The munsterlander is quickly returning to normal. The alternative title of this post is inspired by her appearance as she eats. When food is placed before her she puts her head down so that the entire circumference of her lampshade's edge is flush with the floor, covering the bowl. From within come a series of NYUM NYUM NYUM noises - and, is if by magic, when she lifts the lampshade the food has vanished!

As if that wasn't amazing enough, she will shortly turn the food (not gone forever, merely hidden) into a big steaming pile of poo which I'll have to scrape off the lawn in the pouring rain.

Talking of scraping on my hands and knees for the droppings of superior beings, I'm still eight hundred big ones down after a client charged back the wrong payment on his credit card. The bank cheerfully inform me that as it's an uncontested error they'll have recovered it all in, say, a month or so.

The mobile lampshade is currently sulking. She won't touch water, but has ingested every drop of milk in the house and keeps sending me out for more. She has also had several half NOLLOYD. (To decrypt, move each letter one key to the left on a standard keyboard. She's learnt to pick up the distinctive pattern of fluctuations in the Mac's magnetic field if I type that word en clair).

I hope you all watched 'The Sperminator', which aired between ten and eleven this evening on Channel Four. It was a documentary about a highly successful US fertility expert who helped hundreds of couples conceive with the aid of sperm donation. What he didn't tell them was that all the sperm was his.

When you've finished considering the mechanics (yes, that does represent a serious amount of masturbation, doesn't it?) you might like to examine your personal feelings about this story. The reaction of the expert's 'victims' was almost universal shock and distress that they'd been deceived by a professional of apparent integrity.

My responses were (in this order): 'ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha' and 'good effort, son'. Though I'm sure the whole experience was terribly traumatic for the couples involved. (Ha ha ha!)

The reason, I think, is that the whole episode is at the zenith of the bell curve of comic schadenfreude. As we all know, ninety percent of comedy is chortling at the misfortunes of others. Rochefoucauld was more right than he knew: not only is there something in the suffering of our friends that does not displease us, more often than not we find the misfortunes of others frankly hilarious.

Imagine, if you will, a graph on which the x axis represents the degree of misfortune suffered by an individual or group and the y axis represents the level of hilarity to be gained from that suffering by objective observers. It soon becomes apparent that comedy itself describes, as I've suggested, a perfect bell curve. Just a little way along the 'misfortune' axis we get people walking into trees, stubbing toes and spilling drinks down their shirts. This may merit a wry smile, or, if you're juvenile enough, a Nelson Muntz-style 'HAR har!'. But there's nothing here that's deeply funny. Move along the axis of suffering and the laughter line climbs steeply as people drop pianos on their feet, accidentally reveal the existence of love children to their wives and drink Extra Strength Andrews Salts when they think they're knocking back vintage Krug. The curve tops off with people like our friends who got more fertility than they bargained for. On the descent we have rather more severe misfortune that is still quite funny: climbers abseiling off the end of ropes, grannies getting run over by ambulances and middle-aged men who sustain permanent rectal damage following the ill-advised misuse of household items. At the right-hand extremity lies Auschwitz, AIDS and misery - the comic preserve of those who are insufficiently funny to get noticed without being tasteless.

How wondrous are the patterns of nature. Tomorrow I shall demonstrate how there can only ever be a prime number of Maltesers in any given packet.

Oh, the munsterlander's just been spayed. She's wearing a lampshade and looking at me accusingly.

The greatest manager I've ever worked for is Frank Parr. Frank is greater even than Capt. Furball, who, for all his loveliness, is faaaar too easily bent to the will of Machiavellian underlings (naming no names, Dave).

Frank was and is the manager and landlord of the Burton House Hotel, Boston, Lincs. I worked there during my holidays from university. The Burton, at the Spilsby Road end of Skegness Road, used to be a fine old pub. It was bought in the late eighties by Whitbread, which turned it into a Brewers Fayre Where's-The-Fucking-Apostrophe-Why-Don't-We-Employ-Fucking-Copywriters-Who-Can-Actually-Fucking-Punctuate-I-Mean-Is-"Fayre"-Supposed-To-Be-A-Fucking-Verb-Or-Something Family Pub Restaurant With Microwaved Lasagne And Added Plastic Shit.

