Low levels of melatonin, then

A Pacs is France's answer to the decline of marriage — a legally binding partnership between couples of any sexual orientation. It may soon be here for the emotionally untethered. Our Correspondent finds it alarming.
Once again, The Times chooses to miss the point.

I have no other event to report. From the outside, my life is starting to look like the dullest blog in the world. From where I sit, it feels more like this mixed with this. It's all too common, I know. Often I find myself wondering which of my shoes are the heaviest, cos once you jump off the bridge you really don't want to come back up. Then I shake myself up and have a chocolate soufflé. I'm aware that none of those two things are very reasonable.

Psychoanalysis 101

1)PLEASURE-PRINCIPLE AND REALITY-PRINCIPLE : Respectively, the desire for immediate gratification vs. the deferral of that gratification. Quite simply, the pleasure-principle drives one to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. However, as one grows up, one begins to learn the need sometimes to endure pain and to defer gratification because of the exigencies and obstacles of reality: An ego thus educated has become 'reasonable'; it no longer lets itself be governed by the pleasure principle, but obeys the reality principle, which also at bottom seeks to obtain pleasure, but pleasure which is assured through taking account of reality, even though it is pleasure postponed and diminished.

2)Saucisson + chocolate / green beans + yoghurt
Book + sofa / pay gas bill + tidy up squat
Hot bath /swimming pool

I know which principle I’ll be following tonight, then.

The final word.

Simply hectic

Today I watched the entire First Series of Twin Peaks that J gave me last April, for Christmas.
That's seven episodes, plus the pilot.
It's even more addictive than I remember it, fourteen years later.
Fourteen years!!

Today I also stretched out on the carpet to the sound of Ravi Shankar.
All my joints cracked rather delightfully.
Some years ago my mum decided to take up yoga. She only went twice. She said the mats smelled and that some people were so relaxed they farted. I can still picture her face perfectly when she said that.

I haven't been dumped yet.
I thought I was going to be.
I feel like I've been rescued from drowning.

Where to start..

Bad dreams.
Woke up crying.
Cold.
Rain.
PMT.
Broke.
Nothing for breakfast.
Mother coming to visit next week. That being a good thing in itself, but.. long story.
Did I mention PMT?
Girlfriend is mad at me.
Work is stressful and I dream about it too much.
I'll be a year older in 2 weeks.
I seem to have developed arthritis in my right hip.
It hurts. It feels silly, too.
A hip replacement? At my young and still tender age?
I'm supposed to go out and be merry tonight, but I'm not even sure I want to.
Girlfriend hasn't really talked to me since Monday.

I might just go back to bed.

A possible answer to social anxiety

Our new service

Supposing your are a lady and so completely dumb that dogs on the streets do not think you are worth of growling at. Ring us and explain your trouble.
You'll be instructed to be in attendance at the foyer of the Gate Theatre that evening, and to look for a tall, distinguished-looking gentleman attired in immaculate evening dress.
You go. You meet him. He advances towards you smiling and in an instant his moustaches are brushing your lips.

'I trust I have not kept you waiting, Lady Charlotte', he says pleasantly. What a delightfully low, manly voice!
'Not at all, Count, you answer, your voice being the tinkle of silver bells. ' And what a night it is for Ibsen. One is in the mood, somehow. Yet a translation can never be quite the same. Do you remember that night, in Stockholm... long ago?'

The secret

The fact of the matter is, of course, that you have taken good care to say nothing. Your only worry throughout the evening is to shut up and to shut up completely. The trained escort is a ventriloquist, and he answers his own manly questions in a voice far pleasanter than your own unfeminine quack, and gives answers that will astonish the people behind for their brilliance and sparkle.

There are escorts and escorts according to the number of potatoes you're prepared to pay. Would you like to score off your escort in a literary argument during an interlude? Look out for further information on this absorbing new service.

