Valentine’s Day was spent drunkenly caterwauling karaoke at the Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes. I belted out a version of ‘My Sharona’ so atrocious that even now, five days on, I cringe thinking about it. Steve went to watch some football and showed up at 9.30, but we did manage to have some romantic quality time together, kicking Mags’s and Emerald’s asses at table football. We don’t celebrate Valentine’s (let’s call it by its initials, VD, for speed of typing) but I still get upset when I don’t get a card or anything. Steve insists we agreed years ago that we instead celebrate ‘Ily and Steve Day’, the date of which is pretty fluid and generally falls a few days after VD, when all the soppy-eyed fools have gone back to sitting on the couch watching University Challenge, and the restaurant menus have returned to normal. So it was on Monday that I arranged to meet my husband at Mason’s, a restaurant in Ladywell we’d been wanting to try for years. It has a three-course evening menu for £13, so in the interests of staying local and staying cheap, he’d booked a table. The food was pretty good, and at that price you can’t really complain. Steve also gave me a big bunch of tulips and a lovely card of a cat doing yoga. Who says romance is dead? Happy I&SD!

Things to look forward to

Right this minute, as I type, my sister is in hospital preparing to give birth. I am on Baby Standby and obsessively checking my phone several times an hour for updates. She’s not fully in labour yet, so can still lie around texting me about how bored she is.

Holiday in France. At the end of May, we and some friends are going to the south of France for a week of wine, cheese, swimming in our own pool, eating amazing seafood, riding bikes (basically the entire holiday is going to be Flight of the Conchords’ foux de fa fa made real) and wafting around in maxi dresses. CAN’T WAIT.

Today is Fatty Thursday! Forget Fat Tuesday, or Shrove Tuesday to give it its boring name. Tlusty Czwartek is the day in Poland where you make donuts and eat them all. My mum is doing the former, and I’m popping round later to help out with the other bits.

Things to not look forward to

Just been to the doctor, who diagnosed me with ‘classic sciatica’. Yippee. It doesn’t hurt, but my left leg is a bit numb and tingly and feels cold. No more aerobics for me, just swimming and a bit of yoga.

Swings and roundabouts

Just paid tax bill, still feeling I've been ripped off and massively overestimated the amount of tax I owe. So come April I'll grapple with it again and hopefully claw back some cash... May need help with this (Emerald! In exchange for dinner!) Good news arrived today with my credit card statement (NEVER a sentence I thought I'd write). I've transferred the balance of my ridiculously high-interest card to a 0% card, but I somehow overpaid the transfer amount. So essentially my credit card company owe me £540 and are paying it into my bank account. Woot!

Crafty things I've done while - ahem - resting these past few weeks

1) Made a maxidress to take to the south of France. It is made from a polycotton bedsheet which I dyed a murky grey/blue. It's a funny shape and I think the hem is a bit too narrow to walk properly in. I will still wear it. I'd take pictures and post them here, if I thought Steve could stop laughing long enough to hold the camera.

2) Work in progress: making stuffed bear/cat/rabbit hybrid toys for Maddy's baby and my nephew (due in about 3 weeks, so excited!). They're going to be made from a blue flowery Cath Kidston fabric someone gave me a few years ago. They're a bit freestyle and I apologise in advance for any nightmares/long-term trauma they may cause.

3) Not crafty but long overdue - a new kitchen is on the horizon for the J-D family. AT LAST. I detest my kitchen with a passion. It has no storage (people think I'm exaggerating, until I show them space for a few food items and 4 mugs and they shut up), doors hanging off their hinges, and massive gaps behind the units, forming an adventure playground for mice. But we bit the bullet and headed to Ikea, and got a not-too-terrifying quote for a new one.

Am nearly as excited by the prospect of a new kitchen as by the imminent arrival of my nephew.

