By the time she started talking about Guinea pig bereavement I knew it was time to vokda up my lemonade.

I have never been a fearless flyer. To be honest, my parents said to me at an impressionable age, you're more likely to die in a car crash on the way to the airport than in the air.

As a result I've always veiwed journeys to airports as particularly perilous.

Despite the fact my dad and my brother have been driving since yesterday morning (ferry to Dover, Dover to Calais and then down through France to Spain), I am anxious about the taxi my mother and sisters are currently taking to the airport.

It might just be that I'm a bit anxious. I'm going to turn off Neil Young now because he's not doing anything for my nerves, not doing anything at all.

"That's a nice blouse" said my Nan, on Saturday when she was staying with us.

"It's actually a man's shirt, but it fits doesn't it?"

"It fits very well"

"My son" said my mum's friend in our kitchen on Tuesday, "only wears girls clothes these days. He says he wears girls skinny jeans because they're skinnier, and I found this pink top in the wash that other day that I thought was mine until he took it. And his friend wears these baggy tweed shorts and you know, paisley shirts. They're like... oh what's the comedy music thing? The Mighty Boosh?"

"Oh," says my mother, "but Noel Fielding is a bit lovely"

"Girls wear boys clothes now though" I say, "I don't know any girls who'd wear pink. Sister A's boyfriend has the nicest pair of trousers- they're pinstriped in purples- and I asked him where they were from and it's the women's section in Hennes"

"It's true" says my mother, "that's a boys shirt she's wearing".

Even so, it felt strangely transgressive buying boys clothes (the shirt and a waistcoat), despite the fact me and my sister have been stealing shirts from my father for years. Despite the fact that everyone does it.

I'm going to dye my hair blonde some time in the next week, before I fly out to meet my family. I had it cut yesterday.

Blonde, with perhaps a bit of sun in my skin, in my boys shirt and my high shorts and pencil skirts made out of curtain fabric, I might look pretty good.

And I am worried you see- starting my second choice university, because forget accademia (which I might as well, because it is a second rate university) I am worried because there's finally a chance someone might see me naked. I don't think I can do it, I don't think it's a very good offer.

I'm exercising a lot at the moment. Too little too late? At least I'm better at running for buses, even if the other day I had to take my shoes off and leap over broken glass. Which would be an incentivising work out.

Naomi Wolf was all well and good until it started to matter. But it's not her fault I've been lazy about going to the gym.

It's been close. July, not even a particularly hot July, but everyone has slowed down, the days have the tiring texture of softening butter.
People are falling asleep at strange moments. It's not even been hot, just warm. England can't cope with weather. Any weather. People and dogs all have the same burdened expression. Yet more weather and the only thing for it is to talk about it.

But is has been close, and tonight it's finally thundered. Blue white lightning and heavy rain, so I take a golfing umbrella (no-one has ever bought a golfing umbrella; our house is a graveyard of corperate logoed umbrellas on top of radiators) and slip out the back door.

And outside it smells of pavement, soil, rosemary, lavender and eucalyptus; of people's front gardens. The rain is so heavy the road looks like lawn. And it's ghost story colours again, orange and blue backlot colours. And it's like the night in Italy which was only weeks ago, but could have been never, where I walked in the same type of storm along the lake back from the cafe my hotel in a night that could only have been made for ghost stories, past the windowless bulk of the derelict Lido Palace, and the little lakeside shrine the Virgin was lit up with an omenous red candle. It was hard not to think of omens, or to pray on that sort of night. Everytime the lightning flashed ordinary things looked like men in the dark.

But there is nowhere to walk tonight because I know this town nineteen years too well, and so go home with muddy ankles.

My granny is staying with us. She took us to the botanical gardens today, G and B took this in bad grace. Sister A stayed at home, but I had the responsibilty of keeping the sulkers in line and acceptable in front of our grandmother the Supreme Matriarch, who's judgement is always forthright but often fallable.

G- the brother- was conveniently ill, having already decided at dinner last night he didn't want to go to the botanical gardens, and if we had to go to the botanical gardens he wanted to go to Kew, which wasn't where we were going. For a healthy boy he is often ill. I don't even think he fakes it, so much as he sulks an illness into being. He decides to be ill and becomes ill. But never too ill not to eat icecream or do something he's chosen.

