Martin Jol has left the building.

Well not quite: as I write this, he's apparently in the WHL boardroom (hopefully delivering a few parting shots to the assembled suits who have made his last few months in the job a thoroughly torrid affair, before leaving with a reported £4m in compensation), but what is clear is that the most popular Spurs manager since Bill Nicholson has overseen his last game in for the club.

It would be unnecessary to grind out the raft of rumours which have circulated since about 8:45 this evening (when ITV4's coverage broke the story) but as yet nothing has been confirmed, other than that for the time being Jol is officially unemployed.

I, along with just about every other true Tottenham fan out there, wish him well and will remain grateful for the style and the passion with which he has rejuvinated the club during his (nearly) three years in charge. I only hope that the debacle which has been his protracted departure doesn't sour his or anyone else's memory of his time in N17. Thanks Martin, and good luck.

Get the official party line here.

An inescapable rattling sound in my brain.

There are men working outside my house using jackhammers to dig up and then relay the pavement. The pavement is perfectly fine. And today I need to make a number of important phone calls.

Can anyone else see the madness in this situation? My head hurts. More later...

I am a statistic

I've had no full-time work since I left university and, believe me, it hasn't been for lack of effort. After a somewhat fruitless attempt to get onto the property ladder and make some money in development, I turned my hand to journalism, attempting to get publishing anywhere and everywhere in the hope that it might land me some cash. However, things have been getting increasingly desperate as my departure date for Canada looms and my bar job is not really allowing me to accumulate anything even slightly resembling a 'running away fund'.

Calling recruitment agencies is like a kind of telephonic Russian Roulette. For every 6 calls you make, there's usually 5 where the revolver (or, if the metaphor is lost on you, 'handset') clicks and the person on the other end is pleasant, articulate and chirpy. However, like clockwork, there comes the instance where the person you've phoned is grumpy, terse and deeply unhelpful (and, usually, male). Bang! And now I've got to clean bits of brain off the sofa upholstery. It's a fairly soul-destroying process at the best of time, ringing around for temp work, and its made all the more unpleasant by these miserable bastards you have to speak to every so often. Shame on them.

A triumph.

I've just returned home, braving the risk of eye strain and a sleepless night by blogging at this ungodly hour, to share my joy at having seen Patrick Stewart in Macbeth, at the Gielgud Theatre, London. Tonight was my long-overdue first time seeing Shakespeare on stage, and I feel I have been spoilt beyond measure, so much so that I wonder if anything subsequent to this is destined to disappoint.

Patrick Stewart is brilliant in the lead role, but his presence as a big-name star seems to have attracted the best the London theatre scene has to offer, all of whom are currently on five-star form. 'Pin-drop', reverential silence met Michael Feast's rendering of the moment that Macduff is informed his wife, children and servants have been slaughtered at the hand of his former kinsman, gasps attended the pivotal scene at the end of the first act where Banquo's bloodied ghost arrives at the banquet to the astonishment and terror of the eponymous hero, and rapturous applause greeted the entire cast once the breath-taking performance had come to an end.

It was a staging drenched with Soviet, Stalin-esque imagery, the paraphernalia of an extremist state evident in the set design, the costumes, et al - and the programme notes (with their quotes from the aforementioned Russia dictator alongside the likes of 20th century agitator-general George Orwell, among others) underscored this brilliantly. The use of a grainy television set and full-colour projected imagery, skewered with interference and a CCTV-like resolution quality, evoked the staging's allusions to our surveillance culture, implying an Orwellian prescience.

Macbeth is at once a play which tells us something undeniable about the human condition, but at the same time incorporates elements so removed from the overwhelming majority of human experience so that the audience gravitates to and is repelled by its array of ever more blood-thirsty characters in equal measure. This production highlights the relevance of Shakespeare with supreme success - it is exactly this sort of theatre which keeps Shakespeare alive, more than four centuries after its being written, and ensures generation after generation continue to re-read and re-interpret his canon of work. For even the most sceptical about Shakespeare, this production will win you over.

For the Guardian review, in which Michael Billington reflects on the production's brilliance in far more articulate and lucid terms than I can muster, click here.

Feel the burn

If you read my previous post (if not, why are you not checking this page daily? Well?) you'll know that I have spent the last week at the gym, the lucky recipient of a free week following a friend's referral. I realised, as I stepped onto the treadmill at 5.30 on Monday afternoon, that I had not seen the inside of a gym for around 4 months. And do you know, I was a little disgusted.

I intended to use my tinge of self-loathing as impetus to make the most of the situation, and made a committment to visit every day for 7 days in a row. Needless to say, I cannot begin describe the sharp ache coarsing through my chest, arms and back come waking-up time on Wednesday morning. Ouch indeed.

Follow the red light.

Today I went to the opticians. To start with, it went as it usually does: I sat and waited for ages while some elderly people 'ummed' and 'ahhed' about which pair of massive specs to buy for doing their crosswords and picking winners on Channel 4 racing; then I entered the brightly lit room, had the scary-looking contraption put on my face and told the friendly lady whether it was "better...or worse" with each change of slide. However, just as I was about to pay my £5 and leave (I'm a cheapskate, I did go to Specsavers) when I was told one more test was required, this time to assess my peripheral vision. I walked into a little room to one side, which I had never so much as thought of entering before, dimly-lit and often occupied by an old bloke staring into a light box with a clicker in his hand. I was peturbed, to say the least.

The process is as follow: you wear a fetching pair of dusty old specs with one lense taped over while following a red dot around a screen, clicking the clicker once for every green dot (between none and four may appear with every mechanised whirring and shift of the red dot), before repeating with the other eye covered. Fairly boring, after only a few minutes. But on emerging from the little dark room, I was told I had to do the test for my left eye again. After this repeat performance, I was told I was missing dots in the same section of my vision each time and therefore yet another test was required. I'd was wondering, albeit for a split second, if my family's history of glaucoma had caught up with me a bit early, or something.

After the third time of asking, I was told everything was fine (I had, in effect, 'passed') and it was probably just because I had got a bit bored. Panic over.

I don't know if you heard me counting. I did over a thousand.

Today I begin a free week at the gym, thanks to a friend who's just become a member, and I can't wait. I've been going cold turkey since I left university, where I was down at my local uni facilities 5 times a week, jogging to and from given that it was only 3 minutes away, and ever since I moved home I've been getting the shakes and waking up in the middle of the night reaching for the treadmill. Not that I'm some sort of vain, fitness freak you understand. My oft-espoused reason for this was that the more exercise you do, the more energy you feel you have in the long-run, and while I was at university trying to finish my degree, visit my missus who lived 2 1/2 hours away and keep up a part-time bar job I needed all the lead in my pencil that I could muster. I'll report back at the end of the week (when, no doubt, I've pulled every muscle in my body and suffered a stress fracture in my knees, or something).