The vast majority of the good stuff here is friends only. This is because it consists of all the best in scandalous gossip from the classical music industry, which would totally get me fired if it were in the public domain. Add me and I'll probably add you back...

Mary Cherry absolutely frickin' rocks. And Harrison (at around 4.17 in the first video) was just about the most heartbreakingly gorgeous man ever to appear on TV... I just never got over the untimely death of Popular... *sob*...

My favourite Mary Cherry quotes ever:

"Y'all, do I have to do the splits? I'm a Christian."
"We're gonna die, y'all!"
Nicole: "You carry a vial of e-coli in your purse???"
Mary Cherry: "A girl never knows when she's gonna have to drop 20lbs!"

I know exactly what I'm going to hell for: gluttony.

As I type this, it is 11am and I am already tucking into the sandwiches I brought for lunch (really strong vintage cheddar with avocado, cherry tomatoes and spinach and just a dash of mayonnaise on granary bread). Yesterday I was overjoyed to discover that Pret have already started doing those yummy Christmas sandwiches they do with turkey and cranberry and stuff. The thing that I am most going to miss about being in warmer climes for Christmas this year is missing out on a bit phat roast dinner and tucking into all the chocolates my mum's students give her every year. The first thing that I am likely to do on arrival in Mexico is to sample some local delicacies. Stephen and I are talking about going on a long weekend to Segovia next spring, partly for the glorious architecture and to practise our language skills, but mostly to stuff our faces with cochinillo and chorizo al vino and to go to Dia to buy a suitcase full of jamon de serrano and chorizo and olive oil - all those delicious things that cost a fortune in England. I have started a facebook group entitled, "The Chip Butty Appreciation Society". When I was a small child, my parents used to bribe me to do things I didn't want to do with jaffa cakes. I have been known to hallucinate about sushi.

What are you going to hell for?

I have a confession to make. I spend a lot of time with my feminist hat on, ranting about how we shouldn't worry nearly so much about our looks, which are given completely disproportionate importance by our disgusting patriarchal society, and which are just one of our many and varied attributes. But I'm a complete hypocrite. It's true that I would like to see women in general worry less about their looks, but my own appearance causes me considerable distress.

Most of the time, I look in the mirror and think I look ok. Occasionally I think I look good. But I look absolutely bloody fucking awful in photos, and of course the camera never lies. I am ugly. Sometimes I bypass ugly and just look mediocre, which to a perfectionist is just as bad.

I can't see how anyone would ever love me or find me attractive. I can't even see how anyone would fuck me without wishing they were fucking someone else. I have no other attributes that sufficiently compensate for my mediocre looks. I am worthless.

Sometimes I feel like killing myself because I'm not beautiful. Today is one of those days.

I have just returned from a dark and dangerous expedition. I have, for the first time in over five years, bought condoms. I didn't really set out with such a mission in mind, but I was in Boots buying first aid type stuff for my travels, walked past the family planning section and stopped and thought, hang on, I suppose I might get lucky...

Stop laughing, it's not totally inconceivable!

So anyway, I discovered that it's impossible to buy normal condoms these days. By which I mean, condoms that aren't ribbed, lubed, flavoured, flimsy or industrially reinforced. There are no bog standard vanilla condoms on the market. All I want is something that's going to allow me to get some action without getting gonorrhea - is that too much to ask? Apparently so. A brief summary of what's available:

Ribbed "Enhanced for her pleasure". The last (and only) time I used one of these, it was like having sex with a cheese grater.

Flavoured Nothing wrong with it per se, but they look ridiculous. The last time I used flavoured condoms, I couldn't stop laughing because my partner's bright red strawberry-flavoured penis reminded me of Satan in the South Park movie. Highly amusing, but not really conducive to great sex.

Performance enhancing Really, really scary, these ones. Like normal condoms, but with this stuff on the inside that actually numbs the penis and delays ejaculation. Yikes! I suppose it might help chronic premature ejaculators, but frankly, I'd rather anyone I slept with enjoyed it as much as I did.

