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This morning I had a nice big breakfast before going out. Result: by the time I got out to walk Spike I was already sick, and as soon as I got back and collapsed on the sofa, where I still am.

I would suspect celiac - again - where it not that I was fine all day yesterday as long as I kept to dry biscuits.

I don't know what this is but I'd much rather be doing something else than laying in bed trying not to puke.

So, I have been walking Spike for four days now. I am starting to realize that I can't call to mind any dog-owner that is also fat. Some of them are sturdy, but, fat? Not so much.

That is, it's incredible how much a small creature who doesn't reach out to my hip can exercise. It's also pretty humbling to realize how horribly unfit I am compared to him.

The fun part of the walk is always getting to Hampstead Heath and being able to release Spike from his leash. There is this burst of the utter joy of caninity that is contagious and rewards all the begging and occasional lifting I have to do to get him to the park.

Unfortunately, with the exception of the first day, by the time we're there I'm smashed and panting. It's not so much the distance, the fact is that at some point Spike always sniffs that the park is near and starts walking briskly, and I tend to match my pace with him completely unconsciously. So I get there after a not bad workout and then he wants to play. Often there are other dogs who want to play just as much and it's only a question of collapsing on the grass and watching them play. The first couple of times I was a bit alarmed because Spike is a Bulldog and has powerful jaws, as well as lacking a tail that could reassure me around his moods. But now I know how utterly gentle he can be, and if the other dog's tail is whirling like mad, it's usually a good indication that they are having fun.

When no dogs are around, well, it's time to play Fetch the Stick. The Stick yesterday turned out to be a huge log that I had trouble lifting, never mind throwing, but that Spike could carry around in his mouth running. This morning I decided that a frisbee would be nice, not that I expected it to last for long, so I went into a cheapo store and bought one. Spike loved it to bits: literally. Unfortunately it also emerged that he loves tug-of-war much more than Fetch The Stick, and while Fetch I can play sitting down on a bench, the tugging has to involve my muscles.

I am getting paid very little for this gig, but there are times when I marvel at the thought that I am paid at all.

I suspect that I might maybe be tiring him out a little bit too. The first day he was jumping up and down in excitement when I opened the door. Today I found him splashed on his bed, and had to spend five minutes scratching his belly and telling him what a good dog he is, before he showed any wish to go out.

Anyway, on the way back I saw a white cat, maybe a Van or something like it, coming out on the road towards me meaowing demandingly. I petted her a little, but started to feel a bit alarmed at the clinginess and demands of this little cat. Lost? Hungry? Well... I could have walked away but my increasing MadCatWomanness kicked in. So I picked her up, rang the first bell I found, and asked the old woman who came to the door if she knew whose cat it was. She told me it was her neighbour's cat and she always meows like that, so I let her down, told her goodbye, and was on my way much reassured.

Monday the woman from the Mayhew is coming to see if my house is suitable for fostering semi-feral kittens. I think I should do a bit of picking up stray stuff.

The good news of the day is that I have an interview for a place at the Minster Centre, which is the training centre I really wanted to get into.

This elicited another round of passive-aggressive guilt-tripping from my mom, all very depressing, and also happening at the same time and instead of preparing to go out to meet rozk. I was only four hours late, but the good news is that this time I managed to kick myself out of the house at least.

This is something that I have found very hard of late. I have missed a whole lot of birthdays, meetings, celebrations, all things I was invited to, because... well, because getting out of the house is getting harder and harder. It's one of the reasons I am always so chronically late. I am late when I have meetings with people, but I am much, much later when I have just decided, say, to go out and shop for groceries. Sometimes two or three days late.

So I don't know if the problem is that I find it hard to meet people or just that I find it hard to get a move on. The results are the same, and are alarming for me. For a long time in my life the chief source of unhappiness, a bone-deep, aching misery, has been loneliness, and seeing myself as different, shunned, an outcast. Since I've moved to London that has gone away: I see myself as outgoing, gregarious, somebody who relishes being in the company of people. This may be because the people I can associate with now are actually people I like and have lots in common for, but I think it is also partly because I have changed myself.