The gardens made me want to be one of the people who knows the names of plants and birds, and to remember my classics to recall which lover and which nymph and who's blood and whose tears became which flower or the other. But it was too close and my mind was buttery.

I might write a bit more tomorrow, another entry since it's been a while (and love to 5th Story by the way, before I forget) I have things to write about but they're only scraps of things which I'm trying to bundle together in my mind but keep dropping. Suffragettes and war profiteers and missing my bus, that's what I might write about tomorrow.

Back from Italy.

Lake trout tastes the way swimming is at 6.00am in fresh water. The water smells of earth, skin smells of the water. The mountains are doubled.

I'm tanned, I look well, I have a great smile.

Churches, Futurism, castles and ruins. AC went mad and came home just before I flew out- back in London she slept with a man whose gay dad and boyfriend have Morrissey soap in their bathroom. We went for breakfast I gave her a sunflower- "you're in luck- it's happy people who go mad in Italy day!". That was a week ago. Now I'm back home.

Boys on bikes think I'm very very very nice.

I'll write more tomorrow.

Goodness, exams have ended, purdah has ended. But I'm all dressed up with nowhere to go, since everyone I know seems to be travelling. I go to Italy quite soon though, once I get round to booking my flights. I'm still not sure where I'm going.

Also, should I buy a spinning wheel?
I mean, I'd never thought I might want one until I saw one advertised on a notice board. And anyway, if I prick my finger it might help with my insomnia. I think I probably won't buy a spinning wheel, although I like knowing that I could.

I'm approaching the end of my time at the Shop With No Customers, but my boss doesn't know this. I don't have a contract, I don't have to give notice and she'll be glad to see the back of me. I can tell.
Saturday was so boring that once I'd put all the stock out and swept the floor etc, I made a doll's house out of the empty boxes. I know, how fucking twee.

It was awesome though. It had staircases and windows and a full length mirror that tilted on it's hinges (and reflected a picture of Eva Longoria from a magazine, though, confusingly, the mirror in the bathroom reflected Paris Hilton) and a toaster and kettle and a bathroom suite made out of bubble wrap (it was also carpeted in bubble wrap) and a wardrobe with doors that opened and little styrofoam cushions in the living room. And it had a little cardboard turret and a balcony.

If I'd been minature I'd definately have lived in it. It even had a washing machine and tumble drier.

Then a Customer arrived with her daughter, to collect some plates and was like "oh, what a brilliant doll's house, it's like the things my daughter makes, who made it?"

And I had to be like, "oh, I don't know probably my boss's daughters..."

Because otherwise it would have looked quite a lot like I was insane or a nine year old.

Anyway, after months of revision, I realised I'd done something impossibly stupid. And, long story short, even though I'm actually brilliant at biology A Level now- it's impossible for me to get enough UMS marks for an A grade because the paper I didn't retake is actually worth a bigger percentage of the final grade than I had thought.

Sometimes, despite my stringent athiesm, you just have to take a hint from the universe.

I'm writing to Goldsmiths to transfer from history to English lit and creative writing. I'm looking foward to leaving home. I'm looking forward to doing something the grammar school thinks is stupid.

Baby Jane (as Sister B will henceforth be known) is getting ready to start at the Convent in September. The Convent do not think going to Goldsmiths to do English lit. and creative writing is stupid, they think it's a great idea and they're like my extended family. So I'll put my faith in power of prayer and the wisdom of fate, although I know they're not real.

And when you think about it, I mean really think about the implications of what the universe means, the fact that it might give you hints now and then is less frightening than the looking-directly-into-the-sun feeling of remembering that it came from nothing and it's expanding into nothing and that it had a finite start in time, but that this start was also the start of time itself. Nothing existed before the start of the universe- not even time- but that somehow everything exists now.

Compared to that, terrifying, gaping hole in the creation myth, even astrology is less than ridiculous- although it is preposterous. And I don't believe in astrology, but maybe I'll just believe in little hints now and then. When it suits me.

