Lodged.

So the 44 year old father of three got a new job in Leeds and it turned out that he didn't want to come and live in London after all, and I felt a bit outraged that he only thought to tell me this on the day he was meant to be coming round and viewing the flat, and once again it exacerbated the feeling I've had all along that looking for a lodger is a bit like looking for a boyfriend, except they move in straight away and pay you, so it's a bit like a really intense prostitution arrangement without the sex. OK, this analogy's never going to work.

But basically, you have to advertise your flat, and your room, and take really nice photos, and then, because you're looking for someone to live with you, you have to show a photo of you too, and I used one of me looking down-with-the-kids at a festival in an attempt to scare off all the old people who want somewhere impossibly quiet to live. My flat (me) received a LOT of attention, which made me feel good about my interior design skills (my appearance). But in the end I only considered now-confirmed-to-be-selfish father-of-three and one other man, who didn't ask me a single question in our hour-long get-to-know-each-other session, but who shares many of my interests and doesn't seem to be the kind of person who'll have noisy late night phonecalls (sex partners). So that's confirmed: I have a new lodger. I feel like I'm growing.

The ganglion update is as follows: as we all know, the skin on the back of one's hand is very wiggly and stretchy, you can push or pull it around a great deal, in comparison (for example) with the skin on the palm of your hand, which is stuck to the tendons or whatever there is below it, and can't move. The flexibility of the skin on the back of the hand is quite important as it allows you to wiggle your fingers and rotate your wrist and all sorts of other things. After I'd had the operation, the doctor told me that as the scar tissue forms, it tries automatically to fasten to the tendons etc. below it, and if left alone, the skin around the incision would affix to that point in my hand. He'd put a bit of some special doctor's fabric in there (probably a bit of old T-shirt) to stop the scar from sticking to the back of my hand, but he said that I would need to massage it with some moisturising cream or oil for a few weeks to try and encourage it not to stick. He was quite blasé about the whole thing and I felt unworried.

It's now nearly ten days later and the skin is definitely stuck. I've been massaging the whole freaking time, even though it does not feel in any way pleasant. I'm not sure if I'm meant to be rubbing gently to gradually encourage the skin to loosen, or if I should be doing a semi-invasive deep tissue rub to break down the tissue. Neither seem to work. My left hand is loving all the attention and increased oil: I will inevitably age dramatically differently on each side as a result and end up as an eighty year old, gnarled, veiny, hooked on the right and youthful, soft, plump on the left. While the cut looks to be healing very nicely and is now just an inch-long, rose-pink pale line, the scar tissue beneath (presumably still with a few undissolved stitches within) remains raised and ridgelike, leaving a small hump approximately half the height and interest of my original ganglion. Plus, because the skin is stuck, it means I can't bend my wrist very far in either direction, so yoga and/or violent waving are both out. This is a loss for my health, mental state, and the enjoyment of departing guests.

I am finding the whole thing less and less funny and, while I was never one to listen avidly to my dad's opinions of my appearance, in future I will be even less likely to take his advice if he starts suggesting I ought to get something looked at.

Anyway, I really wanted to write a perfectly-weighted, immaculately-crafted blog entry for a change, but once again time has run faster than I can, and I am leaving work in less than 1.5 hours to walk out in the bucketing rain towards what will hopefully be my last ever therapy session for some time. I've been trying to leave for weeks, but she insisted on a minimum of four weeks to summarise and wind down, and then she heavily implied that I would be missing a trick (making the biggest mistake of my adult life) if I didn't carry on, and that I'm only letting myself down etc. etc., and of course, child that I am, her resistance only makes me tug harder to get free.

She's been trying everything to make me stay, to the extent that I then said I'd stay if it was free but that I can think of a lot of other fun things I can do for £45 a week, and then she pounced on that with an alacrity that reminded me of that really sweet little dinosaur in Jurassic Park who gets angry and SUDDENLY these huge red wing-ed flaps come out of its head and neck and it's the scariest thing of all time. Obviously in real life all she did was shift imperceptibly in her chair but I knew that she was saying that I'm using money as an excuse to finish, that really I am scared of all the terrible truths I will uncover in future sessions and I'm running away from something that could be enormously painful but enormously beneficial.

But like I've told her over and over again, I am just FREAKING BORED OF IT ALL. Nothing more, nothing less. I'm sure there's more I could talk about with her, certain of it, but for now, I've had enough. I've said it over and over again for the past few sessions, and then dutifully paid her £45 for the experience, and now I'm going to do it one last time, and then take the tube to Tooting and get my eyebrows threaded, and then go home and pack for Glastonbury, and then leave tomorrow morning and get trench foot and liver dialysis. See you on the other side.