On your masks

I am not a Buddhist, nor do I aspire to be one, but this article by the Dalai Lama is one of the simplest, warmest, most encouraging messages I've read in a long time. On this day, allegedly the most miserable of the year (nice to get it over with so quickly), I heartily recommend reading it if you can make time.

I, of course, am already fully signed up to its messages, and it is perhaps for that reason that, as I strode through the clattering rain on my way to work this morning, I felt positively buoyant. I had a really lovely weekend. This would normally be where I'd list all my engagements in a nonchalant manner, achievements masquerading as activities, trying to persuade myself (and maybe even you) that I am worthy. But that's the Old Jane. This weekend, I'm happy to tell anyone who cares that I didn't do very much at all. I was meant to go out on Friday night, but I didn't. I'd never intended to go out on Saturday night, and I stuck to that plan. And although I went round to my friends' house for a delicious Sunday lunch, I was back at home by 6pm for a third consecutive evening with myself. It was wonderful OH MY GOD IF THAT MAN SITTING NEAR ME DOESN'T STOP CLEARING HIS THROAT IN THAT UNBEARABLE FASHION I WILL HAVE TO RIP OUT HIS LARYNX. See. I told you I was zen.

I'll admit, I did have one task booked for the weekend, and it was a blinder - on Saturday morning at 10:30am I was in Brick Lane for a one day Introduction to Sewing Machine Skills course and I totally loved it. I made a skirt! Not a REAL skirt, it actually fit round one of my thighs, but it had seams, and a hem, and a waistband, and a CONCEALED ZIP. I am like Kirstie Allsop but without her bank balance or her penchant for Smythson. From now on I will be making cushion covers like there's no tomorrow. If you are my friend, you may as well accept now that your birthday present will be square and squashy; if you have a fabric or pattern preference, I take requests. I am like a wedding DJ, only with soft furnishings instead of records.

But that was it. Sewing, admin, reading (I finished Hearts & Minds by Amanda Craig which was impressive but occasionally fairly unconvincing), eating, jogging - oh my god, jogging! Nike+ have released a new version of their app that works with GPS. It also syncs with Facebook, so if you choose to do so, you can tell your friends that you've started your run, and then if they 'like' that status while you're out, you get a motivational cheer in your headphones. How amazing is that?! Someone liked my status, but not til I got back, so I missed the cheer. :( I still ran though, for the first time since I hurt my leg and yelped like a beaten Labrador last year, so I'm pleased with myself.

This morning I got up early and did thirty minutes of Pump with Davina McCall. Then I was afflicted by the occasional, unexpected but always-paralysing condition, 'I can't decide what to wear' and then the tubes were a nightmare but I am now reading Nothing To Envy, a report about real lives in North Korea and it is FASCINATING so I was thrilled when the train stopped in the tunnel. I'm going to leave work shortly because I initiated a large group gathering for this evening, and off-handedly suggested the theme of 'masks' and then forgot to bring my cardboard Gordon Brown one that I had leftover from last year's election party, so now I've got quite excited about going to Angel's in Covent Garden before they close at 5.30pm and getting a ridiculously big feathery one, or maybe a catwoman one, even though I am pretty much certain that no one else will have remembered their masks either so basically I'll be in a Green Park pub on a Monday wearing an elaborate facial accessory while everyone else just looks damp and miserable. But still. A theme's a theme.

Catwoman: "White Russian. No ice. No vodka. Hold the Kahlua." Purr.