Let's just say "Ah jaysus" and leave it pretty much at that.

I'm sitting in Edinburgh Airport. Yesterday I was in a small village on the west coast of Ireland. By Friday I could be in Leeds. And I have no idea where my head is, as they say, at.

There's no doubt that this will go down as an interesting year. I've gone from a position of relative discomfort with my job but comfort with my lifestyle to a position of relative comfort with my job, but a position where I am looking at other jobs in a series of crazy and ever-more-eccentric steps that are taking me further afield and further from where I thought I would head when I set out on this curious journey. But in the mean time, I am thinking about a little old lady who lived in Hong Kong.

Obviously, I'm writing this from a Spectrum Interactive doodad in an airport so I'm not going to look up the details of the precise location or the precise name of the gentleman involved. However, about six and a half years ago I passed the bottom of the staircase leading up to her apartment. It was on a street with a leafy park next to it - odd enough in Sheung Wan - and outside her front door she had a small shrine.

There's nothing too uncommon about that - a small red and gold shrine, a picture of a god, a few sticks of incense. The memorable thing about this one was that the image in the shrine was not a conventional god, but a model and an actor who was known for removing his shirt and occasionally more.

When I lived in Green Street in the late 1980s, I was faintly titllated by greetings cards with the same photo in it. I wasn't certain what it meant back then, although I think that both Mr Twinky and I have probably worked it out by now. Same guy in the same pose in a card that opens to reveal his charm. I never plucked up the nerve to buy the card, not even as an amusing joke for one of my friends. But I guess that the little old lady in Sheung Wan was more courageous than I was.

I like to think that at points in her life she had difficult situations to consider, strange new opportunities and saw strange and marvellous things. I hope that she did, because while it's a scary position to be in, as far as life shaking events go, deciding where to go next in your career is proving to be a fascinating experience. I'm lucky, though. I have a good job to start from, and the support of my evil sidekick cat and his plans for world domination (now on stage 3 - membership of his fan club still available). I have my health this year, and I've got my professional qualification and an OU course under my belt this year.

It's the waiting that's killing me, though. So many other things depend on whether I am offered another job, which one or two I am offered, and there is only so much that Mr Twinky and I can do until this is all resolved.

Hopefully it'll work out well - but I am going to go home and set up a shrine to beefcake just in case.

Your home smells funny.

This is because of the dog, or the farting, or the baby sick, or the natural world creeping in to your hermetically sealed living capsule. You need the artificial natural smell of meadows, or pumpkins, or white tea and lily, delivered in to your home in puffs of chemistry, possibly with a changing light show and how about a magic little tune to let you know that a corner of your room now smells of something that might be orange blossom.

It's a multi-gazillion dollar industry probably, with new products squeezing themselves on to the market. The consumer - that's you, spraying frantically to cover up the fact that the dog has farted on the baby - has now realised that one smell is not enough - you get bored! And so, we now have air fresheners that change scent every forty-five seconds from chocolate to burning casserole to ck1, just to keep your home smelling fresh.

We need these products because we live in a world without fresh air, where opening a window lets the good air out, and where we have to keep all of our waste indoors because we don't have enough space for a compost patch as our gardens have been sacrificed for a range of six brightly-coloured waste bins (one for paper, one for glass, one for bodies, one for toenail clippings and so on) - which are collected fortnightly on an arcane rota known only to the air freshener companies.

Of course, most air fresheners don't get rid of smells, they just mask them. That's what the air freshener companies tell us, and they've been making this stuff out of long-chain hydrocarbons and waste from the petroleum industry for long enough that they've got to know, haven't they? So we now get products designed to kill nasty smells and the new second-generation version that covers up the new, fresh air, with the scent of lemon on a Tuesday. Aren't we lucky.

It's a multi-dollar industry, but one that nobody actually needs, so we've got to catch the youth market. Teach our offspring that the natural thing to do after a smelly poo is to push the ugly plastic sticky thing that's ruining the paintwork in the bathroom to release a puff of chemicals to cover up the other chemicals that have come out of your bottom. And then to complain to your mother, whose lips don't move in time with her words.

Your home smells funny. It always has done, and probably always will. And there's no doubt that artificial pseudopear and pseudojasmine can cover up the really nasty fart after a really good steak. But if you need a scented home with a smell that changes ever four seconds then you're either a nasally-retentive chemical addict or you should maybe consider finding a more long-term solution to the smell in your home. Clean.

The phone rang on Monday.

It's all pretty mad around here at the moment - lots happening, none of it of any interest to readers of this august journal, and I'm now working on four projects. At least that's what I'm doing in theory - in practice, I am falling behind with all four. But my head's not really focussed on work anyway. It's already miles away, thinking about working for the Sontarans as a fifth columnist.

Except for two things, one of which was this phone call.

I was interviewed by two Sontarans on Tuesday. I might have met one of them before - it's hard to tell as they are all clones. This was in a grey uniform office in the boondocks, ran on until eight o'clock, and left me feeling slightly zonked. I've not heard back from them yet, but the thing I've realised this morning is they completely failed to excite me about the job and I've no idea if I actually want to go and work for them.

This phone call was a cold call for a recruiter for a job that really interests me. Really seriously interests me. So much so that I can't stop thinking about it, and that's probably distracting me from the Sontaran opportunity. The only thing about the new job is that it's abroad. In a foreign country. So I'm not going to go for it at all, but I still can't stop thinking about it.

Hmmmm.

That's my last girlfriend sitting over there, looking as though she were alive.

In an airport for so many reasons, waiting for a delayed flight to anywhere, and who should turn up in the queue behind me for the mildly insulting sandwiches, but my ex. The ex that I don't talk about. Not because there's anything wrong with her, per se, but because these days I tend to focus on the evil cat sidekicks of this world. And of the many things my last girlfriend was, she was not the sort to sit on your lap, purr, and plan world domination.

Of course, it's been a good few years now. We change. She certainly hasn't noticed me, or if she has, she doesn't recognise me. That'll be the scars and the rainbow tattoo for you. She's almost unrecognisable herself. For a kick off she's wearing heels and her cheeks are less chubby. A decade will do that to you, though. Someone turned her feminine.

She's still a half-hearted vegetarian, ordering the ham and cheese sandwich because it's hot. I've not heard her speak or seen her boarding pass. She picked the ham out of the sandwich. That's pretty typical of her. She pushes her hair back from her face in the same way.

It might not be her, of course. That's part of the reason I've not been over to say hello. She's reading OK magazine, and I might never forgive her for that. But everything is right. It's too real for it not to be her. She'll be sitting beside me on the plane back home. I can see it now.

We've got a saying here in foreign, something about interesting times and so on.

After my disastrous experiences with Torchwood and the Federation of Earth Reptiles, last week I went for a coffee with a very nice Sontaran Gentleman. This could be him, but it probably isn't because they are all clones, you know. He was a somewhat affable chap, and seems to be looking forward to seeing me again. He's not offered me a job yet, but I kind of hope he does, because he bought me a coffee and if I see him again it's my turn.

I've been very busy recently, taking over the world. I've been to Scotland this month, and London, and I'm going back to both this week. I've finished my course (hurrah!) and I've fallen behind with my housework. So it's all good stuff, I guess.

But the possibility of going to work for the Sontaran Empire is frustratingly tangible. Send in the clones.