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.

The last line of this paragraph from Michael Ondaatje's 'Anil's Ghost':

He had grown up loving the sea... And whatever coast he was on - at Hambantota, in chilaw, in Trincomalee - he would watch fishermen in catamarans travel out at dusk till they faded into the night just beyond a boy's vision. As if parting or death or disappearance were simply the elimination of sight in the onlooker.

Each time anyone close to me has died, I have been absent - not close at all. The pattern has been remarkable, to me at least. And so it has at times seemed to me as though it is not that the person has gone, but simply that I am not going to see them any more; they have stepped outside my line of sight. Almost as though it is my failure, my inability to see, that is at the heart of their absence.

This all sounds pretty silly and pagan and more serious than I would like when written down by me, but when Ondaatje says it - it speaks.

So it would seem that sambuca shots and sleepless nights are not the fastest route to curing a cold. Oh when will I learn?

Still, no cold was going to stop me from getting to Wardour Street to buy the fabric for my soon-to-be ballgown. Yards and yards of periwinkle blue chiffon, with bluebell silk satin for the lining... Old-fashioned Heaven.

So anyway, I'm walking through Trafalgar Square with a bag of silks in one hand and a baguette in the other, desperately trying to stay ahead of the huge anti-vivisection march, out of earshot of catchy slogans such as 'No more torture, no more lies, every six seconds, an animal dies' - and I get chatted up. I am actually beginning to think of myself as some kind of sleaze-magnet. Ok, sure my dress was short and blowing about a bit in the breeze, but I was doing my best to control it with my baguette-wielding hand, so hardly channelling Marilyn Monroe. I suppose perhaps I ought to be flattered, but this man was out WITH HIS SON. And I am so not ready to become the stepmother of a five-year-old kid with a mohican and a gold chain. So thanks, 'Marcus', but no thanks.

The thing I love most about being ill is how I feel like a child again, wrapped up, small, drinking hot ribena, luxuriating in just the right degree of self pity. I am actually trying to work here on my sofa, but instead I keep dozing off and dreaming of crocodiles. Funnily enough, I also wonder if this is what it is like being old. The involuntary dozing bit anyway.

From the warmth of my room, the brightness outside successfully impersonates summer, rather diminishing the pleasure of being poorly. I suppose this cold is penance for staying out til 3am in that ghastly club in Leicester Square on Tuesday evening. On a school night! I wonder if now I am older, all misdemeanours will be paid for in like - comedy dance moves in the early hours of the morning will inevitably entail an afternoon on the sofa wheezing and snoozing like a granny. Great.

I'm not old, I'm not old, I'm not old.

It’s ten days since I returned from my two weeks abroad, and it’s a relief to find that the feelings of rejuvenation and optimism have not yet completely petered out. Strangely, I still feel a deep and constantly surprising pull of homelessness for Singapore. Lovely as my first spring in London is proving to be, the memory of heat is hard to shift. I could write endlessly about this holiday. 2009 was characterised by huge upheavals in my life, and yet I still managed to spend most of it within Zone 1. I became completely intoxicated with London. But my brief affair abroad has altered, although not quite broken, the spell.

Travelling alone again has reignited my independence. After months evading solitude, it was thrilling to rediscover that things can be just as exciting, just as beautiful, when seen on one’s own.

I still miss Jane though. In the heart of Colombo we made a pact - of resolutions to be fulfilled within the five months until our next meeting. Anything seems possible on the other side of the world.

At least I know my optimism and my plans will not be quashed or cluttered by my love life. One of the major disadvantages of travelling alone is having to apply sunscreen to one’s own back; mine now resembles an atlas in browns. I’d blend very well into the undergrowth. Then there’s my brown stockings, which end abruptly mid-thigh and the stripes of my midriff, which resemble a diagram of the earth’s crust, and wouldn’t look too wrong labelled ‘topsoil’, ‘permafrost’… Anyway, it’s hardly a good look for seduction.

When I grow up I want to be a chav

So I have two fears at the moment:

1) I am becoming an fully-fledged adult.
2) Under my liberty-print, Byatt-reading, David Dimbleby-watching exterior, I may actually be a chav.

The first is to do with a sudden liking for Jamie Cullum. For an ex-jazzophobe, discovering that I suddenly can’t get enough of the boo-boppety (ok, not quite the boo-boppety, more the laid back omelettes-on-a-Sunday-morning kinda groove) is disconcerting to say the least. Jazz and wine used to represent the habits of people more grown-up (read: more boring) than myself; now they seem pretty acceptable companions. Well blow me: looks like I’m a grown-up!

