This is no Bridget Jones... well I kind of wish it was.

I have a guilty secret. Yes, I love my fancy literature, but whenever I'm feeling a bit depressed about my life I read Bridget Jones' Diary. Sometimes a trashy read is exactly what you need to cheer yourself up. I think I feel an affinity with the novel because every time I read it, I am struck by how disturbingly similar my life is to Bridget's. Here are the ways in which we are similar:

1. She is very, very middle-class. When she talks about her "hideous middle-class singleton guilt experience" in the supermarket when she goes shopping for a dinner party, it reminds me of the time I almost had a break-down in Asda because everyone else was buying Asda Smartprice Bacon Flavour Cardboard Pieces and Asda Frozen Deep-Fried Sheep Intestine Burgers and I was buying asparagus tips and wensleydale with cranberries. I believe I wrote about that particular traumatic experience on this blog, actually.
   
2. She works in publishing. All right, I don't work in publishing yet, but according to my incredibly sketchy life plan - which takes up half a page of my pocket book and was written in a sleep-induced haze when I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat thinking GAAHWHATAMIGONNADOWITHMYLIFE - that's where I'll be in a couple of years time. Bad: she sees her job as a 'dead-end' job and hates it. Good: she has a degree in English from Bangor and a poor grasp of spelling/grammar, and yet still managed to get into the industry. This bodes well for me.
3. She is terrified of growing old alone and then being discovered in her apartment weeks after her death being eaten by alsations. Admittedly she is thirty and has more reason to be worried about not finding someone than I do, as I am still twenty and young and sprightly. However, I really can't see myself ever finding anyone who meets my impossibly high standards. At least I have managed to co-erce one of my guy friends into the old 'if neither of us is married by forty...' pact. Well, when I say co-erce, I have decided it is going to happen, but I haven't exactly told him this yet. I'm sure he won't mind.
4. She is an obsessive calorie-counter. I'm not proud of this. Before uni I ate as much as I liked and never worried about it, and because I was still growing I never got fat. When I first came to uni I decided that no-one liked me, I didn't fit in anywhere, and I wasn't clever enough to be there. I think everyone has these worries at some point, but everyone responds to them differently; I responded by eating. I remember one shameful day when I ate an entire Christmas log for lunch, and then sat there on the verge of throwing up thinking this has got to stop. So then I went the opposite way. Once you start counting calories you can never stop, because even if you stop caring about your weight (which I have) you know how many calories are in everything. Please, never start doing it. Anyway, there are some days when Bridget eats about 5,000 calories... that always makes me feel better about myself.
5. She is socially awkward and always makes an idiot of herself. And to emphasize this point, I just wrote 'myself' instead of 'herself'. I always say weird things to fill silences, and am constantly tripping over in public, spilling things all over myself, walking into trees and falling down stairs. Honestly, what am I like? Guffaw.
   

There are differences between us. She likes smoking and drinking, both of which I hate, and she watches trashy TV instead of reading books. However, most importantly, she is a fictional character and I am not (I hope). My life would make an awful novel or movie, because nothing interesting ever happens to me. Reading Bridget Jones cheers me up because even though she fails almost all of her New Year resolutions she's still happy, and she gets her Mr Darcy in the end. It's unashamed wish-fulfilment, of course, and promotes the idea that you need to be in a relationship to be happy. But I'm not going to go on about that, because everyone knows it, and no one really cares. Sometimes, a bit of escapism is nice.

And now I've had my little jaunt to the land of escapism, I'll return to the gritty, depressing WWII literature I'm reading for next year. Which I love just as much.

(Oh, and mouse update: I forgot to take a photo, but I set her free under the shed because I think that's where the mice live. She was dragging one of her legs and kept falling over, but hopefully she made it home. I couldn't have kept her forever...)

Mice!

Today started off quite well. Except that Jack inexplicably woke me up at 8am to ask if I wanted a cup of tea, which was nice, except that I was fast asleep and therefore quite obviously not in need of a hot beverage of any kind. I said yes anyway. Then, since I was up, I decided to go for a run, which was very good of me.