Heavy duty Reinforced for really rough anal sex. Since I'm NOT going to be taking it up the arse, this extra reinforcement is unnecessary and likely to detract from my partner's pleasure.

Featherweight I'm a bit suspicious of these. The idea is, they're as thin as possible for the most natural feel. But surely they break more easily?

I went for the featherweight ones in the end (12 pack, baby! I'm feeling optimistic), reasoning that they can't be that flimsy or they wouldn't meet safety standards, and since I have a contraceptive implant, a split condom isn't the end of the world.

What's interesting is that when the cashier ran the condoms through the till, they just came up as "Chemist goods". How twee and unnecessary. But then, I suppose that might make it easier for teenagers to buy them and not have to worry about their parents seeing the receipt. Likewise people having affairs not wanting their partners to find out about the 24-pack of extra-large, extra-reinforced, deviant S&M ones they'd just bought.

The condoms I have just bought expire in July 2011. Surely I will get laid before then. SURELY.

I am currently eating the shittest lunch ever.

There is a little Thai buffet place near the office that I'd never tried before, so having neglected to pack sandwiches today, I went there for a take out box. Imagine my horror when, already having paid £4 for said box, I discovered that it was fucking VEGAN!

I now have greasy, salty, shitty, rubbery chicken substitute, bouncy tofu, minging curried noodles, and even the vegetables are salty, greasy and undercooked.

The place is called Tai Buffet and it's near the British Museum on New Oxford Street. DO NOT go there unless you actually like soggy, salty tofu. Sod animal rights and the environment, I want some proper food. WANKERS.

This is just too funny not to share. I particularly love the 'alternative' usage of the square root sign on the paper 5 from the bottom. Oh, and the description of the graph. And the stick man terrorist!

Actually, it reminds me of a legendary incident at my mum's school. My mum teaches Year 2 kids and one of her more thankless tasks is getting them to do well on their SATs exams. The maths papers used to be set out in a manner whereby they'd give you a problem, ask you for the answer and then ask you for an explanation of how you arrived at that answer. So, a kid in my mum's class a couple of years ago wrote down the answer to the problem correctly, but then got a bit confused about what the examiners were looking for. In response to the question, "How did you get that answer?" he wrote, "I used my brain" and illustrated it with a great picture of a disembodied brain. He received no marks, which I thought was an absolute travesty seeing as he'd clearly answered the question correctly.

Yesterday I had my first taekwondo tournament in ages. I hadn't competed for over a year for two reasons - firstly because my asthma always happens to have been quite bad when tournaments have come round, and secondly because I have been feeling less and less confident about my ninja skillz. However, there really wasn't an excuse not to do yesterday's. I was in good health, and seeing as it was a friendly inter-club tournament it was the perfect way to ease myself back into competing and give me some confidence.

On Saturday, my instructor (the young one) spent an hour with me going over my patterns and taking me through a few sparring drills, before insisting on buying me my first ever Krispy Kreme doughnut (the day before a tournament!) which was really yummy but actually gave me a sugar-overload headache - pretty impressive for one doughnut. Definitely something to enjoy occasionally as part of a balanced diet :s

So anyway, the day of the tournament dawned, I got up at an unfeasibly stupid hour, packed my bag with huge quantities of water and Lucozade (1st rule of tournaments: however much water you take with you, you always need more) and set off for Dunstable. The kids were doing really well when I got there and we all cheered them on for a bit before heading off to the weigh-in. Normally there are three weight categories, but in this tournament there were only two, meaning that I wasn't the only lightweight and didn't end up having to fight people considerably bigger than me.

