I’ve got an airing cupboard, I don’t need Jesus, whatever that is.

Because I’ve got an airing cupboard, I’m experiencing the luxury of warm pyjamas. I’m also experiencing the luxury of a warm bed, courtesy of my electric blanket. I don’t think either of these luxuries were mentioned in the bible, so to some evangelical types, they might be a sin. If all that worries some people is their extrapolations, hang on, interpolations, of how we should behave in the 21st century from things that weren’t mentioned in a book of fairytales written from hearsay and translated by people with no knowledge of the language to suit the rulers of the times over many centuries, then it’s clear that our mental health services are very much in crisis.

I wonder how future generations will interpret His Dark Materials in centuries to come. They might be seen as documentations of humankind’s release from the shackles of religious doctrine. I’d hope that they’d be taken as a pretty good trilogy of fictional work.

Sausages
One thing I miss most about not going to Derbyshire anymore is my sausage supply from the village butcher in Crich. They were LOVELY, probably still are, but it’s a bit out of the way to travel just for pork products.

I must find a good butcher; my reliance on branded sausages that you can buy at the supermarket it shameful and unsatisfactory. Tonight’s dinner was roasted veggies with sausages and onion gravy. Roasted parsnip, carrot and beetroot with olive oil, sea salt and chilli – delish, but the sausages let the whole thing down.

I suppose my sausage disappointment puts the whole impending armageddon into perspective. It’s clear to me that North Korea has finally cracked because pie boy isn’t getting quality sausages. Derbyshire should send a drone over there for an emergency sausage drop to ease the mood. Then again, the whole thing might get misconstrued as an act of aggression and the Dales could get nuked.

Ah well. Oops.

Sociable
I have to be vivacious tomorrow. This will be good for me, I’m sure of it. I’m off into the big city for a birthday celebration at the place where, of all places, I met the person who I hope will get nuked in Cromford. Stop it. I’ve no idea how many people will be there; I don’t think I’ll know any of them. This means that I have to be nice. For fuck’s sake.

Socialising with people who are used to me is great. They’re comfortable with my little quirks and I enjoy them taking the piss out of me. I can live in Tina world and come out with whatever rubbish blurts out and I know they won’t be offended because they know that deep down, I’m a kind soul with a strange brain. Strangers are different. Strangers bring stress. They don’t say stranger danger for nothing!

Added to this “Oh balls, I need to meet new people” is the “should I have a drink?” dilemma. Things were great when I was teetotal, I didn’t drink and that was it, but now I’ve gone and ruined all that by allowing myself the option again. If I don’t drink, would I feel that I ought to give people a lift into Manchester? If I do drink, will I make a tit of myself? This is all complicated by the fact that a bunch of us are meeting up at my sister’s and then travelling into town.

This whole thing is causing me stupid amounts of stress. It’s ridiculous that a social butterfly like me, somebody who is so at ease with themselves, should be undergoing this anxiety.

And I’ve no idea what I’m going to wear or what to choose from the menu, which I’ve obviously already studied extensively.

What would CBT Tina say?

I like CBT Tina. I wish I could be more like her.

A pig shat in my head
With tomorrow well under way, I’m still suffering from a headache that started in the early hours of today, or was it yesterday? Whatever. It’s emanating from my neck, into my ear and into my head. I think the only thing for it is an early night, lots of water and a good night’s sleep.

Unfortunately, it’s now 1.40am, I’ve had four bottles of beer, and the little dog will have me awake within seven hours. Added to this is a compulsion to read up on the crimes of Ted Bundy. Things aren’t looking good for a productive day tomorrow/today/whatever.

CBT Tina is very disappointed in me right now. I’d better go before she starts shaking her head and wagging her finger at me again. Bitch.

So, it’s tonight that the clocks go forward, not last Saturday as I’d assumed last week. Even if I had changed my clocks last week, well, I wouldn’t have, because they all change themselves these days. Gone is the time when you had to run around on those Sunday mornings in October and March and move the hands or digits of your time pieces manually; everything does itself.

This country has no traditions left.

I recall once a couple of years ago when I was on holiday. It was the last night of our holiday in France, the clocks were going forward, we had to set the alarm to be picked up by the airport transfer people at 7am… and we were in France. If you set the alarm on your phone before the clocks changed, would it wake you at the right time? If it woke you at the wrong time, would it be too early or too late? And would the time on your phone change automatically if you weren’t on your home network?

I have never been so confused in all my life.

Actually, that’s no entirely correct. There was a time in Rome when me and my sister visited a restaurant with this splendid buffet and we couldn’t grasp whether we could just pay for a buffet dinner, and if so, whether we were allowed to go back to keep filling our plates. In the end, I made her keep watch to warn me of angry waiting staff while I went back for seconds. The artichokes were just too good not to go back for more.

But apart from if you actually have to get up to be somewhere, the change to BST or back to GMT shouldn’t really have much of an impact. I wake when the little dog’s bladder tells me it’s time to.

It’s Easter Day tomorrow. Big deal. I have always hated Easter, it was always so solemn when I was growing up. “So we’re celebrating somebody getting hideously murdered? What’s so great about that?”

