Hormoanal again

I am very hormonal at the moment. This month, the hormonalism entails being monosyllabic, exhausted to the point of nausea, unmotivated, pointlessly but painfully nostalgic and in possession of a slightly blotchy face. Sometimes it sucks being female. I was bemoaning my lot last night over dinner with Murray, specifically with reference to the fact that if you meet a single guy aged 31, the normal assumption is that he is happily single and has choosen to be so, whereas if you meet a single girl of the same age, the vision that comes to mind is of a rabid dog, salivating, howling and desperate to get her claws into her next victim. Whether it is true or not that no 31 year old girl really wants to be single is not the issue - the fact is, society makes her feel like a failure. It's freaking annoying, especially if, like me, you have no current desire to be in a relationship whatsoever - and I gained Murray's pity, which was some consolation. I think.

On a positive note, the play we went to see last night pre-dinner was really good, almost excellent. Three Days of Rain starred the compelling James McAvoy (who I'm sure must be unattractively full of himself in real life but yet I can't stop liking him), and two other less-famous people. On the basis of this production alone, it appears that the more famous you are, the better your American accent. James had the fewest slip-ups, while Nigel was OK except on words like 'York' and when he went into shouty mode, and the female actor was the least well-known and sounded a bit like she was in a Cornish AmDram production of Guys and Dolls. But with the exception of the distracting accents, the play was pretty fantastic. The script stole the show, fast-paced, unpatronising and very funny, and for the most part, the actors pulled off the speed of the dialogue with dexterity. The Shaftesbury Avenue theatre was packed and, after an initial panic that no one was going to stop whispering and rustling all night, I calmed down and have to admit that the audience was largely well behaved, with the exception of the girl on the other side of Murray who had a distractingly intermittent coughing fit involving crackly Strepsils packets for the final three or four minutes of the play. I nearly killed her but I'd noticed how nice her vintage dress was at the interval so I was slightly more forgiving than normal, and just settled for a death-inducing glower as we filed out.

This morning I had an unpleasant shock as I reached the tube station opposite my flat. The nice people who work there usually liven up our commute with a thought-provoking Quote of the Day, written on a whiteboard near the ticket barriers. Past morale-boosters have been by Oscar Wilde, Seneca and Jane Austen. But when I went past today and scanned the board hastily for its pearl of wisdom, I became aware that it seemed a little more vacuous and unremarkable than usual. When I saw the quotation's owner, I realised why: it was Brittany Murphy, star of Clueless and 8 Mile. I'm sure Brittany is a lovely and intelligent girl, but on a level with Seneca? I think possibly not. I scooped my lower jaw off the tiled floor and was about to file a complaint when I realised that I was running seven minutes late, due to my inability to get out of bed this morning on account of my hormones. So I scuttled down the escalator, levered myself onto a carriage, unrolled Prospect from my bag and got on with another day in the life. Politics class tonight. Woop.