(diaryland) December 23, 2008 - 11:43 a.m.

Apart from always being stressed out in several, non-conflicting ways, the benefit of having eight thousand jobs is that your cornucopia of bosses will feed you nice meals at the end of the year so that you won't have to cook anything for a two-week span.

Also, being in the building industry (for one of my jobs, anyway) means that clients and builders will feed you as well. So far, I've been to a forbiddingly expensive noodle place where a Scottish guy said indecipherable things but was the life of the party, a Bedouin restaurant run by a Malaysian guy who missed out on being on a TV cooking show because he wasn't actually Bedouin, and the restaurant of a hotel where I tried many types of expensive seafood and accidentally got the poo tract of a prawn explode all over my hands because I'm a noob to crustaceans.

I had a raw oyster, which I'm pretty sure I've had before, but I don't remember exactly. My boss said to swallow it down like a big tablet, so I did. Therefore, I didn't taste anything. I think you're supposed to do it slowly.

Why am I telling you this? You probably know more than me.

My technique was to get it in, and get it down. I was stressed because it was huge, so it went down before the magic everyone tells me about could happen. My boss said, don't worry. The flavour will come back. It didn't. Maybe he meant I had to burp? I also tossed a lot more random foods into my gullet after the oyster because it was a buffet, so that probably didn't help.

I've got another mega-feed coming up today. Hooray! I know not where.