In the Department of Ironic Retro 80s Love, two items. Ironic Retro 80s Love is ordering a copy of Eurythmics's Peace album off Loot, tearing off its sealed wrapper and opening the cover to discover...all the instances. This whole process is giving me fascinating new insights into the indexing process. Half the works I consult regularly are, in my educated opinion, indexed appallingly badly. Huh

This week of leave is beautifully timed, I'm beginning to feel almost human after a couple of days of doing not much. On the downside, my brain is apparently disconnecting, leading to strange manifestations... together with a random segue into Tolkien-dissing, and have the comments spring to life with an impassioned discussion of The Incredible Hulk ? Human perversity is a strange and wonderful thing.

One of my students has insisted on writing her vampire essay on Queen of the Dammed . This is clearly about repression on a scale I have hitherto failed to associate with Anne Rice. Amusing student errors...fascinated me that birds stand on one leg when they're contented. Do you think they like to keep one foot warm, or indicate their basic subliminal trust that no-one's going to sneak up and push them over

General joy, as the geeks in the IT department have apparently managed to wrestle to the ground the malware Godzilla which slowed our bandwidth to a dodgy and intermittent crawl over the last week. (500...series of Unreasonably Beautiful Dawns. Now with added lowering clouds, fiery skies and, what was it? "portentuous effulgence". . Disclaimer: probably not as good as the one you obligingly imagined

I really don't like getting up early in the morning while it's still dark, but occasionally it's actually worth it. Improbably Beautiful Dawn on the Common, no. 2 in a series which will probably continue because I quite enjoy the weird looks I get when I pull the car over to take random pics of a fine morning's rush hour.

There are some compensations to this working lark. Not just the money (which I have to admit is compensatory), but actual bright sides to the ungodly hour of the morning at which I have to stagger forth...Man). Fortunately he had a vehicle large enough both to tow the boat and to pack in all my junk, and we fled the scene just in time to miss the awards ceremony for the enormous crowds of film students

Good grief. Today's completely surreal experience: shopping in the local supermarket, wherein a scheduled power cut (they're digging up cables in the road outside) had caused a total and absolute failure... but the blurriness is all my own work. I shall attempt to assuage my wounded artistic feelings with soothing clouds, spotted on the way to the baby shower this morning. I feel better now

My favourite World Cup 1 story: one of the parents of the Toddler Horde 2 yesterday was limping rather severely. His wife, in tones of miff, was recounting to all comers the source of the injury. Hubby...we won, but rather a boring game, all thumping pile-ups for two-inch progressions, no running. I do like watching rugby players run. 2 I survived! Even the psychological scarring was minimal.

I love my nice new digital camera, but generally speaking I take pretty dreadful photos, mostly because my timing is inventively bad and I habitually photograph things a few seconds after they've moved... since I am somewhat galvanised by this morning's polite e-mail from the press, asking for an update on the book status. Alarms ring! lights flash! the nice editor lady is back from maternity leave...