(On the marketing collateral they usually shortened that to 'Brewers Fayre' - still without the apostrophe, though)

When I first worked there the place was run by a local husband and wife team who appeared also to be a sister and brother team, and had all the charming characteristics of people who think that running a 'Team Meeting' to pretend to take 'Team Feedback' put them on a level with Woodrow Wilson, or possibly Zeus.

When Frank arrived everything changed. He gave clear instructions and encouraged initiative. He was funny, he always said 'please' and 'thankyou' and you knew he was actually bothered about how you were. Most of all, he was driven by a passion to make that shitty little chain pub THE BEST shitty little chain pub in the whole damn universe. And it was a passion that was infectious.

So when I'm late with a piece of work, or I can't be arsed to phone a client, or I'm just being lazy - basically all the things I'm doing now - it's Frank's voice I hear in my head, gently cajoling me to get on with it.

He's still at the Burton, of course, and will be forever. Frank is basically too clever and too decent to rise high in any corporation. A good manager, you see, can never be a successful one.

My interim blog wasn't abandoned, exactly. Rather it died for lack of things to talk about. That's pretty much because I've spent the past six months plastered to a computer screen eighteen hours a day developing the business now I'm at it full time. Basically, I've been empire building.

And I'm doing quite nicely. To take the 'empire' metaphor a little further - and, indeed, torture it into analogy - I'd say that I'm no longer a small central-Italian tribe emerging from the Bronze Age and beginning to learn the secrets of sophisticated crop rotation and building in stone. In fact, following my success in the Punic Wars, I'm established as the major power in the Mediterranean. Despite a few nasty scares (Hannibal, alps, elephants) I've growing military confidence and a firm economic base, largely rooted in sea trade with North Africa and the Near East.

I'm now very much looking forward to being a sprawling, corrupt and decadent empire entirely given over to luxury, sexual excess and the persecution of Christians.

I've just been in town trying to buy a data cable for my phone. I couldn't be arsed to go into Darlington, so I went to the local phone shop in Richmond instead. This is one of those places that belongs to a small chain (I can't quite remember the name - something like "Tat 4 U" or "We Are Shit", I think) that's signed up as a reseller for the major service providers, and, consequently, will go swiftly and messily bust the moment Vodafone and Orange change their pricing structures.

However all I wanted was a cable so I decided to give them a try - and, immediately, entered into one of the defining cultural experiences of our times. For those who were young in the first half of the twentieth century the defining experience was war: comradeship, cruelty, shortages and in many cases the daily expectation of death or crippling injury. If your time was the sixties, you will remember some sort of sexual and cultural revolution. The seventies, depression. The eighties, monetarism. The nineties, materialism.

But my peers and I will look back on the defining experience of the richest portion of our lives as standing around in phone shops thinking 'when the fuck are these people going to be finished?'

All that is by the by. The real purpose of this post is to explain my new Theory of Inverse Capability, which, let me tell you, I had plenty of time to formulate while the single shop assistant was explaining to the customer in front of me that no, she didn't actually have to trail a very long wire after her wherever she went in order to use her new handset. The Theory is basically this: the more technologically advanced a product, the less intelligent the people employed to sell it.

If you walk into a small, independent furniture store hoping to buy a table, you will probably be guided in your purchase by someone who really knows what s/he's talking about - if not the craftsman himself, then a shop assistant who is finely attuned to the idea of what a table is for, how different tables might suit the decor of your home, and, in general, is au fait with the basic Platonic idea of 'tableness'. At least that's my experience.

But say you want to buy a computer? You find yourself in PC World discussing the very cutting edge of home computing technology with an individual who apparently doesn't have the inner resources to fight a sustained battle against BO, let alone grasp the finer relative complexities of different platforms and operating systems. If you insist on the very finest technology available the chances are that your purple, gnome-like interlocutor will shut down completely, his brain unable to deal with new concepts at the same time as operating an advanced cardio-vascular system.

Mobile phones aren't on quite the same technological level as computers, and so, true to the Theory, the shop assistant was a little brighter than the average PCW goblin. Needless to say, she was still utterly unable to help me.

You can probably tell from the length of this post that I've got shitloads of work to do. There's another Inverse situation to consider: however Inverse Procrastination is not a theory at all - it has all the weight of Law.