Saturday, 30 July 2011



Good things about the summer "holiday":

- absence of masonry dust

- unlimited wine








Bad things about summer "holiday":


- strong likelihood of being very cold

- strong likelihood of being woken very early

- no suitable footwear



- large amounts of driving

- many great big fuck off objects to incompetently drive into

- no money





1. Tourist idiocy



Idiot 2: Yeah! Is it always like this?




Idiot 2 (tentatively): London was ok?


Idiot 2: They do? Why?





Idiot 1: It's a dirty shithole. Like Paris.


2. Senior violence




Tuesday, 19 July 2011


"So ... that picture you just sent me. Is that three severed plush Capybara heads?"

"No. It is a capybara that is 94% face. It has tiny legs underneath. I was going to get you one but they only had the giganto-bara left and they wouldn't sell me the display one".

Also, there is one that is like a cloak for children, so they can have a hood like kapibarasan's head, but then on the packaging it says that it can be used as a blanket/hand warmer by crazy women like us".

"I see. Reading this, I am filled with the strange, soothing certainty that everything is going to be alright".

"M? Are you just walking around Seoul stalking giant rodents?"


Sunday, 17 July 2011


You know that 'life is passing me by' feeling? I have that at the moment. Which is plainly ridiculous since I have cleaned the bathroom cupboards out. I mean, how much more viscerally alive is it possible to be, than spending Sunday afternoon throwing 7 year old vitamins and multiple tubes of rancid Protect and Perfect serum out? I blame social networking. I'm sure I would have been satisfied with my day of wondering why I have seven tubes of Caudalie Crème de Corps Nourissantes when I have never knowingly bought one if I wasn't exposed to other people's weekends, the parties, the festivals, the aspirational shopping. It's engineered to create dissatisfaction, isn't it? Well, unless you are preternaturally well-adjusted it is. And no-one will ever accuse me of that, I fear.

Actually, I blame social networking AND my slightly too tight trousers. Everything looks wrong in too tight trousers: the world is leached of all joy. My waist and I are cinched into a perpetual loop of grumpy recrimination with each other. Also, I think, tight trousers leave me slightly oxygen deprived, the symptoms of which include "drowsiness, shortness of breath, anxiety and tension". I think "desire to eat more cheap chocolate" must also be a symptom and so the cycle continues. You may quite rightly wonder why I am wearing too tight trousers (or, far more likely, you do not remotely care why and wonder why you are still reading this, which is like your annoying auntie telling you about her gynecological complaints at length, without the slightest provocation). I am wearing them because I have mislaid my trusty Gap physiotherapist's trousers and I can't leave the house in turquoise tracksuit bottoms. Should I buy more trousers? Yes I should. But buying trousers when you are over your fighting weight and have no money is not fun. I'd go on the rob to buy myself new trousers, but I am too tired and breathless, it's a tight trouser Catch 22. My only hope is eventually the money gets so short I can no longer feed myself, and I get thin enough to fit into the trousers again. I do not actually see this happening in my lifetime. I'd wear dresses, but it keeps pissing down and the average temperature is about 12°C.

I am thinking about body shape today, because I tried to buy a swimming costume yesterday. Is there any more dismal experience for the generously torso-ed lady than trying to buy a swimming costume in a non-specialist shop? I think not. Ok, if I thought long and hard, I could probably think of a couple. But it's pretty wretched. I did it yesterday in Spa.

Spa is a small town in the Ardennes attached to a motor racetrack and a droning chanson française festival. If you can avoid both of these things, it also has a most excellent Sunday market where I found a stuffed squirrel string quartet once, and, reason for my visit, the spa. The spa is bracingly municipal, but it is a good, cheap way to sit in various temperatures of water and doze in public. There is also a series of benches under heat lamps, so you can bask like a lizard. I am very much in favour of those things.

What I am not in favour of is buying a swimming costume, but sadly it was necessary. I do not have one that fits at the moment, partly because I seem to have lost several, partly because I am expanding alarmingly (see above) and try as I might, you cannot wear a M&S minimiser bra with a swimming costume. People look at you strangely. Also, it is surprisingly hard to find a full length Victorian bathing gown. Harder than finding a stuffed squirrel string quartet, actually, which I think shows a skewed sense of priorities among the citizens of Spa.