Maybe I'll believe in a very quiet, almost completely metaphorical god of university choices. Because it's not like it's important, not in the long run.
I'm an adult now, and I think that might mean realising that other people don't know what's best for me; not the Times universities guide nor my former headmaster, lizard like in his ridiculous oak panelled study surrounded by old boys' own manuals from the 1950s, hidden deep in the Victorian part of the grammar school. None of that was made up; sometimes, it's not the universe you have to take the hint from...

Today is my dad's 50th. Yesterday we had a barbeque for friends and family, although the distinction between the two isn't that important, since the older children of the three families of friends who were invited are as much a feature of my early childhood as my own sister was. More so than my own cousins, except Catherine, who were either too old or not born when it was important and lived to far away anyway, and secretly (or not even that secretly) a few of whom I simply can't stand. Although blood is thicker than the fact they drive me mad. But shared childhoods are quite binding too. I know some of then aren't that keen on me either.

Despite the forcast the weather was lovely; we sat in the garden, the boys pummeled each other on the trampoline, everyone fawned over Dusty the puppy who dragged around half a lamb chop and slept in the shade.

We all drank too much and probably ate to much- it was difficult not to. I still find it strange at these things that I'm one of the grown-ups now. I do expect sometimes to be given a burnt sausage in a bun and be sent to off to play with the other children so the adults can talk in peace, and that I know now what they're talking about.

The food was very, very good. Red onion and goats' cheese tart, big sweet prawns, sardines, salads, new potatos, steak, home made burgers, lamb chops, sausages, hunks of chicken, green beans in lemon and mint dressing. Chocolate cakes with cherries, strawberry tart, apple pie and a big fruit salad with pineapple, melon, kiwi and pomegranate.

Everyone complimented my dress and were suitably impressed I'd made it myself, and hadn't used a pattern. Even though it isn't finished yet and half the apples are still just beaded spots and I still haven't put the zip in.

It was a lovely Sunday and I'm not sure I ever want to eat anything again. Although I had an apricot and an expresso for breakfast, which is actually the perfect breakfast. I don't think I'll have lunch though- since even after all that we're going out to dinner tonight.

God I'm tired. I haven't been sleeping well and I'm getting headaches. I am so tired my eyes are small and my face is puffy.

But Jeff's book post started me thinking, and I started writing this out there (not the health complaint bit- what I'm writing now) but I thought it was getting too long and anyway, if jeff has an opinion on me at all it's not a flattering one so I thought to myself, start your own damn thread if you will be self indulgent. Which I have and is this journal.

It's just that being out doesn't mean everything. You tell your family and your friends until it stops being something you tell and become this matter of public record, but really you can be out for years but still not quite get it.

I was gayer before I was out- whatever that means, and here it means less inhibited. I came out over the six months before I turned 16, and now I'm 19.

Before I told I adopted all these little markers of femaleness, in case the girls I'd never wanted to be like in the past decided I wasn't quite one of them, although I'd never been like them before. And most the habits I chose were improvements maybe, or just a part of growing up. I started shaving my legs and I grew out my hair and stopped wearing the non-underwired bras that came in multipacks and started caring about the clothes in magazines and learnt how to talk to boring girls about tinted moisturiser the most boring of all the cosmetics. And it's not that I regret any of this- talking to boring women is one of the most useful skills you can learn, since talking to boring men is easy as all you do then is let them talk- it's just I chose them deliberately to assimilate; so no-one could say that it was obvious I was a lesbian. However crudely stereotyped the markers were (short hair, sensible shoes), I didn't want to prove them true, but I also didn't want to be indentified by them.

It's what I was about to tell everyone I was, but the last thing I wanted to be.

And in the past four years I've had no female queer friends, no girlfriend, no sexual contact, barely even eye contact. And with my friends I am just a neutered straight girl. I don't want to make them uncomfortable- (and it does make them uncomfortable...)- I don't want to make myself uncomfortable- (... or maybe it doesn't, and it's my discomfort). Of all my friends only KD doesn't let me pretend to be a straight girl, and it's strange.

