Funnypenny

Well that was quite amusing. My boss was going to a lunch today at White's, which is an old-school members' club in London. On Tuesday he asked me to book him a cab, so I went on Google to find the address. I was expecting it to be in Mayfair or St. James', but on typing 'White's private members club London' into the searchbox, the first result that came up on Google maps was in Aldgate. Odd, I thought, but pasted the address into the Outlook calendar entry, booked the cab and forgot about it.

At 12:30 this afternoon, I got a call from my boss. He was in the taxi, outside White's Club on Leman Street, Aldgate. It turns out that members' club means different things to different people. I'd sent my boss for lunch at a strip joint.

I tried to apologise through the laughter, but annoyingly, saying sorry while cackling with uncontrollable mirth didn't communicate the sincerity I'd intended. The idea of my unbelievably clean-living, teetotal, 11% bodyfat, immaculately-dressed boss expecting a stiff-upper-lip English club and getting a lunchtime dose of fake tan, fake boobs and diamante thongs at a tacky City lapdancing venue was just too good to be true. I have since researched the establishment a little further; a review on ViewLondon by Jason1976 suggests it is just the kind of place any self-respecting man about town would hope to find himself for a business lunch on a Thursday afternoon: "Had my stag do at Club Whites this week and my first visit will definitely not be my last, as soon as we were lead to our VIP room i knew this was going to be the stag night i only dreamt of." Another reviewer, Sweeting, adds: "I tell you what, this club is rated as the best , i am never disappointed when i go , it's true that i go there pretty often but what i am saying is the truth, this club has it spot on in my opinion and i recommend highly once again, the girls , the management, could'nt be better."

When I eventually stopped laughing and was reassured that he hadn't even got out of the cab and was now safely on his way back to the office, I found the phone number of the old-school White's and tracked down the intended lunch date to apologise; thankfully, he also saw the funny side. I then emailed his PA to explain what had happened who comforted me with a tale of a friend of hers who once sent her boss to Manila instead of Milan. I guess - as ever - things could have been a little worse...

In unrelated matters, I received the below in an email yesterday and it made me laugh. There is, I'll admit, an element of recognition in my response although I SWEAR I haven't knowingly burned down a house yet. Y'know, though, never say never...

Vigilant Idiot

"Be a bit vigilant," I suggested to you all last Friday. Advice, like criticism, is clearly something I can give but not take.

The time: approximately 08:48. The date: today, Tuesday, 24 May. The place: Northern Line carriage, northbound. I am leaning against a glass partition, listening to Alexander by Alexander, and playing a game on my phone. There is not enough room for me to extract my book from my overflow bag and certainly no space to annotate. I am reading Becker's Pullitzer Prize winning The Denial of Death and it requires annotating. So iJewels it is.

At Bank, there is always an exodus, but today's is even more pronounced than usual. Out of the corner of my eye, it appears that there are four vacant seats behind me, the other side of the partition, two facing two. A woman walks towards one of them. Without pausing iJewels, I swivel around the edge of the partition and reverse into another.

It is not vacant.

I have lowered myself into someone's lap.

It is the funniest thing I HAVE EVER DONE. I squeal, leap up and turn around. My victim is a diminuitive Asian female, probably in her mid-thirties, wearing headphones. She is finding it a bit funny but not really. The rest of the carriage is giggling quite a lot. I apologise with all the sincerity I can manage, while laughing uncontrollably. She gestures to the seat next to her, which does not appear to have anyone sitting in it. I get the message and lower myself down once again, thankfully without incident. My game of iJewels is a write-off.

It is nice to laugh. The worst fall-out from The Incident has been at night - I couldn't get to sleep before 4 or 5am, and when I did doze off, I dreamed bad things. On Sunday night I woke up early due to a full-blown panic attack, my hands round my neck, unable to breathe properly for several minutes, lots of asthmatic-style wheezing. Fun fun fun! But last night (Monday) I popped a Melatonin and slept right through. Today I feel like a new woman.