I went to Spa's ladies underpinnings shop and found a couple of unlikely, but just conceivable, black, matronly contenders on the sale rail. I tried them on. They looked horrific. One of them got stuck around my ribcage and made those worrying "material stretched to breaking point" noises. The other one had a sort of unwisely deep 'v' in the décolleté out of which 98% of my chest was trying to escape. I tried to adjust the straps, and one of them pinged farcically off across the changing room.

The saleslady - size 6, bra size approximately 28AA - came in to offer me a couple of extra horrors. There was a purple one, and one with a hideous geometric pattern, like a dog had eaten, then vomited up, an Escher drawing. They were both over €100. I tried to suppress a sob and forced my defeated body into the Escher vomit one, which made me look like the Queen mother from the neck down, a nightmarish optical illusion. Impregnable. Shaped like an unwisely upholstered pouffe.

"How is it?" she said through the curtain.

"C'est môôôôôôche, it's HIDEOUS". I couldn't even muster enough British reserve to lie.

"Vous faites du 38, 40?" she said drawing back the curtain to look at me. She meant dress size. I was so distressed by this point, however, I thought for some reason she was talking UK bra sizes and nearly wept.

"Non! Je fais du 32! Du 85 quoi! But with a large cup size". This was not a conversation I ever wanted to be having with anyone. Ever. There should be some system where you step into an unmanned booth which scans you, then provides you with a humane, appropriately sized swimming costume. Make this happen, inventors of the world.

She tried to sidle away before I could get any more unhinged. She had nothing else to offer in any case, so she went back to folding negligées. An awkward silence fell over the shop as I muttered and struggled in the cubicle.

In the end I had to buy the one with the stupidly deep 'v'. I had come all the way to Spa, I was not going to let this put me off. It was a Large, which meant it was saggy over the body, whilst barely covering my chest. I looked ridiculous. I fiddled with the straps. Then I went up to the baths and stood in the damp, echoing changing rooms and had a little cry.

I have been at war with my body for most of my adult life. Once it started dicking me around with alopecia, I opened hostilities on the damn thing. I starved it, beat it up, filled it full of crap. I was never satisfied, never liked it however hard I worked on it or how much I deprived it. I suppose everything else became so much more important when I lost my hair; once that was wrong, I couldn't bear for the rest not to be "right"; not to be the way I wanted it. Anyway. A few years ago - I suppose around 2008, perhaps not entirely coincidentally when I started this blog - I finally got too tired, too sad, too damn bored, to fight with my body anymore. I thought of all the time I had wasted being pointlessly dissatisfied, or worrying about food and cellulite and stretchmarks, and it horrified me. Also, genuinely terrible things - illnesses and accidents - happened to people around me which made me profoundly grateful for the basic fact of my body; it worked. It allowed me to enjoy things and to look after the people I loved.

I stopped being the person who couldn't find a single thing she was prepared to eat in a motorway service station, who wouldn't eat chips to save her life, who didn't drink alcohol, who ate spinach every day, who obsessed and fretted, and body brushed, and calculated everything, even on holiday. I relaxed. I ate chips, and it wasn't a big deal. I drank wine. I had a sandwich for lunch if that was what there was for lunch. I simply stopped caring. I ate whatever was put in front of me, and if we had to find lunch in a motorway service station shop, I'd eat a Snickers and a packet of crisps and not agonise for a second.

