This was meant to be a very short post which I started to write because it started snowing again tonight. But I started to type and like the Lambton worm it grewed and grewed and grewed and this came out instead and all sorts of things which I thought I’d forgot ended up being typed. So it has nothing to do with the title but I can’t be bothered to think of a new one right now and as I haven’t slept for the past two nights I need to go to bed now. In any case if I keep going until we actually get to my Snow Place then we’re going to be here for a while. So here it is, a post that has nothing to do with the title written on no sleep and a glass of red wine (which is a bit of a lethal combination). Should you attempt to read this then I suggest you go get a cup of coffee first….

We had been homeless for nearly two years. The big house was gone, we’d owned it for a year, spent eight months gutting it, rebuilding it, redecorating it and then moved in. We lived there four months, throughout the summer as I seem to recall, until the evening that Dad came home, wandered into the garden, looked back at the house, and realized that this was it. He’d done it. Arrived. Here he could spend the rest of his days. The house hit the market the very next morning.

We knew the drill; we’d done it several, (eight times) before. Our furniture went into storage; our goldfish, (Goldie, Goldy, and Bert) went to stay at my Nan’s. We didn’t miss them much, their gold had started to tarnish by the time we’d knocked the coconuts off and what little was left had turned to gilt by the time we’d walked the damn things home, thin plastic handles straining holes with every step. They, Goldy, Goldie and Bert, didn’t miss us at all and proved it by, (within the month) allowing Grandpa T to teach them tricks.

Our cat Tiger, real name Snow Tiger Terror of the Steppes, proved a little more difficult to place. My Nan, usually a guaranteed soft touch where animals were concerned was convinced that he was the devil incarnate (she just hadn’t quite decided which one) and we, Mum, Herebe and I, had to agree – although privately – that his eyes did glow a strange shade of green whenever he saw her.

Grandma S; who could normally be relied upon to do her Christian duty in matters such as this, flatly refused to have him in her house. He was a lovely looking cat (she said) with those bright green eyes and tufts on his ears and she could quite understand why we were so proud of him. But speaking of ears (she said), Sasha (her dog) was meant to have two of them, not one and half and although the vet had managed to stitch most of it back on, it was just too much worry and expense to go through on a regular basis. In vain did Mum point out that Tiger was just a big softy really, even Herebe and I didn’t quite believe that. In vain did Herebe and I try to explain that as a greyhound/whippet cross with not a few wins under her collar, Sasha should have been quick enough to get out of his way. The fact that she hadn’t, proved that even for a greyhound/whippet cross, she was an incredibly stupid dog and as her ears were much floppier than any self-respecting dog should have anyway you could quite understand Tigers reaction when they were flopping around him. In vain did the three of us suggest that if Tiger was given the run of the garden no-one would ever dare climb over the wall to nobble GrandDad S’s leeks. That might be the case (Said Granddad S) but where in hell was he supposed to put the bodies? Herebe’s suggestion of the leek trench because after all that was where Granddad kept threatening to bury us – along with the rest of his grandchildren – fell on ears as deaf as Sasha’s left.

With nowhere left to turn and time until the move fast running out, Mum did what every child with siblings does in such a situation. She used emotional blackmail on the nearest ones (my godparents). She needn’t have wasted her breath. In the first flush of panic now that Jboy was on wheels (a natty red trike), they leapt at the chance of even temporarily homing our cat, their only reservation being that Mum couldn’t guarantee a more than ninety percent chance of their first born becoming its lunch.

Tiger never made it to my Godparents house. On the day we moved, before we were twenty miles down the road, he’d bitten through the wicker of his basket and escaped. For the next fifty miles, he alternated between crouching viciously behind the brake pedal (used rarely when Dad drove) and launching assaults – via the top of Dads head – on the goldfish, whose tank with its makeshift cardboard breakwaters, was wedged between Herebe and me on the back seat. When the car finally stopped at a junction near to my Godparents, Tiger took off out of the window and was gone. Like so many barbarian chiefs before him, he eschewed the soft belly of a three year old for the freedom of the Steppes, in this case the concrete steps of the outhouse of our ex-almost neighbours, three doors up and on the other side of the back garden to the house we’d lived in four months before.

