Just bought half a dozen eggs. Nowt unusual about that. Except that they're marketed 'Pretty eggs from happy hens'. Apparently the hens are 'kept in small flocks on family farms...encouraged to roam outside...enjoy the privacy of warm secluded nest boxes, trees and shrubs for cover - in fact, everything that a normal healthy hen requires for its freedom of expression and fullness of life'. And it strikes me that I wish that I produced pretty eggs not web pages.

After four night's sleep in my new place, am I a changed woman? Hmm. Perhaps not, but its double, triple, quadruple height ceilings have somehow given me room to think. Life seems easier and more manageable already. How can that be. Maybe I'll start to write shampoo ads.

So I had my photography class. I got exposure envy. Valerie had beautifully exposed pics. I told my tutor I was experimenting with apertures and he seemed to buy it. I got home, called the folks to ask my Dad to lend me some cash to buy a place. Within seconds we were arguing about Bush, Iraq and Uncle Harold's shares. I've sent him a copy of Pilger's Hidden Agendas as the ultimate Daily Malicious antidote.

Argh. Has every blogger photographed The British Museum's new glass ceiling?

Just moved house. Now in lovely new pad. I can see the mechanisms for the train line outside, they look like notes of music strung across the cables.

Anyway, moving unearthed lots of curios from my past, including a book of quotes (oops, mind the pop-ups!) I’d been compiling at some point, with a black and white photo of me swimming naked in the sea off Denmark on the inside cover. Amazingly, some of the quotes still make me shudder a little. I say amazingly as I thought I wasn’t the person I was 10 years ago, but gee, perhaps I am.

One by Peter Carey:

“...he much regretted that he had not protested. Not a simple regret either, it turned and turned, as endless as a corkscrew in his heart.”


Martin Amis:

”Of course, you were far too young to remember. But who says? If love travels at the speed of light, then it could have other powers just on the edge of the possible.”


Aldous Huxley:

”Most of one’s life...is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.”


Hmmm.

Just had my first photography lesson at St Martin's. There was a line in Susan Sontag's On Photography that inspired me:

Life isn’t about significant details, illuminated with a flash, then fixed forever. Photographs are.


That, and her perfect description of photographs as 'paper phantoms'.

So, The Big Move East happens Saturday. I never again need to take the Northern Line again unless I actually need to. I'm ready to pick up all the unpacked boxes in my flat and move on. I have accumulated a further 12 empty boxes, including 2 x coveted Walkers crisps (Sensations) boxes in preparation for said move, and this I call progress.

There's a tiny nest in the second-to-last tree to the right, on the approach to the building in which I work.

I wondered if it belonged to a family of sparrows, then if they had flown the nest of their own accord and when they might return, or if the electromagnetic forces emanating from this building would make the decision for them.

Is this the best place in the world in which to mull the world over? If you don't think so, find one of your own to crawl to.

Gifts for all ages from John Lewis.

A collection of picturelogs, for people who hate to read.

Just had a fantastic Sunday lunch over a bottle of red in St John's. The most unappetising looking place from the outside, but can they cook. Someone told me recently that lamb is the cleanest meat you can eat. I guess they're right. They just sheep around, eating grass, rarely eating recycled bits of themselves.

I didn’t realize how much room in my brain there would be if I started to write stuff down. It’s like feather-dusting my cranium, no, like a cranial version of colonic irrigation.

I finally put the pictures in the post to my friend Kattis. It’s one of those things to do that had been bugging me for a while. A simple task of putting some photos in a hard-backed envelope, writing a note then putting that in also, sealing, addressing, laying in the out-tray, no need even to buy or stick a stamp. This small project took me three weeks. This is the gestation period of some mammals, so whole new lives have begun, probably ended, in a shorter space of time. In the last two weeks I have:

++ joined a pension scheme (time taken: two years)
++ bought an ibook (time taken: two years, six months)
++ arranged home insurance (time taken: two years, seven months)
++ attempted to cancel gym membership (time taken: four months)
++ begun yoga again (time taken: 18 months)
++ started writing again (time taken: 10 years)
++ paid in £150 cheques (time taken: three months and one month respectively)
++ stopped waiting for calls from prospective partners (time taken: 15 years)

Gosh.