For a long time, this felt like the most amazing revelation. It was - still is - wonderful not to be "fussy" any more, not to attach such fetishistic importance to food. But of course, you can't hit 36 eating exactly what you damn well want (and being naturally very greedy) and doing no exercise and stay as skinny as I used to be. So I am bigger. Lots of my clothes - bought when I was both rich and thin, back in London - don't fit any more. I've mentioned it here in passing quite a few times and I can't pretend it doesn't bother me a bit. It does. There are whole sections of my wardrobe that I know not to even try, and others I approach with increasing trepidation. But even so, I remember what it felt like to have a constant hunger headache, to keep a running tally in my head of everything I had eaten in a day, to feel genuinely panicky at the thought of someone else cooking for me. I remember I remember bingeing mechanically, joylessly on ice cream, knowing it was the easiest thing to throw up again afterwards. It was horrible. I know what's more important, and actually, I'm not that unhappy with my body. It's a perfectly ok shape, really. Would I like to be 10% thinner? Yes. Am I willing to go insane again to get there? Hell no.

But sometimes, and it's partly a reflex, I think, a learnt way of channeling anxiety and strain that never quite left me, I find I want to wage war on my body again. I want to cause it pain, deprive it, make it suffer. And standing in the changing rooms at Spa, I felt like that again. I felt revolting, disgusting, angry. I wanted to hurt myself. I walked into the pool hunched and weepy in my towel, sick of myself. I stood in the water, blinking back tears and picked at the dry skin on my lips until they bled.

It was Saturday afternoon, and the spa was quite full. All around me people wandered around in their swimming gear, all shapes and sizes and ages, going from pool to pool, lying reading the paper, several of them having a crafty beer and a fag outside, this being Belgium. There were babies, floating luxuriantly fat and serious in their rubber rings. There were several cadaverously thin, pale, ginger youths, their bodies almost luminously blue white. There were solidly barrel shaped women in their forties and fifties in sensible one pieces, and other women of the same age, lithe and tanned mahogany with layers of waterproof mascara, string bikinis and elaborately bleached peacock coiffures. There were men with vast bellies in tiny trunks, unselfconsciously lying legs akimbo on loungers, reading the sports pages. There were frail, stooped elderly ladies in floral swimming caps and costumes with frilled skirts, carefully negotiating the steps down into the water. There were lots of larger chests than mine, including some on men, and lots smaller. As I looked around, I could feel myself ever so slowly uncurling, the tension starting to dissipate.

There were some really beautiful bodies too. Gorgeous leggy teenagers in tiny bikinis with impossibly perfect honey coloured limbs. Bony, angular ten year olds with peach soft skin that reminded me of Lashes zooming around and getting reprimanded by the lifeguards. There was one woman of about my age with amazing red hair, who was absolutely beautiful, tiny and completely compelling, impossible to take your eyes off. But there were lots and lots of completely ordinary, unexceptional bodies. Bodies with the odd sagging bit, a few thread veins, bruises or stretchmarks, bodies like mine. There was an endless variety of tattoos, some luxuriant back hair, a range of Caesarian scars, and some ludicrously clear tan lines (particularly cyclist's ones. The Ardennes is full of serious, iron-calved cyclists in lycra). There was one man, about my age, with alopecia, like me, though he wasn't wearing a wig, of course, and a girl with a large port wine stain on her face, joking with her boyfriend in the hot tub. The hot tub was ferocious. It wobbled away lots of my anxiety. I sat next to three generations of, I think, a Japanese family, who kept laughing and taking pictures of each other.

And everyone was just getting on with it. They were just bodies, doing what bodies do. Wobbling bosoms in the jacuzzi, prominent hip bones under the heat lamps, pregnant bellies and knobbly knees, old ones, young ones and somewhere in the middle ones, all soaking calmly. After a couple of hours I fell asleep in my stupid new swimming costume, lying on my lounger, soothed by the constant sounds of the water. My tits probably looked a bit odd, determinedly trying to escape out of the sides of the idiotic swimsuit, but whatever. By 6 that evening I was deeply, deeply relaxed. Well, until I had to put my stupid tight trousers back on.

I wish I could go back there every week. Failing that, I am committed to buying a couple of cheap pairs of trousers that fit. Also, if anyone can suggest where I can find a decent swimming costume for the generously torsoed, for god's sake PLEASE let me know.

