I think I'm meant to be going up to Newcastle this weekend but am not sure as it's my friend Drama Queen who is infamously unreliable. Also, she's a great friend of mine, but we work much better with a buffer between us and we've been lunching à deux too much recently so we rub each other up into a wrong way frenzy. I love her though, even if she does owe me a lunch and some theatre trips.

On the bright side of busy-ness, I've managed to cram in some fantastic books recently. The Autistic Muso lent me a couple (including a great one about, er, hermaphrodites, by the author of the Virgin Suicides, and another weird Japanese one called Kafka By The Shore which makes me feel a bit like I did when I read The Books of Magic for the first time.

I'm also rediscovering all my old favourite - my Dylan Thomas collection, John Donne, She, some proper goodies. They're books that are so personal to me - not through having any connection to anyone, nobody gave them to me, I found them - and they always remind me to keep my head when I feel like I'm being pulled in different and not necessarily pleasant directions by the way that people act.

Here's my favourite Dylan poem as a cultural segue to lunchtime:

Once it was the colour of saying
Soaked my table the uglier side of a hill
With a capsized field where a school sat still
And a black and white patch of girls grew playing;
The gentle seaslides of saying I must undo
That all the charmingly drowned arise to cockcrow and kill.
When I whistled with mitching boys through a reservoir park
Where at night we stoned the cold and cuckoo
Lovers in the dirt of their leafy beds,
The shade of their trees was a word of many shades
And a lamp of lightning for the poor in the dark;
Now my saying shall be my undoing,
And every stone I wind off like a reel.