I had high hopes as I made my way through the winding streets of Vienne to see Norah Jones headline the town’s renowned annual jazz festival. Despite tickets priced at a punchy €45, the event was a sell-out, with touts lining the route to the venue: Europe’s largest Roman amphitheatre.

Those in the know had clearly arrived early to secure a seat, while the rest of the 3,000-strong crowd – my party included – clambered up the narrow steps to a high-altitude area or simply perched precariously on the crumbling walls. But as the sun set behind the stage and the more well-prepared members of the audience tucked into their cheese and wine picnics, it became clear that the real star of this show was the venue.

Norah’s innocuous strumming and dulcet tones were little more than background in the cavernous semi-circular amphitheatre. Even her most adoring fans must admit that she seemed somewhat dwarfed by the occasion – and her rudimentary French didn’t help engage the crowd.

Although her big hits – Come Away With Me and Don’t Know Why – were pleasingly familiar highlights, she was never going to emerge completely victorious. Norah lives to perform another day, but it was Vienne’s spectacular amphitheatre that held us enthralled.

If you’ve seen the 2004 blockbuster The Bourne Supremacy, you’ll already know that the easiest way to create a timed explosion at short notice is to disconnect a mains gas pipe and shove a rolled-up magazine into a toaster.

This gives you just enough time to scarper before the smouldering copy of Country Life blows your enemy’s gaffe sky-high. Neat.

Now, although I haven’t had cause to set off incendiary devices in kitchens recently, I have had the urge to make a deliciously toasted cheese sandwich. So it was with some trepidation – and memories of Matt Damon’s kitchen-based bomb-making – that I read the instructions on my new Toastabag 500: “Just prepare a sandwich as normal, put it in the bag and then pop the bag into the toaster.”

How could this be? Could I really stuff a small plastic bag into a hot toaster? Surely it would be a matter of seconds before I was engulfed in acrid smoke and left to watch in vain as my iroko worktops were reduced to a pile of charcoal.

With a steely nerve that would have impressed Agent Bourne himself, I slid my limp cheese sandwich inside the Toastabag, dropped it into the slot and shoved down the button.

Lo and behold – minutes later a perfectly formed cheese toastie popped up. Such is the miracle of the toastabag – and all without the need for an unsightly Breville contraption or a special agent in a flame-retardant pinny.

What though, of the lesser explored area of female toilet etiquette? And specifically, ladies’ toilet etiquette in the workplace?

You might think none is required. I mean, it’s all very straightforward. There are cubicles. Each person goes into a cubicle and locks the door. They do their business, wash their hands and leave. Simple.

Unless of course, someone throws a spanner in the works. Riddle me this:

I was in the (fairly small, two-cubicle) toilets at work on Tuesday morning washing my hands. A colleague who I know only vaguely walks in and asks me how my meeting was. I tell her yes, it was fine and she asks another work-related question.

So far, so what you might ask. BUT – between question one and question two, she has walked into a cubicle and locked the door behind her. I am thrown. Am I meant to continue normal workday chit-chat while she’s in a cubicle? All rules have gone out the window.

I answer question two and hope that signals the end of the conversation. I am wrong. She continues to chatter at me from the other side of the cubicle door. I mumble a non-commital closing remark and hastily exit the bathroom.

Is this normal? Are people in offices so used to a don’t-waste-a-minute multi-tasking frenzied approach to the day that they now conduct conversation while performing their routine bodily functions? What’s the correct erm, toilettequette?

(As an aside, it turns out I’m not the only one who has hit on the HILARIOUS! word, “toiletiquette.” Check this out. Perhaps someone needs to suggest a “No talking please” sticker.)

So, in true Mean Murmurings tradition, here is a dodgy photo with said famous person loitering in the background. Can you guess which former pop singer-turned TV actress this is? Oh, the excitement! I must go and have a calming cup of herbal tea.

Take a look at the two Chinese fortunes I received on Friday.

The first one was kind of lazy:

But the second was just sloppy:

Having said that, I guess fortunes found inside edible snacks have always been a bit grammatically dubious – just take your average Thai fortune roll.

Or so you thought.

Until the staff at South Kensington station installed just the thing to deal with the problem at the end of platform 1.

His name? Jonah Fisher.

Still, that is all by the by, as my mission here – which I have woefully neglected recently – is to tell it like it is. And this I will endeavour to do from now on. It’s good for the soul (not yours, mine).

I will merely recap my past half a year in pictoral form. Here’s a selection of what went down:

That’s that – normal service will be resumed shortly.

Anyway, what I have gone and done is re-entered the world of the tax-paying, employed masses. Yes, sometime in the near future I will be oiling the wheels of the corporate machine once more. What all this means is that certain things will have to be put on hold, namely:

The clock’s ticking…I’m off to get some Diamond White.