staycation

I am super double skint.

So in the spirit of credit crunch chic (ha!), I am enjoying a holiday at home in good old London town. Here is a list of some things I thought I could do:

• Visit art galleries/museums and be very inspired, and probably finish up trying to look intellectual over coffee and cake
• Go to yoga every day (I haven't been to yoga for about 6 months, so I don't know who I was kidding by putting this down.)
  
• Catch up on all the films/boxsets I own and never watch because I'm too busy watching Friends for the 6th time (seriously, I don't know what is wrong with me. I'm not proud.)
• Do an ambitiously long river walk
• Read an improving book or three in the sun.
• Bake a cake and related domestic goddess nonsense.
  

All sounds lovely, doesn't it? This is how day one shaped up:

Get up really late.
Think about going to the gym. Decide against it.
Lounge about for a bit. Head out of the house.
Decide I need a Project for the day. Buy dye for my curtains.
Come home.
Put curtains and dye in machine. Realise machine has stopped working mid-cycle. Spend several hours alternately panicking that my landlady is going to go apeshit about this and trying different programs to get it to work.
Google the fault and decide to try to fix myself.
Attempt the unblock filter, whilst holding up washing machine tilted at an angle as gallons of lilac water swooshes out onto the kitchen floor - my baking tray wedged ineffectually below to try and catch some of it. It doesn't.
Clear up related mess, and run the washing machine again (which I have to do so it cleans the dye out of the machine and can be used again.)
Accidentally put on the two-and-a-half-hour programme, which means the spin cycle is still going at 1.30am as I try and fail to get to sleep.

The good news is the curtains are now a lovely shade of lilac, as intended.
The bad news is my week has signally failed to get any more exciting than this.

Next time, I'm putting some big fuck-off holiday to the Maldives on the credit card and being done with it.

Displacement activity

Here are a selection of things I've been doing lately instead of writing:

• Watching episodes of Friends I've seen at least 4 times before. (Honestly. This is tragic behaviour. I just don't have the energy to watch good stuff sometimes.)
• Drinking coffee. (I drink a ludicrous amount of coffee, in the frankly delusional hope it will give me the energy and momentum to write loads of Exciting and Amazing stuff. It doesn't).
• Looking with mild despair at the last few boxes of god-knows-what that I didn't feel able to throw out before I moved but have no actual idea what to do with.
• Reading really rubbish magazines that make me feel a bit dirty for caring about the weight fluctuations/relationship ups and downs of very minor celebrities. And yet... really quite enjoying them. (Sorry.)
  
• Looking at holidays and wondering how/if/when I'll ever be able to afford them. And wondering if my camping tolerance threshold will ever lower enough to consider it as a credit crunch alternative to a proper holiday. And mainly concluding, no, not in this lifetime.
  

As you can tell, these are all immensely useful and rewarding activities to enjoy during the bits of my life I'm not doing my real, proper job. But, y'know, it would be really nice to get writing again.

Soon.