I am back home, tentatively writing, revising (i.e. being defeated by prosody and imagining I went to the Canterbury Tales staged at the New Vic which I missed by a day), and not at all tentatively working out again, with S who is rowing for the blues soon, and off on a rowing training-camp in Italy next week. (She wears lycra leggings and silently judges all those who dare use their incorrect, untrained erg technique on the rowing machines.) I eat toast without feeling guilty, and sometimes even cake; I have been cured by being away from home, or laziness, or lack of willpower, or A.

I have decided that I can live neither at home or in Cambridge. As lovely as both are for short periods of time. I know it is probably time to go back to Cambridge when my mother’s audible chewing makes me want to throw things across the room. I’m pretty sure, and it worries me, that I sometimes chew audibly, and perhaps one day I will have children who object so strongly (and silently) that they’ll want to leave home. Similarly, I know it is time to come back home when Friday night in Cambridge passes me by completely three times in a row, and I want to hide in my wardrobe for a few days to relearn how to be by myself and escape the endless popping in and popping round and procrastination and frayed nerves and tiredness and anticlimactic drunkenness and work and work-guilt and life-guilt. So S and I will move in together after our third years, preferably to London, because we tolerate each other, even though she sleeps with the light on and I hate shopping and sequins.

I met my mother’s new gay friend from work, which is how she refers to him every time he comes up in coversation. He gives her pomegranates and is allowed to put his arm around her, because, as she says defensively to my father, who suspects rum goings-on, ‘he’s gay so it’s okay’. Perhaps, my father thinks, his gayness is a beard. We sat next to each other at a showing of The White Ribbon, and afterwards he put his arm around me (he’s allowed), and said, ‘how awful, did you grow up like that, do they make you wear the ribbon when get home later?’ I wore my mother’s doc martens, and a crumbly, kindly white old man approached me scattering compliments. A less crumbly, white woman approached my mother to tell her ‘and no offence intended’, that her skirt was tucked into her tights. My mother’s new gay friend said, ‘yes, it’s not a very real town, is it?’ about Cambridge, where he lived for a year before he escaped, ‘and most people there do need reminding.’

I am building an army of pastel cupcakes.