“But he rose from the dead two days later!”

“What? Are you out of your minds?”

The run up at school was OK; we did the making Easter chicks out of pom poms with pipe cleaner legs, oh, and paper daffodils out of toilet roll tubes. Then they let us off school and the telly was full of really morbid shit and church stuff. There weren’t Easter egg hunts in those days, we just stayed off school for a fortnight being bored. Because that’s what kids did back then in school holidays, they were allowed to get bored.

After my auntie died when I was twelve, Easter had an added dimension of misery as we were taken to the crematorium where we had to stand and look at half-dead rose bushes in the garden of remembrance. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my auntie so much and losing her caused an awful lot of pain, but she wasn’t there in that rose garden – even I knew that. People who are gone are gone, why not just cherish their memory? Because bloody Easter tells us that people who are gone aren’t gone. Why? Why can’t people just be allowed to not exist in any form other than the sweetest of memories? Why do people hold on to this bizarre notion that they have to live on in an afterlife… for all eternity, which is for as long as is imaginable, only multiplied by infinity… time that you have to share with all the tosspots and wankers who’ve ever walked the earth, yet have been “saved”. Why would anybody want that? It’s just fucking ridiculous.

Anyway, then we’d come back from the misery of the crematorium and be made to watch Jesus of Nazareth – again, and The Greatest Story Ever Told – again, and a Bond film.

So as a child, Easter = misery & boredom. Then as I grew older, it meant misery, boredom and stress of exam revision. Now it means a couple of days off work and hot cross buns, so I’m finally enjoying it, all these years on.

Some might say that the original Pagan festival is more appropriate to celebrate: rebirth, spring, fertility, whatever. Why not celebrate and enjoy the world as it comes to life after the cold of winter? Because it’s still fucking winter, that’s why.

I shall celebrate my time off work with my family, the little dog, crap telly and a bit of booze.

Now, what time is it? It’s 11.52am, but this time tomorrow, it’ll be 12.52am. Oh good grief.

I can’t get my head round it, but flux capacitors at the ready, we’re heading off in time.

This is nice: the little dog has decided to cuddle up next to me in bed instead of sleeping on my knees. Oh, hang on, he’s now doing his “I need to spin round twelve times clockwise and five anticlockwise before I can curl up” thing. Happy, Little Man? Yes? Good. Then I shall continue.

It shouldn’t, but it gives me some satisfaction when his anus touches the pillow on which my ex used to rest her head. Juvenile, I know, but I wish that woman a thousand curses and an eternity of smelling nothing but dog anuses – ones whose glands need clearing. Then again, with the one she chose to betray me with, she probably has that anyway.

Oh, how I wish I could strike them down with a might as powerful as Krakatoa, so they feel their impending doom: the heat; the choking fumes; the fear; then, poof! vaporised and sent packing back into universe as nothing but disparate molecules and sub-atomic particles. Gone.

Be gone, all of you who just fucking piss me off. Yes you there, Asda! You’ve doubled the price of cans of Pepsi just like that. BOOM! Consider yourself smited. Off you fucking well pop. And you, Bolton Council. You increased my council tax this year, and what better services will I get? Oh, you’re reducing my bin collections to once a fortnight. Just what services do people who pay council tax actually get? Seems they mainly exist for those who don’t contribute at all. Suffer my wrath, wastrels, and take those bastards from Salford with you. Mister, “I can’t be arsed queuing, so I’ll cut you up”, or Miss “Lane markings and box junctions, they don’t matter”? You clearly don’t give a crap about your fellow humans, society, or little furry animals, so you’re all going to get skewered on my huge human kebab and spit roasted. You can cry and plead and beg, but you will suffer!

Why does it have to be this way? Why do some people have such inconsideration for others? I’d like to think it’s down to plain stupidity because then there’d be no malice in their actions. But it’s not like that, some people are genuinely, consciously utter twats. They might not do anything that’s against the law, but surely there must be some sort of correctional intervention for those in our midst who are just cocks?

I’m tired of this world I live in. Perhaps it’s the extended winter that’s bringing me and everyone else down. Even without sunshine and warmth, nothing can take away the longer days that are coming and maybe a little less darkness will make things all better, until autumn at least.

Until the chill winds from the east turn around, I am reliant on my electric blanket for bedtime warmth. Until others start showing more consideration, I shall sit here, wishing for the power of the almighty and planning what to do with it.

After lamenting another late Friday night, and suffering the consequences for most of today, here I am in bed. The promise of a decent night’s sleep is facilitated further by it being clean bedding Saturday. Aaaaaaaand relax.

Today has been a trial and I’ve been met with a number of challenges that are so much more difficult when you only have one pair of hands:

What is it with parents that they have to bombard you with queries as soon as you set foot inside their house?

“Tina, can you have a look at this, what does it mean?”

“Just a sec, my nose is dripping, let me get a tissue.”

“Oh fine, don’t help then!”

