You know that time about four o’clock on a Sunday, when the clock is ticking down to the end of the weekend and all those jobs you’ve put off like the laundry or homework still have to be done? All you have to look forward to is Monday morning back at work or school, which is quite a depressing thought for many. Now imagine that feeling lasting a whole week. That’s just what Paul Vlitos did when he wrote his second novel Every Day is Like Sunday.

His first, Welcome to the Working Week, set in the workplace came out last year and was written entirely in email format. His second moves on to a minor public school, Buxton, detailing a year in the life of Matt Bletch, wannabe writer and reluctant teacher. His intention is to write his travel memoirs about Japan in his spare time and escape to London as often as possible to visit his girlfriend Caroline.

But life doesn’t pan out that easily, not least because stuck in the back of beyond, his creative juices don’t seem to flow. In the meantime, he has to deal with all the myriad misfits that make up the staff, pupils and parents at his school and the fact that his rocky relationship with Caroline is being threatened by her sleazy boss, Rychard.

The book mainly unfolds through Matt’s eyes, in the form of entries to his journal, with the occasional letter. So what made Paul choose this format? “I wanted to write longer, continuous prose, rather than short email exchanges,” he explained, when we met at his parents’ house in Botley. “People said the bits they preferred from the last book were the longer bits.”

And why a journal? “I just started writing it in diary form and it seemed to unfold quite well.”. He added: “I found you could do things really quickly, in terms of introducing characters. It was a way really of trying to put small incidents in, to kind of build the texture, and then I wanted to put letters and other stuff in, just to mix it up a bit.”

Since Buxton and Matt can both be rather miserable, it might seem strange that the book is often funny, with a few laugh-out-loud moments. However, this is intentional. “I always think that slightly miserable things are a bit funnier,” he explained.

Now living in Edinburgh, Paul is in Oxford to do jury service. He grew up here and attended New College School and then Abingdon School. He says the book is semi-autobiographical. “I tried to change things so I don’t get sued or offend people. The teachers, in particular, are really jumbled together and are more stereotypes or archetypes. It’s more like incidents and again they’ve changed.” And while he might have made Buxton rather a horrible place to attend, Abingdon wasn’t like that. “I remember some really great teachers getting on to your wavelength and really understanding and enthusing you,” he said.

Paul wrote both of his books while living in the north of Japan. He was there for three years, teaching English language and literature at a university in Sendai.

He was often asked to go to schools and talk about Oxford, because the place is so well-known over there.

“The idea of writing about school was because it was something people I talked to in Japan were really interested in. They were always asking what school was like,” he said. He decided to write from a teacher’s viewpoint in part because a schoolboy’s viewpoint had been done in books such as Jonathan Coe’s, The Rotters’ Club. “I thought if you had a teacher, he could escape from the school a bit and have other things going on. I also quite liked the idea of the teacher slightly dreading going to school.”

With a PhD from Cambridge that looked mainly at Indian writing in English, as well as completing the third novel, he is hoping to find a job in academia somewhere in England. Does he ever plan to write about his own travel experiences in Japan? “People keep asking me that,” he said. “The book Matt is writing is why I would never write a book about Japan.” In order to understand that answer more fully, you’ll need to read Caroline’s opinion on the subject (page 286). I think she’s being a little harsh.

l Every Day is Like Sunday is published by Orion at £12.99.