There he spent the next two years, laying siege to the gates (a dark green back door) of the castle which imprisoned his Queen. That she was a very insipid Queen indeed, (called Susie most definitely without the Q) mattered not one jot to him. Occasionally he’d bring her gifts – half a dead fox, a feebly kicking rabbit or two, on one occasion the mutilated body of another Tom Cat- which he’d lay upon the garden path with a careless aplomb, but mostly he spent his days reclining Genghis like upon a sack, composing poetry in a foreign (and off-key) tongue.

The ex-almost neighbours, it must be said, took it with a very good grace. A far better grace in fact than they’d ever taken to us living three doors down and on the other side of the back gardens from their house. The “Lady of the House” and I use the term in all its drop waisted crimpelened glory, Grandma S’s good friend, when we lived there, it had all been scandalized tones of “They have a drum kit in their dining room, don’t you know (my Grandmas name)?” and “Why was there a lamb in your daughters back garden last weekend?”. Like Grandma S would know. We weren’t that sure. It wasn’t ours. Thank God the night Dad had chased the next door neighbour’s son down the garden path with the samurai sword he’d just made; he’d run him down the front path and not the back. Deserved as it might have been (and it was), we’d never have heard the end of that. But somehow, Tigers lonely vigil had worn through the layers of foundation garments, masticated milk tray and mills and boon romances and found a place – a very small place but a place nonetheless – in her heart.

We knew this because when Mum arrived (three times a day) wielding tins of Whiskas and the odd bit of raw meat, she would open her dark green door, plant her feet firmly upon the white painted well scrubbed step, American tan tights straining over sausaged ankles, and watch him eat. “HE’s not gulping his food down” she would say with a satisfied air, as if the day that Tiger would wield a knife and fork was the day he would be allowed to date her cat. Ha! I’d watched her eat. A Mississippi steamer paddle had more grace.

Tiger paid her little heed. Three times a day he walked to the garden gate, welcomed Mum (who was his pet) with the air of a millionaire showing off his mansion, and then, when dinner was done and the remains of his ears had been scratched and Mum had rearranged his bed to his satisfaction, he walked her home – around the corner to my Grandma’s house – where he would wait at the gate until she was safely in and had waved from the window, before sauntering back to compose another stanza.

That was where we lived. Mum, Herebe and me – at my Grandmas house. When the big house had gone, Dad had moved back to his bed beneath the sea. Living here was a “temporary measure” until we found a home of our own. Our clothes went into bin bags, and we; Mum, Herebe and I moved into the front bedroom, the room with the rose coloured carpets and old-fashioned bunks, the bottom one I shared with mum. Narrow as a plank, hardly big enough for one small child – which I was not- we slept top to toe, me pushed up against the wall with an extra three inches for my head where the bed stood in front of the alcove was. The bunk above was so close that if I sat up straight my hair would catch in the weird patterns of wires and twists and have to be cut free before I could move. When Dad came back – one weekend in every six – Mum and he would sleep around the corner at my Nan’s and in the morning they would pick us up and we’d go off, hunting for a home.

Somewhere in a parallel universe there is a perfect me. I know that she’s in a parallel universe because our paths have never crossed and I know that she exists because she keeps her clothes in my wardrobe. But I know she isn’t me every time I see my reflection.

It’s not about beauty or body shape. The perfect me doesn’t have a better body than I do - or at least most of the time she does not - and her face is exactly the same. We could be twins. This wasn’t always the case. For a long time the perfect me didn’t look a bit like I did. She was shorter, taller, thinner, blonder, cut, pre-Raphaelite, Edwardian, edgy, post-punk, hippy, grungy, groomed, glamorous, manga, rock-chick, fifties pin-up poster girl, you name it - she looked it. Probably the only trend she ignored was Britpop but given the prerequisites necessary for any female attempting to join that particular gang – Radiohead, clumpy shoes, no make-up, short hair, acrylic jumpers, cold heart and air of insufferable superiority – you can’t really blame her for having too much sense for that. But over the years we’ve grown closer together until now if you stood us side by side, we’d look exactly the same. Except for one important detail. The perfect me is…well…perfect.

