Free Diary of a Grumpy Old Git by Tim Collins

I threw away my last chance of happiness.

M ONDAY 11 TH M ARCH
    Jo thanked me for coming to her party when I got in this morning. She didn’t seem angry about my refusal to dance, if she remembered it at all. Jez said he was sorry he
didn’t make any sense, but he’d just smoked a massive joint when he spoke to me. I felt like telling him he was exactly the same as usual and his dealer is clearly selling him Oxo
cubes.
    Jen looked up from her screen and narrowed her eyes whenever anyone mentioned the party, so maybe it was worth going after all. That’s right, Jen. I’m in the cool gang and
you’re not. Get over it.
    Also, I was tagged in a few Facebook photos that made me look like I was actually enjoying myself. I hope Sarah sees them. She was always going on about how I didn’t know how to enjoy
myself. Well, here’s the proof, Sarah. All it took was the removal of a particular person from my life for the party to start.

T UESDAY 12 TH M ARCH
    Trevor has invited me to another meeting tomorrow. I got the email first thing this morning and I spent all day worrying about it. It didn’t help that Jez had a really
annoying sniffle that I couldn’t force myself to complain about.
    I could feel myself getting tenser with every sniff, but I didn’t say anything. If you complain to sniffers, you look neurotic and they get to feel like they’re doing you a massive
favour by blowing their noses rather than letting the same bit of snot travel up and down their nasal passage all day.
    Sniffers are like terrorists. If you let them know they’ve got to you, they’ve won. You just have to ignore them and get on with your life. And dispatch a unit of Navy SEALs to
assassinate them when they drop their guard.

W EDNESDAY 13 TH M ARCH
    Trevor kept me waiting for half an hour this morning before calling me into his office. He kept his eyes fixed on his computer screen, so I took a chair and waited for him to
speak.
    ‘Morning,’ I said after a while.
    Trevor held his hand up to silence me.
    After a couple of minutes I asked, ‘So, where are we at on the brochure?’
    ‘Did someone speak?’ asked Trevor. ‘I thought I heard someone speak.’
    I had a vague memory of saying this to Trevor on the school coach once.
    ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘This is getting boring.’
    Trevor turned away from his computer at last. ‘You should have thought of that before you bullied me, shouldn’t you?’
    ‘I didn’t bully you,’ I said. ‘I just sided with the bullies so they wouldn’t pick on me. And gave them the odd suggestion every now and then. It’s not the
same thing. Can’t you let it go?’
    ‘I don’t need to let it go,’ said Trevor, digging his fingernails into his palms. ‘It was the best thing that ever happened to me.’
    Trevor took a plate out of his desk drawer. ‘Biscuit?’
    Rather than the usual array of bourbons and digestives, the plate contained nothing but an unwrapped Kit Kat in a pool of yellow liquid.
    ‘No thanks,’ I said.

     
    Trevor shoved the plate closer to me and an acidic smell drifted up into my nostrils.
    ‘Eat the biscuit,’ said Trevor.
    ‘I’m not hungry,’ I said.
    ‘Neither was I,’ said Trevor.
    I tried to remember the day we dipped Trevor’s Kit Kat in the urinal. I’m pretty sure we didn’t make him eat it.

    ‘Eat it,’ said Trevor. ‘Or I’ll call Josh and tell him you’ve screwed up. That I’m resigning the account and telling all your other clients to do the same
unless your company puts you out to pasture.’
    I looked at the Kit Kat. OK, so it had been pissed on. But would it kill me? Would it even make me ill? Didn’t people in lifeboats sometimes drink urine to survive?
    I lifted the Kit Kat slowly towards my mouth.
    Trevor let out a squeal of laughter and clapped his palms together. ‘Oh my God. You were actually going to do that, weren’t you?’

T HURSDAY 14 TH M ARCH
    I think Trevor has stopped now. As soon as he’d done his Kit Kat