I felt treacherously overjoyed in the past when I was seen out with my ex-minus-the-boyfriend and people thought we were together. [an equally repressed gay boy I'd known as a child, met again at 6th Form and had a platonic, walking-the-dog-in-the-park-on-Sundays phase of quasi coupledom before an actual break-up and now we have to avoid each other on the bus]

I was getting agitated the other day, because I thought, what if this was a choice afterall? A choice I don't remember making, back when I was 12. Because I could unchose it. But it isn't really?

In a few months I'll be leaving home and then maybe, we'll see. I'll run in different circles hopefully.

You can be out and not out at all.

Anyway, although I doubted them I think the stupid all-natural herbal suppliment sleeping pills are actually working a bit and maybe I'll cheat insomnia if I go to bed now. Goodnight.

Ooh the police, the police are here. Downstairs, because there was an assault last night and did we hear anything?

Mum phoned the police on Monday because the kids Sister A went to school with, some 12 year olds- who when they're not skiving still barely fit in their blazers- and some older kids (but still younger than me) who congregate in the road by our house were blatantly dealing/ buying. At the weekend there had been another fight- same kids- I watched in my dressing gown looking out of my window. A big sprawling fight; a car drove away with the back window smashed. We saw a few arrests (my mother watching from the front door being told to go away by a policeman), shouting, disorder. Several police cars, a police van too. The people inside the police van banging on the walls, as if that's going to help. And this is such a nice area...

You can never hear the details, it sounds like dogs fighting. A litany of fuck yous. Language, language my disaffected youths. Still better way to spent a Friday than watching Jonathan Ross.

They were always little shits, even at primary school, the ones that knew my sister.

AC came round yesterday because she still hadn't seen the puppy. After dinner we sat in my room, my dad's records spread all over my bed like it's 30 years ago. We listened to a few of the bettter ones. A time machine to my father. I love his records, even the terrible ones. He turns 50 this year, the records I like he bought in '72/'73 when he was 15 which is impossible. Glam rock. It all got bad in the '80s (Genesis, father? Genesis honestly, what is this American Pyscho?).

I know my father quite indirectly, I'd probably know him better if he were dead because then at least people would tell me about him. Although of course that's worse than standing on pavement cracks. Cryptically on the back of an Alice Cooper album is a note from his ex-girlfriend, who he lived with before he met my mother. When they broke up she took half of everything in the house. Half the cutlery, half the curtains. That's all I know about my father when he was a young man, and that he had a good friend who might have died of AIDS, although that's not something I can ask about; he only mentioned it once. I don't know anything my my dad's friends now, or if he's happy.

I don't mind not knowing very much about his life, but I'd like to know whether or not he actually likes me at all. And if he's happy, that's the mystery.

('Manfred, the Man?' suggests CA, who I haven't seen now for months although I need to- but she has first year exams, rent to pay and a fiance- the last time I saw her in a pub by the river that we don't normally go to but have no choice since the barman at our usual is in love with her and her fiance doesn't know. Our usual pub has a DJ, here they pipe in inoffensively not terrible music, you can't hear it anyway. "What? Manfred Mann? No that's not it. It's something the something, something the something stupid", "Are you sure it's not David Bowie, MT thinks it is", "No, I think he wrote it but it's not by him, someone else sings it", "Mott the Hoople!" "That's it.

This song makes me feel sad and I don't know why")

In true style of school fetes and English summertime in general Saturday, when it mattered, the weather was grim, on Sunday the weather was fine.

My mother, stalwart of the PTA, had organised the annual May Fair at my brother and sister’s school. Weather stricken set piece of suburbia. There was a dearth of volunteers, so I was manning a stall where children filled jars with coloured sand; I suppose channelling bleak 1950s style holidays on the Isle of Wight. I've never been to the Isle of Wight, I imagine it's bleak. I’d thought children today were consumer savvy sophisticates, but no, sand in jars remains very popular.

I can understand. When I was 7 my friend Alex brought me back a jar of coloured sand, which I treasured until I dropped it climbing out of a downstairs window. I was running away from home and had decided to begin my new life as an itinerant with my collection of china ornaments. I soon gave up on the idea. Mostly when I ran away I just skulked by the side of our house, by the privet bushes getting impatient waiting for my parents to notice I'd gone.

