The day started with staff meeting and talk of the old GDPR stuff that’s going on now. I dipped in and out of listening – the whole thing is astonishingly dry, and I think the phrase ‘data protection’ has swiftly entered my personal pantheon of instantly-depressing utterances, along with ‘Brexit’ and ‘WiFi password’. The plan is for all hard-copy data to either be securely stored in an air-tight fridge or destroyed by shredding, burning or eating. Something like that.

The theme of personal information being potentially stolen threaded into my day when it emerged that someone had broken into a load of the post boxes downstairs and forcibly ripped them open. Ours is tucked away in a corner, so somehow evaded the cunt who had prised open about fifteen or twenty others. A policewoman was sifting through mail on the floor when I arrived back from work. Luckily, a package that Rae was expecting was unharmed and she managed to retrieve it with the cop’s supervision. The whole thing is unsettling, and follows a bunch of parcels being ripped open on the floor of the post room last week, which we had imagined were possibly kids being dicks. The weird thing is that we’ll probably never know who it was, what type of stuff they were hunting for and what they made off with. I’ve never experienced anything like a burglary before, not even in my five years of living in dilapidated accomodation in Brighton where the condition of the doors and windows were so poor that an excitable pigeon could’ve forced its way in, so this is the closest I’ve come to feeling that type of threat.

A trip to the gym in the evening brought with it a reminder of that fat lad smell that I hadn’t caught a whiff of in a while. A big guy in the changing rooms was changing back into his work clothes and his aroma practically forced me up against a wall it was so strong. I felt sorry for him, and it reminded me of a poor soul I used to work with at the Cinema who was asked more than once by management to give his uniform a wash when he got home. I once bent over to pick up a pen near his feet and almost fainted. Apparently it’s a lot to do with the type of food eaten and how that comes out in your sweat, and I distinctly remembered this guy alternating between the neighbouring Pizza Hut and KFC for EVERY SINGLE break. But also, in my experience, the ballsack area can get very smelly very quickly if you’re not vigilant, and my thoughts are that fat lads are less likely to go to the effort of scooping it all up and giving it a committed scrub, in part down to laziness but also accessibility issues.

Tonight’s TV viewing was utterly bereft of any kind of fat whatsoever as the wife and I both decided to give Love Island a go to see what all of the fuss is about. I wouldn’t have given it a consideration, but comedians Sara Pascoe and Aisling Bea have both Tweeted enthusiasm for the show and I’ve started to feel I need to watch and listen to stuff that’s ‘not for me’ occasionally to have at least some grasp on what the fuck everyone else is going on about. In summary, the first episode confirmed everything I imagined the show to be and surprised me little: the people are model-perfect in their appearance but with obvious personality flaws, and are at least pretending to be vacuous and interested only in partnering up with people. That, as I understood it, is the point. It all definitely gestures towards a world that I’ve never been a part of, filled with the kind of people I’ve never met, with motivations and values that I’ll probably never understand. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed myself watching it, but I will say this – an hour and a thirty five minutes of my life had definitely elapsed by the time the first episode finished.

Rae had suggested that they should maybe have a go at doing a show like this but for ‘normal’ people, or at least letting a few on the show, which sounds nice and fair in principle, but having followed Twitter reactions as the first episode unfolded, I balked at the idea. The image-perfect contestants on the show appear to be fair game for people to laugh at, make into memes, critique and instantly hate – but substitute those chiselled, tanned bodies for a set of hairy tummies and wobbly arms and I imagine the discussions online would be a lot harder to look at. A lot of the comments were centred around body insecurities, with apparently slim, beautiful young girls posting things like ‘the bodies on #LoveIsland are making me wish I hadn’t ordered a Dominos lol’ and ‘OMG I feel so fat’ GIFs. If that body negativity were reversed, I feel it would be a new level of awful for Twitter bile, but I may be wrong.