The days have been largely OK - I've just kept myself busy and, if I do remember what happened, I just remind myself how much worse it could have been. I do think it's clever, though, that despite my conscious mind's failure to maintain Red Alert, my unconscious is still doing its job. I was in Paperchase on Sunday picking out a birthday card, totally focused on the task at hand: the mugging couldn't have been further from my mind. But suddenly I felt something brush past me and I leapt as if I'd been tasered. I gasped, whipped around and my potential attacker revealed herself as a four year old in an elaborate princess dress. Similar things have happened several times - a lady stood on a plastic bag yesterday on the pavement and it burst surprisingly loudly - jaded city-girl that I am, I'd normally not even reacted, but yesterday I jumped melodramatically to one side and squealed like a TOWIE cast-member receiving a BAFTA. Clearly, although I've reverted to my casual self on the surface, there's still a good bit of heightened awareness bubbling away underneath. No wonder I can't sleep without 'erbal assistance.

Anyway, the long and short of it is this: thank you all for your kind messages of support. It's meant a lot. And I feel a great deal better as a result. You don't need to worry about me, I'm alive and lap-dancing. Let normal service resume.

I Woz Robbed

I literally was. And it's not like me to shy away from a dramatic encounter, but I've been dreading this. Still, for some weird reason I want to put it in writing.

I posted my last blog entry at 15:29 on Wednesday. Thirty minutes later, I left work, walked to the tube station and boarded the southbound Northern Line to go see my therapist. Usually, I cycle to her house every Wednesday. I quite enjoy the twenty minute blast of air - it's a useful chance for me to get my thoughts in order before I spent one hour and £45 discussing them with a paid professional. Wednesday night, though, was to be book club, and I still had thirty-odd pages of the book left. I thought I'd use the tube journey to try and finish the last section.

I got to her stop, took the lift up to street level, and began the familiar 8-minute walk to her house through a mixture of quiet Victorian squares and across a couple of arterial main roads. Gripped by the final few pages of The Wisdom of Whores (well, gripped plus my usual I-can't-believe-this-writer-is-such-a-dick scoffing), I approached my therapist's house while looking down at my book, a biro and my iPhone (to tell me whether I was on time or not - I don't wear a watch) in my left hand, my handbag over my left shoulder. The streets weren't busy - I saw a father and son walking home from school, and an elderly woman coming back from the shops - but I was pretty free to walk along reading without worrying that I was going to bump into anyone.

At 16:29 I was about two doors away from my destination when a man seemed to jump in front of me and grab me round the neck. I was utterly terrified and simultaneously completely confused. My hands shot up to my neck to prevent him from hurting me, and I tried to back away but his hands came with me. I couldn't see what he looked like, his head was up close to my shoulder, and helpfully I think I closed my eyes in fear. Within a couple of seconds I was screaming and thought very clearly, "Jesus CHRIST that is a lot of noise you're making." It wasn't a dramatic, Hollywood heroine scream, but rather an uber-womanly, gutteral noise, like when Pippa The First found out she'd lost her baby in Home & Away. I wasn't enjoying the fact that this was the sound I made under duress, but I couldn't stop. I screamed and screamed, and threw in a couple of desperate "Get off me!" attempts at the guy, but he didn't give up. I'd known he wouldn't give up, but I wanted someone to hear me shout - I hoped they might come and help me. It was a quiet road but I didn't know what else to do other than make a racket.

Give it to me," he started saying after a few seconds of struggle. "Fucking GIVE it to me." I couldn't feel the blade of a knife but I knew he might have one. I was absolutely prepared to give him what he wanted but I couldn't work out what it was: his hands were near my neck, but my bag was still over my shoulder and my phone was still in my hand. Then it clicked - he wanted my necklace. At pretty much the precise moment I worked it out, the chain finally gave way, and he hared off up the street. It had been about ten seconds, fifteen at most. I was left alone, sitting on the pavement, my glasses three or four feet away, my book out in the street, my splintered biro across the road by the wheel of a parked car. My neck was stinging a lot and there was a cut from his fingernail in the flesh of my left hand. Without all the screaming it was eerily quiet.