So Saturday it drizzled, was sullenly dry with a grey sky, threatened to drizzle again and then it rained. A man made announcements over the tannoy, we huddled under a tree shared by our sand stall and the plant stall. Some children danced around the maypole, to the same maypole dancing music cassette tape they've had since I was at the school (and schools still used cassette tapes). My brother won a coconut from the coconut shy and one of the classrooms was converted into a reptile house, where an iguana did a poo behind the book case. There was the sorriest white elephant stall in the world, a terrifyingly food poisonous cake stall of sunken charred fairycakes and a tombola.

After the fete I went to work, normally I do all day Sundays not Saturday afternoons but there were two birthday parties in so my boss switched my hours. Anyway, less said about that the better. Couldn’t go out in the evening because I was on brother care duties, and he was having a hissy fit because mum hadn’t taken him ice-skating with Sister B and her friends. By hissy fit I mean he cried for abut three hours solid, in between fits of shouting and sullenly watching Doctor Who while I brought him cups of jasmine tea.

I’ve been ice-skating five times in my life and each time I’ve gone I’ve got worse. Once when I was a child and was relatively fearless. Then when I was 15 with K (heart stopping coming out novel moment, she held my hand and dragged me around the ice, if only I’d had a sequel with someone else since it would be less pathetic). The other times have been at Christmas with friends.

Anyway, I had Sunday free so I met AC in town and we ate cake sitting by the river, and walked in the park to the horses. We sat on the grass, chatting shared a pomegranate which I produced inexplicably with a flourish from my handbag. I’d had to prise it open without a knife, and ended up sitting cross legged, barefoot in my long white dress with a half of a pomegranate in each hand and seeds on my lap, looking like a symbolist painting. And that made us laugh and everything made us laugh.

I still need a decent novel to read. I am reading 'Wilderness Tips' and although I love short stories (and Margaret Atwood, of course), I haven't read an actual novel for months. Actually, that's untrue- but I've been rereading novels. I need something new.

I was cycling home from work yesterday, slowing down at the traffic lights when a man ran along the pavement until was in front of me in order to look up my skirt.

Now, I was wearing a summer dress and footless tights, and a pair of shorts under the dress, since you know, I didn't want to be putting on a show in transit. And when I shot him a filthy look and floundered -because yet again what's the protocol here? what I say?- and before I can say anything he makes a little "meow, raww" cat noise, as if the fact I was taking silent exception to his looking up my skirt was somehow... uppity.

And again, the fact I was cycling along a main road and the fact it happened too quickly be sure enough of what he was doing to tell him to fuck the fuck off, until too long after it happened puts me at a disadvantage. And the fact that if I had confronted him properly, all he need do is deny it and I'd look like an idiot. Fat girl on a bike thinks it's all about her. Don't flatter yourself, love.

It's like, I really do not mind guys looking at me. I'm not very pretty, really I'm kind of fat and I wear glasses. Though as AC said the other night I do 'go in and out in the right places' and in summer I'm mostly blonde which seems to count for something. So when I see a guy guve me a look, I tend to give him a lovely smile and walk on by.

But often I don't notice men looking at me, I only notice when men stare long ogling malicious stares. I don't have to be attractive, because that's not what this is about. Primate agression stares that are designed to let the person know they're being stared at. Disrespectful stares, that sort of have a kernel of hate in them which I've only recently noticed. Hatred at what? Women, the power women have over men, their own beta male impotence? Hatred of what?

If one of you Oasis lads stared at a straight man that way... well the point is you really wouldn't. Either because you're considerate or because you'd fear retaliation.

I'm sick of it and of the shouting out comments and the car horns and of the general fact it's inescapable, running the gammet of jokey, but still demeaning, to threatening but unspoken. It's different in clubs say, on Friday nights or at a party maybe- places where people go to pull. But not all the time, whatever we wear, wherever we go...

