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.

Apple grumble

Grumble grumble grumble iPhone stolen on Saturday night grumble it's still on, ringing and ringing, then goes through to voicemail grumble but my service provider says that even though I locked the handset with a four digit PIN, £9-worth of international calls were made on it yesterday, which could absolutely have been WAY worse but it is still annoying that it has definitely fallen into the hands of thieves - I am insured but I have a £100 excess to pay, so I had to fork out for that this morning grumble. ALSO, it turns out that the damp smell in my 'utility area' (American accent there please) wasn't a figment of my imagination, but was in fact due to the fact that my washing machine has been leaking for several weeks during the rinse cycle, and I finally had to confront the problem after water appeared in front of the machine on Friday night, and I got down on my hands and knees and looked at the area under the machine that I'd been avoiding for approx. six weeks as I was scared that the rotting smell was a dead mouse or similar and I couldn't bear to be on my hands and knees, peering into a dark area and be faced with a dead mouse, so I didn't. But then on Friday I realised it was definitely water and not a mouse, so I moved all the stuff out from the nook under the machine and all the carpet has rotted away and I had a really complex operation involving hoovers and towels and rotten washing powder boxes and coat hangers but my efforts were unsuccessful grumble and I have to get lovely Rob the plumber over which will be more money grumble grumble grumble. And ALSO I have really bad period pains and am sitting here at work with a hot water bottle clutched to my stomach grumble and my back hurts too and I feel revoltingly bloated like I've been injected all over with plutonium botox grumble and I'm really not even making up the feeling fat part, I really have gained weight, even though I was watching my eating last week I'm two pounds heavier grumble, which They Say is definitely to do with monthly water retention etc. etc. but it's still a bummer because it's not easy being careful with eating and if you do it for seven days and then gain weight at the end of it, that doesn't feel parTICularly hilarious, especially if you're already grumpy about your phone and your washing machine. AND when I was out on Saturday night, I was with a group of people, a reunion, and one of them was taking a photo of a few of us and she asked me to take off my glasses. Is this acceptable?! I was in shock. Can I say, "I don't like your jumper, it's clashing with the rest of the set-up, can you put your coat back on?" Or how about, "I really think we need to cover up that double chin, how about letting your hair down and wrapping it round your wattle as a scarf, you flabby-faced monster?" I paid extra for non-relective lenses, before you ask, so it wasn't that. And the woman who asked me is in her seventies and wears her hair in a bob, and the arms of her glasses go through the sides of the bob about an inch back from the front of her hair but I WOULDN'T ASK HER TO TAKE THEM OFF FOR MY PHOTO. What is the world coming to? Grumble.

But on the upside I had a really fun weekend. On Saturday afternoon I saw the extraordinary Black Swan, which was unquestionably weird and unexpected and laughable at times, but afterwards I realised that if you took out all the weird bits and made it more conventional, it would lose almost everything that made it so captivating. Natalie Portman, who I've been in love with since Leon and obsessed with since the double whammy of Everyone Says I Love You and Mars Attacks!, is exceptional. As I'm sure everyone else has said, it's the performance of her career and she deserves every accolade in the Bumper Book of Accolades - there's not a scene she's not in, she's utterly spell-binding throughout, managing to make a obsessive, ruthless, miserable and ambitious character seem sympathetic and pitiable, and if she doesn't have an Oscar-shaped doorstop in a few months it'll be an outrage. The movie-going experience was additionally memorable as it was the first time I have ever been shushed during a film. Kate and I were next to two French ladies, and at one point I struggled to understand something Vincent Cassel's character had said. "What was that?" I whispered to Kate, who was sitting on my right. "SHHHH!" responded the woman on my left. I was agog. If I'd been talking throughout, that would be one thing, but I'd been sitting like a Henry Moore, and had even shushed Kate when she'd been crackling her packet of Love Hearts during the opening scenes. I almost lost track of the plot, such was my confusion. Maybe Intolerant French Woman had thought I was to blame for the sweets and the whispered question. It is the only possible explanation. Being shushed for a primary offence is too vexing.

