I suspect the amount of time I spend on public transport in the company of plants isn't quite normal. Today it was a large scarlet and slightly squashed cyclamen which elicited the friendly smiles of fellow passengers on the bus home. Travelling with a plant is rather like wearing fancy dress - a guaranteed key to the kindness and/or interference of strangers. Once, in a rare act of courtesy, a man gave up his seat on the bus for me and my tray of a dozen pansies. Perhaps the elderly and pregnant should each be given a small pot plant to carry around with them as an invitation to similar kindnesses.

Two weeks ago a woman on the central line openly wanted to sniff my baby Christmas tree, bending down and having a serious inhale to the point where I was worried some of the needles were going to be vacuumed up into her brain, or even that she would have sniffed up for herself all the smell that my 'delicately scented' little arbor contained. Then upon leaving the carriage, a small child waved me 'bye bye Christmas tree'. I resisted the urge to ventriloquise a response.

Days like this are heaven on earth. White blazing sunshine, cool green shade, a bit of melodrama and a bit of football (the latter on TV; the former in my living room over a bottle of wine). This is the first World Cup to which I’ve paid much attention. I remember the last one vividly, not because of the football, but because it was the summer I fell in love with London.

I was in the early clutches of an infatuation which, although it would continue for much (too) much longer, was then at its most potent, and least painful. It was the summer after my first year at university, and I took the train into Kings Cross from Hertfordshire armed with nothing but a discman and The Kooks’ ‘Naïve’ on repeat. A month later I would be living in Italy with an iPod and a new wardrobe, but that July I was still easily impressed - and consequently for me, one person came to represent a whole city.

We drank sat on the street kerb in Camden; we watched the sunset from Primrose Hill. I followed him through the cast courts in the V&A, utterly unable to concentrate. He took me to shabby bars in Shoreditch, worlds away from the London I had grown up with – the London of West End musicals, department store windows at Christmas, Topshop and water lilies at the National Gallery. It was the first time I had been in the city with someone who wasn’t fretting over the last train home, or the rules of their travelcard. I rode terrified and laughing on the back of his bike through Trafalgar Square and St James’s Park, back to the Westminster flat – where I would wake the next morning, too early, and with careful quiet marvel at the views, the office workers already at their desks in the Channel Four building, and at his library of ‘important’ French literature.

I spent those days in a paralysis of joy and fear. Out of them was born an enduring passion for this city, with whom my love affair has continued (thankfully) beyond the other. Cities are endlessly generous, at least I feel them to be so – but then snatching at summer evenings with a guy who is in a serious relationship with someone else gives one a rather warped view of generosity. So today I still find London endlessly rich and captivating – and never more so than in early summer. The arches of Green Park, cathedral-like on an early Sunday morning. The eternal fairground of the South Bank, the baubles of the Albert Bridge. The cool meditativeness of the Tate, the civilised crowds of the Royal Academy, the ebullient flowers of St James’s Park, the scarlet of the guards outside the Palace – London is worth every flicker of my passion. Whereas he was most definitely not.

So it is Sunday, which invariably means the little man with the hammer has awoken in my brain and set to work with exceptional dedication. In other words, I am badly hungover. I can actually feel my peripheral brain cells shrivelling in disgust, and internal organs going into mute revolt. My body hates me.

My life is altogether too complicated at the moment to allow for these blips of inactivity. At this moment I have an overly complex and disastrously precarious set of relationships with various members of the opposite sex requiring careful vigilance (I would say management, but I'm not managing it very well). Who'd've thought painting pub signs could lead to so much drama?! One bar, four guys - it's a mess and a muddle, just like me.

Oh my head, my head, it hurts!

No one gives a pep talk like my mother. And boy, did I need one.

From time to time things happen which strike the carefully balanced walls of your life with the force of an earthquake, perhaps not exactly crumbling things but shifting their foundations – so nothing is quite what it was before, and nothing stands steady. This week, one such thing happened. It didn’t even happen to me exactly; I was on the periphery – but I felt the tremors and saw the cracks.

Perhaps these past few months haven’t been the best of my life. But you can’t hold troubles responsible for making you a troublemaker and in truth, I’ve done some things of which I am less than proud. So now is a new season, and it’s time to change. Sudden shocks can throw new lights across your life, and my height is not the only thing which could be improved… It is the only thing which beyond a doubt won’t.

You know that feeling of frustration when you've filled out an online form and, hitting the wrong button, wipe the lot? And you have to go back over it and painstakingly re-type your postcode, and phone number, and Visa number... And then it happens again.

Sometimes that's how my life feels.

At the moment, I am mostly thinking about the cold. It is May - loveliest, greenest, most radiant and promising of months; my favourite. But it is freezing, and in my spring wardrobe I feel like a flower struck by late frost. I have decided that I actually prefer heartache to cold. I prefer crippled feet, and an empty bank account, and Saturday nights in alone - in fact all of the bad things that happen to me are better than being cold. When I walk home in the early hours and the loneliest streets, I am less afraid of being mugged than I am of shivering myself to death. Snake blood, my mother says.

But the evenings are longer and I am in love with the promise of summer; my imagination is all wrapped up in sunshine and warm lawns and cool drinks. I have also started my very first garden. Gertrude Jekyll herself would be impressed; this is going to be the Kew Gardens of 8 foot patio spaces... To open my curtains in the morning and see a dozen pansies winking up at me is nothing short of miraculous for a girl who once killed an airplant. And yes, they do wink - my flowers are saucy little minxes...

Ah - one good thing has come out of my sickly imprisonment. I put up some pictures. Am a huge fan of Rob Ryan, and this is my homemade homage. An homage both pretty (in that it coordinates with our fairy lanterns) and useful (in that it partly conceals the glue that was sprayed onto the wall the night we had a, erm, spray-glue fight...) A domestic goddess of a sort.

N.B. I was asked to show ID when buying the craft knife I used on this, as well as for the blue spray paint. Just in case I was going to go slash up my own graffiti. And because I would obviously go to 'Let's Fill This Town With Artists' if I was that kind of a kid.

The moon is luminous through the frames of the gas works tonight, and out on the roof it is almost still warm enough to sit. I wonder how many years it will be before I stop associating being ill with comfort, with day-long company, jaffa cakes and afternoon repeats of Midsomer Murders - and begin to remember that these days it is actually loneliness, and boredom, and a lack of decent meals. Anyway, I am returning to work tomorrow even if I do still look (and feel) like last night's leftover pizza. The new boss starts, and I'm meant to be seeing my ex, and if I have to spend another day in this flat on my own I will probably have to tidy up, which is just one step too far.

For a tiny flat it can get remarkably messy. I don't know where all these things come from (sometimes, disconcertingly in the case of items of clothing, neither does Natasha), nor can I work out where things go to. I have spent the day feeling its smallness, and now, suddenly, when I unlock the back door and put down the key, or try to make up my stripped bed, it is an infinity of little places. Seriously though, it is not cool to lose the only bedlinen that wasn't put in the wash today. How far can a satin pillowcase really go on its own?!

I need to get out more. I'm blogging about pillowcases. One pillowcase.