If perhaps you're from 1957 and were thinking well, clearly she dresses like a slut and gets what she deserves. It doesn't make a difference. On the way to work on Friday I was wearing sweltering, ugly lumpy old jeans and a tunic (long sleeves, high neck), greasy hair and still I got things shouted at me.

And the point is, they shout things you can't shout back to. Because, sometimes people do just call out something that's friendly or funny and then I laugh. But I get upset when people lob words and looks like grenades. They want you to feel under fire. Their pleasure is the resulting discomfort. That's what I can't understand.

My mum says in the early '80s, when she was my age, this didn't happen. Or it did sometimes, but was veiwed as impossibly old-fashioned and embarrassing.

So what is it? Backlash?
Against feminism, against women, against something else?

Anyway, no customers again in the Shop With No Customers. It's less a job more a riddle. What do you call a shop with no customers? Er... I don't know. I won't need to know soon because I'll quit once I've done this biology exam.

So I did some revision, read my book.
And I ate two pomegranates, bursting the beads between my tongue and my teeth. One was riper than the other, the membranes between the arils rotting down and so they spilt out when I opened it and dried around my nailbeds looking too much like blood. I'm sure they shouldn't be allowed because they are ridiculously decadent looking fruits, the colour of art and taste conflicting. They're wonderful. I've been craving pomegranate since November, not for any reason. But I'm glad I didn't eat one then because I might have had to live in the grey forever.

So Saturday morning wake up and account for mystery bruises and grubby knees. Had gone to bed with the birds singing, first night out in months where I haven't cried, haven't left early, haven't left sad.

We drink and dance. I drink more than usual, dance more than usual. Same old pub, same old club. The dj is terrible, I mean terrible and normally this is a pretty good night- indie, motown and disco- but does it matter? We were almost the only girls there which made us hot property. Sometimes intimidating, sometimes fun. Let a Russain speaking man with a French accent who never lives more than seven years in one country buy me a drink, flirted with his friend. When asked if I have a boyfriend go from "total lesbian" to "it's complicated", as the night drags on because, well, I don't know. Because I haven't spent enough time on feministing.com to turn down a free drink once I start to run out of cash? Feel ashamed. Dance and dance and dance. Go to the toilets to see our sweaty faces. First time ever the queue for the ladies' is shorter than the queue for the gents. We look a mess by 3.00am (and probably sooner) but it doesn't matter.

It must be summer because we're out without wearing tights. I fall down on the dancefloor get heaved back up by my friends, I'm not drunk it's just my heels are high and the floor is wet. Explains the dirty knees. But not the mystery bruises.

Drag AC to one side, demand to know why I'm flirting with all these men.
Because it's funny, she says. None of us went home with anyone.
In transit from pub to club rather than icy silence I shout back at the groups of boys who call out to our group of girls, me, AC, RL and two friends without acronyms, and we laugh, not because I'm being especially funny but because the night is funny.

So eventually they stop the music and I get a taxi home. Talk to the cabbie about starsigns and wanting to be a journalist. Drink tea, eat toast watch Starksy and Hutch at four in the morning.

And Saturday I spend slowly, black coffee and a bacon sandwich. Buy books and records from a charity shop. Try to mend my crappy turntable. It only works if you hit it. To chage the RMP you just have to slap it harder. I'm buying a new record player.

Worked in the Shop With No Customers today, no customer so I stood outside and blew bubbles with a coffee stirrer and a cup of washing-up liquid.

And just now we had a barbeque in the back garden, dog ambled, bonfire smelt of vanilla, air smelt hot and after me and my siblings clear the table and dance savagely to songs from musicals, the Long Blondes and the Buzzcocks.

I don't really want to go to UCL any more, I want to go to Goldsmiths. If I get an A in my biology resit I have to go to UCL, but if I don't I go to Goldsmiths. It's almost a dilema, but it's in the lap of the gods and god this is what happiness was and is still. I'm happy again. How quickly that happened. Eight months of the dark over my eyes and then a miracle, faith healer, pagan gods, migration who knows? But happiness and fear, of course, but normal fear.

Listening to Puccini now on my useless record player. I like the sound of dust and crackle. And I'm happy.