Now I am back at work feeling confused as I was up til 4am on Saturday night and then asleep on my sofa by 7.30pm yesterday, so today I feel like I'm on GMT -5 and GMT +8 at the same time. All terribly confusing. Maybe I have slipped into The Matrix without realising it. I am certainly a bit wobbly of foot today as moments ago I accidentally fell onto a Giant Quality Street Caramel Swirl and ate it before I could realise what was happening. I am putting Inadvertent Ingestion down on my Food Log. Tonight I have a 90 minute Introduction to Climbing session in Swiss Cottage and feel like going about as much as I feel like taking off all my clothes and walking onto the trading floor to sing Ooh! Ah! Just A Little Bit. The thought of even putting on sports kit makes me feel a bit wrong, let alone hanging from a rubberised nook while a group of strangers get to enjoy that uniquely sexy view of me - My Bum From Below. There's a gag about menstrual cramp(on)s somewhere but I'm too weak to spot it. Wish me luck.

Enough's enough

Right, stick a fork in me, I'm beautifully medium rare; a moment more under the grill and I'll turn to overcooked, chewy and inedible.

It's been a funny week. And when I say funny, I mean miserable and weird. But now it's Friday afternoon, my feet have finally warmed up, the sun is streaming through the window, I'm full of homemade vegetable soup, there's a wash humming away in the background, and if I don't want to, I don't have to leave the house again until Monday morning. Could. Be. Worse.

Someone described this blog the other day as 'about mental health issues' and I went into a slightly flat spin. I mean, obviously this blog is sometimes about my struggles to find peace in modern London, but I also think it's about a lot of other stuff - for one, if it was only about my head, the only tag on the right would be 'Health' - so I was a bit shocked to think that even one reader felt like that was all it does. But then this week, I got into one of those self-fulfilling funks where I felt like if I didn't write about what was going on in my head, I'd be being massively dishonest, but I didn't want to write about it because I didn't want LLFF to be just about my mental health.

But it is ALL I've been thinking about. So hear this: if my mental health fills you with a) dread, b) boredom, c) hatred, d) A. N. Other negative thing, then off you trot and don't spare the horses.

Where was I? OK. Yes. What was weird this week in therapy was that I came out of the session thinking that it was very inconclusive. We'd talked about lots of interesting stuff but nothing had really been fixed or redressed and I wasn't sure how to move on. I said to her that I felt like I'd spent my life sprinting along a motorway, missing out on all the pretty villages en route, my goal always changing so that wherever I reached never turned out to be where I needed to be. And now I feel like I've finally stopped sprinting, and am lying, exhausted, on the hard shoulder, still panting in shock, and completely unsure whether or not I need to get back on the motorway, or find a quieter road to walk along, or whether I should just hop over this fence into this lovely field and gambol about in there, going nowhere for a while.

However, I've been percolating since Wednesday's session and it turns out that it was actually more revelatory than I'd initially thought. I went in there very grumpy indeed. I had stopped meditating altogether, because every single time I do it, instead of focusing on what I'm meant to be focusing on, I end up beating myself up somehow, whether it's suddenly remembering that I've failed to water my geraniums yet again, or panicking that my parents might be dead and no-one's told me, or stressing about being fat, or wondering what to wear to work tomorrow. And although some of those concerns are mighty insignificant, having a barrage of negativity thrown at yourself by your own brain for several minutes is not my idea of fun. So I stopped meditating.

