Normally I can count the press releases I get and actually care about on the bones of my little finger, so this was a really lovely treat in my inbox: Amiina, four nice young Icelandic girls who make lush and quirky music that sticks freakfolk in a bowl with a load of bass and fumbles it around awkwardly and probably with pom poms.

It doesn't make sense, it doesn't have to because it's LOVELY. I was slightly worried about not having anything to fall in love with this year, but with Lavender Diamond's album and this, I should be ok for the next few weeks at least.

Wibbles...

ohmygodbatmanohmygodbatmanohmygodbatman...




"Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?"

"Why no actually, I turned around and ran away in the opposite direction."

Who'da thunk this was Heath Ledger?

Three confusions: the unexpected fact that the last and very sad Ugly Betty I watched turned out to be the last one I get until the leaves start falling again; whether or not I fell asleep and forget about the little girl in Heroes; and Pirates 3, just in general.

It's released on Thursday, but the big media hoo-ha screening was only last night. Generally studios do this if a) the film is crap and they don't want the press flexing their vitriol much before release or b) the film is going to make squillions anyway and they don't need to care. This was a b moment, as made obvious by the bored-looking men standing around holding screens showing clips from the trilogy.

It was actually really nice to be able to walk into the Empire without having to hand over every electrical item in your bag and thus sharpen your elbows in preparation for the post-credits scrum later on. At the same time, it seemed curiously empty. Nobody was very excited, only a handful of people in the gigantic auditorium were wearing their Pirates bandannas, and expectations in the Empire camp were low to middling. Pirates 2 was smug and safe, in the way a lot of pictures get once the characters have their own action figures. Pirates 3 was...well, it's out in three days, you can see for yourself.

Having experienced the delights of a friend being blitzed by someone on the internet the other weekend, and then been slightly less delighted when I scrolled down to find that a bunch of his friends, me included, had been brought into the middle of it, it's only now that the whole sorry affair has been removed from the internet that I can snigger gleefully at this. Actually that's a flagrant lie, I'd have laughed anyway. Although I love paintball, and if my skin was tougher and I wasn't such a mimsying pansy I'd totally take it up professionally.

"So many memories, shared and archived…

…the day I met him, and I told all of you, “This could be THE one, or the NEXT one.”

…the night he proposed, and the morning he forgot he proposed.

…Great America… Hedonism II… Camping (I still have the scar!)… Meet the Parents (more scars, only on inside! LOL)… Hedonism III…

…the time he cheated on me with my own cousin but I forgave him because she had cancer and he was just making her feel good about herself but then it turned out she never had cancer and I still forgave him, even though a lot of you wrote a lot of thoughtful comments advising me not to."

"If anyone sees Dave, please inform him he owes me 32 thousand dollars."

Mother of god, I don't care that it's not real.

Also, some lessons in how not to make a flaming website. These include:

- Building it, and alternative flamers from your own IP address. If you're going to fork out for it yourself, you could at least sneak off to an internet cafe. Which brings us on to...

- Don't pay for it with your own credit card. Seriously, if you want revenge, at least plot it out properly. However outraged your friends are on your behalf, they need security details.

- Get your facts right. If half of it is going to be an anguished call of love, then putting in lies the (admittedly incredibly stupid) boy in question told one of your friends and calling them fact just makes you libellous.

- Don't put in stuff about their friends. Especially not if one of them is me and you've just written them an incredibly well thought out email explaining why you are not insane. Actions like this rather negate that.

- Spell and punctuate properly. Emotional turmoil is no excuse for abusing the lower case.

The thing that pisses me off most in the world, being wrong about people. Thank god I've got coffee.

I don't really think about withdrawal very much except in connection with a) my horrific overdraft b) nicotine and c) heroin. I don't do heroin. I'm not Socttish enough. I gave up chocolate for Lent when I was 16 and was so upset after two hours of the prospect of 30 days without it that I ate three Snickers.

Nobody likes withdrawal because it reminds us that we need stuff and that's wholly at odds with the idea of being free-thinking and choosing our own path down the yellow brick road. At the moment, I'm stuck slap-bang in the middle of chemical withdrawal and it fucking sucks. Rather than writing Trainspotting via Clapham ("We've run out of organic limes!") I would just like to warn you about something you probably know about already, being more interested in life/medicine/stuff that happens outside of fiction than me.

It's called Seroxat and it fucking sucks. Before I found this out, I thought it was called Paroxetine which it is, to give it its less glamorous Tesco's Value equivalent name. The three evils of job hunting, panicking about losing any grip on writing I'd made in the last two years and whether anyone would ever employ me for longer than 9 months made me even more anxious than usual, and given my brain had a tendency to self-destruct until three years ago, my doctor went all American and thrust pills at me, ones that incidentally have the highest incidence rate and severity of withdrawal of any similar pill. Like, score!

On Friday, after a month of numbness, yawning and general meh, the pills ran out. Yesterday I burst into tears within ten minutes of getting out of bed and didn't stop for 8 hours. I wrote a furious and outraged email to a friend that was way over the top however annoyed I was, and I haven't bothered checking my inbox to find her inevitably furious and outraged reply. My boyfriend thought he'd done something wrong, but nobody had – it was just my brain suddenly realising it wasn't being zapped into numbness by suicide-enhancing anti-anxiety tablets and throwing a massive wobbler in the process.