Tuesday, 12 July 2011

L'Odeur Fraîche des Poneys*

Hello. Speak quietly please, I am struggling with dreadful insomnia and the insistent sensation that I have been swimming in, and binge-drinking, embalming fluid. My suspicion that my gin was switched with formaldehyde at Brussels' premier (only) (unless you count Homo Erectus, and really, who would) transvestite cabaret bar last week is apparently inaccurate, however, according to the mighty forces of Science, or at least Mr Cookblog. Apparently "our bodies produce aldehydes as part of metabolising alcohol", so it is my own fault I feel like a long dead thing.

I am currently in London, international city of glamour and so on. This is demonstrated by the following facts:

1. Shopping

I have purchased two Marks & Spencer minimiser bras for the modish sum of 14 of your British pounds. I am very delighted with my newly crushed chest, it is everything I hoped for and more. With the sterling elastic assistance of my new bras, I can probably fit into almost 20% of my wardrobe, progress indeed. I also went to Londis for deodorant and Maplins for an adaptor, but then I had to stop before I became overwhelmed with retail opportunity excitement. The latter was an excellent retail experience for a Belgian resident, since it:

(a) took 30 seconds; and

(b) was very cheap; and

(c) took place on a Sunday.

London 1, Brussels 0, but Brussels doesn't care because it has a lift museum, and popular music in the metro.

2. Romance

An elderly Irish gentleman smelling strongly of Tenants Extra chatted me up on the 31 bus. Actually, he offered me his seat but I am fairly sure he did not actually think I was pregnant.

3. Livestock

There has, apparently, been an escapee peacock down my father's street in recent weeks. "The neighbour's dog barked at it, so it flew onto Ivo's roof (ed's note: if you live in Notting Hill, there is a strong likelihood that one or more of your neighbours will be called Ivo) and sat there".

I caught a tiny frog in Beckenham which tried to jump into my cup of tea.

The CFO, who is also in London just called me. "I am in an office in Sussex Place", he said. "And I am watching a fox in the corner of the room scratch its ear. There is another one sleeping next to it".

Which was odd.

4. Social events

I went to 52 Betty's book launch last night, in posh sex emporium Coco de Mer. There is nothing like nervously sipping pink Cava and waiting for someone you recognise to arrive in a forest of high end vibrators and jade dildos to make you feel like a bit of a tool, but thankfully the Harridan arrived and I attached myself to her side, like her mute, black, parrot. We made an excellent double act, I think: her telling everyone whose paths we crossed that her "stroke face" was due to her root canal work rather than a stroke; me getting people's names wrong and knocking over flogging paddles and god knows what else at every turn.

Betty's book, The 52 Seductions, based on her former blog of the same name, is about Betty and her husband Herbert's year long mission to revive their sex life by seducing each other every week. It is not a how-to manual, and it's not self-congratulatory or likely to make you feel inadequate. It's warm, often thoughtful and frequently very funny. Actually, it's at least as much about love and vulnerability and the meandering course of long term relationships as sex. It feels a very brave book, actually. I would no more be able to speak of such things than I would be able to do particle physics, so I am particularly awed by her candour.

Most importantly, it was an excellent do, with mini sandwiches shaped like pants and pink Cava. I took a picture of the pants-wiches, reasoning, why be classy when you can make an arse of yourself.

Speaking of arse, there were also biscuits with chapter headings on them, very similar to my own arse biscuits, but larger.

Now I must return to Brussels, but not before I have walked around Marks & Spencer in a fugue state.

*The title of this post comes from today's chat with M, which also covered our respective attitudes to various geometric shapes.

"So, you're saying a disc is ok, but a circle is bad?"

"I don't know. Am I? I have nomenclature problems. I am saying bagel bad, biscuit good".

"Noted. Cheese: ok, elastic band: not ok. How do you feel about squares?"

"I associate them with caramel shortbread, which is positive".

"How do we feel about half circles? Like, a rainbow? Or half a reblochon?"

"I am against them".

This did not even arise in the context of Google Plus, it was just common or garden stupidity. How do you feel about circles?

Thursday, 7 July 2011

The Chipping Norton Set

I have a pressing question on the phone hacking scandal, and it is this.

What the fuck are the Chipping Norton Set doing in Chipping Norton?