The second has been a sneaking suspicion for some time. The way huge gold hoop earrings always seem to be the perfect finishing touch to my outfit; the way I love to drive vans; the fact that my phone is pink and that the other weekend I woke up to find a half-drunk WKD blue in my fridge – these are all serious symptoms of a barely repressed chav persona. The well-bred don’t suddenly lapse into an Aussie accent; they don’t make up ‘alternative’ names for works of art in the Tate Modern; they don’t win sailing trips by dancing on bars – they just sail.

I am never cool and languid, nor are my limbs long and graceful. I have no cheekbones to speak of, my hair will not be bouffant no matter what I do (I cut it myself on a whim in a pub in Victoria, so the most it does in the way of wispiness or volume is to stick out over my ears in racoon-like tufts) and I am never going to be tall. Ever. But with one friend telling me that a male mate of hers isn’t posh enough for me, whilst another tells me ‘you’ve gotta treat those posh boys mean’ – what am I to do?!

It’s not all bad news, however. My Chinese step-grandmother was a notorious Kampong flirt, who used to run up gambling debts then hide under the bed when the collectors came to call and throw scissors at her daughters across the room. She’s now nearly 100 and still going out to lunch. So maybe there’s something to be said for a bit of roughage in the diet…

I think I am actually allergic to Friday nights in. It doesn't matter one bit that I've got a horrible cold, my body temperature doing a jig up, down and all over town - I do not want to spend the best night of the week sat at home alone watching Jonathan Ross and wondering: when did Charlotte Church get hot?!

Note to self - if a mum of two looks that much better than you, it is definitely time to go to the gym. And stop eating ice cream from the tub. That would be now.

Essentially, I think I am paying for last weekend. I had been drinking for fourteen hours straight; something was bound to go wrong. And it had been such a lovely weekend - tequila in the Cuban bar, picnicking in Richmond park, pool in the Pilgrim... Then of course I spoiled the fun with my very special knack for making a mess.

And now someone is very angry with me.

Misandry, and other endearing traits

Apparently last Saturday was the 100th International Women’s Day. I am a woman, and yet I was completely oblivious to this fact. Apparently some thousands of women marched through the centre of London, along the very same streets that I trod 24 hours later, guilt-shopping (it’s like comfort-eating, only where you substitute some niggling moral guilt for the more easily assuaged guilt of spending money on scarves and nail polish).

Reading The Independent’s celebratory feature on the women’s movement (well, celebratory insofar as pointing out still extant inequalities and producing lots of mini pie-charts of how badly off some/most women still are is celebratory), I began to feel a little left out. The feminist debate still rages, and so far I have opted out.

It’s never seemed to have much to do with me: I grew up in a home where Mother ruled, where Calamity Jane was the aspiration, where Barbie didn’t need Ken so long as she had a substantial wardrobe and where men, well men just weren’t around to cause any problems. During my teens, the place at the head of the table was more often than not occupied by the most important male in my life – Snoopy the cat.

University changed everything. I had never had to compete with boys before. A girls’ school education, girl guides, dance classes – none of these had prepared me for the discovery that in the ‘real world’, most of the authority figures (dead and alive) are Men. And that Men like to argue.

As a student faculty representative, I sat through many committee meeting discussions trying to unravel why, in a female-dominated subject, academic success nevertheless belonged to the male minority. It seemed simple and yet unsolvable: examiners rewarded those who took the plunge; amongst the reams of exam responses those which stood out would inevitably be those with the wildest and most uncompromising lines of argument. Balanced and consequentially cautious approaches wouldn’t stand a chance, conventionally female approaches wouldn’t stand a chance.

A girl a couple of years younger than me followed me from school to Cambridge, to the same college and the same subject. I think she too was startled at the differences between the High School for Girls and the Higher Education for Everyone. She once asked me, frustrated and bewildered, why we hadn’t been taught to argue the way the boys had – 'the way we were supposed to'.

It was also at university that I encountered openly sexist attitudes for the first time. My male friends compiled a spreadsheet (this was Cambridge, they were geeky as well as misogynistic) rating all eighty-odd girls in our college year. The qualities afforded ratings included Face, Legs, Breasts, How many pints before you’d sleep with them, Accessibility, and – my especial favourite – the Personality tick box: Yes or No.

Back then I wrote an article for the student paper on the facet of sexism which most affected me - which continues to affect me. Putting aside the rights and wrongs, dos and don’ts of promiscuity, language is against us girls. Whilst a guy who is frequently friendly with our sex is nothing worse than a ladies’ man, or a player, any girl who indulges in the same behaviour is likely to find sooner or later that ugly word slut creeping into her company.

