Menstruvacation (DYSWIDT?)

I know I go on about how easy boys have it, what with no biological clock and less pressure from society in terms of their physical appearance, but it's normally a bit in jest. I mean, it does suck that only one gender has a biological clock, but as far as the looks department is concerned, I genuinely love getting dressed up and doing my hair and make-up, and I would feel straight-jacketed, deprived and totally miserable if I only had one outfit I could wear to weddings. When it comes to looks, I'd rather be a girl. Sure, it's hard - but it's fun.

However, this morning I remembered one thing that means it really does suck to be female: menstruation. The run-up of PMT is annoying, too - I've been grumpy for the past three days and all I've wanted to do is lie under a 900 tog duvet and groan softly. But there's a kind of luxury to it - I file it with hangovers in the way that it is a physical impossibility to function at full throttle so instead you take a mini-holiday from normal pressures. Merely getting through the day without crying or stabbing someone with scissors is a major achievement.

But once PMT is over, then DMT starts. And DMT - where D stands for During - is less funny because it is actually (for me) really quite painful. When I was in my mid-teens, I once had such a bad stomach ache that I nearly fainted on a train to Waterloo. I was carried off by a man at Vauxhall and put on the platform to recuperate. Then I phoned my dad from a payphone sounding as though I'd lost a limb in 'Nam, and he had to drive for about 40 minutes to come pick me up because I was in such agony. Like migraines and cystitis, unless you've had it, you don't really believe they exist. But trust me, period pains can be paralysing. Thankfully, these days a couple of Nurofen usually do the trick and the phase normally passes in a few hours, leaving me feeling shattered but delighted to be merely normal, in that same way that the joy of 'not having lost my wallet' or 'no longer having a sore throat' makes wallet-losing or sore-throat-having almost worth it.

Today, sadly the Nurofen failed me, and I was on the tube to work and had to get off midway through my commute and sit on one of the platform chairs at Borough, doubled over in pain but relieved that I hadn't actually been sick or passed out when I was still in the carriage. It's such a specific and exhausting pain, and it's now eight hours later and I still feel like there is someone wringing out my insides. I am absolutely shattered. All I want to do is go home and lie diagonally across my sofa, eat takeaway and watch bad TV, but I can't - my temporary flatmate is in residence, and he has first dibs on the sitting room tonight. Instead, I'm going to go for a couple of drinks at 6, and then go home, sneak into my bedroom, don a lot of velour, clamber into bed and watch a DVD on my laptop. It's all been a bit much but then I look down at my feet, clad in new leopard-print pixie boots, and suddenly everything is OK again. I can't imagine many men being cheered up by the same sight.