I mean, have you been to Chipping Norton? Because I have. I got my first and only speeding ticket to date trying to leave Chipping Norton, actually, and that's no coincidence. Ok, it's very pretty. The Cotswolds is, generally; I must concede that it is exceedingly attractive If You Like That Kind of Thing. If, however, the tunnel from Barbican tube to Silk Street is your idea of beauty, you may, like me, struggle. I suppose the fact that there's a Londis AND Co-op helps (actually, scrupulous fairness requires me to disclose that there's a Sainsburys, which I will admit is the height of Cotswold sophistication. I often find myself weeping tears of gratitude when I get as far as the rubbish Tesco in Broadway). And yes, there is a nice hotel and two delis. But the discovery that Chipping Norton is a nexus of News International evil baffles me. Do they perhaps get up to such depraved, horrible things because there is arse all else to do?

Even before the current brouhaha, I kept hearing about the London-on-the-Wold side of the Cotswolds, how it's lousy with celebrities - Liz Hurley Kate Moss, Damian Hirst, Kate Winslet.. And other people I have just looked up on this handy list. Well. I have never spotted ANY of them. Not even at Brailes Agricultural show, where they have a live pensioner fruit machine (this, magnificently, is three old people sitting in a row with a basket of fruit each, no word of a lie, I promise this is true) AND ferret roulette, so I am deeply sceptical. What on earth could they possibly find to do which would beat that?

The reason I know so much ("so much" = virtually nothing) about the Cotswolds is that my father, the Bearded King of Science lives there, has done for years. He used to live in Blockley, which was supposed to boast a more reasonable selection of notables: Alan Rusbridger, Will Hutton, Joanna Trollope and The Fat One From Lovejoy. Not quite premier league, but you know, enough for a little frisson. We never saw any of them. My stepmother did once claim to have seen Sting in the pub, but we didn't believe her. Our idea of Cotswold celebrities remained the homicidal goat at the Cotswold Farm Park (pictured here, that man in the flat cap doesn't realise he's dicing with death).

Now he has moved to a remoter corner of the Cotswold firmament and I have yet to spot so much as an extra in Hollyoaks. I am not saying there are not compensatory delights. Regular readers may remember the dizzying array of activities on offer for small children: the opportunities for fishing dead mice out of storm drains, chasing spiders the size of ponies out of the shower, the cheery parlour games of 'guess the cause of death of the small mammal', the hours of fun dicing with death or amputation in The Tetanus Adventure Playground TM (barn full of rusting agricultural machinery). Well behaved children may be offered the chance to go down to the stream and poke a decomposing fox corpse with a stick. If I am very very good myself, I may get an hour's free pass to go to the nearest market town while my children roam free range near the septic tank, whining about the absence of digital tv. Until recently it had largely escaped the gentrification of most of the Cotswolds and a good day out involved wandering round the hardware store, then buying a lardy cake, that tasty traditional Oxfordshire blend of diabetes, heart disease and raisins. Sometimes, if were feeling lucky, we would beg the depressive café-gallery owner to turn his coffee machine on, though this rarely ended well. Now there's a proper hotel and everything, with reading material other than Cotswold Life. Maybe next time I go I'll see Lily Allen or something? I live in hope. I did once go to Daylesford, but it was terrifying, filled with women in Tod's loafers assaulting each other for the last jar of plum compôte. I'd rather take my chances with the horse sized arachnids and the badger carcasses.

I do not understand The Country, this has been long established. But this whole Chipping Norton set thing has piqued my curiosity. What do they do? Presumably they just go to one another's houses for cocktails all the time, and none of them have to deal with the queue in Londis or negotiate the challenging journey to the Costwold Motoring Museum to see Brum. I am quite certain none of them have ever been to the "Fundays Play Barn" in Bourton on the Water (it is hard to type those words, the scars are still fresh). But I am going back there in the first week of August (children and dog have tetanus boosters scheduled) and I will investigate. Maybe Brailes will be throbbing with paparazzi? Goodness, I am almost looking forward to it.