Patterns was a strange experience. Normally patterns is very much my thing. I've come first in all but one of the tournaments I've ever entered and have never lost to anyone who wasn't a higher grade than me. I did a great first round, but in the second I was up against a girl of the same belt as me, who was doing the same pattern. The fact that we were doing the same pattern freaked me out a bit for some reason and I didn't do so well. The judges' decision was split right down the middle, but seeing as the head umpire had voted for her she won that round. I ended up coming third overall. It was kind of a controversial decision though - loads of people not just from my club were bitching about how much better my kicks and jumps had been, and I'm thinking perhaps I actually went properly wrong at some point - a wrong stance or something - some major technical error that perhaps nobody who hadn't been sitting on the umpires' table would have noticed.

Sparring was better, at least in terms of what I had expected of myself and what I actually achieved. I had a particularly vicious bout with a girl from my club, who I think is probably a future world champion. She's only sixteen but she is virtually unbeatable. I did manage to score a few points though, and was happy with that. We both ended up injuring each other at some point though, and mine was quite amusing. She was punching me in the face and ended up accidentally poking me in the eye. The referee called time out.

"It's ok, she just poked me in the eye, I just need a minute..."
"You don't wear contact lenses do you?"
"Yes..."
"Is it still in there?"
"Yeah I think so"
"No it's not, it's on your cheek"
"Oh no!"

He picked it off my cheek and handed it to me. I don't have uber-bad eyesight so was fine to continue with only one, but I was kind of at a loss as to what to do with the one that had fallen out. The referee told me to go and hand it to my instructor (the old one) who was standing at the side. So I deposited it in his hand saying, "It's a disposable one, just get rid of it, thanks!" He looked so disgusted!

Then a minute later I landed a great kick to the stomach, totally winding her. It was my turn to kneel on the floor facing in the opposite direction and get bollocked by our instructor whilst she recovered. Fortunately we were saved by the bell a few seconds after she recovered, and I think we were both quite relieved. I think the referee was highly amused by us more than anything else.

Point stop sparring was quite embarrassing for me. For those not in the know, point stop sparring does exactly what it says on the tin: you stop each time someone scores a point and start again once it's been verified by the corner umpires. There is such a massive advantage to be had in height for point stop (Kelly, our future world champion, weighs the same as me but is 4 inches taller with very long limbs) that it was an average of only about 5 seconds in each time that she scored a point against me. I scored one against her though. ONE!

Then it was onto tag team sparring. Tag team sparring works like this: You have a team of three containing at least one lightweight and at least one colour belt. There are two people in the ring at any one time, but your teammates are standing at the side and can tag you out at any time. Normally what happens is as soon as one team puts in their lightweight, the other team puts in their biggest girl who then wipes the floor with you. But as it happens, the heaviest girl there was only just over 60kg so we all had to rely on skill. I was definitely prouder of my performance in this than anything else. The other team's scariest sparrer was giving my teammate a hard time, so I did what I had to do and tagged her out. I was terrified both for my personal safety and for my pride - I didn't want to make a tit of myself and let my team down. But I actually did really well. I scored us a lot of points until the unfortunate moment when she attempted to raise her leg at high speed for an axe kick, but my groin got in the way. She should have been docked a point for kicking below the belt, but I honestly don't know if she was because I was in far too much pain to notice anything about my surroundings. My teammate went back in and finished her off. At the end of the match, it was the referee's second time to laugh at me that day as I bowed to my opponents with my legs crossed and tears in my eyes.

It was clearly an accident, but I was really annoyed that the girl in question didn't apologise to me. She had ample opportunity to do so after the match but she didn't. Grrrr.