I don’t know how she does it but her hair is always shiny and her mascara never clumps. Her foundation never has that bit on the side of her nose which doesn’t rub in properly and her eyeliner is always straight.

The perfect me does not need to spend the day before she goes on holiday desperately trying to make up for the past eleven months of neglect by sitting with her feet submerged in a bucket of water, hair slathered in a vat of intensive conditioner, face buried beneath three different types of face mask and the rest of her basting in a foul smelling combination of hair removal cream and a moisturiser guaranteed to turn the clock back ten years. If she did these things - which she would not – then you can bet the bloody stuff would not react adversely against itself, the atmosphere and her skin, burning her legs to the blood and meaning that she hits the beach looking like a textbook picture of a skin disease. Neither would she get so sunburnt on the very first day of her holiday that for the next two weeks she looks like the caped crusader every time she takes her fucking sunglasses off. The perfect me packs her suitcase perfectly too. She doesn’t try to stuff her case with every item of clothing that she owns and then break the catch by jumping up and down on top of it in a fruitless and bad tempered attempt to get the damn lid to shut. Instead the perfect me has a capsule wardrobe which perfectly encapsulates every eventuality she may encounter and, what is more, it all fits into her hand luggage.

The perfect me is perfectly organised. When she takes off her green shoes, she polishes them, puts them back into their shoebox, puts the shoebox back onto the right hand side of the second shelf of the shoe cupboard and there they bloody well stay until the next time she wears them. She doesn’t look in the shoe cupboard, can’t find them, pull out and look in every box of the shoe cupboard and still can’t find them, get hit on the head by a shower of shoeboxes as she balances on a chair in order to peer into the boxes of the shoes she doesn’t often wear – a task made more difficult by the fact that even standing on a chair leaves her two foot below the tallest stack on the shelf – decide that she must have put them somewhere which is neither the shoe cupboard or the stack of shoes she doesn’t often wear and start the sort of search only usually carried out by forensics after a particularly puzzling crime.

Her search for an item will never turn into a philosophical exercise into the nature of reality. Not for her sitting on the bed in a trashed bedroom – all cupboard doors open, all drawers ransacked, shoeboxes and coat hangers spewing out their contents until the room resembles an art installation – wondering whether she ever actually bought a pair of green shoes, whether she just thought she bought a pair of green shoes and why it was she was so convinced of the fact that she’d not only bought a pair of green shoes but could distinctly remember that after the last time she wore them, she polished them, put them back into their shoebox and put the shoebox on the right hand side of the second shelf of the shoe cupboard.

She will never need to abandon her search, completely change her outfit, realise that her belief that she bought a pair of green shoes was nothing more than a false memory symptomatic of her diminishing mental capacity and go to pull her brown boots of the cupboard only to discover, when she opens the cupboard door, that there on the right hand side of the second shelf down are her bloody green shoes and that her brown boots have now disappeared into the ether.

Even though we wear the same clothes she doesn’t seem to have the same problems with them that I do. She never finds herself sitting at the dinner table wondering at exactly which point in the past hour she suddenly lost the three stone in weight which made her trousers not just hipsters but kneesters and thanking God that the chair she’s sitting on has a solid back to it because that’s all that’s between her and a full moon. Nor would she ever need to question by which magic (at the same dinner table) her cardigan miraculously shrank two sizes leaving a gap of flesh which no amount of surreptitious hitching and stretching (even if she was able to move her arms which would be difficult given the shrinkage of her cardigan) was going to cover. No, the perfect me has a perfect outfit for every occasion and more to the point they stay perfect throughout the whole occasion. I probably wouldn’t mind so much if they weren’t my clothes she wears.

She borrows my brain without asking too and never gives it back when she is done, leaving me to struggle on with an echoing space between my ears and only a vague remembrance of thoughts I might have had. Because of her, I am left to fill in the blanks with the desperation of someone being asked to complete - against the clock and if my life was dependant upon the outcome – a crossword in a foreign language, with no clues and only black spaces making up the grid. To make it worse, the perfect me is able to articulate my opinions and ideas with an eloquence and flair and does so whenever I have left the room.