I thought about standing up but then realised I didn't want to. I stayed there. A few seconds later, a woman approached from the left.
"Are you OK?" she said. I didn't really know what to say, so I didn't say anything. I just stared into the gutter. "You're not OK."
A man came out of another house, saw what was going on and went back to get his phone to call the police. I just sat there, shocked and upset that I was going to waste a good chunk of my urgently-needed therapy session on this stupid guy who took my necklace. The woman introduced herself. I managed to confirm that I was basically fine, that I'd lost some jewellery. My wool dress was ripped and she said I had bad scratches on my neck. The man passed the phone to me and confirmed that the police were on their way. I gave a few details and handed the phone back. Then I rung my therapist's doorbell. She'd heard the screams, but hadn't known it was me. In London, you hear screaming at night, it's drunken morons - during the day, it's stupid kids. You don't react to screams. I don't.

The police pulled up, only about three or four minutes after the guy had called them. Two male officers got out of the car.
"Get in," they said to me. "Let's go see if we can find him."
The tears started in earnest then. I knew I'd not got a good look at the guy and I really didn't want to go after him. My main concern could have been so easily explained if I'd managed to articulate it: what are we going to do if we find him? I'd be in the back seat. Say we find the guy - then what? He gets into the back seat with me and we sit side by side? You put him in the back seat and I get out and sit on the lap of the police officer in the front? You leave me at the side of the road while you drive back to the station with him? I didn't want to see my attacker again. I didn't want him to be able to identify me, not ever. I just wanted it to go away.

I told them I didn't want to go, that I didn't want to see him and that I was pretty sure I'd be unable to recognise him even up close. The policemen looked really frustrated and I realised then how pumped up they both were. The adrenaline was flowing and they wanted to go catch a thief. I just wanted to forget about it, sit in a wingback chair and discuss my existential crisis. I knew I was being unhelpful but I left the two helpful neighbours talking to the police and, with a few apologies, took refuge in my therapist's sitting room.

I cried a lot over the next thirty minutes or so. The session was a write-off and I came out of her house pretty rattled, terrified. I didn't want to go home so, as planned, I went to Emily's house for book club. On the tube I took a photo of some of my scratches. I'd not seen them in a mirror and I wanted to see what had happened. They made me feel sick. And then I wrote down what I could remember. How my first thought was about wasting my therapy session. How annoyed I was that the guy had been black, how time and time again the stereotypes are backed up, how hard it gets to blame the police for being racist. How I'd wondered if I could call my recent ex and ask him to meet me at the tube tonight, and how straight away my grown-up voice had come into my head, saying, "You manipulative BITCH." How I knew straight away I'd be using my vulnerability to get his pity and affection. How the police's hunger had scared me almost as much as had the attack. How I started worrying that the scratches would fade before book club and I wouldn't be able to show anyone my war wounds. How one minute I'd thought it would make a good blog entry, and the next I was shuddering at how terrified I felt. How I had always been able to say that I'd never been mugged, and how I'd always thought it was because I was tall and strong-looking, and how maybe this meant that I'd lost so much weight that I now looked vulnerable, and that in a way it was a bizarre compliment. And how fucked up that made me, that I was in a tiny glad to be mugged because it meant I looked THIN.

And so I got to book club, and I told Emily, and then I told Kate when she arrived, and then the others came I really didn't want to talk about it any more, and then I had a lot of white wine and felt a lot better, and at the end of the night, I walked back to the tube with Ness, and a guy came up to us, close up, and asked if we could spare any change, and I leapt into Ness like Scooby-Doo into Shaggy, so then I had to explain to her why I was so jumpy. And I got home OK, determined to walk into my flat alone even though Ness had offered to accompany me, and I got into bed and turned off the light, and all I could feel was my scratches stinging and all I could hear was his whispered, urgent voice going, "Give it to me, fucking GIVE it to me," and so I put on a podcast and slept fitfully.

Yesterday I got up and went into work, and the police came and took a statement, and then later in the afternoon, a forensics guy came around and photographed my scratches and the cut on my hand, and although I knew it was no big deal, after he'd gone I think the tiredness overwhelmed me and I did a fair bit of crying. Today I've had a row with my insurance company, and it just doesn't seem to stop. But I know it will.