WHAT A DAY. Fired our cleaner* as we can't afford to keep her. She was fine about it (I paid her double for today) and it'll be a bit of a relief to be able to find stuff in the house again. All random bits of paper with very important things on them tend to get shuffled into neat piles, and forgotten, and I nearly screamed today when I noticed that my very expensive left-handed fabric scissors had been washed up and left in the cutlery drainer.

If you hadn't guessed, I'm broke. I know - how chic. Everyone's broke, everyone's 'economising' - TopShop instead of Marni, Southwold instead of Thailand. What fun! But as someone with a flexible income, I'm living from cheque to cheque and counting my pennies. Trying to think of what to sell on eBay. Clothes? (Really should - I have over 50 dresses, most of which I've never worn...shameful.) Hair? (Not long and luscious enough, sadly. Maybe in 6-8 months' time.) Steve? (That man costs a LOT to keep.) Am trying to make my own fun, too. Here's my top five free fun things to do.

1) Bubble bath, manicure. Drink wine in the bath for added luxury. More realistically drink random sugary liqueur from drinks cabinet.
2) Read! I have a ton of books to get through.
3) Long, bracing walks. Ideally not along the South Circular.
4) Read blogs/online news.
5) Sew. Am making a dress into a top, and shortening things I've never worn in the hopes that they'll now fit/somehow be more appealing.

Even I got a bit depressed reading that list.



* Yes, I KNOW it's bourgeois, fascist, Tory whatever to have a cleaner, but she's really nice, I pay her well, and she only comes for three hours every two weeks and spruces the place up a bit.

Happy 2009. Not sure why, but I'm not really loving Christmas any more. It just seems increasingly like a month or so of stress and scrabbling around to get gifts for everyone, and then sitting around stuffing my face for two weeks, followed by a month or so of self-hatred when I can't get my jeans on. Well that's what it was like this year, anyway. Sorry to sound all bah-humbug, but I think next year I'd like to take a ten-day vacation over the Xmas/NY period...

What else? Well, it wasn't improved at all by the Israeli strikes since the 27th, as my sister is in Gaza. She was due to come home on January 17th but as the boat she was supposed to travel on has been hit (thanks, Israel, for that too) she'll be there a while longer. And to be honest she's not in any hurry to get out. As the British representative of the Free Gaza movement, she can't just run home as soon as it kicks off. But it doesn't reassure me to know that when buildings are being blown up, rather than sheltering, she'll be heading towards the explosion.

January 15th is our 6th dating anniversary... I'm getting S a present, seeing as his Xmas gifts from me ran to a Terry's Chocolate Orange (in limited edition hazelnut!), a copy of Revolutionary Road, and some stroompwaffles (?!). We did venture out to John Lewis at one point, only to both become distraught at the crowds and the fact that the entire shop had been picked over. I wanted to get a jigsaw and there were none. Steve wanted a leather satchel. Nothing. We also wanted to get a goose or a duck for our Xmas dinner (traditionally held on the 29th or 30th of December), but no game was available.

Pics are of Our People's Christmas meal, eaten at 10.30 as cooking took 5 hours (Steve) and tidying the dining room (me) nearly as long. On the menu: pork belly cooked with garlic, herbs and orange, roast potatoes, pigs in blankets, sweet potato & black pudding mash, honey roast parsnips, sprouts with chestnuts, stuffing, and gravy. And port and champagne. Cheers!

Am just about done with Christmas shopping, in every sense. Reached the stage where I was just buying things and not giving a hoot if people actually liked them or not... This was directly attributable to spending half an hour wandering round TK Maxx listening to Noddy Holder roaring 'IT'S CHRIST-MAAAASSSSSS!!!' and nearly culminated in me panic-buying my father-in-law a pair of tight briefs and anti-wrinkle cream. Got ahold of myself and purchased him some real ale instead. Tonight the kitchen production line will be in full swing - I'm making dark chocolate and hazelnut truffles (with orange-vanilla liqueur) and ginger and white chocolate cookies for various family we're seeing over the next few days. Am pretty happy to have done all my Christmas shopping for around £100. I made quite a few things - Steve had a couple of jumpers he didn't wear, which I felted in the washing machine. I cannot reveal what they have been recycled as, due to some of the readers of this blog being the 'lucky' recipients... I always feel faintly apologetic giving home-made gifts: 'I made you this - sorry.' But this year I'm actually pretty happy with them, the only downside being that due to cutting yards and yards of fabric, my left thumb has pins and needles and goes numb when I press on it in a certain place. Like when I'm holding a pen or a fork. Ooops.

