"Excuse me, can I interest you in buying this dead horse?"

I had such good intentions. I came to update this virtually the second I'd come into the room, and it refused to work. Grrrrr. I pressed 'Refresh' a lot and then got sidetracked listening to I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, and checking my email (oddly enough I didn't have any new ones since checking half an hour previously), and trying to destroy a paying-in receipt with nail clippers.

It has been quite a long time since I actually provided any illuminating information about my life, as opposed to pointless yet amusing quotes or photo-spam. This may be because the last posts went roughly along the lines of: "Ooh! Oxford is sunny! All my friends have finished finals and nobody has anything to do except sit on lawns and drink Pimm's or (once the bank statements come through) Blossom Hill." There have been several inclement breaks in the sunniness, but not frequent enough to prevent my back turning bright pink. Other than that, my life has really changed very little, except that Nik is no longer doing finals and is now able to watch epic quantities of 24 with me.

I could talk about various difficulties (re-)fitting into already established social groups (that I may once have been part of); or feeling like an appendage to the boy (a dull one, that gets sleepy at parties and nags him about finding a job) instead of an actual person; or not having a particular purpose now the mad Italians have gone home and finding a life of unmitigated hedonism rather unfulfilling having not just finished some very stressful exams; or general distress about The Rest Of My Life.

This last is, actually, rather unfair. I have a plan, involving postgrad funded by EFL tutoring and translation/proof-reading and then becoming a critically acclaimed novelist, and if this falls through (i.e. the idea of stringing together enough words to constitute a respectable thesis or novel overpowers me) then a helpful website has thrown up several more career options which had me raving about becoming a lexicographer (can't you so see that happening?), and it doesn't bother me at all that of the handful of jobs I liked the sound of, in 90% of them financial reward plays "no part". It is hugely self-indulgent to worry about all this now when a large proportion of my readership consists of jobless ex-finalists for whom this angst is a good deal closer than a year away (*hugs* to all in this predicament), but the astonishing number of transitions, goodbyes and departures I've endured this year has given me a peculiar twitchiness and an irritating tendency towards self-analysis.

It's just that sometimes I feel like the quote in the introduction to all the Folio editions of Beauvoir, that quote that I can't remember or translate about feeling torn between living life and writing about it; like how I updated this almost every day in Lyon, because I was bored and miserable, but as soon as Sainsbury's has Pimm's, Cava and strawberries on special offer, I can go days without stringing words together; and this choice between dullness/misery and productivity versus (most of the time) contentment, good company and not feeling the need to lock myself away with a computer may replicate itself later in life with something (I hope) of more worth than this. I feel passionate about so many things, but at some point I have to stop them, and describe them, or else I go mad.

My problem is not that I don't know what to do: I've known that since I was 5. My problem is that what I want to do scares me.

I'm scared that I'm not as good at it as I think I am. I'm scared that I won't have the discipline to find out. I'm scared the fear of rejection will turn me into the sort of person who hoards things in drawers and that all my descendents will find fourteen unfinished novels and say I could have been quite good, it's a pity I wasn't. I'm scared the ancestral curse will get me, and I'll give up being creative and notable in order to breed prolifically, like all the women I'm related to did while my Grandpa gets a CBE. (Sorry. Just had to drop that in.) Indeed, in a Shakespeare's sister sort of way, we could extend this beyond my immediate family, but that's a whole different ball game. I'm scared it may be incompatible with a normal life, whatever that may be, and whether I even want it.

There's a Margaret Atwood poem which sums up how I feel pretty accurately, but not even Google can find it. It begins "Do poets really suffer more than other people?" if you want to look it up. (And I recommend you do.)

And now I'm going to curl up in bed, with my diary, and Le Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs.


oh but now, old friends, they're acting strange
and they shake their heads
and they tell me that I've changed
well, something's lost and something's gained
in living every day.