Flower power

My new bath salts smell lovely, but the chopped up bits of flowers in the bottle look less 'rose petal bath in the honeymoon suite of a swanky hotel', and more 'someone dumped their garden compost in my tub'.

Fly paper for freaks

My epic series of crazy people on public transport continued today, as I watched a woman methodically tear fragments from her Evening Standard and eat them. Hygienic!

I love my friends

P: I've been having trouble with my dauphinoise lately.
E: That may be the gayest thing that's been said in North London today. And that includes all our talk about cock.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

In 2011 I have slept through the night twice. I've had periods of insomnia since I was a teenager, but this is getting ridiculous. I feel lucky if I manage four hours of sleep a night. I can't remember ever being so exhausted, and it shows. My dark circles are like inky thumbprints smeared under my eyes. I'm always pale, but lately I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the windows of the tube, and I don't even look like the same species as the people around me. I look like something that's been left underwater too long; the bloated, water-bleached corpse of some long-dead fish. The very fact that I'm comparing myself to a piscine cadaver is probably a good sign that I'm going a little crazy with tiredness. In my defence, it's gone two in the morning, I've been trying to get to sleep for nearly four hours, and this is fast becoming the norm. You'd be rambling too.

Things that make me smile No.74

Having one of the babies make her mummy bring her back down from halfway up the stairs because she wants me to give her a goodnight kiss. It's nice to be wanted.

Things that make me smile No.73

The sunrise this morning was stunning: streaks of concrete grey and the washed out blue of old denim, with a candyfloss froth of peach. I admired it for a while, and then realised I was dressed in that exact combination of colours. Joy!

Spoons

Spoons, and cutlery in general, are a necessary evil. I appreciate the need to use them in public, but table manners are only a concession to other peoples' sensibilities; a way of making oneself pleasant to be around. I don't want to watch somebody chew with their mouth open, and they don't want to watch me eat with my fingers. At home, however, with nobody else around, they're welcome to chomp away as messily as they like, and I will almost always choose to forgo cutlery. Obviously this doesn't work with every foodstuff. A tub of ice cream requires a spoon. So does anything too runny to pick up digitally but not runny enough to drink straight from the bowl. But generally I think food just seems to taste better when eaten with the fingers. Not wanting to sound like too much of a knob, but I think it gives you more of a connection with what you're eating. It also, admittedly, sometimes gives you burnt fingers, but that's a risk I'm willing to take.

Breathing

Sometimes when I'm concentrating on something (usually writing or attempting to make numbers add up properly, since there's very little else I bother to concentrate on) I start to get a bit dizzy. Then I realise that I'm unwittingly holding my breath. I sometimes wonder if this unconscious respirational suspension could ever lead to actual unconsciousness, or if I will always become aware of it in time to remind myself to start working those lungs again. Either way, isn't breathing supposed to be an automatic thing? How can one just 'forget' to breathe?

Inspiration dearth

I expressed concern on Facebook regarding my current lack of inspiration for writing topics, and received two responses:

J: Spoons.
M: Breathing.

Thanks guys. Thanks a lot. Still, I'm not one to shy away from a challenge. Actually that's a lie. I almost always shy away from challenges. Not on this occasion though. I shall not be beaten!

Dark thoughts

Is it strange to be 26 years old and still scared of the dark? It makes perfect sense to me. After all, anything you could possibly be scared of could conceivably be there in the dark. It's like Schrodinger's cat. Until you open the box the cat is both dead and alive, because it's impossible to know which. Well until you turn the light on, everything that frightens you is right there. At night every window has the potential to suddenly frame a creepy face staring in at me. The space under the bed is populated with spiders and indefinable creatures ready to clutch at my ankles. Indistinct figures stand over me as I lie there, just waiting for me to close my eyes. Luckily for me, the time-honoured technique of pulling the covers right over your head is a very effective one. After all.....if you can't see it, it doesn't exist.....right? Modelling myself on an ostrich may not be the most effective lifestyle choice, but I still wish I could apply it to life as a whole. If I never had to worry about anything that wasn't right in front of my face, my stress levels would be much more manageable.