The necklace was my favourite. It was a long gold chain with a gold pear at the end, the pendant given to me by my parents, the chain handed down to me by mum, although it had been given to her by dad when they were first married. I remember being in my mum's arms as a toddler and playing with the chain, and as a grown-up I've loved wearing it. The guy didn't get the whole chain - it snapped in two places and I was left with a small section of it. I never want to see it again. My ripped dress is in the bin, next to my laddered tights and the biro he must have crunched underfoot as he ran away.

I couldn't sleep last night either - it's one of those times when you tell yourself not to think of elephants. I was up late playing crappy computer games on my phone, trying not to replay the details, wonder why he'd not stolen my phone, or ask myself whether he'd seen me on the tube and got a good look at the necklace so decided to follow me along those streets, whether he'd still have grabbed me ten seconds later when I would've been two doors further down and in my therapist's front garden. I know it's just bad luck, that it could have been so much worse, that this is what you get in modern life, that he was desperate, that the memories will fade, that I'm healthy, that the scratches don't really sting now, that there won't be any scars, that it wasn't near my house, that it was only a theft, that it happened in daylight, that I will sleep well again. But right now, I'm still pretty wobbly, and I don't like it one tiny bit.

Anyway. It's done now. I've spoken to the police, the insurers, my parents, my boss, and my Faithful. It's over. Just hope my crappy Alzheimer's memory selects this as one of the 97% of all events it chooses to forget. Wishing you all a happy weekend. Be a bit vigilant. Love all the people.

Staged In Chelsea

I can't really comment on Made In Chelsea as I haven't seen it, but I'm not entirely sure I will ever see it, and if I don't watch it then I think it will be hard for me to review it with any authority (although by no means impossible given that, as a pop journalist, I managed to review several hundred films and albums without ever seeing them or listening to them. I also 'wrote' a lot of interviews without actually speaking to the celebrity in question, and put together countless horoscope and problem pages despite never having been an astrologer or an agony aunt. I don't even have any siblings and was unmarried, so any readers who checked up on my background could have established fairly quickly that the chances of me being an aunt were slim to none. I suppose I do have some experience of agony. But these are stories for another time).

ANYWAY. This is not a review of Made In Chelsea. It is more a series of concerns.

First of all: I do not understand this new genre of programming, which seems to have been spearheaded by, I believe, The Hills in the US, and is now sweeping our weak-willed nation in the form of The Only Way Is Essex and the aforementioned Made In Chelsea. I watched about ten minutes of TOWIE a few months ago, and just couldn't get a grip. Fiction, I get: ideally, some clever people sit around in a room and construct a narrative storyline with which to entertain or educate their audience. Then they turn the storyline into a tightly-woven script. Then actors learn the words and, with the help of a director, interpret them for our viewing pleasure. We are given an elaborately-constructed tale and we are free to enjoy it as we wish. Then there is reality TV. I get that too: at its best, some clever people come up with a format and then invite a selection of the general public to appear in front of the camera for us to watch. Programmes in this genre can entertain and inform (Big Brother, C4's The Family), challenge popular conceptions (Wife Swap), or just feed our obsession to see celebrities humiliate themselves while we use our button-pushing power to decide who has to eat maggots (I'm A Celebrity: Get Me Out Of Here). Like it or not, reality TV has been an extraordinarily successful shift in the way we make and consume television, and it's here to stay.

But TOWIE and MIC aren't fiction. And they're not reality. They're exaggerated versions of real people, in staged situations. It's like a fictional series, but with untrained actors. And I just don't get it. In typical Six Degrees of Private Education fashion, several people in the choir with which I sing have firsthand connections with the poshoes in MIC. One of them has been asked by the production team to supply a list of handsome gay male model types, so that the show's Ollie (who somehow has a girlfriend but is clearly gay) can come out with one of them in a future show. From what I'm told, there is no way his 'girlfriend' seriously believes he's straight, nor that he loves her. It is all just an act. But there's the rub: these people can't act. Watching TOWIE was excruciating - not because of the people or the storylines, but because it was sub-Neighbours. The script was rubbish - because there wasn't one. The acting was rubbish - because they're not acting. But all the oh-my-god, I-can't-believe-he-really-said-that shocks that come from reality TV was missing too, because it's not really real. It seems like the worst of all worlds.