Here's one he made earlier (about six months ago, in fact)

Spent the morning on a frantic scurry to M&S in Beckenham, to take advantage of their crunch-busting ‘2 dine for £10’ offer. You get a main course, side dish, pudding and a bottle of wine for a tenner. There’s not much choice for vegetarians (boo hoo for you!), what with the mains being a seafood paella, chicken breasts with apple sauce (yuk), Italian beef meatballs, and a whole chicken. I was tempted to get two chickens (usually £7 each) as part of the deal, but in the spirit of Christmas decided to not be greedy, and leave some for the poor suckers who couldn’t get there till after work.

PURCHASED TODAY

Beef meatballs with provelone
Whole chicken for roasting
Potatoes with rosemary and tomato
Roasting potatoes
Sticky toffee puddings
Selection of British cheeses
Bottle of Chenin Blanc
Bottle of Shiraz

Usual price: £32.90
Special price: £20

Ker-ching! It gave me a warm glow, I can tell you. Not least because now I can theoretically cook an entire meal without having a nervous breakdown/ bursting into tears. Steve does most of the cooking in our house, and does it best. This is mostly down to innate mad kitchen skillz, but also because he follows a recipe, shops for specific ingredients, and locks himself in the kitchen for three hours creating a gourmet feast. I use what’s in the house, don’t like to dirty more that one saucepan, and season most savoury dishes with an Oxo cube and ketchup.

But when it comes to baking, that man can’t touch me.

I'm back! And it only took me half an hour to sign in to Blogger after forgetting my password, which email address I'd used etc...

What's been going on in the 18 months since I last posted? Still freelancing, still (mostly) loving it. Steve and I got engaged in October 2007 in Sardinia, during the last week of sunshine the island had that year. After a few false starts on the proposal front over the holiday (he got a glint in his eye on a deserted beach, but a wasp spoiled the mood; again on the roof terrace of the World's Crappest Museum in Alghero, but I was too crabby to be approached), he got down on one knee in a cafe, and through my tears I managed to blub the word 'yes!'. We then celebrated with prosecco and crisps, followed by a horse & cart ride around the old town, lunch in a fancy restaurant, and hiring bikes in the afternoon. (Actually, we may have done the last bit the next day, but as all these activities would constitute my perfect day I'm selectively remembering it like this.) A ring was finally purchased in June 2008 (ahem...) and the wedding took place on September 20th. The groom wore a custom-made grey three-peice suit and a neat beard, the bride wore a $200 dress, £16 shoes, and jewellery and underwear that cost way more than that.
Honeymoon was a blow-out trip to Argentina and Uruguay, where we upped our iron levels with steak, chocolate and red wine, rode horses in the Andes, visited an amazing cemetary, and saw lots of birds. We returned to crashing poverty, kicking ourselves (OK, I was kicking us both) for not really saving up for the wedding or the trip. That's what credit cards are for, right?

So, December. I'm trying to catch up on lost earnings by working 6-7 days a week, and everyone's getting homemade stuff for Christmas (I apologise in advance).

Married life is like cohabiting life, but somehow different, too. Without wanting to be a Smug Married, it's just... nice. Like you're a team - you have to be, it's too late to get out of it now. Divorce is a lot of hassle. It feels like you have someone on your side, all the time.