So why do I find it so hard to go out and meet people I like, who have invited me, and whose company I enjoy?

I think part of it is the general slowing down, being sluggish and full of inertia, that comes with long-time depression. I can deal very well with my depression, but it is still there. The cognitive and emotional components have changed out of all recognition, but I think there are underlying modifications of my brain that are there to stay.

All the same... it was good that I had promised to go to this meeting tonight and that I managed to actually go, even if shamefully late. I want to connect with you people out there. Just because I fall asleep and take two hours to get ready and then get lost on the way and only show up at the last minute doesn't mean I don't want your company...

For three days running now I wake up bright and active, go walk the dog, come home feeling very satisfied, eat, snooze a little... and wake up feeling utterly crap. Nausea, headache, guts doing disgusting things, no wish to stay upright at all.

What gives?

Today I decided I IZ NOT SIK and went out to my cats in Warwick Avenue, who were particularly needy. Each one of them got twenty minutes of determined cuddling, after which I sat down with my computer and tried to write my autobiography, since the cats had settled down happily and where grooming themselves contentedly.

All, that is, apart from F, who came to sit beside me and, noticing how my attention wasn't on him 100%, put a white-socked paw on my chest and told me, "Meow." I tried scritching him, but even petting him with one hand while looking at the screen wasn't enough for him, eliciting more polite paws and determined "Meows."

He's so lovely. If I hadn't had to meet Alex, I would have stayed far more than my contractual hour.

Anyway, then I met Alex at Notting Hill, we had a good lunch at Pain Quotidien, walked through Portobello where I took a lot of lousy photos with the wrong setting, then caught a bus home.

I am still suffering with a damn cold and my throat still hurts, but a lot less than it used to. Last night I managed to sleep fairly well by falling asleep in front of the Tv on the sofa, let's see how it goes tonight.

Yesterday I lovingly trimmed Zip's claws, and today I noticed her enthusiastically trying to sharpen them on the arm of a sofa. I tried to dissuade her, as I usually do (not that it does any good, of course). Then I realized that the noise coming from her paws was not SKRATCTH but ffffrushhhh frushhhh. Basically she was caressing the velvet.

I gave her an affectionate pat and tried no to laugh.

Still feeling like crap, only now I feel like crap at random intervals. Annoyingly, the intervals tend to be when I would rather be asleep thank you very much, for example tonight. Total sleeping time, I think two hours. I wonder what is it about sleep, but specifically sleeping in my bed at night, that makes my throat hurt?

Anyway, this morning sneezing and some coughing and the start of nose drooling have joined the party. Ho-hey.

I have to apply to my next-year school, like, NOW. To do it I have to write a 1000-1500 autobiographical essay. This is not, you understand, difficult. I'm good at writing. I can whip up an essay in a day.

Only... I can't. I have been sick all week, true. But now, even when I am well enough, the mere thought of writing the essay makes me go queasy.

It will probably get down before next morning, sometime. But in the meanwhile, I am stuck in bed with a bad case of the procastinationitis.

Am so sick I cannot read LJ. Throat hurts like fuck. Period come and added its own. Since on mefenatic acid cannot take paracetamol. Am hurty.

No wish to eat anything or drink hot fluids. Slept as much as I could, with VERY BAD DREAMS thank you very much Penicillin.

Not possible to go to skeptics in the pub, moan moan moan.

Well, baby swallowed some penicillin that baby had obviously not finished taking the last time around, as she should have, even if long reading and careful examination of oral cavity had basically excluded strep throat (no cough, which is yes to strep, but no fever in the last two days, although it would have to survive the paracetamol, and no swelling of the tonsils that I can see, plus no plaques).

Mostly it was because strep throat remains contagious for weeks, while it stops being so after three days of antibiotics. Also, this fucker hurts more than it is reasonable. And apparently streptococcus simply does not develop penicillin resistance, which means that I am not cultivating new and interesting bacteria, one hopes. Well, not new and strapping streps, at least.

I still feel guilty.

Did I just say I was feeling better than yesterday. Scrap that. I feel like hell. I'm giving this stupid throat another day, then I go to the GP.