After that, and a quick trip to the toilet to get changed and inspect the state of my ladyparts (blue and purple, but fortunately no bleeding) it was time for the men's sparring, when I got my first taste of umpiring. Umpiring works like this: you have a head referee in the middle standing with the sparrers, bossing them around and making decisions. You have someone at a table at the front keeping time and telling everyone who they're fighting and when. And you have four other umpires, one at each corner, keeping scores. This is what I was doing. You have a red clicker and a blue clicker, and one opponent wears either a red or a blue bib so that you can see who's who. Unfortunately the bib had gone missing, but fortunately one of the clubs involved had a uniform involving red stripes, so it was easy to see who was who in most matches. In others, the referee told us which was red and which was blue. In the last match however, he forgot to do this. We had one man in a red striped dobok wearing a blue belt, one man in a plain white dobok wearing a red belt, and none of us knew which was which. Luckily it was pretty much a draw anyway! There were two bloody noses in the mens sparring, one of them inflicted by an absolutely spectacular jumping reverse hooking kick by our star sparrer. He was docked a point for excessive contact, but by God it was worth it, especially since the other guy was ok in the end.

I'm really glad I went in the end. I might be slightly concussed and having to apply an ice pack to my ladyparts at regular intervals, but I now have three massive trophies (and one little one for the patterns) and a bit more confidence in my sparring ability. A more pressing issue though is that I have sore back muscles and am very much in need of a good massage. Where's Fit American Boy when you need him?

Anybody who's ever worked in an office will be familiar with franking label salespeople. Someone will call the office and parrot a script along the lines of, "Hi, this is so-and-so from such-and-such a company, can you tell me how many franking labels you've got at the moment? Do you need any more?" This is designed to sound like a friendly courtesy call from the company that your company always uses for their franking label needs and to trick the person on the end of the phone into ordering labels from the wrong people. One of my colleagues fell for it yesterday afternoon - he took a call, put someone on hold, asked how we were all doing for franking labels and we all said, "No, no, get rid of them, it's a total con!"

But how to get rid of them? How to get rid of them in the most fun way possible? Well, we came up with some ideas...

Conduct the above without actually putting them on hold
"What are you wearing?"
Heavy breathing
"Franking labels get me so HOT"
"We don't have a franking machine - we use carrier pigeons instead"
"I'm afraid this is a very bad time. One of our directors died in a horrific franking machine-related accident yesterday"
"I like to put franking labels down my pants because I love the sticky sensation"
"Can I interest you in advertising in Classical Music magazine?"
"Sorry, our franking machine is being exorcised today"
"I'm terribly sorry, I've just come"
"Are they from sustainable forests?"
"Que?"


Any further suggestions?

A geeky site that I frequent has started a bit of a competition: somebody has set up a scoreboard on hotornot.com so that we can see who's hottest.

I was one of the first to jump on the bandwagon, and started off on a fairly respectable 8.7, putting me in 2nd place. 30 votes later and I was languishing at 7.0.

"Aha!" I thought. "Lots of jealous women have been giving me low scores in order to beef up their own rankings!" Yes, I am officially an arrogant bitch, this really is the first thing that popped into my head. I was right though. A cursory glance at my histogram tells me that A LOT of people have given me 1s and 2s.

So anyway, this is my hotornot photo, and if you think I'm worth more than the 7.6 that I currently have, please vote! If you don't, then don't bother... ;-)

There's an interesting article in The Times today about thug culture and how we can teach young people to have some basic respect for others and not go around killing people.

One quote really struck me:

He [a father in Norris Green who wisely declined to be named] said that to describe these groups of wild children as gangs was a misnomer – they were not that disciplined, but they certainly were dangerous, “precisely because they fear no one, and they are too stupid to understand that when you pull the trigger death is for good”.

They're not too stupid to understand. They understand all right. They just don't care.

I attended a pretty thuggish primary school and witnessed, and indeed fell foul of, some evil lowlifes. My school was banned from the Thousand Voices, which was a massive annual event involving every year 6 kid in the borough, because a boy in my year had brought in a pair of nunchakus to school - real ones, that can easily kill someone with one blow (I should know - I twatted myself in the neck the other week with a foam-padded, supposedly safe pair and was in pain for days) - to beat up another kid outside the school gates, seriously injuring an old lady who tried to intervene.