It seems that after many, many years (about four, I think) of happy if sporadic blogging, it’s time to call it a day. I hardly ever update (I keep forgetting my login and password, which doesn’t help), and in my freeform workday I don’t schedule time to blog (which I should), and in the evenings there is wine to be drunk, TV to be watched, dinner to cook and a sunny garden to sit in. (I tried taking the computer into the garden and working from there but the screen was so dark I couldn’t see shit.) But I am still around, still guiltily signing up for things and then not working on them enough (see www.girlsrockuk.org) and still dancing like a drunken 60s loon every few weeks (see www.actionettes.com for the evidence…)
So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu.

Happy smingus dingus, the Polish festival of throwing water over each other! We thought it was this morning and much kitchen-based wet frolicking ensued, but actually it's next Monday. Don't tell Steve!

I pretty much stopped keeping up with music and going to gigs (apart from Yo La Tengo) a couple of years ago. I just didn’t know who was new, who I’d like; I’d never heard of the hot new bands. I relied (and actually still rely) on recommendations from friends, especially Jodie, Therese and Anamik. But I’ve recently discovered the Fred Flare boombox. Showing every one of my 31 years, I am rocking out in my home office to Of Montreal (Heimdalsgade Like A Promethean Curse – crazy name, amazing song), the Shins (I’m so 2005), CSS, the Changes, and New Young Pony Club (and that’s just one DJ’s selections). They also throw in classics like the Cure’s Boys Don’t Cry and some random NKOTB (does it matter that I was a fan first time around?). Suddenly even ageing indie kids like me can be hip to what the young ‘uns are listening to…

Creative Cooking

Me and the boy decided to defrost over the weekend. This decision was sort of thrust upon us, seeing as the fridge (yes, the fridge) had about 6” of ice on the back wall. We had a big jar of pickles in there, and it was filled with ice. (Steve took a photo.) So we turned up the heat (or turned down the cold) and left the door open, not thinking this would affect the ton of food we had in the freezer… Sunday morning, and the frozen bagels are soft. The veg, pastry, prawns, mixed berries, fish fingers, Chicago Town pizzas* etc are all gently thawing. We put in an emergency call to Tom, who despite being skinny can eat three portions of everything, and still have room for pudding. I made a giant veggie curry with spicy stir-fried prawns, and a (bloody delicious) mixed berry pie. Waste not want not. But what to do with those five chicken breasts…?

*the official drunk food of the J-D household

So not much has been going on these past few weeks - although I pretend to work really hard I actually do a lot of sitting around, drinking tea, and reading trashy magazines (Grazia has been replaced with high-street-fashion bible Look - Steve is disgusted, although he sneakily reads it... sometimes they have a piece on Beyonce, Scarlett or Zooey). During March and April I'm working in-house at a big company for 2-3 days a week. I sit at a desk, sometimes with amazing views to Hampstead Heath or St Paul's (the office is on the 14th floor), and check proofs for picture books, or input corrections, or sign off covers. It's fun, I get to work with my friend Christine, and I'm never sitting around twiddling my thumbs. Plus, I get a taste of why I left full-time publishing in the first place. A lot of the women working there (it's children's publishing - therefore 99.9% women) seem dissatisfied with how their careers are going, the amount of work they have (too much), the shitty 'no paid overtime' policy all publishing houses somehow combine with a deeply ingrained and well-observed long-hours culture. I figure 3 days a week is the maximum I can stand to be in an office. Spoiled, moi?

