OK, OK, I know this shouldn’t matter to me but it does – OK?

In fact it matters more to me than I have the ability to articulate. What matters so much? I hear you cry. Well, after weeks of feeling trampled on and crushed at work, culminating in my posting from last Wednesday (broken?), I had an experience today that made me feel so valued and appreciated that I actually cried in the office.

I walked back into my office after a meeting and opened up an email from Louise, my rock, who has worked with me for the last 6-7 years I suppose. Louise and I hit it off instantly when a friend of hers recommended her for a role in our team and we’ve worked together ever since.

She emailed me (although she only sits ten yards outside my office door) to tell me that she’d entered me for ‘The best boss in the Pharmaceutical industry’ as voted for by the members of SOPhIE (secretaries of pharmaceutical industry executives) and her entry for me had been put on the shortlist, to be judged on 26th May.

What’s so wonderful about this is that she did this spontaneously, no preening or prompting from me (I didn’t even know the competition existed until she told me we’d been shortlisted) and in my view that means she really meant it. She could’ve just not entered anyone or she could even have entered someone else but she didn’t – she did this because she wanted to. I am so humbled by this that I can’t even begin to list all of the reasons why I don’t deserve it (starting by never being around because of all the travelling I have to do and leaving all of the team to wade through the quagmire without a leader).

I doubt that there is any way we will win this thing – apparently the five shortlisted secretaries go to one of the client offices in May and a bunch of actors enact some scenarios that the secretaries then have to explain how their boss would deal with each of these awkward situations. The winner is determined by the secretary’s description of what the boss would do in these situations. I doubt that the winner will win through dissolving in tears in the office or making frantic phone calls from some airport trying to find someone to help with something while climbing aboard a plane destined for somewhere else.

There is something about this that makes me think it may have been simply a matter that no-one else entered their boss into the fray – after all we’re not even IN the pharma industry, just a service provider to it. I’ve no idea of the size of the membership or the likely number of entries but my suspicion is that there were probably only half a dozen entries so we got in there by accident. Maybe that is an injustice and there are actually hundreds of secretaries out there who think their boss is the greatest and entered them but the cynic in me suspects not.

Anyway, however we got in, it doesn’t matter one jot to me. What matters is the simple fact of entering me and our relationship. I am so flattered and honoured about it that I simply had to write about it tonight.

My Mum always uses an expression ‘the darkest hour is just before the dawn’ – maybe I should have realised on Wednesday of last week, when I felt at the end of my tether, that something would turn up to revitalise my belief and energy levels.

How I wish that the same could be said of Paul Hester, the Crowded House drummer who took his own life at the weekend. I am so sad that this wonderful, witty, funny talent from one of my favourite bands found it so difficult to see his own chink of light as the dawn starts to light the sky. How I wish that his family was not now fatherless and that his friends didn’t have to walk on without him.

My piece today was planned to be a longer piece about him but my own happiness took first place after all, selfish though that may seem. Strangely, (I believe) the only song on Woodface (their superb third album) that was written by Paul Hester was Italian Plastic, which found its way into my ‘Capturing Songs’ gallery only last week and there are no other Crowded House songs in there until now…..when this photo is about to appear to illustrate ‘It’s only natural’ as a tribute to the man who made millions of people smile the world over with his crazy antics when CH were on tour.

One funny story I once heard about the band came from Youth – the ex-drummer of Killing Joke, who produced the last Crowded House album, Together Alone. The story sticks in my mind because of its ludicrous nature – the tensions in the band were running high by the time of recording this album – I think Paul Hester had become thoroughly fed-up with life on the road. Youth hit on an idea to diffuse the situation – he made the band play their instruments naked in the recording studio….apparently they were so busy worrying about hurting themselves(!!!!) that they were really well-behaved. I don’t know if the story is true by my goodness it makes me smile.

I’m sad whenever I hear of one of my musical heroes losing their life but I’m even sadder when that individual was so unhappy that they took their own life. This strikes me as such a waste of life and talent.

I met the very wonderful Barbara and Arthur this time last year for the first time. It's funny, I've met these relatives of DMs from the other side of the world twice now, but many of those closer to home barely even know of my existence. Two years ago, I was eagerly awaiting my new kitchen!