Because I was a bit weird and brainy and not very pretty, the other kids thought it was tremendous fun to do things like set fire to my skirt or strangle me with a skipping rope, because being a bit weird and brainy and not very pretty made me sub-human in their eyes and therefore they could do what they liked with me. They gained pleasure from my suffering because they didn't empathise with it.

It was when I was in Year 5, the same age as the boys who did it, that Jamie Bulger was tortured and murdered by a pair of ten-year-olds. My headmaster delivered a "shocked and appalled" assembly, questioning how on earth a child of our age could bring themselves to do a thing like that. But I wasn't shocked at all, and I don't think my classmates were either. Doing something like that requires nothing more than a suspension of respect for human life, a suspension of empathy and a taste for violence, all of which a lot of kids have in great quantities.

It seems as if even normal children develop an instinct for cruelty a few years before they develop morals or empathy. There is no creature on earth with a greater capacity for unfeeling sadism than a child between the ages of ten and twelve. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if all children go through a stage of pre-pubescent psychopathy.

The moment at which I realised I was no longer going to be seriously bullied happened in my first year of secondary school (which in my spacky education authority was actually year 8). I can't remember the exact details of what had happened, but somebody had done something wrong in class and the teacher had wrongly identified a culprit, whereupon the boy who had actually done the dirty deed raised his hand and admitted guilt rather than watch a classmate go unfairly punished. It was such a petty little incident, but at that moment I knew that everything was going to be ok - that my peers were starting to gain some respect for the lives and feelings of others.

I don't think you can force anyone to really give a toss about other people - that's a personal choice, and it might even be a developmental thing that some kids take longer to acquire than others. What you CAN do is not to let them get away with it. In an ideal world, everybody would just want to be nice to each other and not go around beating people up and, in some cases, shooting them. But much as it pains me to sound like a Daily Mail reader, what are these parents doing, even letting their kids outside the house if they know they're capable of cruelty and, in recent cases, murder? The way I see it, if you're twelve years old, going out with your friends is a privilege not a right, and it's a privilege you shouldn't have if you're a junior psychopath, or if the friends you want to hang around with are junior psychopaths. What the fuck are their parents thinking? And what about school too? One of the reasons bullying should never be tolerated however petty is not just because of the distress it causes the victims, but because of the habits that can become ingrained in the bullies if they are not curbed. Sometimes it seems that people are frightened of discipline, because the word itself conjures up images of horrid Victorian values and ruling with a rod of iron and stuff. But really, all it means is having clear boundaries, high standards of behaviour, and intolerance towards bad behaviour.

Anyway, I'm just rambling now, but I just can't help feeling that if these kids had people actually bothering to tell them that lacking respect for human life was unacceptable and that there would be actual consequences for such behaviour rather than just an ASBO, it couldn't be a bad thing.

It's funny how the tiniest mistakes can spell disaster. Obviously last night I forgot both to set my alarm and to take my asthma medication, which is how I ended up waking up at 7:50 this morning wheezing like a 50-a-day smoker.

Luckily I'd taken a shower the night before after taekwondo, so really I didn't need to do anything except get dressed and get my stuff together, but I had to sit quietly for ages waiting for the asthma medication to kick in before I could walk to the station without collapsing.

Anyway, I arrived only three minutes late for work! I think this is really good going, especially since had I not gone on a detour to Pret to get some breakfast (I absolutely cannot function without breakfast and don't understand people who can) I would actually have been a bit early.

I hate this time of year. And not just because the weather is getting colder and the evenings darker. I hate it because I appear to be allergic to midge bites. Not properly allergic obviously, although at the rate my reaction to them seems to be worsening I wouldn’t be surprised if in ten years time I spend the whole of autumn in anaphylactic shock. I don’t normally get bitten by insects at all, and when I do, it’s not too bad. Mosquitos don’t bother me. They don’t seem to find me particularly tasty in the first place and I’ve never had a bad reaction to a mosquito bite. But those tiny little English midges that don’t have much of an effect on most people bite me to pieces, which come up in hideously painful welts that drive me crazy and take weeks to go away.