Still, people seem to love watching these over-wealthy twenty-somethings blowing their inheritance in south west London. My friend Lucy last night had tears of laughter in her eyes as she ramped up her posh accent and did an impression of Ollie talking to a group of his friends at a dinner party. "Guys, yah? As you all know, it's my BUTHday next week, yah? And I thought, why don't we all do something CRAZY, yah? Like, let's go skiing?" And I get that that is agonising. I get that these crazy rich young people are jaw-droppingly clueless, and that they live on another planet and that that's possibly funny. But the fake-real issue ruins it for me. Because if the setting is a set-up, then what they're saying's probably fake too, and thus we're laughing at people who are pretending to be bigger idiots than they actually are, because reality's not good enough, and no one would believe it if it was totally acted. Sounds lame to me. Might watch the next one though.

In other news, a glitsch (read: MASSIVE COCK-UP) by Blogger last week appears to have reset every single Show Me You Love Me box at the bottom of my blogs (except those I've posted post-glitsch) to a count of one. This disappoints me. And of course, I can tell you about it now, Faithful, and you might be able to let it slide, but what about all the millions of new visitors I will get in future, who perhaps won't read this particular paragraph, but go instead directly to entries I wrote pre-wipeout? They will think that only one person enjoyed what I wrote enough to depress their index finger on their left mouse button, thus clicking a checkbox and making me unbelievably happy. They will then, naturally, conclude that I am a CRAP WRITER. Which is so annoying. I HATE that a total stranger who I will probably never meet will think that about me. OUTRAGEOUS. HOW DARE S/HE. S/HE MUST LOVE ME.

The only solution I can find that will compensate for this lost data and subsequent negative fallout is for Blogger to give me one million pounds. Failing that, I think Blogger should put a disclaimer at the top of each of my affected posts, saying "At the bottom of this entry by Lost Looking For Fish, you will find a checkbox that allows readers to demonstrate that the words above had bought them some pleasure, or, at the very least, not caused them discomfort. Many hundreds of people had ticked the box. However, due to us being really really bad at our jobs in mid-May 2011, the data was lost, and, by the time you read this, it is likely that the count of people who have ticked the box appears to be a measley 'one'. We humbly inform you that this single box-tick is a technical error and is in no way an accurate reflection of the standard of Lost Looking For Fish. We are well aware that this incident will impact negatively on your reading experience: after all, no sane person wants to read an unpopular blog entry. For this, we apologise unreservedly. Please be assured that Lost Looking For Fish is one of the most entertaining and important blogs in the Blogger canon. We hope you enjoy the rest of your reading experience. Best wishes, the Blogger Support Team." That or a million pounds, Blogger - which is it to be?

Defensive much?

So Woody Allen, CBT psychologists, Human Givens therapists (my current score: 5/10) and many others agree that too much time alone is pretty much guaranteed to spin us out. Excessive rumination is not good, they say. I too concur. But I also think that too much denial - keep busy, keep busy, and for god's sake don't look the demon in the eye - isn't a long-term solution either; these volcanoes have a habit of erupting eventually.

Yeah, OK, probably if I wasn't in a job where I have several hours a day without much to distract me, I wouldn't be having these thoughts so often. But as we all know, there are tons of people out there in super-hectic jobs, who are still only one passive aggressive remark away from a nervous breakdown, and there are also a lot of employees with crushingly dull jobs who are more likely to actually melt than have a meltdown.

What's my point? Dunno really. I guess I'm trying to defend myself against some faceless individuals who believe that if I had a more fulfilling job, everything would be OK. I'm saying: a) I can't think of a more fulfilling job that I would both like to do and am qualified to do, and b) I need this salary because I own a flat on my own, have a huge mortgage on interest only, and not much of a safety net, and yes, I could get rid of the flat and then take some amazing low-paid job, but then I'd be without something that brings me a LOT of security and pleasure, and also please refer back to a).

You might think I'm having this existential crisis precisely because there's so little on my plate. Chicken and egg, I'd say - maybe you're right, but I'm pretty sure it would have happened eventually, and personally I maintain that it's lucky I'm having it now while I've got nothing else to do. It is, I reckon, perfect timing. I snog my crisis, squeeze its bum, and we walk off together into the sunset, leaving you and your happy balanced lifestyle playing alone on the beach, realising it's got quite cold suddenly and that you forgot your cardigan.

