he can't do for himself any more. The strangest thing seems to be the fact that his personality has completely changed since the accident, and his family must come to terms with the fact that he is a different person now. It's hard to watch, mainly because his family remind me a lot of my own family, but also because his injury is the sort of thing that could absolutely happen to anyone. It could be tempting to point to the fact that he was drunk and stupidly trying to climb over a wall to get back into a club he'd been kicked out of – but people do stupider, drunker things every day and get away with it. The film ends with his 21st birthday, a point at which he seems to be coming to terms with what has happened to him (he has no memory of it) and the fact that he can't go back. I'm pretty choked up by the end.