The weather, the weather is good

Bank holiday Monday I lay on the grass in the park by the longwater and read the brothers Grimm. Swans swanned about with that chimeric reptile malice, on the opposite bank someone else was reading next to their bike and when I left we waved to each other.

The puppy is now officially called Dusty, and I keep meaning to get a photo to post here. She's cute, but cowardly. Mum calls her the second Mrs deWinter, because she's faces constant comparison with the dead dog. So far she lacks character and won't poo outside.

Anyway, I wentto pick up the minisibs from school yesterday with Dusty in a straw basket (she's still to little to go out on the pavement). I have a new found respect for Paris Hilton et al, because it turns out dogs in baskets are actually quite heavy and awkward.
And I upstaged someone else's puppy at the school gate.

Depression and allergies, are in my unkind mind, sure signs of weakness. But I've definately developed some mystery allergies, and I finally went to the doctor yesterday to get a prescription for an inhaler. But that's good because it means I won't feel so faint and tired and will be able to sing again, since I've been unable to place or sustain notes whenever I've been tight chested.

And since I cancelled that consultation with the psychiatrist I don't know if I've been clinically depressed these last eight months or so, or just unhappy. What I do know is the frequency of the limb paralysing, mind fogs have decreased and are less intense and easier to shake off. And I'm not having crying fits and I want to see my friends and I'm not thinking so much about suicide.

The parakeets are back. I saw them in the street last night and I laughed. One flew overhead and then the other and then I realised there was a cloud of them in the trees opposite the library like leaves. I walked laughing because they were back.

The thing about symbols is so obvious, they only mean something because you say they do but that's not the same thing as meaning nothing.

KD came round for Sunday dinner and to see the puppy. He gave me back my copy of Das Capital and I gave him back his zombie book. There were no fights at dinner about socialism between him and my father (for a second I thought there might have been), who he found charming, because my father is very charming. We talked about swans and horses and the London elections and the people we know.

When it's rained recently I have felt elated, on my bike getting to work soaked through but happy, unable to see because of my glasses and noticing the damp bluebells and finally green. Or cycling home and only knowing it's raining because the puddles pucker, the sky still looks like the end of the world and in a months time I can travel, or get on a train, or do whatever I like. I will go to the sea.

And everything will be ok, because nothing was wrong afterall.

Ok, so there's a little tiny puppy coiled up asleep in our dining room.

We've got a new doglet. She is an eight week old, Jack Russell terrier, white, with a black and brown markings on the face like a little mask and she has actually melted my heart.

I am fairly apathetic towards animals: I like them in their habitats, I rather like seeing peculiar ones in zoos, I don't like bad zoos, I don't like deliberate mistreatment of animals, but I dislike mistreatment of humans much more. And I am definately not a vegetarian.

But this puppy is adorable. It has such tiny legs and such crinkly skin and such a tiny face.

And it's weird because it actually makes me miss Beanie, our lovely little terrier who was run over just before Christmas. Because although I was sad when Beanie died, I hadn't really missed her since she was just a dog (albiet a dog who ran like an idiot, picked fights with swans, fell in rivers and could dance to Dead or Alive: aka an amazing dog).
I'd be amazed if cutey-the-puppy can ever match Beans in temperment and dancing skills, but we'll see.

Now of course there's a war on in my house:
My brother is adament we name the dog Miley, which had been the name settled on before me and Sister A actually saw the puppy. Now my mother, Sister A, Sister B and I want to call the dog Dusty.

All my other suggestions (especially Bat Dog and Morrissey) were not taken entirely seriously. Dusty has generally been agreed on, but my brother hates it.

I wouldn't mind calling the dog Dolly, but mum thinks it would be embarrassing for my brother post-puberty to be calling 'Dolly' in the park.

Anyway, the dog has to be called Dusty, because it's already been established it likes the music of its namesake. And as Sister A pointed out, the doglet does not resemble a teen pop sensation. Whatever my brother might think.