I told my therapist about this, who said that she has this exercise she gives people who get bogged down in stuff like this - she calls it 'intentional offloading' and the idea is that you put a name to the common cause of the negativity, and for a minute you say it out loud. I explained that the difficulty was that my negative stuff was all so different - geraniums, parents' death etc. - and that the only common focus was that I, as I am right now, am not good enough. I was pretty sure that my issues were about success versus failure. But, in an uncharacteristically insistent way (given that therapists often don't push their ideas on you), she said she thought it was something else. She said that the thing I should hate, out loud for a minute a day, is 'feeling excluded'.

"I dunno..." I said, unhelpfully. "I feel like it's more about not being good enough." But she pushed her point. Why don't I feel good enough? she prompted. Because of my childhood, I responded dutifully, knowing at heart that she is right. And here's the thing (if you're still with me):

On the surface of it, I had an amazingly happy childhood. I was, and am, the beloved only child of two wonderful, healthy parents. My mum and dad are full of joie de vivre. They spend everything they earn, they eat and drink and laugh and sing along to music, and play golf and go on holiday and work to live rather than live to work. When I was born, they owned their own business where they worked together, and most of the time they got on brilliantly. They were pretty successful yuppies under Thatcher and had been able to buy massively wasteful luxuries like a boat and an aquarium and private school fees for lucky me. I had my own life-jacket, a My Little Pony grooming parlour, a box full of Lego, another box full of Playmobile, and books and my own stereo and their near-constant attention, blonde hair and blue eyes: my future and I were pretty bright. What could possibly go wrong? Why am I now spending hundreds of pounds on therapy, with green eyes, platinum highlights and no time to do Lego?

I sincerely hope the answer doesn't hurt my parents. It's not meant to. But I think that being an only child is destined to leave a person a bit mental. Now, it's my firm believe that pretty much everyone is a bit mental - I don't know anyone who wouldn't benefit from a few weeks in therapy - but I'm pretty sure that my own particular brand of mentalness is caused by growing up as the sole child of happy, loved-up parents. Any child wants to fit in to the dominant social order when it's born. I wanted to be my parents' equal - an absurd goal given that they had a 33 year head start on me, but there it is. I wanted to be part of their gang - but due to the fact that I was a TODDLER I couldn't be there with them. I didn't understand this. So I felt left out. A typical childhood memory involves me sitting on the landing outside my bedroom, listening to them having dinner with friends below, occasionally writing tragic notes that I would post through the bannisters to land noiselessly on the stairs one flight down and then get madly upset that they didn't notice the missives' arrival and come talk to me.

I'm sure many firstborn children have these recollections - our parents seem desperately cool, popular and wise, and we want to be a part of every bit of it - but then a sibling comes along, and normalises everything, and you learn your place in the family. Finally you're not the sore thumb - you're one of a pair, and then sometimes a trio, and you fight for supremacy with your peers, not with people decades older than you. And of course, siblings cause major traumas of their own. I'm not in any sense claiming that my problems are worse than anyone else's. If anything, they're a hell of a lot better. Poor me, I'm the healthy child of loving, well-off parents. But anyway, I'm coming to terms with why I'm still crazy after all these years. You can click the window shut if you want.

[Jesus. There's a huge fight going on outside my window. About four bikes have been abandoned in the middle of the A-road and people are driving round them. A hundred yards away, eight or nine guys in hoodies are yelling at each other in such furious blasts that initially I thought it was dogs barking. Now there's a woman crying. It's 15:39. Madness.]

Back to me. I wanted - however foolishly - to feel like me and my parents were equal, like I belonged. But even though they loved me, inevitably I could never feel like their true equal - because I wasn't. I was a child. Not better or worse. Just different. But, as many children do, I didn't feel good different. I felt wrong, and I blamed myself. When they feel left out, kids rarely think, "Oh that person's at fault," or, "We're just different. It's not my problem." Instead, they conclude: "I am bad."

