Fuckin stupid ... grrrr ... grumble, moan ...

It's a shitty shitty week - I've been getting in three hours late from work, eating something foul tasting, then collapsing by seven or eight o clock, and not waking till forty minutes after the alarm the next morning, which leads to ethical crises extraordinaire: a little late and no coffee, or a lot late, but awake? (clue: actually, no, you don't need a clue, nobody would be surprised which was the damn answer).

Also shitty: fell asleep and didn't go to a lesbobookclub discussion of my favourite book ever, even though I had spent three months underlining natty quotes, rehearsing my speech about why the heroine was a thinly veiled roman a clef representing yours truly, and also pinned every last shred of dignity and hope upon it being the final opportunity ever to ensnare a woman who can actually read or converse without gulping "gosh you're so intelligent, I find it hard to keep up with you" (clue: never true; other clue: basically an insult; another clue: never going to be taken well unless you're looking for a Top Dog for your prison ward).

Still shitty: It's summer. It's hot. And there's no way it's not going to get much hotter than this. I'm pasty skinned, pale and celtic looking - kinda grey, kinda lumpy, kinda oatmeal, sorta tones of wet cement with an undercoat of blue - and that's after twenty five hours on a sunbed this spring. Clutching a warm bottle of water, plastering myself with sticky fly attracting sunblock and running from shade to shade to get to my non-air con workplace is somewhat less than a thrill a minute. I like Autumn. Roll on frigging autumn. My clothes are wrinkled (no iron), and sweaty (no car) and grubby (no washing machine). This was never going to be pleasant, but I'd at least hoped for hygienic.

The shit it shitteth all day long: hayfever. Taking double the max dosage of hayfever tabs, but still spend half the day wandering around with a mouth like a fractious anus, one finger hesitantly laid a centimetre below my nose, intoning the hayfever sufferers' mantra, 'ah ... ahh ... ah, ah ... ah'.

It shitteth nightly also: In Liverpool, I sneaked a look at Sarah's weighing scales, and it turns out I weigh fourteen pounds more than I should do. That makes me a fat lardy munter overcompensating for my turdy lardiness by eating willy nilly. This must stop. There have to be limits set (clue: biscuits). Deadlines established (clue: bikini). (hah! bikini! What bikini?!) (clue: exactly. Get off your lardy arse).

Even shittier: I had hard-won tickets for a poetry recital (fuck off, okay, I like it), where Seamus Heaney, Harold Pinter, Tony Harrison (that's three living eternal geniuses - poets, for the uninitiated) and Vanessa Redgrave and someone called Balcon (actors, ah buh-leeve) were reciting the poems of Stephen Spender (mate of Chris Isherwood, whose book 'Goodbye Berlin' was filmed as 'Cabaret' - dead good, possessor of big feet, ex boyf of one of my uni profs, and well into artistically arranged nude Nazis - oh do keep up at the back, there, we'll be testing you on this later), discussing his work, and reading works of their own inspired by Spender. It took me forever to secure a single ticket at the very furthest end of the auditorium, and guess what? (clue: involves snoring, in bed, at home).

Yet shittiest: My fucking ever-reliable car, with the broken glow plugs, with the broken brake light, with the flat battery, with the used up battery cell, with the impending MOT in two week's time, and the garage twenty miles away across the river in Barking .... (clue: kranken. Again).

Solution? Went to boss and asked him to help do my work. Decided to go to work late every day, in jeans and trainers (I speet on your dress code), and play classical music extremely loudly at all times to distort colleagues' sense of absolute entitlement to my attention. Allowed myself with perfect impunity to lose my rag completely at least twice a day. Spent this evening in a mad effort to paint my fingers and toes a violent and repulsive purplish pink, phone several friends, plan a weekend of socialising, and bought some scales to go on a diet. Yumlicious.