Help, I've been cut off from the world

LOST in redundoland: day eight. Lines of communication with the outside world are going down one by one.

Opinion has divided on whether my spur-of-the-moment new email address - which began "samleithfired@" - was funny, or a shade on the passive-aggressive side. My old friend T, a freelance herself, said: "Yes, darling, it is funny but you are a serious writer with serious commissions to get; don't send yourself up too much." She added: "I say this as a reformed maniac."

I set store by her qualifications. The email address will have to change. Again. Which means, in turn, I'm going to have to figure out how to let everyone know the new one, or set up some sort of forwarding thing. That's even before I set about trying to get the CD-Rom full of my old contacts onto my home computer.

I was just gearing up to enjoy a good long migraine when I learned that my phone was knackered, too. It has ceased, altogether, to register incoming calls or voice messages but, cunningly, continues to invite people to leave them.

"Does the ungrateful little perisher want a fabulously lucrative new job or not?" I imagine one global media tycoon after another thinking, as days tick past without me returning their calls.

I urgently need to get my phone sorted but my brain has gone numb. I have something called a PAC number but no idea what you do with it.

How the hell does anyone choose a mobile telephone? I can't face an entire day traipsing in the bitter cold from phone shop to phone shop so that teenagers in nylon shirts can talk at me in what might as well be Swahili.

Can I get my webmail on a BlackBerry? Will my old Orange number port to O2? Am I a dolphin, or a raccoon? Is driving this here Biro very forcefully into my right eye the way forward?

On the other hand, the good news. It is quarter to 10 in the morning, and I am at my desk. I am fully dressed, and smartly dressed at that. It is important to hang onto your self-respect.

As a result, since losing my job I have taken up shaving, and wearing a suit, and getting out of bed at a reasonable hour in the morning: none of which I used to do much more than once a week in my old life.

This morning - I kid you not - I stood on my own two feet, in my socks, before the ironing board, and ironed a shirt, or at least the front of one. Took me right back to my childhood, it did.

Actually, I do kid you. It's 10 past 10, I'm in my dressing gown, and I'm at the kitchen table.