When I came back the cat was in the garden, and he had that bulgy-cheeked look that immediately told me he had some kind of creature stuffed into his mouth. When he saw me he spat out a poor little baby mouse onto the lawn... It was still alive and trembling. You know how quite a lot of people scream and jump on top of the nearest piece of furniture when they see mice? I think those people are weird. Seriously, I love mice. They're adorable.

So I put the cat under house arrest and then attended to the little mouse. It didn't look seriously injured but it was in shock and lying on its side shaking. I put her (I decided it was a girl) in a plastic box with some leaves and moss, crumbled up bread and a bottle cap full of water and she's been there ever since. At first she just lay there but now she's up on all fours nibbling at the bread and washing herself in the water...nawwwwwwww. I want to keep her forever and ever but I suppose it's best to let her back into the wild eventually so that she can get chewed up by another cat. I might take some photos before I do so. Last time I checked she had burrowed under the moss and was having a little nap. How can anyone think mice are disgusting?

Actually, as well as loving mice, I really like snakes. I'd like to own a snake but then I'd have to feed it dead mice which would be a bit of a contradiction. Mice and snakes and bats... It's a good thing I'm not living in the seventeenth-century or someone would probably have accused me of being a witch by now.

When I came back inside after rehabilitating the mouse, I found that the cat had kindly left half of its brother or sister on the dining room carpet. The top half. I've yet to find the legs but I'll keep you posted on that one.

Oh, and that I went upstairs and the cat had also thrown up all over the landing carpet. The cat is not in my good books. He's currently shut in the living room so that he doesn't continue to traipse around the house depositing vomit and bits of dead critters in random locations at will.

And that is how today went from being a Good Day to a Not Very Good Day. However, I have saved a little mousey life so am feeling like quite a saint at the moment. I think I'll reward myself with another cup of tea. And a biscuit.

Back from the void...

Oh my! I haven't been on here in a while, have I? I can't really be bothered to write a long entry, but I will summarize what has happened in my life since I last posted.

• Did lots of revision. Had a slight nervous breakdown and went home. Emailed my tutor, to the effect that everyone in the English department will now probably think I am mentally unstable, talk to me in a soft voice and look at me with big sad eyes when they walk past me in the corridor. Got medication, felt better. Returned to uni.
• Did more revision. Because of lack of sunlight/social interaction, started to resemble Gollum, hunched over my desk in a dimly-lit room muttering things about Wordsworth to myself.
• Did exams. Floated up to exam hall on cloud of bliss after imbibing a little too much Rescue Remedy/Kalms tablets.
• Finished exams. Went on three-person bar crawl but only ended up making it to two bars. Got IDed seven times due to looking about twelve. Went out clubbing, had barbecues, lazed about watching television and generally doing nothing.
• Went home because I have to work. I have to commute to London five days a week, which means getting up about 6. Feel busy and important sitting on the train, dressed in my smart clothes, amongst dead-eyed suits staring at newspapers in despair. I don't know how much I'm allowed to say about my work on here, but I'm sure it's safe to say it's actually quite fun and that the free three-course lunch every day makes it more than worth the effort.
• Got my exam results in a congratulatory letter from the head of the English department: a first-class honours in every module and 77.5% overall. This was the 'third-highest average of students of my profile in my yeargroup'. Not sure what that means, but I'm quite happy to interpret it as 'third best student in the year' - at least that's what I'm telling people! Anyway... That made it all worth the stress. Hard work pays off, kids.
  

So currently I have little money and even less time, but I am happy and having fun, and enjoying the amazing weather and carefree summer vibe. I've even been writing a bit. I'm considering beginning to publish my new story on FP, since I'm thirteen chapters in now, and if it turns out the plot doesn't work I will just kill off all of the characters in a spectacularly violent finale and end it all.

Oh, and I've stopped writing lists.