The reasoning, cynical little part of me is extremely blasé, just as I was when sitting on that sofa all those months ago carrying on full of drunken wisdom and big ideas. Society teaches me to cry when I should instead shrug at things that, in the grand scheme of everything in the world, would come somewhere near the very bottom of the big list of important-ness.

On my side of the line, a long silence in which I scrabbled around my brain for something to say other than ‘uh what?’ My scrabbling was not successful. I am mostly bad at talking to people. I see close-ups of my lips moving, hear my voice played back to myself in my head. The phone is worse, sometimes, with eons of space between the two handsets and no way of reading body language. So I didn’t say much. Only now I have things to say, and these things are the elephant in my little attic room.

It makes me a little bit happy that there is a just balance of good things and bad things. Judith came over last night, over the moon about her date with Naked Ben. Ben lived up to his premodifier during the course of a drunken card game last summer. In fact, all five of us - the girlies and Ben plus his scrawny, unappealing friend Chris (who I can never quite bear to think of as Naked Chris) - mysteriously ended up wearing not a stitch, smoking on the patio wrapped in the two sofa throws shared between us. They are doing things the wrong way round - nakedness and then waking up together and then him looking after her when she’s drunk and then the ex-girlfriend/boyfriend stories and THEN finally dating. He is a gentleman about it, opening the doors of cars for her as if he hadn’t yet seen her pulling her jumper over her head, unhooking her bra, sliding her underwear over her feet.

My thoughts get a little more cruel the longer I wait. I feel explosive.

I have too much work to be doing to spend my evenings in these stupors of inactivity. The next two weeks will be spent huddled away in the corner of my metaphorical dusty library with imaginary eggnog, following by example of C.L., who has the right idea. A A A A’s must somehow make their ways onto that piece of paper next summer.

And I don’t mind if you read this.