Hostess or guest, in social situations the perfect me is always in control. She does not sit and shake, hands trembling so hard it takes both of them to raise her glass. The distance between plate and mouth does not seem so insurmountable to her, her spatial awareness does not disappear. Her fork is not transformed into some complicated machine with an instruction book she has not read, she can remember the basic mechanics of how to chew and swallow. She does not sit with ashes in her mouth, terrified that all have noticed how she froze. She does not need to repeat a million times within her head, “These people are my friends, now breathe”.

The perfect me has a knack of letting people like and her doesn’t give a damn if they don’t. She has a stream of small talk guaranteed to put the most nervous at their ease, her jokes are not strung along the gibbet of a silent room; there are no awkward moments, no silences dropping upon the carpet with a crash. The perfect me can converse intelligently and with charm upon any given subject, the right questions fall readily from her lips. The right answers too, the perfect me does not wake in cold sweats with curling toes, rerunning a lifetimes worth of words and situations long since past.

The perfect me believed her godmother when she said, “This pumpkin is your coach”. She does not anticipate the fraud of her existence being revealed; she can love and be loved, laugh and exist without the fear of midnight chiming the joke on her because she knows that when the slipper breaks, she will not fall upon her ass but fly.

Somewhere in a parallel universe there is a perfect me. I know that she’s in a parallel universe because at no point have our paths ever crossed and I know that she exists because she keeps her clothes in my wardrobe. But I know she isn’t me every time I see my reflection.

God I hurt. My muscles are as frayed as the knees of these jeans and all the tiny broken threads are ribboning pain throughout my entire body. It hurts when I sit down. It hurts when I stand up. It hurts when I walk. It hurts when I raise my arms. It hurts when I type. It hurts when I turn the page of a book. It hurts when I lie on the floor and watch telly. Whatever I do, even if I do nothing - it hurts.

It probably doesn’t help that my legs are a glorious melange of technicolour bruises where I’ve hit the coffee table, each bruise a ducks egg of riotous pain. Admittedly the fact that I spend a large proportion of every day prodding the bruises just to see how much they hurt isn’t helping the healing process but I can’t help it. It’s like having toothache. You have to prod a bit just to remind yourself of how painful it is.

The net result of all this pain is that I am in a foul mood. It’s not being helped by the fact that my blood sugar has hit an all time low, gone right through the red and come out on the negative side of empty. For the past three days I’ve been living on watermelon, sardines and black coffee. You try it and see how good your mood is (never mind your mood, try your breath. Two bottles of Listerine down and I’m still swallowing sardines). Lest anyone mention that this is perhaps not the healthiest of diets, I point you in the direction of Michael Holden who won the 1999 Light Heavyweight championship on a diet of the same (except he ate tinned tuna not sardines but I don’t like tuna – tinned or otherwise). It’s not exactly a recipe for healthy eating in the long term but for a month or so it doesn’t hurt (other than those people you breathe on) and it gets results. Not perhaps the same sort of results as the black coffee and amphetamine diet which used to be a favourite of mine when I was modelling, but somehow the older I get (not that I’m getting old btw, Herebe is now years older than I am) the more I value my kidneys.

What it doesn’t do it guarantee a good mood (something it has in common with the amphetamine and black coffee diet). Which is probably fine if you’re aiming to knock seven shades out of someone and become light heavyweight champion but isn’t so good if the most energetic you get in a day is moving a set of three lines .14 mm to the left. So right now I am not happy. Right now I make Satan look like Santa Claus. Right now I’m a simmering mass of seething hatred waiting to boil over into physical violence of the pounding kind. Or at least I would be if it didn’t hurt so much to raise my arms.