On the flipside, I thought I should update you on the mundane details, since we haven't done that for a while:

1. I still take Hair, Skin and Nails supplements from Boots and remain happy with the results.
2. Brown & Harris moisturiser (received in goody bag at Christmas) is fractionally more effective than smoothing water over your hands and arms, but not much. Admittedly it does smell more strongly than (most) water, which might be considered to be in its pro column, depending on whether or not you like the aroma of Muguet des Bois, or Lily of the Valley.
3. I watched Bright Star, about the poet Keats' relationship with his neighbour, Fanny. It made me cry a lot but I also thought it was quite silly.
4. I have decided that Rimmel 60 Seconds nail varnish is the best.
5. It is annoying because I have had my glasses frames for ages but I don't think I will ever find ones I like better than these, so I can't buy new ones. Good for my bank balance but bad for my potential to reinvent myself.
6. I received an email this morning, subject line 'Your Glastonbury tickets are being delivered today'. That made me happy.
7. Crunchies and Daim (The Chocolate Bar Formerly Known As Dime) are my current winners. I think I possibly ODed on Lindt with sea salt.
8. If I was only allowed to buy clothes from one shop for the rest of my life, I would choose Marks & Spencer. My back-up would be ASOS but I don't think their bras are good enough.
9. I have booked in a date to have my hideous ganglion removed. The surgeon offered me a general anaesthetic but after my hideous wisdom teeth experience I said I'd rather have a local, which he said was fine, but apparently in addition to the local, they will also put me to sleep in some way that isn't a general anaesthetic, because I might get stressed. This is annoying as I want to watch. It has been in my hand for years, it would be nice to put a face to the name. But then I think the reality of seeing inside my own hand might be freakier than I imagine. Apparently I can decide on the day. The day is the 2nd June. Pop it in your diaries now so you don't forget to send me MASSIVE BOUQUETS OF FLOWERS.
10. I am still on the lookout for the perfect mascara. Cheap or expensive, they all go clumpy. These cosmetics companies have money coming out of their ears and the world's top greedy scientists working for them. How hard can it be to get right? It is most distressing.
11. I really want a cat and/or a dog. It is annoying that I can't have one. But then life is full of compromises.

700

What's amazing about life is that you can be questioning pretty much everything, and feeling a deep sense of solitude and existential angst, and then you can get on a train, meet a friend, sit on a deckchair and drink half a bottle of Cava, head into the Royal Festival Hall and have one of the best musical experiences of your existence. Maybe that proves that my angst isn't that deep-seated. Maybe I'm just really fickle. Or maybe it's that Sufjan Stevens gave me exactly what I needed: a brief sense of belonging.

I'd never seen him live before and knew him only from two albums: Illinoise and some crazy Christmas collection where he plays original festive songs on a bizarre selection of instruments and sings along in his breathy, meandering, wouldn't-hurt-a-fly fashion. If you'd asked me to describe my gig predictions beforehand, I'd have gone for a kind of Ray Lamontagne figure, sleepy and unprepossessing, noodling away on a guitar centre stage, low on personality, high on awkward musicality.

So when the show opened and Sufjan's band arrived, three trombones back right, one drummer front left, another drummer front right, a pianist centre right, some guitarists mid-left, and two great backing vocalist dancers on a raised platform centre back, I was a little surprised. I would have been surprised even if he'd come on wearing a T-shirt and jeans, as I'd expected, but Sufjan was wearing a tight black zootsuit covered in strips of neon tape, with further strips of tape on his face, and a eight-foot diameter pair of homemade fabric wings on his back.

