I had a mild crisis before when I thought I'd snapped the chain of my pocket watch - the one I bought at the Cambridge Rock Festival. It has an annoying habit of catching in the black pashmina I usually wear to work, and when it caught today I couldn't untangle it, so decided to just snap the thread it had caught on. Only I broke the chain; actually snapped one of the links.

Happily, the links are just big enough that the clasp will go through, so while the chain's technically broken I can still wear my beloved pocket watch. Thank god; it cost me £12 and I've only had it two weeks!

It's nearly time for me to go and meet Jason and catch the bus, so I'm basically just killing time since there's no point in starting another story. But what to write about when the day's just been same old, same old? Writing stories, poking about on news websites and the like?

I made quite an amusing cock-up, it transpires, on a letter I keyed in last month which only went in this week. A woman, originally from St Helens but now living in Surrey had written to us with an appeal for old friends and acquaintances to get in touch; I assume it's been a while since she's heard from any of them. In this letter she listed the names of specific people she wanted to get in touch with.

This was a typo, and I have no idea how it happened. I typed 'Norman Ball' as 'Normal Ball'.

Hilarious, and it led our editor to make a joke about Normal Ball's brother, Abnormal. Thinking about it, though, I don't know how it happened. L and N are nowhere near each-other on the keyboard. I think I just had the world 'Ball' in my head as I was typing and the L carried into Norman somehow. If that makes any sense. It probably doesn't.

I'm not sure if I wrote in my last entry about my novel still being partially missing. Those thirty or so pages (along with my Journo portfolio) remain missing. The journalism portfolio thing isn't so bad now as Steven showed me how to access St Helens Star E-Editions from months gone by to print off individual pages, which could come in very handy, but those novel pages are irreplaceable.

I could write them again, but they just won't be the same and I know for a fact I'll be unhappy with them. I hated them while I knew where they were, funnily enough, but now I don't think I could match them. I've still no idea where they are, but I'm thinking that a bit of a look around my desk could return something.