A couple of nights ago I felt a slight burning, prickling sensation on my abdomen, pulled up my top and actually watched my skin swell and blister before my eyes. I have four bites on my stomach, which are so painful I want to rip my skin off. I felt really sick for a while after they first appeared, and I’m not sure if that was just a reaction to the pain or yet another symptom that I’ve started having. I am now dreaming of my next “fix” of antihistamines in a Trainspotting-style, hair-tearing state of withdrawal.

Goddammit I hate midges! The world would be so much better off without them. Nothing seems to eat the bloody things so it’s not like their extermination would bugger up the ecosystem. Annihilate the greedy, bloodsucking fiends, that’s what I say.

For anyone interested in such things, I have recently become a professional ranter. I've been invited to join The F-Word's team of bloggers. The F-Word is THE UK-based feminist website. This is quite a big deal and will look fantastic on my CV. I'm feeling rather pleased with myself!

It's been a while since I was able to furnish my lovely readers with any gossip of a man-related nature, but now I may just have some...

Fit American Boy is back!

Who remembers Fit American Boy? Fit American Boy is the guy who I met at a friend's birthday party last summer and had three very successful dates with before he went back to San Francisco (I obviously made a great impression on him then). We lost touch, as you do when you've only known someone for two weeks before they bugger off halfway across the world for four months, but a week ago he popped up on one of my friends' facebook pages, I friended him, we arranged to meet up and had another extremely successful date involving sitting around drinking coffee, eating cake, discussing feminism, literature (he is scarily well-read. I feel like a right idiot) and politics, and him insisting on walking me home a mile out of his way.

I like Fit American Boy.

He has never been to the Proms, so we are going next Sunday for an awesome programme of Shostakovich and Bernstein. Watch this space...

Yesterday I bought a 65L gap year wanker rucksack, made by a reputable manufacturer, for £24. For those not in the know, this is pretty amazing - something like this would normally set you back at least £70. And it wasn't even on sale. The place where I bought this was Sports World, bastions of the worst customer service in the known universe.

Sports World are a chain of sports shops that sell ends of lines and last season's sportsgear at hugely discounted prices. Their shops are veritable warehouses full of every cut-price sportswear you could possibly want (except martial arts shoes, grrrr), provided you're not too bothered about having the latest gear. Sports World have been steadily going out of business for ages and it's only a matter of time before they admit defeat. The reason for this? I think it's entirely the fault of their staff and shop floor management.

They simply can't be arsed with their customers at all. They don't care whether or not they sell you anything. They don't even notice you're there. They're rude, surly, unhelpful, inarticulate, lazy morons.

Take yesterday for example: In addition to the rucksack I had found a pair of shorts that I wanted to try on. I couldn't find a changing room, so I found a member of staff and asked him where it was. "It's closed," he said, turning away from me and wandering off. No apology, no suggestion of when facilities would be available, no explanation of their returns policy.

So I found a mirror in front of which I held the shorts up against myself, trying to work out if they'd fit me. Another member of staff pushed past me without apologising.

I decided that the shorts would probably fit, so took both them and the rucksack to the checkout. There was a fairly long queue, several tills unmanned, and several staff lolling around doing nothing. When I finally got to the front of the queue, I was held up because the woman in front of me was trying to return a faulty item. "I can't give you a refund, it's company policy," the moron behind the till kept saying so inarticulately I could barely understand him. Call me classist, but I really don't think someone who can't speak proper English should be in a job where they have to speak to people. "Company policy, company policy, company policy..." The woman gave up. She should have asked to speak to the manager, but I doubt that that would have got her any further.