It’s the curse of the smartphone: Mother has discovered Google. She was trying to look up a particular hotel in Riccione, near my dad’s family. I found the hotel’s website, but it was all in Italian, so I had to pass it onto Dad to translate, but his translation skills only go so far against a backdrop of poor eyesight and technological blindness. And then they started shouting at each other.

They all shout in my family. They’re all mental.

This gift horse has halitosis
It’s nice to be thanked for the work I do; just an e-mail from an academic is lovely. I don’t need any more than this since I’m not doing people any special favours just by doing my job. I rarely go out of my way to get things done; I just get things done (eventually). I even get paid for what I do, so it’s always a little bit embarrassing when somebody drops by with a treat for me, but welcome all the same and I’m always grateful when it happens.

On returning from work after my period of leave and those few days off sick, there was a bag waiting for me under my desk. It contained a bottle of wine, which I brought home yesterday and put in the fridge. I’d had a look at it before putting it away and it seemed to have a few suspicious-looking floaters in it and when I opened it earlier, the cap unscrewed with worrying ease. Yes, it had already been opened a LONG time before being passed onto me and yes, what was unleashed from the opening was like a thousand years’ worth of curses from the fiery depths of hell.

Despite washing it down the sink with lots of very hot water, my kitchen now smells of stink bombs. There’ll be news headlines tomorrow of a chemical spillage into the Irwell that has caused the deaths of thousands of fish. Apologies, it was me.

I feel so appreciated, but in many ways I’m glad. I didn’t need another booze-fuelled late night and a Sunday fight against torpor.

At 6.30pm, I was ready to get into my pyjamas and come to bed. It’s now 1.20am and I’ve finally achieved duvet.

Why do I do this? Throughout the day, my body can barely function because of fatigue, yet each weekend, the opportunity for restorative sleep is shunned in favour of crap on the TV.

Perhaps it’s because I know that I can lay about until gone lunchtime. I have no plans of a weekend; nothing to get up for other than chores. No company to keep, other than that of the little dog and maybe my parents. I am my own person, answerable to nobody, with nobody to judge me or care what I do with my time.

Being single has so many advantages and I actually like it, but I’m coming round to the notion of being part of a we again. There are things that are missing like having somebody to send share the most banal thoughts with, conversation, laugh until you’re sick with, somebody to cook with or for – not to mention intimacy or even love.

When you have a huge part of your being ripped out of you, you feel like the only thing that can fill that hole would be the same shape as the person who left it, or indeed the person who left it. But it heals over and you grow back to fill the space, at least in part. I’ve come to realise that I’m never really fulfilled, that there’s always something missing unless I’m with somebody. Everybody deserves somebody special, everybody should be part of a we. If only to have somebody to bring us coffee – or to make coffee for – of a weekend morning.

Fucking hell, I’m the most awesome person I know! Who in their right mind wouldn’t want to be with me?

Could it be the weather?
Spring has sprung, according to the calendar, yet it snows and the temperatures struggle to get above freezing. What on earth is going on? I have stuff to do to beautify my yard and borders and we’re still suffering winter weather.

There must be a department of weather somewhere within government. The environment agency must surely be working with the MoD to develop a methodology for weather control. Just what the hell am I paying my taxes for?

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does a bloody thing about it. It’s a national outrage. Yet people whinney about a bit of horse meat in their burgers! This country has got its priorities all wrong.

Sleep, finally
As the wind batters around outdoors, I shall finally lay my head down and dissolve into a long awaited slumber. But as I do so, the thing on my mind will be, why on earth didn’t I buy those hot cross buns when I was in the supermarket last night?

I’ve taken to my bed. Well, that’s not strictly true; I’ve simply come to bed early, as I’ve been promising myself for the past week. I’d love to take myself to my bed with an attack of the vapours, but that’s the sort of thing that people do to get attention. The only person who’d notice is the little dog and he wouldn’t let me get away with it.

Oh do be a darling and pass me my fan. I’m far too weak to reach it and clutch my pearls at the same time. And darling? I seem to have run out of gaspers, be a dear and bring me some. If I’m feeling a little better tomorrow, I might be able to sit in my chair by the window: I have so many letters to write to mama and dearest Fanny, but I can barely muster the strength to hold a pen. I fear I may die in this room.

I need a Mrs Danvers to tend to my every need. Or maybe I just need some early nights. I have been feeling somewhat wrecked since my brief hospital stay. And so very achy. The pains in my long bones are reminiscent of growing pains and my other joints are aching too. Woe is me. WOE is me. All I can say is that if this is what it feels like after just one dose of that drug they gave me, I hope I never have to have a full course of chemotherapy. Still, it did the job, so I shouldn’t complain.

Equinox
It’s the spring equinox. Or something like that. The clocks go forward at the weekend and the evenings will be getting lighter. And so with it, the world stretches into a sleepy wakefulness and shakes off the wintry cobwebs. Unfortunately, the world seems to be hitting the snooze button a few more times and it’s not quite ready to welcome in the spring, but it will come and with it there will be colour and freshness and warmth.

I await that first day of feeling the warming sun on my face with such anticipation. Until then though, I shall remain here in my bed, in my head at least.