At the end of a week from Hell, therefore, I did the only thing you can do when the house of cards comes tumbling down: I drank more rum than I should have been allowed to drink (and then ate pickled artichoke hearts out of a jar), ate more Knobbly Bobblies than I should have been allowed to eat, sat in a park until my shoulders went bright red (again: when will I learn that I am not a tanner?) and attempted to make sense of my life with a few long-suffering friends. We didn't get very far ("you're a tit: again," was all I managed to achieve), but it didn't really matter: what mattered was that I had people around me who were prepared to spend hours and hours trying to make me laugh, until they finally managed it. (Well: them and the most ridiculous item of clothing I have ever seen: an office shirt that transforms, half way, into a g-string knicker which then clips up under the crotch. My friend and I had to leave the shop because I almost collapsed with laughter in the handbag aisle.)
The strange thing about blogs (some of them, anyway: mine included) is that they're incredibly navel-gazing. The nature of them means that daily minutiae and outpourings that probably should be locked away next to your bed - with a hair across the top so that you can check nobody has read it - suddenly become public, and you are essentially exposing your tedious misery to the entire world. And by God do you expose it. I've had some really sweet emails this week from readers telling me to 'keep my chin up', and they have been both incredibly uplifting and ridiculously humiliating: the fact that I have demonstrated my sadness so clearly that strangers are worried about me is actually very embarrassing. And it's not very British, to be honest. We're supposed to be all reserve and stiff upper lip: not whining online because you're having a bit of a crappy old time of it.
I'm going to do my best to bounce back, and show a little strength. To stop whining, and start accepting the consequences of my actions with my chin up. And I'm going to do my best to make this blog a little less self-indulgent (making my life a little less self-indulgent would probably help that). On the grand scale of things, I am a lucky, lucky girl: and the fact that the majority of my own pain comes from my own hand (I am unbearably self-destructive) should be reassuring, because at least it means that I can do something about it.
So I'm starting again. It's a sunny day, and I need a sunny perspective to go with it. And, if it all goes wrong, at least I know where to find a bottle of rum, a Knobbly Bobbly and friends that know how to make me laugh. And a shirt that will never, ever untuck from my trousers.
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