'Well, well, Godfrey, how awfully wizard being at the theatre with you!
'Yes, it is fun'
'What have you been doing with yourself?'
'Been trying to catch up on my reading, actually.'
'Ow, good'.
'Yes, I've been studying a lot of books on Bali.You know?'
'Ballet is terribly bewitching, isn't it? Do you like Petipa?'
'I'm not terribly sure that I do, but they seem to have developed a complete art of their own, you know. Their sense of décor and their general feeling for the plastic is quite marvelous.'
'Yes, Derain did some frightfully good work for them; Sort of grisaille, you know..'
'But their feeling is so.. profound, one thinks of Courbet.'
'Yes, or Ingres.'
'Or Delacroix, don't you think?''Definitely. Have you read Karsavina?'
'Of course';
'of course, how stupid of me. I sa her, you know.'
'Ow, hadn't't realised she was Balinesese.'
'Balinese? what are you driving at?'
'But...'
'But...'


Borrowed from Flann O'Brien, the best of Myles

Fifth Wheel

When I was eleven I had two best friends. Both were very pretty, in different ways, both tall and popular in a giggly kind of way. All three of us were in the same class for our first year of secondary school. We started a newspaper together and handed it out to the class. We had sleepovers and we fancied the same boys. We practiced kissing together. We did.
Whenever pairing up was called for, it always seemed to be the two of them, and me. They sat together in class. During the 12-hour coach journey to London we took at the end of term, they sat side by side, whispering about that blue-eyed boy who looked just like that actor whose name I don’t remember now. They swapped clothes; not with me, though, because I was clearly shorter and skinnier.
I was doing better in class than either of them, but they both got to wear a bra much earlier than I did.

When I was thirteen, I had two best friends.. not as pretty as the ones I’d had previously, but trying hard. We were not as creative as we’d been; some phenomenon had happened to us all and we were way past writing newspapers. We fancied the same boys, ferociously so. Whenever some pairing up was called for, however, it always seemed to be the two to them. I understood. After all they were so much more grown up than I. They’d started their Period. That was fine, I was doing better in class than the both of them combined.

When I was 15, I had two best friends. Pretty. Clever. Well-stacked. Whenever the situation called for some pairing up…
I was fine. In the space of three months, I got a first boyfriend, then a second one, and I was the first in the class to have sex. Then we didn’t talk so much anymore, as their parents disapproved of me for some reason.

When I was 19, I had a best friend. Seriously stacked. We compared university grades, made Goth clothes and went to Goth clubs. We lived in different cities, though, so she had to get herself another best friend; it was too lonely otherwise. I think she’s married with two kids, now. She called me from Ireland three years ago, but I never returned her phone call.

Was T-Rex a scavenger? You decide!

The Natural History Museum is really not what I remembered. I have (dim) memories of dark and dusty rooms, things floating in jars, crumbling dinosaurs skeletons. Or maybe those memories are only what I would like the museum to be, collective consciousness-style. Well, no mad scientists' lair in there now. The whole thing is now targeted at bright 8-year- olds. There are buttons to push and phones to listen into and screens to gawk at and all kinds of clever, state-of-the-art, pretty, flashy stuff. And also stuffed armadillos. (Soft on the inside, crunchy on the outside, Armadillos!)
On the way out, I saw:
- a tall, lanky black teenage boy in sportswear and gold jewellery, carrying a spongebob squarepants plastic lunch box.
- a five-year-old whose trousers fell down to her ankles as she ran after a pigeon.

All in all, a day well spent.

Beef
In the 19th century, London was the suicide capital of Europe. As early as the 14th Century,though, Froissart described the English as ' a very sad race', which description applied principally to Londoners. The French considered that the London vogue for suicide was owing to 'the affectation of singularity', or maybe, 'from a contempt of death and a disgust of life.' One Frenchman described a London family ' that had not laughed for three generations' , and observed that its citizens committed suicide in the autumn, 'to escape the weather.' Another visitor remarked that self-slaughter was 'no doubt owing to the fog.' He also suggested that beef was another essential cause, since 'its viscous heaviness conveys only bilious and melancholic vapour to the brain'; his diagnosis can be linked to the London superstition that to dream of beef 'denotes the death of a friend or relation.'It was also remarked by Grosley that 'melancholy prevails in London in very familly, in circles, in assemblies, at public and private entertainments..The merry meetings, even of the lowest sort, are dashed with this gloom.' Everything was blamedfor this constant gloom, except, perhaps, for the onerous and exhausting condition of the city itself.

Peter Ackroyd, London.

This afternoon I've discovered a way of playing with dolls I was not aware even existed - not to this extent anyway.
And there's a whole site of it!