Today I just feel sick. The sort of sick where you can't see any way of getting through it because you're about to cry anyway. Everything is misted up in a grey veil of panic and upset, about absolutely nothing, about tears and the fact my head is being denied this horrendous drug. I've taken it for a month for fuck's sake, this is utterly absurd. There's a reason people go on this for so long: coming off it is exactly that – coming off. Ironic when none of the myriad tablets I was prescribed when I was actually ill did anything other than give me something to do every morning.

I absconded to BDQ headquarters in Windsor last night and for a blissful 12 hours felt safe and happy. Then I got the train home this morning and hid behind the Style section of the Sunday Times quaking in a hot puddle of saline surrounded by burly men and yummy mummies in Wasps shirts.

Depression isn't my illness anymore and hasn't been for years. I'm no happier or sadder than anyone else in London. What I am is at the mercy of my body, and it absolutely sucks. Screw Seroxat, Paroxetine, and doctors who'll throw drugs at anything that moves because the NHS gives them sod all support to do otherwise. Don't take this drug. Don't let anyone give it to you. Eat coconut and lemon meringue ice creams instead. And smile lovingly at your Pirates 3 screening ticket for tomorrow evening. Aces.

Best Holy Moly Duty Log ever...

(If you don't know what a duty log is, it's where Disgruntled from Lancaster write in to express their concerns with their television stations. Apparently. I'm sure people write in with praise as well, but it's considerably less fun.)

"My favourite programme on TV is and always has been Heartbeat. It's one of the few programmes I allow time for. THAT IS UNTIL NOW! 8.07pm I HAVE JUST SWITCHED OFF (AND WON'T BE SWITCHING BACK ON - I DO KNOW WHERE THE OFF BUTTON IS).

The reason I have switched off is the shooting and killing of the dog. We have two similar dog's and they both had seen the dog on the TV and were barking at it. My family were all laughing 'the dogs like the show too' we said.

Then a gunshot and the dog lay DEAD. My grandchildren who were watching started to cry and I switched the show off - FOREVER. AND IT WAS BEFORE THE 9PM WATERSHED.

Everyone connected with the show is a DISGRACE."

Thirteen pups for Beethoven! It's like 101 Dalmations, only marginally more physically possible. Bless. I want a puppy. Immediately.

Yawn. Patrick Wolf has changed his mind about retiring from music and is celebrating this fact by going on a massive tour just to show how not retiring he is. Good grief. If you want a publicity stunt he could have just slept with someone. Or worn a suit.

"For me to say I was going to quit music is like saying I'm going to commit suicide," he says. "It's the most extreme thing that could happen in my life." Bless the silly chump.

From Ananova via the DJourno:

"A TV worker has been sacked for mocking the French presidential favourite in English subtitles.

"A plea by Nicholas Sarkozy for voters to join his campaign before the Sunday poll was interpreted as "rally my inflated ego".

"The subtitles were broadcast across the United States in the English news bulletins from public broadcaster France 2.

"Channel chiefs blamed it on freelance workers."

Hilarious. I'm waiting to be paid by a firm based in Spain. Apparently Spain works several weeks behind the actual world, so I sympathise with freelancers who are bored out of their wits, and rather admire their ability to crowbar a joke anywhere near the region of Sarkozy, a man who probably had a sense of humour once but decided it was spoiling the lines of his suit.

I admire anyone who has actually managed to hold on to their languages. I had to interview Marion Cotillard from the excellent Edith Piaf biog La Vie En Rose on Monday and having spoken to the PR in French had a mad crazy panic when asked if I wanted to do the interview in French.

Waiting for the next (ludicrously supercilious) PR to get her, I had horrible flashbacks to what happened when I interviewed Daniel Auteuil in French at the Hidden LFF screening. I was so nervous that I not only got my words the wrong way round but made an enormous clanger caused by having missed the only screening that week. There is no scorn like Gallic scorn or worse, pitying scorn.

Technically, I have half a degree in French. It shouldn't be a problem but for the fact that it's a degree I got three years ago, I've spoken French about six times since and mostly in Beaujolais on Litchfield Street asking what wine they'd recommend to cheer up the sad person sitting next to me.

Beaujolais is a happy place, the flipside to Ed's Diner where only bad things seem to happen to the people who end up eating their grotesquely smiley burgers. I took my dad to Beaujolais last night: it's packed full of oddly-shaped tables that don't quite fit, has ties dangling from the ceiling, blues blaring out of the speakers, over-priced bar snacks, a massive cellar, assorted cheery Frenchmen hanging around the bar and an incredibly vivacious manager who waves you off to your seat to "Rrrrrelax!" while he brings your your bill.

We had a bottle of Fleury and chatted over cigarettes and pistachios. I realised a couple of months ago that a half hour phone conversation in February was our first proper chat in about five years. My dad is brilliant and it was lovely to hang out with him, more so now that I am no longer a Vile Teenager and can actually hold a conversation without blaming my parents for something.

I nipped off to the shop to get some Sluts (Silk Cuts rather than Charing X giftshop) and was chatted up by the smooth operator behind the checkout. "Are you drinking next door? Are you drinking with your friends?" he asked.

"No, with my dad," I smiled sweetly, walking out the door. You never saw a face fall so hard.

Great piece on the BBC: French voting turn out is in the 80%s - in the estates as well as nationally, and more and more young people are voting. Depressing to think that's never the same over here, even more depressing to think I've been so focused on France I totally forgot about local elections over here. I have a horrible feeling I'm still registered in Wales...