For guys, it’s simply a game and you’re the players. Such a label does no damage; in fact often the opposite – it endows you with a little of the frisson of the game itself, the seductive eye-twinkle of the gambler. But for us girls, the appellation ‘slut’ is barely one step up from ‘whore’. Romping in the mire of immorality, with the ample bosom of a milkmaid and unfeasible amounts of underwear on display, the Slut is the nemesis of all Nice Girls, the one-best-forgotten of all Nice Boys, and ultimately the mere plaything of the Player.

Oops, I did it again.

I reckon the reason my heart is so fit is the mini workout it gets every Friday night when I decide to get lost and frightened in Brixton or wander through the subway of doom in Elephant and Castle alone at 3am. Thump, thump, thump - I'm surprised all the robbers and rapists of south London can't hear from a mile off how scared I am. But I put on my fearless walk, and I make it home, and my sensible flatmate makes me promise not to do it again.

Then I do it again.

Work in a nunnery

Spring is here, the sun is out, the clouds have lifted and possibilities are as infinite as the sky!

That is, until I get to work.

Today, my boss booked me into a seminar in late November. My contract is due to expire at the end of October. I should be happy; this means they want to keep me. But I'm not sure I want to be kept - at five months this job is approaching my all-time employment record of six months (in an unpaid, come-and-go-as-you-please position). That's five solid months of getting up on time(ish). I have a smart flat complete with real wood floors and halogen lighting; I am joining a gym this week; I wear shiny pointy shoes - and hell, I wasn't even hungover on Sunday. This is growing up, and I don't think I like it.

Reading Byatt's Possession this evening (yep, I came home and settled on the sofa with a book, like a real adult) I came across the phrase 'full-blooded departmental male'. This is what my current job lacks: a full-blooded departmental male. We are a company of full-blooded departmental women. We sit up in our attic office, spinning words like a band of editorial spiders, or more romantically, like fairytale women trapped in towers, awaiting rescue by a knight on a staircase of books.

Ok, I'm exaggerating. FedEx pay us at least one visit a week, and they're normally pretty male, if not full-blooded. And I'm actually the only unmarried member of the gang. Debs is so inextricably intertwined with her boy-husband Alex that I really don't know how she makes it into work without him clinging around her ankles (I do have to listen to on average half a dozen 'It's in the second drawer, where the whisks are... Well, have you looked underneath the whisks? Mmm, yes I love you too...' phone calls per day, all announced by the epic ringtone 'Take My Breath Away'), and our boss Jacky, all jangling bangles, clinging sweater dresses and fiery red hair is apparently at the centre of some steamy love triangle involving the head of Waterstones and the head of Johnson & Johnson. Whereas yours truly... To be honest I suspect the main reason Jacky is so keen to keep me on is that there is basically zero chance of my absconding on interminable maternity leave. And because I like to gossip.

Just a thought: why is it that spiders are always figured as female? Is it just the spinning, or is it something more sinister to do with legs?

Brush up on culture...

I am unreasonably tired for someone who slept nigh on ten hours last night. I can feel the weight of four months’ sleepless weekends sitting on my eyelids. I catch sight of myself in a mirror and am surprised at how exhausted I look – not weary so much as dazed, pale even beneath bronzed cheeks.

Since being single again, I have found myself with a lot more time on my hands. I do and achieve much more. Hours lolling about in bed are no longer an acceptable way to spend Sunday morning, nor is a quiet evening in a desirable way to spend a Saturday night. Thus, on the rare weekends when I am not too hungover to move (and sometimes even on those when I am) I take myself off for a dose of culture. Sundays are often quite busy for me, as I realise that I’m going to have to wait another whole five days for a free one, and consequently pack as much activity into my final few hours of freedom as possible.

Today, my adventure took me to the Saatchi Gallery. It’s not a particularly long walk from my home, although I did predictably manage to get lost amongst the white streets of Pimlico on the way. I must admit I was very much enticed in by the title of the exhibition: The Empire Strikes Back, and with more shame admit that I was too skint to buy the £1.50 guide. As such, I didn’t really have a clue what it was all about. I’ve never been much interested in Indian culture – being half Chinese I didn’t feel like I had a lot of room for any other Asian influences. There was one particularly disturbing exhibit where a stuffed camel was, well, stuffed into a suitcase.

I liked the gallery nonetheless, and followed it up with a visit to the V&A, where I looked at a little display of fairytale illustrations, including some by Dulac and Rackham. I also wandered into the cast courts. The first time I visited the cast courts I was with a guy with whom I was utterly besotted; it was quite a relief to be able to look at them without such a distraction.