Wednesday, 6 July 2011

Wednesday, no brain left for a title

All is well in law jail. I have progressed speedily (ish), and been exceptionally annoying all day. Thankfully I am the only one here to witness my own annoyingness, but it will be reflected in the dreary tone of the following. Just be thankful I haven't added footnotes.

The answer

Finally, after years of vague unease, I know what has been missing from my life. This.

It is perfect. Perfect, I tell you. I would not care about my inability to make any money or be any good at anything if I had one of those in the back yard quietly grazing. I would just sniff the tiny pony's neck and feed it Polos and be filled with contentment.


So I tell myself. In fact, once I had the tiny pony I would, indeed, be briefly ecstatic, but then I would start to tire of the constant manure shovelling. The pony might well be bitey and evil-tempered, and prove less than co-operative when I tried to put my neck-sniffing plan into action. It might bankrupt me in polos and carrots. I would become ever more resentful of the embarrassment the tiny pony caused me when the neighbours complained about it eating their sturdy perennials. There would be difficulties about what to do with the minipony when I wanted to go away for the weekend. I would start to complain about it on this weblog whilst entertaining oft-repeated fantasies about some OTHER kind of tiny animal.

Self-knowledge is not always a good thing.

Weekend happenings

I realised that in order to counter the - fairly accurate - impression given on these pages that I never leave the house, I should really have told you I went to a festival this weekend. So: I went to a festival this weekend. This one.

I am not, um, a natural festival-goer. It's not the mud, or the discomfort, or the sitting in a nest of discarded plastic beakers and condoms, but I do have some trouble controlling my gag reflex around "challenging" foods and I had particular trouble this time with people eating chips with not only ketchup and mayonnaise (the twin sauces of satan), but also a sort of lumpy brown meat poured on top ALL THREE AT ONCE in the stifling heat. Imagine, if you will, that these people had been at a festival for three days already at that point and several of them had white dreadlocks and you will have some notion of my discomfort. I found the latrines less troubling, actually, than the rivers of ketchup and mayonnaise and unspeakable Brown Sauce and the wafting scent of a thousand rancid spring rolls ALSO served with mayonnaise. Brrrrrr. Make this madness stop.

Apart from the slight nausea issue, however, all was lovely: there was sun, we* did not have to walk fifteen miles to get to things as you usually do at festivals, there were several excellent sets (Kaiser Chiefs, Fleet Foxes - complete with their herbal teas - and crazed disco pixie Robyn especially) and we successfully avoided hearing more than a few seconds of a two hour ear-bleeding drear-fest from Iron Maiden (apart from the piteously horrible noise, some of their coiffures were intensifying my nausea problems). Also, and this is crucial, we went straight back to Brussels afterwards and there was none of this unspeakable, rolling around in a canvas coffin surrounded by halfwits business (yes, I am filled with festival spirit). Actually, I was in my nice clean bed and intensively, vigorously showered by midnight, which is proof of how exceptionally rock 'n' roll I am, oh yes.

I resolved the food problem by eating PLAIN chips and drinking many tokens worth of nasty rosé. I was quite entertained to see that there was a mussel stand, from whence many people emerged with large metallic pots of mussels. Mussels: the obvious festival food. So there. Proof that I occasionally leave the house. Before the festival I also went to a birthday barbecue and a nice man showed me round his beehives, which was fun. See? I have a social life. Of sorts. Sporadically. On current reckoning I might do so again around mid -October.

(*"We"= me and the CFO reprising our excellent festival going exploits of a few years ago, where he tried to smuggle soap flavoured vodka into the venue in a recyclable shower gel container hidden in his pants and passed out at 9pm)

Collar of Calm

This picture, requested by commenter Beccy, might suggest the Collar of Tranquility is working:

I do not know why the dog is bathed in a greenish light. Maybe that is an aura of pheromones?


I despatched my overdue edits on Monday night, praise be. Now they can languish, unread and unloved, on someone else's desk for a while ("while" = anything up to another six years, I should think). I have lost all belief in this book business; I do not think I am any good at it and I am filled with renewed admiration for anyone who can string a semblance of a plot together. Goodness knows what I am good at, except carving marrows and catching spiders. It doesn't matter though, because one day I will have a tiny pony.

