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.