What a surreal night. To celebrate the Oscars Soho House has a party for its members. A friend of mine has membership and asked me along, as everyone else has day-jobs and can’t stay out drinking till 6am on a Monday morning. So we met in Bar Italia at midnight (I felt incredibly conspicuous on the train, in my evening coat and black patent heels, until I got to Soho that is, which was like 10pm on a Friday) for double espressos (£3.80?! Yeah, that perked me up pretty quick. I know it’s an institution and all, but bloody hell. I can’t even calculate the mark up on that). Bagging a good table in Soho House, we were brought bellinis. And then more bellinis. When the free champagne ran out we were bought a bottle by a man who seemed to know everyone, and asked the waiters to take care of us. He took turns flirting with me and Anna, and his conversation ran a very fine line between being obnoxious, offensive and laughably charming. He left at about 2am, after showing us a photo of his hot son, who is studying in Paris, and was replaced by another guy, one of the founders of Soho House. The conversation with him was even more surreal – at one point he asked me if I’d ever been to the New York branch of Soho House and if I went to Cannes and I wanted to have a quiet word and tell him that he had me confused with someone else. We’d both be pretty embarrassed when he realised I was a freelance editor, lived in an unhip part of south-east London and wasn’t a member of any exclusive clubs. At 4am giant trays of food were brought out – scrambled eggs, bacon, sausages, beans, hash browns, mushrooms, fried bread, tomatoes, smoked salmon – and there was a scrum for the buffet. Anna and I stayed till the bitter end (about 5.30), staggered out into the freezing darkness, and went to wait for the 176 bus which rather conveniently runs all night.

Update: it took me about 3 days to recover from this all-night shindig. I'm not as young as I used to be...

I really have no excuse for posting so infrequently. Lord knows it's not like I'm snowed under with work at the moment - I've spent about four days this month earning money. But I figure as January was a hellishly busy (and therefore profitable) month, I can slack off a bit now. Mostly I've been:

* making soup: faves are spicy roast squash, honeyed parsnip and onion, and tomorrow I'm trying to make artichoke and carrot. We got a bag of artichokes in our veggie box delivery and panicked a bit, as neither of us has ever cooked them.
* spending money on cheap clothing. Primark is the devil, and here's why. The clothing is lovely. Flattering, cool, puff-sleeved little tunics and jackets and 60s dresses and Marc Jacobs-esque handbags. And it's also dirt cheap, so it seems stupid not to stock up whenever I find myself passing (via a 20-minute bus ride from my house). Today I got a black sleeveless tunic, a black cropped jacket with big buttons and a big round collar, an orange bag for T, a wallet for me, and a change purse for J, all for £31.
* Doing laundry. Feels like I do laundry every day.
* Getting a bit bored, to be honest. I'm not quite ready to go back to working in an office and the myriad horrors (admin, meetings, commuting, expensive store-bought lunches, getting up at 7am) that involves, but I do need more company, and more money.

Note to the lady on the end of the phone at the local berevement counselling service:
When I call you to discuss getting counselling, please realise it took me weeks to get the courage to pick up the phone. Don't therefore, say 'OK, your half-sister', when I tell you my half-sister died. When I tell you my dad died 6 years ago, don't, after a pause, say 'OK, anyone else?' Isn't two people enough? When you ask me whether I drink and I admit that I drink most nights of the week (a glass of wine with dinner), don't pause for ages and then go 'Riiight.' Don't express disaproval at the mention of antidepressants. And don't then be surprised when I get upset, make excuses and hang up the phone.

It’s been a busy old month. We went to Barcelona at the beginning of January, where we walked around in T-shirts, drank cava at lunchtime (and teatime, and dinnertime), stuffed ourselves with delicious tapas, did an open-top bus tour of the city, wandered the mosaic-covered plazas of Parc Guell, and more. Our hotel, L’Antic Espai, was fantastic. Full of baroque 1950s furniture, run by a sweet gay couple who welcomed us with cold cava served in antique glasses on a little marble tray. Our room had a sunroom attached to it, a high, ornate ceiling with a giant chandelier, and it was 5 minutes’ walk from all the action.

