often seen in the street without a hat

Last night I had an anxiety dream about those cupcakes I wanted to make. I made the batter, and put them in the tin, but they were all uneven, and then they sort of cooked in the heat before I could get them in the oven. They seemed okay when I took them out, but when I tried to do butterfly cakes with them they were all gooey in the middle, and then I gave a lovely woman food poisoning.

(Also Madge from Neighbours (actual Madge, not the actor) and I went to a Trivial Pursuit seminar, and I asked her a question about Charlene's relationships, and she got it right, obviously. How we laughed!)

I have now run out of bowls and forks, so I really really have to do some washing up, even before starting to cook. Life is pain, highness.

I don't watch The Great British Bake Off, but I appreciate its existence greatly because it leads to pictures of Mel and Sue together. The front page of the Guardian website has a particularly lovely example.

I dreamed a dream in time gone by (two nights ago, to be precise) in which lots of weird things happen, but the thing that seemed most normal in the dream and most strange outside the dream is that I was attending a very very strict school with all sorts of rules to follow, and the one we were told was most important was that the tongues of our shoes must always be aligned properly and not bunched up inside.

I bought some trainers on ebay, and they arrived and are great. They are black with tiny pink hearts on the side, and inside those hearts are skull and crossbones. I am wearing them with my orthotic inserts and have no knee pain any more.

I got free tickets to see Bone and Rust last night, which is a French film with a character who trains killer whales, and took someone from work with me. Unfortunately, the screening was on Monday, so that worked out badly. We went to see Looper instead, and I only spent half of it worrying that she thought I'd deliberately inveigled her into coming with me under false pretences. I quite liked Looper, but I never got used to Joseph Gordon-Lovett's face.

I got a bit bored so I started doing lots of sort of projects, and now I'm doing none of them and just lying on the sofa feeling guilty, which is not an improvement on my previous state of lying on the sofa feeling guilty about other things.

I found a DVD of Class Cruise on ebay, and it's supposedly winging its way to me. I'm trying not to be too excited about it, because what if it's not true? It would sound great even if it didn't star a DeLuise BUT IT TOTALLY DOES! Michael DeLuise being a poor kid whose school is taking part in a rich kids' school study cruise for the first time. There's a tiny clip of it on youtube that I can't link to because I'm at work, which shows teens in bikinis getting thrown in a pool. Don't read the comments.

I was having a really promising precursor to sex dream in which a woman gave me her "journal of erotic situations" to read, and then introduced me to her beautiful housemate, WHOM I THEN STARTED TALKING TO ABOUT MY PHD, so that instead of waking up all nice and tingly I woke up in a really bad mood at all the work I have to do.

Since cutting my hair I have realised that something I do when I am disconcerted by unexpected niceness (I am nearly always disconcerted by unexpected niceness) is tuck my hair behind my ears. This now looks even sillier, especially when the niceness is someone saying "I like your hair".

Day 1: socks complimented by elderly woman on the way to the train station.
Day 2: socks complimented by my friend's boyfriend, and Tiffany Stevenson
Day 3: socks complimented by a man through a car window at a traffic light (he seemed sincere enough) and Bridget Christie

(I should point out that this is a range of socks, not the same pair, and the reason for no sock-related compliments on day 4 is that I was wearing boring black socks, not that the smell finally started to overpower people.)

Last night I dreamt I was at a booksale and found a copy of Drina Dances in Ireland, and another book that I thought at the time was something about the Chalet School in Ireland, but surely it can't have been or I'd have been more excited. There was no time to read Drina Dances in Ireland, but I imagine she would have befriended the local Irish people, seen Irish dancing, taken up Irish dancing, excelled at Irish dancing, been offered a job Irish dancing but then decided that ballet was her true love and she must continue to follow in the footsteps of her dead mother. I expect that Queenie showed up only to be vanquished and Rose was overshadowed as per.

I was also on an opentop bus going round a large city with old architecture and spiny towers, and there was a roadsign with an arrow pointing down a hill reading "Middle Class", and I couldn't work out whether it was a political statement, saying where the middle classes lived, or directing middle class people to a more scenic route. Also I think everyone died at the end.

I woke up this morning having dreamt that I was in bed with Alan Coren. This was infinitely preferable to the first part of the dream, where I was having a bath on a train - and then suddenly it was a bath on one of the freight flatbed bits, and we were going very very slowly through lots of stations and people were staring at me.