And the mood was one of love. It was all gloriously flawed. His left wing wouldn't stay erect and so right from the start, he looked like a damaged bird fighting with his final breaths. The suit was all tight and wrinkly around his knees but a bit baggy and wrong in other places, coming in tight around the ankles and paired with some bog-standard trainers. The graphics on the huge background screen were clearly a labour of love, most likely hand drawn by Sufjan himself, who's an artist as well as a talented musician. I tell you what he's not, and that's an amazing dancer by conventional standards. And again, this just piled points onto the Charmometer. His blocky arm movements were carried out with conviction but scarce skill - he looked a bit like he was half-heartedly copying a routine from the TV, while drunk. Several times there was more than a hint of Ross Gellar about him - and, having pointed this out to James, we both then screamed during the finale when the girls did the hold-your-left-foot-in-your-left-hand-with-your-right-hand-behind-your-right-ear move that was almost the best bit of The Routine (click here to revisit - move in question is at 01:20 but my favourite bit is Schwimmer's head jerks of victory when it's over).

So it was all a bit clunky. And as a practiced perfectionist, by rights, this should have irritated me. Don't I have high standards for the performances I choose to see? Don't my gig watchwords include slick and/or perfectly-choreographed? Readers: maybe I'm changing. Because it was the flaws that made this for me. Sufjan poured everything into this gig, and in that respect, it was massively emotional. It's rare in life that you see someone trying really fucking hard to do something, and when you do, you feel gratitude for the bravery they had in choosing to expose themselves that way. The first note I wrote down was about halfway through the gig, when a lyric caught my ear: "And when I die, I'll rot. But when I live, I'll give it all I've got." It was that, that unashamed effort, which wore down my London cynicism. The confidence to be publically vulnerable. I tell the truth too - but in the face of so much pressure to be positive, it's often hard to admit my struggles. But this was infectious. At the first possible opportunity, people leapt from their seats and poured down the stairs to be closer to the stage. The ticker tape, the balloons, the beautiful music, the extraordinary rhythms and chords: it was all so strange and magical, and for an hour or two, I forgot I was alone.

On Sunday morning, I made a note of these lines from Woody Allen that I read in an online interview with him. He's answering the question 'What drives you nuts?':
"The human predicament: the fact that we’re living in a nightmare that everyone is making excuses for and having to find ways to sugarcoat. And the fact that life, at its best, is a pretty horrible proposition. But people’s behavior makes it much, much worse than it has to be.... I do think we live in a nightmare and I feel the same way that Blanche Dubois feels: I want magic; I don’t want reality. I want the paper lanterns hung over the bare light bulbs, like she did. And if there is any way to escape reality, I’m all for it. Unfortunately, there isn’t any real way. You can distract yourself. You can go to baseball games and concerts and plays and have sex and get involved in all kinds of endeavours that obsess you, and you can even create problems for yourself, where they don’t exist, to avoid thinking about the bad problems. But, in the end, you’re caught. And reality inevitably disappoints you."

I emailed that quotation to a friend, who replied with one from Alexander Ebert, the guy behind the band Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros:
"I grew up with more shit than most people and with a lack of a certain kind of suffering that, in some people, signifies true living and experience. So I became self-destructive. But that attitude isn't sustainable, so I found my way back to brightness and more constructive ways to live. Both are reactions to the same thing: death. It's like we're confronted with a fucked-up world and the refusal to lose hope is the only way to prevail over the pessimism and sarcasm. And from the refusal to lose hope comes the desire to build something else and the ability to accept that that something else may not be created in your lifetime. But that's irrelevant. The thrust is the intention."

There are a lot of people out there who know the truth, but who still make positive choices. I'm at an earlier stage where I'm just coming to terms with things, accepting life for what it is and making peace with reality, rather than running and hiding in endless nights out, hilarious antics and the fantasy of unconditional love. But it's inspiring to know that it might just be possible to reconcile this struggle and somehow find a happier place. I'll keep trying.

This is my 700th LLFF. Many happy returns to you, Faithful. This is written with love for all of us.

As promised...

I just wrote an enormously long post, not because I wanted to, but because I made a commitment to write again today, and I hate being let down, and because even though I don't believe in the resurrection of Christ, I still think Jesus was pretty spot on with his Golden Rule.

