'It's natural, it's chemical, it's logical'

Falling asleep to Don Draper’s antics, cringing as Michelle Williams shuns Ryan Gosling, sipping Pepsi as Mila Kunis exposes her dark side under the duvet, it seems that s-s-sexual frustration is on everyone’s lips. February, the month when it matters. This 28-day stretch has begun with a chain of restaurant emails, commanding you and your significant other to ‘Book your Valentines table while you can!’ You contemplate if that night will be spent as this one, with a lone lit candle and George Michael. How sad.

Sunny days have not induce frolicking outdoors but instead struggling with the stiff door and grabbing your fucking gloves. You yearn for pleated hands on picnic blankets and exposed arms but get punched with a sniffly nose and forever wonder where you put the Carmex. It’s not all bad, though. With new documentaries storming 4od, the Monday night chance to see a tiny head protruding from the vulva of what seems to be half woman/half beast has put most off procreation for some time.

It's that time of year.

There are some things that you will always remember, I will always remember how my home-made birthday cake was entirely eaten and replaced with an exact replica. Exact! Sometimes the womanly urge to devour anything sweet and calorific as if it's going to spontaneously combust really does boggle me. Surely the effort of baking, and icing and arranging chocolate buttons is not worth the two slices to be chowed-down on over a pyjama party with Love, Actually? This is not love, no, but a product of the desperate, malicious mind of the cake-o-holic woman.

You know your birthdays start to mean that time is actually passing when your mum falls asleep at a stand-up show. (Still smiling though, perhaps in a constant reposnse to the jokes about rape and disease, but probably just happy to be warm and sitting down.) Or when you're consolling intoxicated friends who think they're life has already gone to shit, there's no going back from here, apparently. Or when a modest multi-pack of Wotsits and a few burnt sausage rolls get replaced with vol-au-vents and tequila sunrise...The clock has started to tick.

I think from here everything should go pretty fast. The monotonous years of polo shirts and petis filous sucked away decades, where getting up at seven meant that lunch was at 12, and the six days, twenty-three hours until another episode of the O.C could have been a lifetime. Some events now go by without being talked about, or planned in the backs of exercise books. Doing things alone means more things to talk about and more things to talk about means that time does run out.

"...Where everybody knows your name"

You move from one village to the next, at uni. Villages where there is not just one token idiot but in fact everyone is...

In what other place, apart from maybe a cresh, do you see a group of boys dressed as builders/wearing gigantic nappies and shouting about how they are "soo hungry!"

The local Tesco doesn't sell out of bread or newspapers but Greg's vodka. And a clumsy, nameless kiss is interrupted by a text to annouce that Rooster house have RUN OUT OF CHICKEN WINGS...There's genuine disgust, like there was no point in going out without the breaded birds to round off your night!

But for some, the night ends earlier...

There's girls that look like crazed witches with water dripping off their chins- "Look, I'm sober now" Oops, drops ID at bouncer's feet. You have to down your pints so they don't spill onto the floor, or yourself.

On return you hear from your neighbours is head-banging techno (all day) on one side and some kind of 6-girl slumber party on the other. People leave their front doors open and 'Happy Birthday' banners frame the windows instead of, the apparently absent house numbers.

It'a warped reality, but with a real headache.

Furry teeth.

It's not very nice, waking up to dog shit. This morning I walked downstairs and nearly slipped on a big fat shit by the sofa. Well, it's confirmed my theory that morning's are weird- that getting up after a certain time is necessary, because all the morning's mishaps are cleared up and not spoken of. That could happen every day at 9am and I had never known. Or the sky could be green between 7 and 8 in July, it would be normal to everyone else but I'd never know. Strange things happen, not after dark but just after sunrise.

I'm at a stage where I consider getting dressed before the afternoon and bothering with breakfast instead of going straight to lunch, as worthy of a gold star sticker. Not today though, as I sit in Winnie the Poo pjs eating a vegetable tart. Last night's stoned sofa-hopping has made me more aware of the extent of my laziness. A three minute walk felt like a marathon on Nytol and the stairs were my failed Everest hike. Consequently, I woke up in a Drunkymunky hoody, face down on the sofa with furry teeth, as my mum drew the curtains to a green sky and held her nose.

I can't get over how good the stuff in Lush smells. All I want to do is eat it, and it's even more appealing because I know I shouldn't. I think the salesman could sense my enthusiasm. He looked like a wizard, a bubble wizard. He followed us about crumbling balt salts into warm water, pouring the foam between two jugs and saying 'See, this is why we call them Hollywood style bubbles'. I thought he was going to ask me to kiss him after he applied their new balm and puckered his lips. But my Lush desires were not to be fulfilled by this magical bath god, I just had to lick a tester of 'Honey I Washed the Kids'. I had hoped desperately for vanilla and unfortunately, got Vanish.