It’s all my mums fault. And my godmothers. And her friend. It was their bloody idea in the first place. “It will be fun” they said. “Just three days” they said. “A slow meander from pub to pub” they said. “It will be a bonding experience” my godmother said. (Not only does my godmother say such things she actually believes them too bless her. She’s probably right if by bonding experience she means four people united in the desire to do away with the other three in the most painful way possible by the end of day two). “R’s dropped out and I’ll have to pay for the room anyway” mum said. I’ll give them their due; I didn’t have to agree to go with them. No-one twisted my arm, although it would have been a bloody sight less painful than the way I feel right now if they had. It just seemed like a good idea at the time (A phrase which really should have warned me because everybody knows that things which seem like a good idea at the time always turn out to be a really bad idea in retrospect.)

I suppose that I was seduced by the romanticism of it all. A gentle stroll through some of the most scenic scenery in Scotland – God knows Scotland doesn’t have a lot to recommend it but even it’s most vehement critic (me) has to admit that it has the market cornered when it comes to scenery. I had this picture in my head – little lunches in country pubs, hip flasks among the heather, quiet dinners of fresh local produce and maybe (definitely) the odd dram (or two) slowly sipped in the sinking sunset of a Scottish summers eve. It’s a sad fact of life that my imagination is not only overactive but that the rose tinted filter sticks. I know this. It’s got me into trouble before and will get me into trouble again. So I agreed to go, hung up the receiver, wandered back to the computer and googled the West Highland Way.

It has its own website you know. It’s a really good website. It tells you all about the West Highland Way; its history and the history of the various villages you pass through. It lists the flora and fauna you might be lucky enough to see. It suggests accommodation and places of interest to stop at should you wish to break off your journey (there’s a distillery tour which I’m counting on to ease the pain somewhat). It also - in what I consider to be a bit of a throwaway fashion - points out that the West Highland Way stretches from Glasgow to Fort William and is a distance of approximately 97 miles, most of which seems to be vertical and not the easy downhill sort of vertical at that.

All things considered, it’s not the distance which is filling me with dread. I know that in order to complete it in three days we’ll have to step a bit lively but that shouldn’t cause any problems. Mum runs 10-15 miles a night for fun (if you ask me it’s a warped and twisted way of having fun and I consider myself somewhat of an authority on warped and twisted ways to have fun but hey if it makes her happy), their friend T has walked the Great Wall of China and then swung up through Tibet and cut through Russia on her way back to Gateshead and anyone watching my godmother cut a swathe through any standing between her and the Ischiko rail during Fenwicks French Salon sale would call odds on in her favour against any heavyweight champ you care to mention – Michael Holden wouldn’t stand a chance. I’m the weak link in all of this and I know it. Long gone are the days when I could blithely run up the escalators at Kings Cross (and from the Piccadilly line too – an ascent which roughly equates to the north face of the Eiger) and then light up with nary a raise in my heart rate, an ability which was solely due to the fact that the one benefit of knocking back copious amounts of amphetamines and dancing your ass off (literally) in some dingy club round the back of Kings Cross Station – was that your general level of fitness increased exponentially until it was nearly as high as you were.

In general though, I don’t believe in exercise. I never have. I don’t see the point of it. Not exercise for the sake of exercise alone anyway. If there’s a point at the end of physical exertion – fine. If you need me to dig the garden, I’ll not only call a spade a spade but I know how to double dig. If it’s wood you need chopping then just chuck an axe in my general direction and I’ll make like Gimli at the battle of Helms Deep. But beating the clock for my own personal satisfaction has never appealed unless by beating the clock you mean throwing the thing at the wall and snuggling back down for a lie in. Given the choice of being stared at in a gym by men with greasy perms and orange pecs or lying on the sofa with a good book (or indeed any book) I’ll choose the book every time. Just as long as I can fit into my jeans without (or even with) the aid of a coat hanger then I’m happy. Beauty is after all only skin deep.