Still hurty. Less than yesterday when it was total misery, but still vastly more annoying that it should be. Paracetamol keeps the pain down but not the irritation. I mean, it's just a cold, I shouldn't be feeling this miserable.

And another thing: I've been watching Lie to Me, which has sort of grown on me after a not totally auspicious start. But I keep being puzzled by Tim Roth's obvious English accent. The character is not obviously British, although it is remarked at one point that his mom was. And I believe Tim Roth can indeed to a credible American accent, although I only ever saw Reservoir Dogs dubbed.

So, what gives?

I have been reading up on the not rinsing thing. Lots of people, usually British, only in one case kiwi, vehemently say it's not a British habit. Lots of people, uniformly British, will tell you that rinsing is not necessary, wastes water, and dishes won't dry properly, and besides, nobody ever died of poisoning from leftover suds.

I am more and more amazed.

I am not fastidious. I live in a house that is mostly gross. I have a healthy respect for exposure to some bacteria.

But I does seem to me that people haven't fully grasped the principles of washing.

Washing means removing potentially harmful substances from stuff. When it's something you eat from, you mostly want to remove old food stuff, because old food stuff is organic, and bacteria can grow on it, and having bacteria grow on the things you eat off from or with can be dangerous.

Mostly it isn't. As I said, I am gross and unclean and I'm still here, with a very robust immune system and no obvious health problems.

But, you know, it can happen. I suppose that when you live in a place where the summers are really, really hot - and I mean temperatures up to 40 C, that never drop under 30 even at night, you are sort of naturally selected for fastidiousness about ripe stuff coming into contact with your mouth. It won't kill you, mostly, but it can certainly be pretty unpleasant.

So, removing foodstuff from dishes and cutlery and glasses. To do that, you need to lift the particles, and then dispose of them. If it's stuff that dissolves in water, like sugar, that's easy: easier if the water is hot, because even stuff that is water-soluble will not dissolve in cold water, but will dissolve in hot water. Try putting a teaspoonful of sugar in a glass of cold water and one in a glass of hot water and notice the difference.

The problem is that a lot of the stuff we eat is fats, and fats are not soluble in water. What to do then? you can scrape them away, but fats are sneaky and will leave behind a thin veil of grease that you can't see, you can just about feel, but can still happily act as a petri dish.

In comes soap. Soap is basically what is called an amphiphile, that is, a compound that has both hydrophilic and a lipophilic properties, that is, can bond both with water and with fats. It's usually a long molecule with water-philic bits at one end and fat-philic bits at the other.

What it does is bind to the fats, bind to the water, and carry the fats away with the water.

This is where rinsing comes in. Soaps are, in fact, generally mildly antibacterial, but that won't be much use to you if the medium where bacteria can grow is left behind on your dish. So when you dunk your dishes in hot soapy water what you do is kill off some of the bacteria with heat, dissolve the water-soluble parts of the grime, and send lipophilic molecule out looking for fats.

You then scrape the dishes. This mechanical action is probably the most important act of cleaning. Putting a dish in hot soapy water and taking it out again won't clean much. Scraping lifts the food particles, and allows the soap to grab the foodstuff and take it into the water.

The water at this point becomes a sort of primordial soup, a happy growth medium full of fats, sugars, soap, and lovingly reaching the perfect temperature for bacteria cultivation.

A film of this perfect growth medium remains on you dishes when you lift them out of this primordial soup and put them on the rack.

If you instead put the dish under clean hot running water, the whole foodstuff slides off, sugars in solutions, fats bound to amphiphils, and big blobs of matter floating away.

So the problem with not rinsing is not the suds: it's that you are not carrying away all that matter that you went to such effort to scrape away. It is true that a lot of people can taste the suds on the dishes, and it is also true that some washing-up soaps can cause diarrhoea, but for most people, this won't be a huge problem. But, you're not really cleaning the dishes. I mean, would you really dip your dishes in a tub of washing up water, full of floating bits of congealed fat and various other detritus before eating?

As for wasting a lot of water, you don't really have to if you use hot water. And if you use the two-sinks, or sink and tub, method: tub or sink full of all your dirty stuff, hot water, and some soap, wash wash wash, pile dishes in other sink, then rinse rinse rinse. The water dropping off the piece you are rinsing will take care of carrying away most of the suds and grime, and you'll only need to do a quick rinse to get the rest off.