But then I read back through what I'd written, and although it makes perfect sense to me, I think most of you would have finished it and thought, 'Poor Jane,' and from my perspective, that sounds about as much fun as anal sex with a leopard. We all have existential angst - well, anyone with an ounce of intelligence and an ounce of humility - and although I could vomit up several thousand words about mine faster than you can make a sandwich, I don't think the act of sending those words into the public domain will help me resolve my questions any faster. It could, I suppose, help some of you who are going through similar battles. But the vast majority of you would read it, feel briefly enlightened as to what's bubbling away underneath my dyed blonde locks, and then you'd pity me, because I spend so much time thinking about all this stuff while you're coordinating bathtime and freezing pureed fruit and changing the world in your nine to five. And that would really annoy me, because I still like being me even if it does seem to suck in my head a lot of the time, and your pity would just make me go off you, and no one wants that, do they?

So I'm keeping my existential angst to myself for now, at least until I can find an hilarious way to recount it. And since I didn't see anything at the theatre last night, and no one accidentally inhaled the lid of their biro on the tube home, and I didn't set my sofa on fire or mistakenly purchase a mail-order husband from North Korea, I don't think I need to write any more right now. I'll be back as soon as I can find some real news.

OK I'm back.

And not just back in a kind of once-every-three-weeks way, like I've been for the past few wishy-washy months. I'm properly back. I think. Let's see. The proof of the pudding is, of course, in the eating, and I need to start as I mean to go on, which means actually writing something.

So I will write about two matters of the heart - last month's Royal Wedding and my own pathetic four-chambered organ, which carries on beating despite being mangled and kicked down the street and covered in bits of gravel and the sticker off an apple.

My mother - and, later, Grania's mother - were very upset with me for not being The Most Excited Person Evah about the Royal Wedding. My parents were both in tears during the service, and my mum, who is American by birth but gave up her US citizenship and became an on-paper UK national some years ago, emailed me that afternoon telling me how proud she was to be British. And I'm happy for all the people who enjoyed it, really I am. I mean, why would anyone nice want other people to be miserable? I am nice and I thus want other people to be happy. However, I could not escape a feeling of sadness on the day that there was all this kerfuffle about a posh boy marrying a posh girl (and seriously, don't get me started on the idea that she's a [retch] 'commoner'), that thousands upon thousands of people lined the streets and waved flags and had street parties and made a fuss, just over some perfectly sweet couple's wedding. I mean, maybe, maybe if they made the same sort of fuss about lots of other things too, it would be OK. But no. This is WAY more fuss than I can remember since the Queen's Golden Jubilee celebrations in 2002. Which means that in ten years, the only two things that have brought the British public together en masse to celebrate are both Royal events.

And let them eat cake. I don't want to stop them. I do wish they didn't give a shit, yes. I'd prefer it if everyone thought that it was a huge waste of money, and that the AV referendum was way more important, but love conquers all, and who am I to dictate what floats others' boats? They can wave their flags and scream and tell their grandkids all about it in years to come, while I'll age into some wizened old crone, wrinkled with cynicism and a miserable inability to join in with populist frenzies, staring out the front window from my wingback chair, wondering why all my friends are out having fun while I'm alone at home worrying about First Past The Post with a strong moral code and a weak liver.

And I bet I WILL be alone as well. The blossing romance lasted, well, about as long as actual blossom, approx. six weeks from start to finish, and the boyban scaffolding is now being slowly resurrected around my battered ego. I'm definitely glad I gave it a go - it was my first foray into That Domain since last June, so it was a real relief to confirm that I haven't completely forgotten how to point out every single flaw in someone else's behaviour, have absurdly long arguments over text message until 1am and feel like utter shit for days on end. Am now back in reality and focusing on the many positives, namely that I don't have to get rid of my feather duvet, feather pillows, feather mattress topper and feather sofa cushions to accommodate his allergies, and that I may still one day have a boyfriend who has bought new underwear since the turn of the Millennium.

It was nice, though, to get a morning text saying 'Hello gorgeous' every day, and even arguing with someone about whether or not we should go out was quite a pleasant change from the normal silence that occurs when I get home each night. Meh. On the upside, I looked at my Hadrian's Wall photos yesterday for the first time in a week or so, and finally realised that it was an amazing thing I did. So that was briefly fun.

Right, I think that's a good start. I'll get back to my busy schedule of annoying my friends with the alacrity of my email responses and counting the hours until therapy. I fully intend to write again tomorrow. Let's see what happens.