I felt wrong. But crucially, I didn't feel irredeemably wrong. I believed, for some reason, that if I just tweaked this or that element of my personality, with enough careful observation and hard work, I'd eventually get the balance right, and everything would fall into place. And I went to school and was ignored, most likely because I was an attention-seeking brat who deserved to be shunned by anyone with a pulse. I realised pretty quickly that I was deeply annoying, but I didn't know how, or why, so I thought 'If I just tweak this, it'll be OK - if I just get this pencil case, or this haircut, or don't wear these stupid glasses, it'll be OK.' But it never was. I never felt good enough.

And time went on, and I got older, and over and over again, in some tragically Freudian repetition compulsion way, I would identify someone who nearly respected me but was just beyond my reach, a girl two years above, a guy who was in love with the girl two years above, and try desperately to make them like me, do everything I could to make them think I was amazing. Sometimes they did and I got what I wanted and then - of course - I went off them. I had to find a way to destroy it because no one worth respecting could possibly respect me. I always wanted one of those posses of Friends-esque friends, people who hung out in the same place, where everyone was always welcome, where the door was always open, but any time I've come close to those kinds of relationships, I've felt claustrophobic and limited, and I've pushed it away. And pretty much anyone who's ever gone out with me will tell you that I nearly destroyed them with my attempts to sabotage the relationship. Although that might have been because they were all FREAKING ANNOYING.

[Wow. They're right outside my window now. There are about thirty black schoolkids all in uniform, varying ages, and one older guy in a hoodie with a beard waving a D-lock in a very menacing way. A lot of shouting and male testosterone flying around. I reckon if I stood down there for more than a couple of minutes I'd probably get a hairy chest. Everyone white is just walking by trying to pretend they don't see what's going on. A black mum's just dragged her eight year old son through the melee trying to run for a bus.]

But anyway. It seems that what I want, more than anything, is not to feel excluded - but simultaneously, I've had to admit that it's not currently possible for me to be happy when I'm included either. And that's where I'm at.

[OK, a big police van has just turned up. Three white policemen get out, and about half the kids scarper. For some reason the people at the centre of the fight don't run away. Within about twenty seconds, a policeman identifies someone as significant and slams him up against the metal doorway of the tube. Three white grown-ups are talking earnestly to the police, trying to explain who did what. I mutter that they shouldn't stick their beaks into stuff that's not their business, but one of the guys appears to be trying to act as a mediator between the kids and the police, and the kids don't seem to be hating him for it. The policeman bundles the tall significant boy into the van, and another one is taken towards another van that's just pulled up. I can't believe how quickly they worked out who to separate. Either the perpetrators are known to them, or they're just picking people at random. Both options are sad.]

It's been a pretty unpleasant journey, especially over the past few weeks. I stopped dating months ago, I've pushed away a lot of friends, I've canceled a lot of engagements, I've wasted a lot of tickets. I've been snappish, grumpy, selfish, ill, self-pitying, unfriendly, ungrateful, unpredictable, over-emotional and teary. I've also done pretty well covering this up to a lot of people. And now I'm here - at the centre of the onion, or as close as I'll ever be. I'm metaphorically weeping, sitting surrounded by discarded layers of allium and wondering what the hell to do next.

But even though I'm metaphorically crying surrounded by onion, I actually feel amazing. Properly joyous. Because Yazz and the Plastic Population were right. And it's the weekend.

With love for you all, even if you clicked the window shut several paragraphs ago. Yours always, LLFF.

Crap!

So this morning I retweeted Paul Chambers' original Tweet to both my followers on Twitter. Since I repeated his crime, I am expecting to be arrested, interrogated and then fined nearly £3k, but I expect the police are very busy at the moment arresting and interrogating the other several thousand people who have also posted the comment. I don't have anything new to say on the matter - I believe in freedom of speech, I believe he was misguided but not criminal, I believe there are more important things to worry about - but I'm just mentioning it in case any of you notice my absence and get worried.

Nothing else to say that's not infused with a cloying aroma of mystifying negativity so will sign off. Wishing you all wonderful weekends. Do feel free to come visit me in the clink.