If you do one thing
Drink a cocktail at Boadas. It’s a gorgeous little cocktail bar, really smoky, small, bartenders (who wear white shirts and bowties) don’t speak English, and it doesn’t serve wine or beer, just cocktails. In proper glasses. I wanted something in an old-style champagne glass, one of those wide, shallow ones, so the bartender made me a champagne cocktail. Steve had some kind of amazing rum daiquiri and we nearly had a run-in with another couple. We’d been standing at the bar waiting for a couple of seats to become free, and when they did I saw a couple heading for them (and, right, we were nearer, and we’d been waiting longer) so I hissed loudly (drunkenly) to Steve, “Get them! They’re going to grab our seats!” Steve said the woman looked daggers at me as I leapt across the room and flung myself onto a stool, but it had the desired effect: they retreated, and victory was ours. Apparently she kept glaring at me and after a while I just started laughing…

I’m back at my old job. BUT it’s just for January, only three days a week, and I’m getting a day rate that’s about 40% more than my salary was. Freelancing is great, but the downside is not working for a week or more at a time (and of course, no work = no pay). So I have been making my own fun: sewing, baking, cooking yum dinners, and decluttering the house (a never-ending project). Bit of a disaster yesterday when I tried to log in to Hotmail and couldn’t. Password would not work. Security question would not work. No contact details for MSN or Hotmail anywhere on the site, except a crappy form you can fill in and email to them which they can then ignore. Whoever stole my Hotmail also hacked into my eBay account. EBay were very helpful in that they confirmed that someone had changed my password and tried to use my account, and very unhelpful in that they wouldn’t tell me who that person was, or what they tried to do. But I have a clue… my eBay addresses page had the name changed to Rose Lawrence. Address was the same, but dopey Rose didn’t think to hide her name… Any advice on dealing with evil hackers, and getting back 5+ years’ worth of email, much appreciated…

We have the internet! Yes, Steve and I have finally joined the late-20th century (I may have made that joke already)! I feel much less isolated, and also by 10am I am usually working but today am playing on the web instead... oops. Thanks for comments people have tried to post: not sure what I've done to my settings but basically comments get sent to my hotmail for approval, but when I approve them they link back to blogger and I get a 'post not found' message. Suck! I think I did something to accidentally ban all comments except those from Rachel.

So, a typical day in slackerville goes something like this...
8.30 get up, shower, dress, make the bed, put on makeup, make porrige and coffee
9.30 sit down at kitchen table (desk not yet bought...) to work
1.30 break for lunch, half an hour or so
afternoon: more work, maybe a nap, or a long walk to Sainsbury's or Dulwich

It's fine, but I think I need to go into central London more, as my world is slowly shrinking to a few square miles, and I can see how people who rarely leave the house start wanting to never leave the house...

Last day! And it’s probably the nicest day I’ve had here since joining the company. Whether that’s cos people are being kind or because I’m leaving and so am naturally happy, I don’t know. Less than two hours left and it feels like Christmas, my birthday, and the day before a holiday, all rolled into one.

Last night Steve and I celebrated our one-year cohabiting anniversary with a nice dinner at Konstam and an argument about laundry. Ahh, domestic bliss. Konstam sources all its food from within the M25, but the thought of eating a London pigeon in London was a bit too disgusting so instead I had a roast artichoke salad and pork belly, and a delicious glass of English white wine. A few hours later I sullied my palate with a couple of glasses of vile Italian Pinot Grigio, which tasted like fruity paint stripper, its only redeeming features being that it was icy-cold and would get me tipsy, which I needed to be in order to dance on a stage in front of 100 art-school hipsters. The Actionettes had a gig at Legal Tender, a club night at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club in East London, and we were the first act on stage. It was a breeze compared to the earlier run-through, when all the bands and their trendy mates were sitting around, and we had to dance on the floor, sober, in work clothes, with bright overhead lights. Imagine dancing in front of a group of strangers, on command, and they’re all watching you. Yeah, exactly. My left leg kept shaking and I was scared everyone would notice. But the band tuning up behind us joined in on Have Love Will Travel, and there was a mildly enthusiastic round of applause when we were done.