Or a sugar glider.

Or .. something.

What are your obscure talents?

Tuesday, 5 July 2011

Human Appeasing Pheromone

Tuesday already. My inbox is bulging with temptation. Can I review 60 50 page judgments on subjects as crucial as equipment for electricity substations and butadiene rubber? Would I like to test some washing powder? Submit missing documents to my accountant? Scan these official pieces of paper? Get even more dates wrong? Try to establish the reasoning behind the current spate of mysterious demands from incompetent electricity supplier Electrabel? No. No, I would like to curl up in a small dark cupboard - under stairs would be ideal - and make loud retching noises like a cat with a hairball. My right ear has developed an unsightly, itchy rash and I nearly kicked the printer down the cellar stairs today for being an ink-guzzling ingrate twat with poor communication skills. The better news is that I am no longer looking after a canary. I am at a loss as to what the point of a canary is. It is like a car alarm, but even more boring.

After a bit of early morning puny impotent techno-rage I settled down to an exquisitely boring job of the kind I used to rather like when I was being the world's most half-hearted solicitor. I still rather like it. It's the kind of job where you make nitpicking notes in nice handwriting in the margins of things without having to actually do or achieve anything. I have been arsily marking up all day whilst tutting and muttering superior comments to myself. I become extremely hateful when I do this job, so it is a good thing I only do it for 2 weeks every six months. Any longer and I would start correcting people's grammar in the supermarket queue and sending back personal emails offering me videos of puppies marked up with 'please see my comments in bold square brackets' and track changes. The amusing thing about this outbreak of twattishness is that I am mainly amending and correcting work I did myself six months ago during my previous outbreak of legal pedantry. See? Pointless.

Better news: yesterday, in an exciting development for humanity, and possibly even my sanity, the CFO's au pair bought the weepette what she claims is a pheromone diffusing calming collar. The box claims that it gives a sense of calm and wellbeing and diffuses anxiety.

The Collar Of Tranquility is very large, and he has to wear it looped twice around his neck. It looks rather chic on him, like one of those Hermès double strap watches. He seems as neurotic as ever, but I suppose we should give it a few days. "It also comes as a plug-in diffuser" she told me.

"What, like Glade?! AMAZING".

"Yes, I suppose". She was wearing a 'humour the nutter' expression at this point.

"Mmm. Calming Glade. Glade Prozac Plug-in. I need one of those". The au pair had disappeared by now, closing the door firmly behind her, but the germ of an idea was born.

My entrepreneurial mind (ahahahhahaha. If anyone locates that, do send it my way) started to work overtime. Surely mankind is missing a trick not developing these for humans? Mrs Trefusis and I, always on the look out for good business propositions (when we are not refining our plan to move to a Bulgarian hill village and breed pygmy goats) brainstormed around this idea extensively when we should both have been doing other things.

E: I so want one. I mean, why? Why would dogs get them and not us? We need them MORE.

H: It's perfect. Every office in the land would buy these.

E: Yes, it's a winner. I think this might beat even as a business proposition. AND Possibly even our plan to write pulp romance novels à deux to sell in Tescos with big "Selected by idiots" stickers on the front.

H: Imagine, when I have difficult meetings, I could simply Plug in a Prozac air freshner and clients would go 'marvellous, simply marvellous' and wave their hands airily.

E: I suppose there might be minor legal issues, but I'm sure we can get round them somehow.

H: How about a collaboration with a fragrance house, slipping 'mood enhancers' into scent? Because if you bought it for yourself, then it would be fine.. it would be forcing it on others that would be a problem. Just imagine:

"I like to spritz on a little [insert catchy name here] in the morning - it's an active chypre, which combines the scent of success, with the cognitive enhancement effects of modafinil"

E: What I like about that is how it's less a long-term commitment to your mental health, and more an accessory. See, I am already aching to buy this and it DOESN'T EVEN EXIST.

What nonsensical business propositions have you come up with? And consider yourself on notice, I will think about stealing them for a moment, then be overcome with indolence and not bother.