Worry about books...

It is payday tomorrow, and to celebrate I went out and spent money that I didn’t yet have. It’s ok though, because I spent it on books, thereby making the only solid investment available to paupers in these pauperising times.

‘My favourite Le Carre, that is to say the one I’ve read the most, i.e. several dozen times…’
These words, uttered pompously by a portly suited man to a fellow portly suited man on the stairs managed to reach me on quite the other side of Waterstone’s. I then decided that life is far too short and full of interest to read any book several dozen times, unless it concerns Moomins, and consequently purchased three by authors completely new to me:

1) The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to be Happy, by Michael Foley
2) What I Loved, by Siri Hustvedt
3) The Wild Places, by Robert Macfarlane

Ok, so the last author isn’t completely new to me – at least not as a human being. He was one of my English tutors and I, along with the rest of the female portion of our seminars (which was the majority), was comfortably besotted. I rarely spoke in seminars, but I did manage to give him an awkward wave once. It was a high point. Anyway, these three books (good thing it was a 3 for 2 offer) pretty much sum up the threads tangling themselves around my brain at the moment – happiness (or rather the lack of it), love (definitely the lack of it) and the wild (not so much lacking as simply inconceivable in the urban paradise that is SE11).

I read this fascinating article by Jason Epstein from The New York Review of Books this morning; it is the best I have come across so far concerning the (inevitably) digital future of books, and should be of interest to not just publishers and writers, but anyone who reads.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23683

Embarking on my first real editing job, and being told I could make a good career out of publishing, naturally I am interested in where this industry I have entered is headed. But my feelings in response to this article are more than just professional interest – I am awed, and terrified. I know I should be too young to cling to the old, but books have been the stepping stones of my life. Furthermore, I am jealous by nature – and resentful of the idea that ‘Digitization makes possible a world in which anyone can claim to be a publisher and anyone can call him- or herself an author.’ As someone who has thrived on traditional (some would say outdated) structures of success – academic examinations being one – and relishes the letters which say that I have a degree which someone else does not, I am not a little dismayed by this literary free-for-all. And finally, I am by no means immune to my mother’s fear of a worldwide powercut simply vapourising the worldwide web (I have still not been able to get anyone to confirm that this is definitely impossible…).

But then again, I am writing this in a blog. One of my two blogs. Who am I to judge?

I am a little anxious about blogging. Is it possibly the most egotistical form of written expression? Is the self-chronicling blogger even more tiresome than the adolescent poet? Am I fretting too much considering no one cares?!

So I was in Topshop Oxford Circus earlier, and, to celebrate London Fashion Week, they were having ongoing 'blogging clinics' with successful fashionista bloggers offering the hapless shopper advice on, presumably, how to also become a successful fashionista blogger. The problem is that in Topshop, height and indifference are the hallmarks of cool - and consequently, being short and enthusiastic, I am deeply un-cool. Just to compound self-consciousness, I have a habit of absent-mindedly picking up a bizarre item of clothing, holding it for just a second too long before realising that it is in fact a size 6 neon lace all-in-one with a velvet crotch and foil shoulder-pads (or something equally confounding) and then shoving it back with a sense of acute embarrassment. No, there is no way I could have approached the fashionista bloggers to discuss their views on bloggery.

It's not just Topshop that's against small people. Shops in general like to laugh at us. They install security cameras and then place all the size 5 shoes on a 7 ft high shelf. They make us stand on straining tip-toes, ask for help, or even occasionally climb - the ultimate behavioural proof of NOT being tall and indifferent. It's a terribly cruel trick - you go into a shop hoping to purchase something which will alter your short-and-enthusiastic image, only to be reminded of it at every turn, until the point where you quit Topshop and go to Octopus on Carnaby Street to look at toasters decorated with clouds, and forks with faces.

Behaving like a whiskeyed granny...

This is the first post of my second blog on the third night of having a hotdog instead of a thumb. Am writing this whilst soaking said thumb in cold water and then blowing on it. This is doing very little to alter the fact that since I poured boiling water over it at 4am on Sunday morning, it has been more akin to a partially-cooked sausage than my familiar digit. I was trying to make a hot water bottle, in the dark, under the influence. I woke up the next morning with the hot water bottle on the floor, and a wet patch on my pillow to whence the hand-bandage had migrated.

I am fairly sure this was Fate punishing me because I had been so chary with the hand mere hours earlier, when someone tried to hold it.