Kitten

Aw, look at his little face, all covered with milk! It is a little-known fact that, when I am not being fascinating and erudite (or, indeed, paranoid and aggressive), I am often being obsessed with baby animals. Throughout 2009, I have been enjoying my page-a-day calendar of cute, featuring photos of kittens, puppies, hamsters, dwarf rabbits, guinea pigs wearing hairclips, a hedgehog with a cardboard tube stuck on its head, a tiny panda cub putting its paw up to the glass so that we can see his tiny pads, and a goat kid chewing on the plait of the girl holding it. The pleasure I derive from looking at these photographs is strange to me. But it is real, and it is harmless. Ha ha! I've just remembered the baby panda! Ah, those were the days.

So, not much has happened since yesterday except I am now crippled. I have some sort of shoulder ache on my left hand side that is spreading up my neck and will inevitably progress through my ear canal into my brain and I will be left writhing in agony for weeks in my flat with only my dying basil plant for company. It started last week, but I successfully distracted myself at first - now my life is so empty that it is almost all I can think about. I went for a Chinese massage after work (like a normal massage except you keep your clothes on and sit face down in one of those massage chairs so I feel like it's more medicinal and less luxurious and thus justify its expense) and after I left, it felt indescribably amazing for about four or five minutes and then returned to its normal state. Laura thinks I have tendonitis which sounds quite glamorous but also fractionally irritating. I'm going to take some Nurofen and see what happens. If it gets any worse I will sue my company, as I think it is almost certainly as a result of some form of RSI. One of my bosses gave me a job to do about a month ago which involved opening an Excel spreadsheet, copying an 8-digit number, then opening a complex bit of inhouse software, and pasting the number in a new box. If the number was recognised (which it normally wasn't), I had to then click a series of other links. Any one of four results were possible, so I had to then put one of the numbers 1 to 4 in a box next to the original number in the spreadsheet. The total number of 8-digit numbers I had to check was around 1200. It was so phenomenally boring that I fell asleep several times while I was doing it, even though my office walls are glass and the person who gave me the work sits about three feet away. I was beyond caring. About ten days ago, he asked how I was getting on and I lied and said I was nearly finished, when in fact I'd done about 65. So the past week has involved hours of this insufferable task, which I'm sure I could have designed some macro for, but didn't have the energy or the conviction in my own macro-designing abilities. Anyway, my shoulder agony coincides almost precisely with this task, so I'm sure it is that which is to blame. Not the fact that I carry an insanely heavy handbag, the opposite to Mary Poppins', in that it looks empty and is in fact almost empty, but magically weighs three quarters of a metric ton. And not the fact that I sit slouched down in my chair with my buttocks right on the edge, my body twisted slightly to the right to read my emails. Nor the fact that I drink with my left hand (and, additionally, write and eat and brush my teeth, although drinking is probably the Big One). I'm sure it's the Excel spreadsheet's fault. I blame my boss. And failing that, I blame Bill Gates.

Ooh, but now I feel guilty because for comic effect I said that my life is empty, and in fact it couldn't be more jam-packed. Why, just on Tuesday I spent the entire evening sitting on my sofa in the dark, refreshing my laptop waiting for Gmail to start working again! What could be more exciting? But then things picked up massively. Last night, Emily took me for my birthday treat: a manicure and a meal at the Ramsay-owned Box Wood Cafe. Lucky me. My nails look amazing and I feel like a proper, dainty grown-up lady which is a bit scary but also I suppose not a bad thing every once in a while. Plus I ate the world's most delicious taramasalata which was so exceptional that I debated licking the bowl. And tonight I am going to the theatre to see Arcadia with Joanna and I'm excited about that, although probably more excited about dinner in Bertorelli's beforehand. And tomorrow after work I'm going to stay with Nicole in the countryside over the weekend, and I literally cannot wait for that. So it's not that my life is empty. No siree. I was just being melodramatic. Can you believe it?