Given my known and proclaimed antipathy to exercise, it’s hardly surprising that everyone I’ve mentioned my “holiday” to has sniggered. (BTW, I’m using the term “holiday” incredibly loosely. My definition of what constitutes a holiday is a period of time which involves no exertion other than the amount of energy it takes to stretch an arm out to the side and pick up the big glass with the paper umbrella in it). At the thought of me walking for three (and a bit) days, Herebes depression has vanished like snow in the springtime, F now periodically takes a break from creating weird and wonderful guitar sounds to wander through to the kitchen, point at me, mutter the words “97 miles, walking” and then wander back into the computer room convulsed with laughter. Even my mum has a twitch whenever the walk is mentioned (although that could just be the paranoid psychosis which accompanies any of the sisters when they realise they’ll have to spend more than an hour in the company of another sister) and it was her bloody idea for me to accompany them in the first place.

Look, I’m not completely dumb. I know that this walk is going to hurt. In fact I’d go so far as to say that I know this walk is going to hurt a fucking lot. Of course I know this. The overactive imagination and the rose filter only ever last as long as it takes for you to commit yourself to whatever seemed like a good idea at the time. Almost before I’d hung up the phone, I know that the whole strolling through scenic Scotland little lunches in country pubs vision was bullshit – although not only have I bought a (large) hipflask, I’ve also borrowed one from my Auntie Jo so that part of my illusion will at least remain intact. I know that the reality will be me plodding through clarts in the pissing rain while plotting matri, aunti and frieni – cide. I know that the reality will involve being eaten alive by midges and worse than that I know that no matter how waterproof the container claims to be, my cigarettes will get soggy. Or, and I’ll put a million pounds on this happening , half way between nowhere and the arse end of nowhere, my lighter will stop working even though it has loads of gas left in it.

None of this is a problem. Despite the sniggers, despite my lack of physical fitness – the thought of walking 97 miles in three days does not faze me at all. I have legs. I have willpower. Where’s the problem?

So it’s not that. Oh no. It’s way more important than that. It’s what the fuck you’re supposed to wear while walking thirty-two and third miles a day (I worked it out) which is not only doing my head in but is causing me to balance on a bloody Pilates ball while chucking weights about. It’s that worry which is causing me to eat so many bloody sardines that give it another three days I’ll be balancing the damn ball on the end of my nose and clapping the weights together like I’m a fucking sea lion.

(I’m using the term balance extremely loosely here too. I don’t know if any of you have ever attempted any of that Pilates stuff. If you have then you will sympathise – unless you’re like herebe and were born to be fit. If you’ve never attempted Pilates before - don’t bother. Despite all statements to the contrary – Pilates is not a gentle form of exercise designed to align mind and body. It’s a vicious and undignified way of going on and it’s made even more vicious and undignified if there is a coffee table anywhere in the vicinity of you attempting it.)

You see, I’ve thought about it and considered all the options and I’m very much afraid that for this particular venture, combat trousers will have to be worn. In fact I know that they will have to be worn. You can’t be plodding through the pissing rain of a nicotineless hell, plotting how to commit matri, auntie and freni-cide with no other weapons than a half empty hip flask and a defunct lighter while you’re wearing jeans. Jeans – as anyone who ever tried to get them to fit properly by sitting in a bath full of water while wearing them will attest – are a bugger to wear wet. It’s a bit of a pity really because at the last count I had over eleven pairs of the damn things, but there you go.

According to the West Highland Way Website the correct trousers to wear while walking are “designed with walkers in mind”. Apparently they often have many “handy pockets”. Now I don’t know what walkers the designers had in mind while designing walking trousers but I’d hazard a guess that they were thinking of their worst enemies. For a start, the only colour the damn things come in is beige. Over a million different shades of beige, it’s true but all beige is the same – distinctly unflattering to just about everybody in the known universe (and that includes all life on other planets). Secondly, trousers are designed for walking are not trousers at all – they’re slacks. You can tell that they’re slacks because they have an elasticated waist and it’s a well known fact that the step from wearing slacks to buying a big slipper, an all in one leisure suit and one of those padded trays so that you can eat your tea while watching Countdown is but a small one and I have no desire to cross that particular Rubicon. Ever.

So hiking trousers are out and the only option left is combats.