Yes, you use more water than the no-rinse method, but when it comes down to it, you are wasting more water with taking a totally unnecessary shower every morning (instead of washing in bits which is what we do in our parts, but then we do have bidets for this), and you waste way more electricity by boiling a full kettle instead of just the amount you need.

Plus, less food poisoning all around.

I know, I'm obsessed. It's one of the very, very few British customs that I find faintly disturbing instead of delightful or quaint.

I am deeply unhappy. The fever went down thanks to Better Living Through Chemistry, but the pain in my throat is still there. I am seriously considering the lidocaine spray.

Went to bed yesterday thinking that maybe the dolmades had done something to the acidity in my gut, woke up this morning with a sore throat and that special misery that signals incoming Upper Respiratory Tract Infection aka the common cold. Or it could be the swine flu, for all I know, they seem to have the same symptoms.

Anyway, I am now home and feeling very sorry for myself. Zip is ecstatic at my return, but then she is every time I wake up in the morning so it doesn't necessarily mean she missed me.

I had another attack of the spring cleaning this morning and emptied the whole of Alex's cutlery drawer into some healthily hot and soapy water, scrubbed the grime of ages off the cutlery container and drawer, and reflected disgustedly on the peculiar British habit of not rinsing their dishes. Corrected overly British-centric Wikipedia entry that attributed to non better specified "Asians" the strange custom of passing the dishes under running tap water after their permanence in the soapy soup.

Wish I could scrub out the stupid virus off my throat. Puah. Instead I ingested zinc, vitamin C and paracetamol, of which only the paracetamol is demonstrably effective, but what the hell.

Just because

Alex's cat Simba is a very nice-looking white chinchilla persian cat. Alex says he's a pedigree cat, but I couldn't find the registration... I wonder if there is any way to find out where he comes from? His name seems to always have been Simba (which is a bit too down-to-earth for a breeder) and he was born in 1996. Any ideas? He looks very good to the breed standards to my eye, but it's a very untrained eye. He could well not come from a recognized breeder, or be an off-breed spare.

(Not a terribly good photo, but the only one I have on hand)

To the person who sent me the books - you know who you are. Thank you, I was actually rather touched today when I got them. :-)

Woke up at four today. Again. Groan.

Tried the hot chocolate but got carried away and started sorting stuff that I don't fit into any more and preparing laundry. Now am in front of the cat and the keyboard. The idea was to complete my application to next year's school, but of course, I am too tired.

Sigh.

The blinds were drawn and the birds were quiet and I THINK the cat only started perching on my hip when I was already awake, but it might well be that she woke me up, the horrid beast.

And for unclear reasons, the World Service no longer sends me back to sleep.

I was seized by a furor lavandi (who do you say wash in Latin? I don't remember) today and unleashed the power of my bleach-soaked sponge on the bathroom and the kitchen. The kitchen required reorganizing, clearing, and even some drill work to install the final bar for hanging thingies and a light, but now every surface has been cleared, cleaned, and even the floor scrubbed.

Miracle!

So this is not a wasted day.

I woke up at a completely stupid hour (yay for long summer evenings, boo for light and chittering birds plus bouncy cat waking you up at half past four) to the news that Michael Jackson had died, and went "Owch."

I was never a fan, it was not my kind of music and I was repelled by the whole star system thing. But I watched the 2005 trial and I have felt a huge pity for him ever since. It was rather obvious to me that he was both guilty and innocent in that trial, in that he had shared sexual stuff with minors, but he had obviously not hurt them. He came across as tender and screwed, a horribly damaged person capable of great love and great betrayals.

That's what I feel now: a great pity for a life so damaged that he never managed to find solace, a man who surrounded himself with all the trappings of childhood without ever being able to get any healing from them because they were as fake and empty as the showbiz life he had been given instead of a childhood.

I wish I could imagine him in a better place, sitting on a cloud, or reborn, as an infant, loved and cared for by wise adults. I will just think that he is at peace now.