Martin Cororan - Author of ‘The Melting Pot’

For a minute there I thought I had it…

…Been thinking for aged: How can I put a You-Tube video together that, at virtually no-cost and with incredible humour, sells both the title and tagline:

= THE MELTING POT - How do you escape from a vicious circle =

Idea:

1. Get an orange and apply with vampire teeth, beady eyes and claws - making it a vicious circle.

2. Buy woman-shaped chocolate of some description and place in small bowl.

3. Place both in microwave with revolving dish and switch on.

4. Vicious circle orange appears to be chasing woman who then melts into a pot.

5. Voice-over with "RRRAAAAARRRR" and "Ohh my Gohhhhhdddd!"

6. Possible flamenco guitar in the background to get the South-American-thriller-angle crow-barred in, with someone reading the blurb in the style of a Mexican bandito.

7. Post on You-Tube, lavished with praise, orders come flooding in etc.

Anyway - couldn’t find a chocolate woman (a market gap that will no doubt be shortly filled by some entrepreneur), so I made one by welding kit-kats (arms and legs) and maltezers (head and boobs) to a cadbury’s cream egg (body). Not the sexiest woman I’ve ever seen it must be said, what with her pot-belly, tree-trunk legs, tiny flat head (a mishap) and lop-sided cleavage. She also towered over the orange which took away from the general viciousness and forced me to substitute it for a melon.

The first obstacle overcome I placed them in the microwave (which I bought especially) at opposite sides and whacked it up on full heat. The oscillating light was a cheeky bonus until one of the woman’s arm fell off, shearing off a boob as it went. This coincided with the melon exploding a decapitating the troll-girl…

…none of which happens in my book.

No one tell Comet about this blog - Will be taking microwave back…

Our offices were refurbished over Christmas. When we returned to work we found that, as part of the move, a cupboard had been shifted to one side revealing a small white notice board beneath. Blue-tacked to the board was a shabby piece of paper scrawled across with several sentences that we discerned to be written in Italian. Typing the text into the translation site ‘Babelfish’ we discovered that it was an extract from Dante’s Divine Comedy - the bit about "Abandon all hope - all ye who enter in" - a description of hell.

After we’d laughed at it’s absurdity I found myself asking what would possess someone to write something so sinister in another language and then hide it. What’s happened to them? And how long has their message been waiting? It’s a far cry from Dilbert cartoons, or a banner proclaiming ‘you don’t have to be mad to work her but…’

So, I find myself, eight weeks into a new job, working in a (basement) office that some unseen entity has likened to the fiery underworld.

Apart from that it’s relatively quiet - put a blog on ‘My Telegraph’:

http://my.telegraph.co.uk/el_scubadiver/