It’s not that I have a problem with combats per se. In fact I like combat trousers. Not the watered down version you find on the high streets obviously and definitely not “cargo” pants but proper combats – the sort which might potentially have seen actual combat- are dead cool. On anybody except me. Because I don’t suit the damn things. I’d love to. But I don’t and when it comes to clothes I’m a perfectionist. I’d rather go barefoot than wear the wrong sort of shoes with an outfit. It upsets me to the point of almost physical discomfort. This doesn’t mean that I’m one of those women who is constantly doing her hair and makeup and looks like she stepped out of the pages of a magazine. Hell I work from home – F’s lucky if I take a shower and change out of my pjs in the morning. But, way before “What not to Wear” I’d ripped off the rose coloured spectacles, looked at my body coldly and dispassionately in the most unflattering light I could find (daylight), worked out which was my best (and more importantly my worst) side, worked out how to accentuate the positive and detract from the negative and decided what shapes suited me.

This is why under no circumstances will you ever see me in one of those A-line gathered under the bust dresses, I’d rather die than wear completely flat shoes ( I’ve got calf muscles) and although I absolutely adore bias cut skirts it’d be more flattering if I just wore big broad black and white horizontal stripes. For better or worse I’ve got an old fashioned eastern European body, which is to say I’m tall and I’ve got a bust and a waist and hips (oh god do I have hips). I don’t want that – I’d much rather be one of those teensy weenie indie London chicks with an urchin cut, big eyes and prepubescent body but I’m not, so I just have to make the best of it (and pray they all get osteoporosis and age really badly). My cousin J is. She can fling on a baseball cap, combats and a sweatshirt and look ingénue. I do the same and look like a Kalashnikov wielding sergeant in the tank repair core of the Red Army.

So the only option left to me, is the Sara Connor look. You remember her. The one from the second Terminator film. The one with triceps you could crack nuts with (and working with Arnie I’m sure she did). She didn’t look ingénue. She looked a damn sight meaner than a Kalashnikov wielding sergeant in the tank repair core of the Red Army. I’ve got two weeks. All I need are the triceps, the six pack and the mirrored sunglasses. Excuse me while I go crash into the coffee table again.

It feels as if I’ve got ants – not in my pants which, if I were that way inclined, might be interesting – but scrawling tiny paths with razor tipped pincers just under my skin. My hands have swollen up “just like 2 balloons”. My eyes are obviously moonlighting as the Sandman’s goods depot and have decided on a look which, if you were being complimentary, could be described as Pigling Bland does twelve rounds with Mike Tyson. My head is thumping, not with pain but with a tympanic wallop that so far the sound of AC/DC put through F’s studio speakers and then mainlined at full volume via the mixing desk into headphones is only slightly masking. My tongue is too big for my mouth, so speech sounds whiskified even if I were capable of the coherent thought necessary to come up with it. I’m sweltering in two t-shirts and a big old jumper of F’s because I’m acutely conscious of all this tumbling flesh that I can’t stand at the moment and want to slash and slash and slash until there’s nothing there. I can’t think straight, stumbling over thinking up words like stumbling and even writing this far is proving to be difficult because in spite of the fact that I’m usually a super-fast touch typist, my co-ordination is non-existent right now and all I really want to do is wander into the kitchen, stand next the china cupboard and start chucking the contents at the walls – just to hear the smash. If I’d known years ago that one croissant and a pain au chocolat had this effect I wouldn’t have spent so much cash on drugs.

I hate feeling like this and I hate myself right now. Because worse then all the above is the violent self-loathing of knowing that it’s your own lack of self-discipline that’s making you feel this way. That if you’d have had the self-control to ignore the temptation of a fresh, warm, just baked croissant (and pain au chocolat) that you knew you shouldn’t eat - and yet despite this knowledge, you still find yourself taking them out of the cupboard in a somnambulant haze and shoving them into your mouth in great desperate untasting gulps. If I’d had the self-control to stop that right before the first bite, to throw them into the bin, grind a cigarette butt into their doughy folds, chuck them in the cat litter tray, do anything that would switch on the “I can’t eat this” button. If I’d been able to do that – then I wouldn’t be feeling like a sack of shit right now.

the only problem with takng the moral high ground is that it doesn’t have the satisfaction of a low left hook.