Less than two days to go

I will sort of miss one or two of my colleagues, but on the whole I am glad to see the back of a few of them, and the feeling’s probably mutual. The irony is that I like the people I’m working with now more than the ones I was working with for the first five months at this company, before I was moved over to another imprint. The first imprint was chaotic, bitchy, backstabbing, and ruled by (but not run by) a bullying, egomaniac workaholic. My boss, a quiet, slightly awkward, woman, was out of her depth and knew it. She went home one day after a meeting and never came back. It was several weeks before we were told what had happened, with a brief announcement for both the company and the trade press, stating that she’d “left the company to pursue other interests”. In the meantime, egomaniac workaholic (EW), who was boss’s harshest critic, and had even gone as far as googling her and telling the entire office she’d been signing up to dating websites, got his own imprint to run. Thankfully he would be doing this at another location. So the “team” was split in two, with EW’s cronies moving to other offices, and the rest of the staff staying here, getting a new boss. New boss used to be commissioning editor at another imprint (are you still with me?), so when she was promoted to publisher there was a position to be filled. This is where I was moved. With two days’ notice and no choice. But seeing as I’d been miserable at the first imprint, I figured I’d give it a go. And although the people were helpful and pretty friendly, it was glaringly obvious to me that I just didn’t want to do this. I just didn’t care. Despite my job title, I was suddenly doing the job of an editorial assistant, and my self-esteem was non-existent. I was getting everything wrong, it was two weeks before the biggest book fair of the year, no one had time to train me, and I think I just sort of gave up. I wanted a break from 9-6 work, a break from commuting, a break from bosses, office politics, egos, filing, meetings.

Anyway, I’m just writing this now because I have nothing – literally, nothing – to do at work at the moment. Which of course makes the hours drag…

Am counting the days until I leave work… only two to go, and each one is passing slower than the last. The hardest thing is feigning interest in what I’m doing. Mentally, I’ve already left, so it’s tough to pretend I care about stuff I won’t be working on.

I’m so excited about working from home. At the moment this feels like the best move I’ve ever made (ask me again in a few months), and here are my plans for week one…

Steve will be off work too (yay!) and we’ll be tarting up the mansion, so a trip to B&Q or Homebase is high on the list of priorities. We’re painting the office pale lilac (apparently this colour stimulates creativity. Whatever, I just like it and think it looks good with hot pink), and the bedroom will be very pale pink. The kitchen and dining room will be baby blue. If we actually get around to painting more than one room I will be amazed, but it’s OK to be ambitious.

Riding an open-air bus. Yes, I realise it’s November. But Jean got me two tickets for a hop-on hop-off bus ride, valid for 24 hours (so I’m planning a day ride and an evening ride), for my 30th birthday, and in a year and a half I still haven’t used them. For shame! We will don our warmest coats and hats, fill the hipflask with whiskey, and pretend we are in a giant double-decker convertible (well I will anyway).

Doing lots of work. My first official freelance proofreading job has landed – and it’s 1,000 pages long. I made a dent in it a few weeks ago when I was at home ill, but at an average rate of 17 pages per hour it’s going to take about 58 hours to plough through this bad boy.

Taking advantage of lunch specials. Mclean’s, a nice little café near us, has crazy specials with buy-one-get-one-free meals for £5.95. We’ve been there for breakfast and it was great. Also, a new tapas bar has just opened round the corner. I walked past last night on my way home and it was heaving. They had opening specials (doubles with a mixer for £2.50, cheap tapas) and I am very excited.

Sleeping a lot. And just lying in bed. Maybe having coffee and breakfast in bed. Maybe reading.

Decorating the office. Although it’s a shared room, who are we kidding, the office is mine. We’re visiting Ikea for a spending spree, to get a desk, shelf, desk chair, and lamp. I want to make a shade for the ceiling light, and wrap clean tins in paper or patterned fabric to make pencil holders. I want to get lovely patterned paper and use it to cover files and folders. I want to buy a plain blind for the glass door, which leads onto a small balcony, and decorate it.

