Ex-colleague, hero, saint.

At midday, the e-mail announcing Francis' departure is circulated. Until then it was meant to be a secret, so of course everyone has known for days. His last days have been marked by a solemn procession of colleagues from marketing, distribution and accounts who have come into his office to weep over him and pay their last respects, as if he were lying in state. Eyes brim over like artesian wells - four pairs in the past 24 hours alone. If he swapped his chair for an open coffin and starting leaving work in a hearse, nobody would bat an eyelid.

When he's not comforting the mourners and liaising with the Vatican about fast track canonisation, he clears his desk, sharing out the customer files with his team and playing hide and seek with his laptop to stop his bosses seizing it when he's not looking and stripping it of all sensitive data, a process with the unlovely title of 'flushing'.

Immediately Francis's new status is made public, feelings of goodwill start slooshing round the company. The senior brass is out to placate the workforce - outbreaks of mass weeping are bad for business. Soon, Francis can't turn his back without somebody attempting to slap it. His boss calls him a consummate professional, and says he'll always be a friend of the family. The financial director winks at him and tells him to have a couple of pints on the company. Everybody loves him, apparently, and will always love him. There's just that little matter of losing his job casting a shadow, but soon, they'll love him so much that they'll be putting flowers in their hair, bringing out the guitars and singing him his P45.

Francis has one final meeting in Abderdeen, which is fine, and is following up a couple of promising-sounding job leads while he's there, which isn't. "It would be a great place to live," he enthuses. And as long as it's not me having to do the living, I'm in total agreement. We've been in our current home for ten years and it's taken me all that time to find a handful of people who I get on with, or who, more accurately, haven't actually stopped speaking to me yet.

Most of them are at the reconvened book club that I go to in the evening. I'm aiming for dignified restraint. It's an attitude I've always admired - and it plays so well in suburbia. My self-control lasts exactly as long as my first glass of wine, and then I'm straight into auto-gab. Motto: she does the self-obsessed rabbitting so you don't have to.

When I see Francis later, he tells me of another job going at a cosmetics company. It's been really hard to fill, apparently. Unless it involves actually inserting the trial batches of new moisturiser into tiny baby rabbits' eyes, I can't see any reason for him not to apply, and possibly not even then, but he's equivocal. "I'd be in town four days a week," he says, with heavy emphasis. "The travel would take hours." It wouldn't. I know because I spent over a decade doing it. I tell him so. "The money wouldn't be quite as good." he tries, next. "Well, couldn't you do it as a stopgap and then look round for something else?" I ask. He shakes his head, sadly, finally. "It doesn't work like that," he says.

An uncharitable wave of frustration makes me want to put my hands on his shoulders and rock him vigorously backwards and forwards shouting, "It's a job, for f**** sake. And how picky can you really afford to be?"

Instead, summoning a tiny bit of the restraint that deserted me at the book club, I mutter, "Whatever you think, darling," and retire to bed with a cup of tea, Radio 4 and the cat.