Sex, cars, clothes and self-hatred

Just before the long weekend, I was having an interesting email discussion with a guy in my office about fast cars. He casually mentioned that driving his was better than sex. I said he's obviously not doing it right. He said he is doing it right, but that the thrill of driving the car beats sex every time. I asked him to choose: either a) your choice of incredible car for the rest of your life, but only bad sex or b) fantastic sex with your dream woman and a lifetime behind the wheel of a Ford Focus or similar. He said he would choose a) without hesitation. I found this extraordinary and shallow, and slightly went off him (platonically speaking).

Later that evening, I was talking about clothes with my friend Alex, and we both agreed that we have a slight problem with how much we love buying new items. And quietly, in the rear left corner of my brain, an alarm bell rang. I relayed my conversation re. bad sex vs. fast cars to Alex, and we replaced the car with clothes, i.e. a) fantastic clothes and bad sex for the rest of your life, or b) fantastic sex but terrible clothes. This time the choice was unapologetic and instantaneous. There is no way in heaven and earth that I could only wear rank clothes for the rest of my life - at least, not living in society as I know it. Bad, three minute sex would be a delight if it meant I was guaranteed to have a permanently great wardrobe. I grudgingly have to accept that the guy at work isn't as wrong as I'd thought.

I've had a lovely four day break - repainted my bedroom, reorganised things in an impressive fashion, single-handedly rehung my mammoth bookshelf, ate three times my own bodyweight over Saturday eve and Sunday when I was staying with my parents', and watched the Coen brothers' A Simple Man at The Roxy last night. It was goodish. Today was back to business as usual. After a couple of stops on the tube, I was standing in the middle corridor of the carriage with a row of seated people facing me on either side. Directly to my right was a small, wizened old lady with a prominent nose, wearing a headscarf and dull, practical clothes without ornament. Her chestnut skin was weatherbeaten to a matt eggshell finish and when the train was stationary I could actually hear her epidermis crying out for Oil of Olay. She looked like a National Geographic portrait of an Afghan war widow, utterly out of place on the tube. I was trying to figure out if I could take her photograph without causing a ruckus, but then I noticed her flicking something rhythmically in her hand. I looked closer. She appeared to be holding a small metal counting device, which, I believe, is called a 'clicker'. Every two or three seconds, she clicked it. I didn't know if she was conducting an experiment or whether she was suffering from unusually regular palsy. Then I thought it: perhaps it's a bomb detonator. I swore violently at myself. I hated myself fully. My cheeks flooded with angry blush. A little old lady looks out of place on the tube, and you think she might be a wannabe mass murderer? God I hate the media for infecting me with such far-fetched bollocks, and my own tendency towards narrow-mindedness for not fighting the infection hard enough. If I can't even stamp it out in my own mind, what hope do we have? Yuck, yuck and yuck.

Back to the groined

Oooooooh it's weird to be back here, wearing a black dress and high heels, perched on my kneeling posture stool in my little glass box, dreaming about huskies and sow-nas and reindeer kebabs. But it's fine. I mentally arrived back in London as the Gatwick Express crossed the Thames late on Sunday night and we saw Albert Bridge lit up to our left - there's certainly a shortage of limitless expanses of frozen lakes round these parts but it's still beautiful.

Yesterday evening, as planned, I hopped in my mother's car and we drove to Ikea. Mum has since revealed that, in her head, she'd thought I might buy a couple of scatter cushions and some candles, so, some four hours later, as we heaved the trollies towards the car, pushing in front of us a large chest of drawers, an oversized full length mirror, a tallish indoor palm tree, a floor lamp and several other items of varying bulk, she tentatively asked how I was going to fit this all on the tube, and I confidently said 'You're driving me home!' as in my head, that had been the plan all along. Note to both of us: relay plans from inside our heads when those plans involve other people.

The personal low point in an otherwise splendid evening was when I was trying to drag the huge mirror onto my wheelie crate thing in the loading area, and the crate wouldn't stay still and the mirror looked like it was going to slide and shatter, and I didn't want to ask Mum for help because I knew she would say the mirror was too big and that it wouldn't fit in her car (which she did indeed say, semi-accurately, a few moments later) so I struggled on my own, holding the trolley with one foot and manoeuvring the mirror with another, resulting in me pulling a muscle in my inner thigh. There are lots of reasons to dread Ikea, but getting a groin injury was not an incident for which I'd prepared myself emotionally. In the end, I forced Mum to drive with the mirror slid along the length of the car and out between the two front seats and the boot tied shut with string, a set-up that was almost certainly illegal but basically fine, and we got back to my flat without traffic dramas - there were verbal exchanges that my dad might have defined as 'a little iffy' but once back home, she phoned me to say that she'd calmed down. Today she admitted that she thought she was at risk of having a stroke but I maintain it is all good exercise.