Sewing. The next Actionettes club is a Monster Mash on November 11th, and I need to look scary. Found a black brocade minidress in Primark for £10, but it’s a bit plain. Needs a black-and-gold sparkly bib front, or pockets, or a collar.

So, big news on the work front: I’m giving it up. Well, not entirely (a girl’s got to eat), but as of November 4 I will be freelance. Yippee! I’ve been toying with the idea for a couple of years but was always talked out of it by colleagues. Reasons given included “If you leave publishing you’ll never be able to get back in” (what? So all those women with children didn’t take maternity leave?); “It’ll look bad on your CV” (my A-levels looks pretty bad on my CV, but I’ve still been offered jobs); “You’ll starve” (maybe, but I could lose a few pounds anyway) etc.

So I am taking the plunge. After weighing up the pros and cons (pros: so many. A few are: not having to get up at 6.45am; not commuting on steamy, stinky trains; not having to go to Kings Cross every day; not sitting at my desk biting my own hand to stay awake; not having to smile and be nice to Bully Boss; being master of my own destiny. Cons include: no regular income. And that’s about it, really.) and discussing with Steve, I’ve decided to do it.

And now that it’s just under a week away I can’t wait. Am making all sorts of money-saving plans, ranging from the bloody obvious (stop buying so much cheap clothing, spend less on booze), to the so-frugal-I’ll-never-stick-to-them (wearing four layers in winter to avoid turning on the heating, having beans on toast for lunch every day), and last night we even had a House Meeting, with all residents in attendance. I took minutes, we agreed to start a kitty for groceries and basic toiletries, and today I changed our phone contract for a cheaper service. We still need to buy a computer – I want an iBook, Steve wants a PC notebook, but whatever we get it needs to be purchased pretty damn soon, as feeling unconnected and isolated makes me depressed. Part of my daily routine will be checking email, reading blogs, etc, each morning, so that even though I won’t be interacting with people physically at least I won’t go mad with loneliness.

Am wearing skinny jeans. After a year of flirting with this most unflattering of trends, it has finally come to pass. But they were only £12 from Primark, which is just as well as I think I’m getting deep vein thrombosis. Seriously. They’re tucked into my black boots, and my calves are throbbing and hurting like crazy, but short of turning the jeans into cut-offs there’s not much I can do until I get home tonight. Oh dear. It had to happen sooner or later – the first death from DVT caused by too-tight jeans. (For the next Actionettes club night we each have to pick a gristly cause of death (it’s the Monster Mash/ Halloween special), and I think I’ve found mine…)

It's now a few days later (a combination of Blogger being uncooperative, my boss hovering over me constantly, and the run-up to the wretched Frankfurt Book Fair prevented me from posting) and today I am dressed as the Hamburglar. Wearing black trousers, a long-sleeved stripy black and white tee, and a black sweater vest. All I need is a black eye mask and I can begin my burger-stealing spree!

Tomorrow I fly to Frankfurt for the day. I am excited to be going (it's a free trip, I get spending money, I'm out of the office for a day) but not too excited at the prospect of getting a cab at 5am (I'm staying over at my Mum's, as she lives slightly nearer to Heathrow than I do), and then landing back in the UK at 10.30pm, just in time to catch the Vomit Express from London Bridge after midnight. I've been looking on the web for vintage stores in Frankfurt, with no luck. I fear it's such a business town that all the shops sell souvenirs/wine and smoked cheeses/designer clothing. I still, eight years on, think fondly of the amazing, tiny, cluttered vintage store I found in Budapest: Victorian dresses and petticoats hung from the ceiling, ballgowns were crammed onto rails. The elderly woman who ran it wanted me to give her my copy of Time Out Budapest, where the shop was listed. I had to explain that this book was the only thing preventing me from wandering in circles for several days while slowly starving to death, as I don't speak Hungarian and didn't know anyone in the city.