Collaborator 2 sent me a cheery text this morning, so all went well with the post, again. I begin to feel that it is storing up a disaster for me. However, any feeling of being ahead was instantly swallowed by the knowledge that the previous evening (spent in a state of nervous collapse) had put me behind with Collaborator 1. Collaborators, I should say. And given that my next job is to draw them both in sexy clothes, I feel rather cheated. A hot body scrub and an early night was no compensation, especially as it took me a staggerinq 45 minutes to make my bed.

And now I'm out of town and into the green. Spring is stretching out this year. There are still buds unburst and from a distance the woods still have that delicate variation that looks like someone was aiming to stipple in all the different shades of green. The fresh greenness of the leaves fills me a queasy, vegetable passion. They're so new, so fresh. In a fortnight they'll be burned to a uniform, workaday green. Don't laugh at me; where I grew up, the colour of the leaves was what passed for gossip.

A nice lady cruised me from her bike last night, but I'd been reading the news, so my first thought was, "I bet she beats her girlfriend." I still haven't sent my father his birthday card. Connection denotes responsibility.

My visits to Oxfordshire villages come in two varieties; half an hour early and a quarter-hour late. Early again. Very soon I will run out of side-streets to walk down.