Whilst all this was going on, I seriously considered giving up and going to Blacks where I knew that I would receive fantastic service from staff who knew what they were talking about, but I knew that at Blacks I would pay three times the price for a similar product. I'm not willing to put my money where my principles are for £50. However, if I'd just been buying the shorts I'd have given up straight after the changing room incident. There are very few bargains awesome enough to make me put up with shit like this. And that, my friends, is why Sports World are going out of business. They make it so unbelievably difficult for people to buy anything from them!

I don't want to see this company go under. I like cut price sports gear as much as the next person. However, they need a good kick up the arse. They need to sack 90% of their staff and hire people without attitude problems. Perhaps they need to start paying them commission. They need to keep their stores clean and tidy. Surely it's an absolute no-brainer - if shopping somewhere is an unpleasant experience people aren't going to go there, no matter how cheap they are.

For the last few weeks I've been having headaches and fainting spells with annoying regularity. I've been exhausted a lot of the time, struggling not to throw up on the tube every morning and having to wear sunglasses permanently like a movie star because I can't stand bright light. I did see a doctor about it last week, who said that it was probably my hormones finally catching up with me. I've had a contraceptive implant for the last couple of years which has completely stopped my hideously painful periods, but recently I've been menstruating about once a week (albeit with no symptoms other than mild bleeding, so I don't really mind) so the doc thinks it's my newly-instated periods triggering migraines and that I should have the implant removed.

I'll have the implant removed when hell freezes over. No longer having periods has given me my life back, and I'm buggered if I'm relinquishing it again.

Anyway, I've been feeling better over the last couple of days. I went to taekwondo last night and for the first time in weeks, didn't have to give up halfway through. I'm really, really hoping that what I've been suffering from is a random virus and not anything to do with my hormones.

My travel plans for the year are pretty much sorted! It's all down to the suggestion of my friend Raz. We had coffee a few weeks ago and she suggested that I went somewhere on my own. Now, I didn't realise that normal people went on holiday on their own - I thought it was just for losers with no friends - but she told me that virtually everybody she knows has done it. Apparently the thing to do is to book a place on a guided tour. Again, my view of tours was of obnoxious chavs going round the Costa del Sol in a coach, complaining about the fact that you can't get baked beans there, but again, apparently this is not the case.

So, the short version of the story is, I went down to STA Travel and booked myself onto a tour of Central America at the end of the year. I will be flying into Cancun on 25th November (my birthday! Spending my birthday on a plane for 17 hours, great...) travelling through Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, and returning on 30th December. I will have the opportunity to go riding lots (which with rising insurance prices is the preserve of people who own their own horses in this country), swim with dolphins, and on Christmas Day, I will be zip-wiring over a jungle.

I'm buying everything I need to buy for this now seeing as most of it's on sale at the moment, and any clothes I need to buy will have to be of a summery nature (oh yeah - it'll be between 20-30C, and the height of the dry season!) and I'm just loving the fact that whilst every other girl I know is shopping for trendy skimpy tops for their holidays, here are a few highlights of my shopping list:

Gap year wanker rucksack (think I'll be able to borrow this from someone though)

One of those money belts that you can keep under your clothes

A pair of those trousers with bottoms that zip off to turn them into shorts, which make you look like a twat in London but quite cool on holiday

Malaria tablets (even though I never get bitten)

And my personal favourite....walking boots, because you can't wear sandals in the jungle in case you step on a deadly poisonous snake

But the best part? I still have one day of holiday left to take! So perhaps I'll go for a long weekend somewhere too...

More free Prom tickets last night, this time to hear the combined forces of the LPO and the Orchestre National de France under the baton of Kurt Masur playing the Tchaikovsky Serenade for Strings and Bruckner 7.

I unashamedly love the Tchaikovsky – it’s such a fun piece to play. Their playing style wasn’t really Russian enough for my liking though – it was all a bit lukewarm and English. The ensemble was a bit dodgy at times too, although this wasn’t the players’ fault at all. Masur doesn’t seem to conduct so much as just randomly wave his arms about and dance around like a little girl. Pretty disastrous, seeing as most of the brilliance of Tchaikovsky’s orchestral writing, even in large-scale symphonies, comes from unison strings. If it’s not perfectly together, it just doesn’t work.