*

I've decided that I cannot stand Come Dine With Me. I want to like it but I can't, and it's taken me a while to realise that. The contestants are either completely annoying or thick, usually with some incomprehensible regional accent or dirty stripper past. No food (even if it isn't out of a can like usual) looks good on Wilkos pattern plate sets. Also, to me it's a strange concept that they get to look round the host's house- where do they draw the line? Laundry baskets, bottom drawers? From what I can gather about dinner parties, and even the lesser civilised ones I've attended, it would not be kosher to take your margarita up to the bedroom and pull back the sheets.

There has been no choice but revert back to this kind of entertainment when the turn in weather again prevents anything in England from being fun (unless it involves indoor drinking). This is not to say, however that the sun promotes a more productive attitude. People want to stay in with the curtains drawn when it rains, but similarly siesta and loll around in the garden when it's sunny. This begs the question, are we always just looking for an excuse to do nothing?

Maybe it's just me.

The times are not a-changin'.

It's so frustrating not to be able to use a new thing. I can't stop thinking about my new orange bike. I bought it, rode and fell off it one day then had to leave it. It's like getting a new ipod and not being able to load music onto- but that's happened too. I have the feeling with this bike like I used to with new dolls or school shoes with a heel, you love them so much you want to sleep next to them.

Speaking of sleeping next to something and not using it, since when did erectile disfunction adverts make it to TV? The man in the advert is wearing pyjamas. Now either that is suppossed to suggest that sexual intercourse is about to happen, 'get excited everyone, I've got my pinstriped ones on!' or this state is shown as something to avoid, 'do you really want to end up as a sad pyjamaed bastard too?'

The worst thing is, now you have to call in! A hotline for the Soft Penis Crew, how humilating. If I was a guy and had this problem, I'd rather revert back to rooting through my Junk Mail folder and doing things the impersonal way. Or I'd probably tell my wife to stop wearing that fucking beige nighty, as is suggested in the advert.


You know she shouldn't have spent 180 quid on a day when your mum says "I never thought I'd be rather be standing in the queue for the porta-loos than watching Bob Dylan" before descending to a tent which looks like a deflated balloon and getting into her beige nightie. It's even worse when you agree bed's the best option because the Carlsberg's turned flat and warm (after making it last half the time it takes to get it), and the fact they're playing Foo Fighters in the break between acts is a saving grace.

First English festival in two years, and the times really are not a-changin'.

Chewing my meat slowly.

It's weird, the difference between the things you savour and those you want all at once.

You eat one birthday chocolate a night and tiny teaspoons of creme brulee. A great novel however, you squeeze the pages into spare seconds, nearly knocking into lamposts as you believe you can multi-task. And another box of chocolates will taste as good but reading a book for the second time just isn't the same.

Maybe there is such thing as a time limit on relationships. In order to make them last longer, you have savour it. Perhaps a relationship that is set to last two years could last five. But you have to have less of each other. Is that where the public are going wrong, because when romance is present, they use up all their time too quickly? Is our problem that we don't savour those we love but instead squeeze?

Strangely enough, early summer seems to be break up period. Maybe it's the topless frolicking that makes you realise your partner really has put weight on, or the extra flow of beers in the afternoon causing disagreements on the sausages. For some, it's a shame the squeeze came before the best season.

Salmon and stereotypes.

Realising you are never going to be something doesn't usually happen. You take gradual steps to becoming something else so it starts to appear obvious that you're not going to live your life as say, a forensic scientist or an astronaut. Tonight however, whilst serving dessert wine to a table of Oxfordian graduates, I realised I will never be in the high brow of society. Tattoo creeping out of cuff and stain on boob, I scoffed to myself at their exam-related banter. "And so I told him, if you're going to plagiarise next time don't use your own professor's articles!"- violent chortling ensued.

I've never met a more electic mix of people, the staff I mean. A teeny Japanese woman who kept flapping and cursing at the others (who said stereotypes weren't fair?!), some gothic pregnant chick and a Polish bodybuilder called Bart. I realised I was happier to be speaking those paid an hourly rate at our dirty kitchen sink than perching with the lawyers in the room opposite.

My favourite past-time.

It's lucky, because wasting money seems to be my favourite past-time. And I don't mean spending, I mean literally throwing away, might as well have wiped my arse with it type of wasting. Right now Michael O'Leary, CEO of Ryanair is carefully folding my fivers for soiling. To preach in an interview about the bareness of your schedule, then realise you're pretty much booked up every weekend of the summer doesn't help cover the unecessary droughts in your Lloyds TSB.

From faking car-breakdowns on the M1 and covering Alton Towers with dental appointments only to avoid three hour shifts, sometimes I wonder whether I actually get a kick out of being in debt. Lloyds text me every week now with my balance. You think they might throw something else in, maybe financial advice 'BALANCE OD 994...We need to use your money so please stop wasting all of ours' or 'Is that £8 in HMV vital because you vaguelly remember this film being on about ten years ago?'(and then you get it home and realise that you thought it was only okay, hence Sunday afternoon, Channel 5) or 'Domino's again... Really?' Just a line, once a week- a reminder of priorities.

Who would need therapy if there was someone to text you every Monday, letting you know where you're going wrong?