Today is crap

1. It is pouring with rain.
2. I am ill with a sore throat and aching limbs.
3. Patrick Swayze is dead.
4. I have just dropped a buttered, Marmited corn thin, Marmite side down on my cashmere jumper. This is the cashmere jumper I wear when I'm ill. I can't take it off or I will get a lot iller. So now I smell of ill person and Marmite. FFS.

Saturday was really fun. I went for dinner with my friend Eva and then walked some of the way home, from Holland Park to Marble Arch, where I caught the bus. When I'd left my house at about 5pm that afternoon, I'd looked pretty cool - I was wearing a new spangly cardigan, my eye make-up was excellent and my hair looked slept-in. And, several hours later, as I walked past all the patriotic tourists who'd been watching the Last Night of the Proms in Hyde Park, I was filled with a sense of worldlove and contentment, and I beamed happily at many of my fellow flaneurs as I strolled towards London's heart, while listening to music by Lambchop, Crosby, Stills & Nash, DeVotchka and Quiet Village.

Then I got home and looked in the mirror.

My eyeliner hadn't just disappeared, it had sunk about two inches, increasing the depth and intensity of my bags and nestling into my crows' feet so as to define them with greater precision for the partially sighted. My hair, previously fluffy and full of joie-de-vivre, was now lank and clinging to my perspiring forehead following my walk. And, as the crowning glory, I beamed into the mirror as I had done at so many passers-by, and found a peppercorn the size of a grapefruit lodged between my left front tooth and the neighbouring incisor. My mental image of myself as an attractive, healthy thirty-something, humming along to her walkman as she smiles at strangers had to be updated quickly to a sectionable, sweating mentalist. Far from an advertisement for happy independence, in retrospect, it was a miracle I wasn't arrested.

On Sunday I saw two films. One was absolutely brilliant: The September Issue - not so much a triumph of skilled film-making as one of those cases where the subject matter is so extraordinary and fascinating that almost anyone could have held up a mobile phone camera and made a similarly gripping and eye-opening movie. I wished it could have lasted several days. Then I came home and watched The Family Stone, a film I was recommended by a friend who shall remain nameless to spare her any humiliation. It was absolutely the worst film I have seen in some months, derivative, embarrassing to watch, patronising and as subtle as a kick in the storecupboard. Take the opening scene, where a gay couple arrive at the home of one of their parents for Christmas, and are seen unpacking bags of beautifully wrapped gifts from their expensive car. So far, so PC. But one of the pair is black, while the other is white. Sigh. And - why not go the whole hog? - the white one is deaf. Actually deaf. I laughed out loud. Anyway. The mother, we discover, has breast cancer and is soon to die. Of course. So I was ironing away, scoffing at the increasingly absurd and irritating plotline where another (straight) son falls in love with his girlfriend's sister, but it's all OK, because his brother fancies the girlfriend, even though her character is genuinely less sympathetic than Hannibal Lecter, and later the bus drives away but then the brakes come on and he sprints to catch up with it and she gets out and asks if he has plans for New Year and I am trying not to be sick, but in the middle of it all, there is a scene where the dying mother is looking out of the window at the snow falling and you know that she is thinking, 'This might be the last time I see snow falling,' and in spite of myself I welled up, suddenly struck by the thought that, shit, this might be the last time I watch a movie, or iron a pillowcase, or get into clean sheets at night. I try to appreciate how lucky I am, but sometimes I forget to appreciate the normal things. I shouldn't have to be dying or confronted with death to appreciate living. So, for the record, I'm truly glad that today is crap, and I am grateful to have a sore throat and to be breathing in and out. And I'm happy that I'm seated here on my sofa, wearing one slipper and smelling strongly of Marmite. Yes.