My dad doesn't care what the dog is called. As far as he's concerned it's just a rat sized shoe eating machine that steals everyone's attention.
Anyway, he's in the garden dismantling the old climbing frame and swingset. When I came out to my mother, in the intervening year-long-hour or so of silence I listened to the Pixies in my room (Doolittle, because I couldn't find Bossanova and it was back in the day before I listened to music via computer) but when the nervous energy of what-have-done? became to intense I ran into the garden and went on the swing and suddenly was washed with freedom.

Anyway, it's all rusted and falling appart and I'm glad it's being taken down because its ugly and takes up all the garden and is vaguely sinister looking.

Until it's old enough to walk outside when I pick up the siblings from school I get to take the dog with me in a handbag!

Cycling home from the Shop With No Customers yesterday, although it did rain again the sky was the colour of the rapture. I thought, if the world was going to end it would look like that for maybe about five minutes or so before hand; in a still street the light will be very bright and the clouds will be very silver and the rain will stop without anyone noticing and the air will have the dirt clean wet pavement smell. Then the trumpets will sound.

But of course they didn't.

And in offices and school and on airplanes good Christian soldiers did not ascend to clouds of glory. Which is just as well because I saw one of them who went to the Convent with me in Marks and Spencers yesterday, where I was buying sensible underwear and lunch, and she has an interveiw for art school in a few days and she wouldn't want to miss it.

And as far as I know Captain Christian Union, a boy I know from school, who wishes I'd repent my flagrant athiesm, is still at Nottingham in the midst of some rather deliciously lurid rumours about his sexuality- which admittedly I've make more lurid everytime I tell pass them on.

They made an ambush once in the common room. The Christian Union. I was quite flattered. One by one they drifted over until we were outnumbered and tried to talk theology with me, because I'm in remission from Catholicism, I suppose. Then VB did an impression of someone speaking in tongues to demonstrate that anyone could do it and they all got rather quiet and tetchy and left.

Sister B has just been chosen as House Captain for Elm House at her school, which reminds me that the proudest achievement of my life was introducing corruption into junior school politics.

When I was in Year 6 (5th grade to the Americans and the last year before secondary school) and desperate to be house captain, because if you were you got to sit on chairs at front in assembly every week and read out the house points (I know, in retrospect the appeal of this elludes me). You also got to wear a badge (which I still have somewhere).

The problem was back in those days it was a popularity contest.
And I never had a chance of winning one of those.

So, I suggested to the teachers, just before the vote was about to be cast, that we should all say a little speech about why we should be house captain. The other little girls looked at me aghast, because they had no speeches prepared. And when it was my turn to say why I'd be such a good house captain I promised that it I won I'd give people sweets.

And it worked.

The sweet giving worked on an incentive system. The person who won the most housepoints everyweek would get the sweets. Which meant we became the most competitive house and at the end of the term Elm won overall and I got to hold up the House Cup.

By the time Sister A became house captain (years after I'd left the school) house captains were chosen exclusively through bribery and intimidation.

Now Sister B has become house captain no-one is allowed to make any election promises. They've banned it. They still have to make a speech though.

So that's my lasting legacy in this world; introducing electioneering into the House system of a small Church of England junior school.

Another day in the Shop With No Customers.

And it's raining, raining, raining. I get to work and I'm soaked, stuck in wet jeans and the rain stops, I leave work and it starts again.

My nan is staying with us because she had an operation. She has a vacuum in her soul but that's not why they were operating, they just mended her carpal tunnel.

She poisons the ambience of our little domestic world and it's not her fault, but like a black hole the vaccum in her soul drags in the life from a room and the oxygen and the lightness too. And if I think much about her life it's all too sad.

So the house is under clouds. And outside the sky is very, very bright behind the houses.

My mother openly dislikes her mother-in-law and talks down to her, my father has only dutiful contact with his mother but they're similar. And she's a boarded up version of a person; silent, holding grudges and kind to children who are low stakes and easily forgiving and forgivable. She should have been born at a different time, to a different family or met some man who wasn't just another version of her bastard father and then she might have been happy.

Because god, people need to be happy. They need people who understand them.

And thank god for my mother, and her mad family because they're sentimental and insane and have stand up shouting fights and hissy fits, but at least they can fill a house and not drag the fabric of the universe into the grey.