My arms hurt all the way up to the top of my neck, as if they were strapped to a yoke, whitely burny across the back of my shoulders. It could have been lugging the new shelves home or scrubbing the carpet (my forefinger is all worn down now!) or cleaning back my scraps into boxes (so much scissor-work!) or dragging out black plastic bags too heavy with paper but I'm inclined to blame the patronising bitch potential useful contact who phoned me up during a horrible upload which kept splintering against the weasel sphincter-sized hole in the firewall that is all IT feels I deserve. By the time I had finally prevented all Dreamweaver's attempts to automatically resume things she was asking me if I wanted her to phone me again later (but by that point what would have been the point). She wanted to me to go to a youth centre in rural Oxfordshire for the next installment of how cradle-to-grave care is turning into cradle-to-grave observation and obligation. Meanwhile the THT box-shakers are not having a happy World AIDS Day; all their lavendar balloons are streaked with dirty winter rain.

I died my hair with unstoppable Fudge Orange Crush for the OUSFG christmas party so I could be Captain Nemo. We were going as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen -- I was Nemo, complete with clownfish paint and a rather small plastic Dorey, and a captain's hat of course -- Damian was my submarine, The Nautilus. Disappointingly, though great slews of my friends have been to see Love Actually practically no-one had seen Finding Nemo (though at least most of them had heard of The League of Extraorinary Gentlemen) so chalk that up as another failure in the fancy-dress arena. The evening ended quite pleasantly, with a tall postgrad called Sebastian (whom we'd earlier press-ganged into being Quartermain/Sean Connery) trailing us back to the Holywell Annexe (or somewhere) to drink at College prices late into the night.

Saturday I took two huge bags of books to the Oxfam bookshop. For anyone who's interested, the children's section is now teeming with fantastic stuff, and the science fiction section's looking rather good, too.

By Sunday my hair had faded to the colour of a Sea Breeze; I found this out by having one for lunch.

How can I have done so much and still have so much to do? Tomorrow I'm going to the opera. It seemed like a good idea at the time I offered to write the review but now I wonder if I shouldn't have left it to somebody else.

What do I know about Idomeneo?