New Trainers (£14.99)

I'm wearing some completely new trainers right now, and it feels very sexy. I'm wearing them because I'm playing football with the Communists later on (just a training match, in the salt mines of Hackney) so they need wearing in. When I was a kid, new trainers made me feel like a superhero. I felt I could run twice as fast, jump eight times as high, rap with 40% greater dexterity, and was at least 87% more likely to survive a head-on collision with a pergeot 405. But I never checked any of these things out empirically (except for the last one), so it may be all lies. I'll find out tonight.

I'm very tired today, so I thought a stream-of-consciousness blog entry was in order. I'm very tired because I only got three hours sleep; utterly wired and restless, I spent the night listening to the radio describe a beautiful sunny bay in Tazmania, and a hillside splattered with houses like painting by numbers, and, almost incidentally, the cricket. It was massively reassuring - albeit in a doomed sort of way - to be lying there, at 4 in the morning, all alone in the dark in an emo fashion, and to still be able to listen to bright daylight happenings bimbling along on the other side of the world. Thing is, the way the world is designed, darkness can never entirely rule. Thank goodness for globular nature of planets.

Yesterday I managed to go swimming at the Malden centre without getting ill, which is a staggering achievement for me. The people of New Malden must really enjoy pissing in swimming pools, as the Malden Centre pool has more chlorine than your average witch's cauldron of domestos. Within ten minutes, my eyes are usually stinging and my throat is on fire, but yesterday I wore my goggles and stopped my usual habit of gargling with the pool water, and as a result I seem to have escaped without contracting scurvy or any other water-based disease.

In tomorrow's entry, I will write about what I did at the weekend, before I forget what it was that I did at the weekend.

Sleepily,

J x