The Bruckner was fantastic. Bruckner is pretty much the last thing I’d listen to at home, but it’s just so great live. I was so impressed with the orchestra for playing something like that essentially without a conductor. I don’t think I saw a single downbeat in the entire evening – he was just waving his arms around in a rather effeminate manner whilst they followed the leader. How do conductors like that get where they are? It’s incredible.

Unfortunately, the orchestra came completely unstuck in Die Meistersinger overture, which they played as an encore, to the extent to which at one point I honestly thought they were going to nosedive completely. They got back together though, and the piece ended well.

At one point at the end of the concert, Masur took a bow on his own without bringing the orchestra to their feet. A more appropriate end to the concert would have been every section leader getting the opportunity to soak up that adulation instead. There are some conductors that orchestras follow, and there are some that they don’t. If the orchestra had attempted to follow the conductor on this occasion, the entire concert would have been an unmitigated disaster. They get away with it, because professional orchestras are accustomed to having to deal with incompetent buffoons like this. They’re capable of ignoring the conductor and staying together on their own, and then the corpulent buffoon who’s just spent the last half hour mindlessly waving his arms around like a geriatric windmill takes all the credit. It’s so gay.

I am apparently obliged to post this first, according to The Management:

1. Leave me a comment saying anything random, like your favorite lyric to your current favorite song. Or your favorite kind of sandwich. Something random. Whatever you like.
2. I respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
3. You WILL update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be asked, you will ask them five questions.

The following are courtesy of radinden

1. Talent, hard work, raw back-stabbing ambition, low standards on who you'll sleep with, or all of the above: what do you really need to get ahead in the music world?

All of the above help, but what's really important is low aspirations and lack of self-respect.

2. According to Facebook (yes, I've been doing proper research for these questions!), you've lived in Spain. I'm sure I hadn't heard about this before. Tell?

That's a pretty tenuous statement to be honest. I've worked there, but only for a total of about 3 months. I just thought it made me sound more interesting.

3. What's the most stupid thing you've done when drunk?

Ummm, shared my personal space with a turd in Burger King the other night? Texted people I shouldn't? Had screaming matches in the street? Oooooh, I know! I was a bit pissed at a house party a while ago, and standing next to me was this girl who was skinny with short hair, and just out of the corner of my eye for a split second I thought she was a bloke. So I turned and said, "Hiiiiiiii, how are you, we met at Olivia's leaving party, it's so funny, right, for a split second there I thought you were a really short bloke!!! Mwahahahaha!!!!!" She didn't see the funny side. Oh, and she'd only just arrived, so she was stone cold sober. Whoops!

4. "You are by far the yummiest specimen of gorgeousness ever to have appeared on the programme." Have you ever written any other fan letters? ;)

Nope, just that one.

5. There's people who would kill to have your life, or at least that part of it that's externally visible: good job, diverse bunch of friends, odd but impressive collection of skills and hobbies, and good looks and health. Nevertheless, you seem to be in a state of permanent dissatisfaction with yourself. Do you just aim high? And what would you change right now if you could?

I'd change my entire life. I'd go back and do it all better. I wish life was like a computer game, whereby every time you screw up, you can just kill yourself, Game Over, start again. A brief and by no means comprehensive catalogue of my misdemeanours: Not getting stright A*s in my GCSEs like everyone else I know (although at that age I'd never heard of anyone managing this), only doing 2 A levels, not going to Oxbridge, not being pretty enough, not getting a first in my degree, screwing up the one time I've ever been in love (and no, it wasn't the bloke I was living with a while back. I know, I know!), lacking general knowledge, having virtually no friends who regard me as anything more than a vague acquaintance. Bottom line is, if hardly anybody likes me, I must be doing something wrong.