I assembled the six drawers of my new chest last night between approx. 21:30 and 22:50, and have decided that putting together flat pack furniture is my new favourite thing in the whole world. It is like doing a jigsaw for grown-ups, and you get a new piece of practical home storage as a prize. What's not to like? I have vigorous butterflies about constructing the outer housing but sadly my next free window is on Monday 29th so I will have to quell my winged friends until then. The remainder of this week is firmly back to business as usual, with breakdancing (someone else, not me), ukulele (me and others), real ale (him, not me), a birthday party (theirs, not mine) and a country jaunt in the schedule. Loins are girded. Groins are sensitive.

Weird weekend

I'm pretty sure it was something to do with the fact that I was worrying about collecting my parents' cat from the cattery first thing on Saturday morning, but I had the most extraordinary dream on Friday night. I was chatting with my mum and a few friends somewhere, it was mid-afternoon sometime, and then I suddenly remember that I had just had a baby, and that I had left it locked in a car, in its car seat, for the past six hours. Weirdly precise, as ever. So I rushed with my mum to the car, and found the baby absolutely screaming its head off, unsurprisingly, and I felt this absolute horror that I had missed this most formative of times with it. And I remembered from somewhere that skin-on-skin contact was especially vital, so I was frantically trying to strip off my dress and lay the baby on my chest. Then I woke up.

On Sunday morning, after another rubbish night's sleep, I got up at 5.45am to collect my parents from Heathrow. I had been flashed by a speeding camera for the first time in my life on Saturday (livid), and I knew I had plenty of time to make it to the airport, so I drove at or under the speed limit for the entire journey, and averaged 40mph on the motorway. It was quite a notable experience. Fun to annoy people, and be overtaken by huge lumbering trucks. But what I noticed most of all was that my concentration hit rock bottom. Travelling so slowly meant that I felt like I was in a tractor or similar, pottering along in an aimless, unhurried fashion. And instead of this making me feel more in control, I got so bored that I found myself staring out of the side window at the rising sun, drifting off into reveries and, frankly, not focussing. It was categorically far, far more dangerous than if I had been doing my customary high-speed cruising. I'm not suggesting that hitting a child at 90mph would be preferable to hitting it at 40. I'm just saying that I felt hilariously hypnotised by the slowness.

Normally when I pick up my parents, I meet them in the Departures drop-off point so that I a) don't have to get out of the car and b) don't have to spend money on the short-term car park. But an officious Heathrow employee moved me on so many times out of the drop-off zone that I gave up and pulled into the car park. This - combined with the fact that my parents must have deliberately ensured that their luggage was the last out of the plane, almost certainly because they were their usual three days early for the flight and it fell foul of the first on, last off disaster - meant that I had about 30 minutes to watch the people coming out of Arrivals. There were banners and whoops and squeals and tears, it was all very emotional. I did love the contrast I saw between one girl, who emerged through the doors and yelled 'Mum!', dropped her bags on the floor and ran about 50 yards to embrace her mother in loud hugs and affectionate gasps, leaving her boyfriend to pick up her luggage and struggle over to the reunion on his own - and the man who sauntered very quietly up to another guy standing next to me, and said oh-so-casually, 'Have you got the time, mate?' - that was the extent of his understated greeting to his friend, who turned, smiled and said, 'Alright, mate?' and the two of them shook hands and walked off. Both lovely, in their way.

And now it's Monday and the working day, at least, is nearly over. I'm afraid the black dog descended this morning, but I made it out of bed and into the office, and forced myself to the gym for a hit of endorphins. It wasn't quite enough to drag me back to normal but I'm definitely feeling better than I was. Far too much time spent alone and in bed over the past ten days. The sockets where the teeth went are still hurting, but much less so - the lack of sensation in my chin and lower lip is perturbing but apparently it can take weeks to come back. Really hope it does, would be sad to think I'd had my last two-lipped kiss. But hey, it was a nice one, so a least that's something.