I can't help wondering why the Guardian bloke in Rome on this horrible story (Italian murders 'the work of satanists') appears to know less than the Associated Press report. And, all the other information at the end of the story is about Italy, and you really want to know about Satanism.

Vote Early, Vote Often
So tomorrow (today, now) is polling day. Question is, do I vote for Ken on the basis he's (a) a Cricklewoodian, and (b) commited to erecting a bus shelter outside my house, or the Greens, because they're commited to more bike lanes, which can only mean less buses, and consequently less bus shelters?

And you say I'm a one trick pony.

Do you think Torah Yoga is near Tora Bora? And does Osama live there?

Sports Injury Related Moan

So I sprained my ankle last summer, comming out of the gym, dontcha know (after a worthy double pilates class) and I was in complete agony, convinced it was broken. My GP said it would all be fine, and it wasn't fine, and I eventually went to a (private) physio, who said it was a rare sprain to the [freak biology word I can't remember], and it needed special treatment. Shame I didn't come earlier. But my GP said it would be fine, I said.

The truth is, I rarely go to my GP. Firstly because they have this system where you have to call up at 9am to get an appointment in 48 hours time (ie this morning for Friday). Except when you call at 9am it's engaged solidly till about 11.30, and then when you do get through it's too late, and you have to call again tomorrow. You get stuck in a recalling, constantly disappointing thang. What's good is, you only go to the doctor if you really need to.

So my ankle was weak for ages, and I wore a support, but was nervous of running and aerobics, but I finally went back to the gym last week. The class was cancelled - bummer, I know - but I went for a little run, and felt happy to back in the land of the exercising.

Another thing I hate about my GP is that if you do go as an "emergency" (which is frankly anything, as it's the only way to see the doctor), if you're childless, they make you wait ages, with phrases like "the children take priority" which is all well and good, but when you feel ill, just makes you feel worse.

The last couple of days my ankle really hurts again. I don't quite know what to do... and guess what. I can't get an appointment at my doctor's till Monday (if I call tomorrow), when I'm at a client site for a coupla weeks.

Moan over.

About Last Night

Saw Promises (a film) with J at the Bloomsbury Theatre (aka University of London Union). The film: interesting, moving, confusing, slightly worthy and badly edited (although the editor apparently worked on Like Water for Chocolate, which is one of my all-time favourite movies).

The Bloomsbury Theatre - the Bloomsbury Set wouldn't hang out there. They wouldn't let me in the bar because I was waiting for J and didn't have a ticket so could have clearly wrought seven kinds of havoc on their thin strip of a room bereft of comfy chairs. And they have blue lights in the toilets, which meant I couldn't shoot-up, just couldn't see the veins. Sheesh.

Of course I blogged that too fast - there's an In Praise of Slow website, too.

In Praise of Slow by Carl Honoré.

I'm in the British Library, using their free wireless access (only until the end of June). This is great. I can write, and then I can check mail on my two live projects, do ma thang, and get back to creativehood (look how creative I am. I just made a word up). And they have aircon: it's sweltering outside. And I'm meeting J across the road at 8pm. So rarely does a day work out so well.

Can you believe people are selling Gmail accounts on eBay?
Maybe you can... after all, people will sell anything, right?

I've got my inbox down to 324 messages. But then I have 50 IMAP folders and 7,000 sent mails.

So I've got this friend, right, and she's going out with some guy, and she really likes him, it's been a couple of months, and then she calls me up in a real state: he forgot to mention he's still living with his girlfriend. What should she do? (Of course, that should be "what should she do, girlfriend?") Obvious to me: no-one wants to be second choice, it's bad for your self-esteem, blah blah blah, these kinda people never change. She loves him. I can't help wondering how much he loves her. I keep schtum. I have learned through bitter experience that people have to find out these things for themselves.

But she's really upset. We go out for a drink, we talk, we reach the bottom of a number of bottles of mid-range red wine, but not the bottom of the argument. She is unsure.

A week later, he ditches her. He's going back to his girlfriend. Quel surprise. (Or is that quelle surprise? Mrs Pearson always said I wasn't good at French).

We go out more, because she's properly sad now. I say she deserves better. She says he was all she could get. I feel sad for her. We differ. She goes home, I make a mental note to see if I know anyone she'll get on with. I forget about it (aka at the bottom of a very long list).

I don't hear from her for a while. She's super-sad. No-one can help her. Yesterday, she calls me up, all summer flowers and jaunty flirty skirts in her voice. They're back together. He left his girlfriend. Really? my inner cynic thinks, but doesn't say, knowing better. Well, he's in the process of leaving her...

I think people don't change their fundamental behaviour, unless something really makes them learn. In my first job, I shared an office with P: an average looking bloke, on the skinny side. Nice guy, but, y'know, nothing special. Turned out we'd been at the same northern Redbrick University, but he'd been in the bar for three years and I'd been in the Union, so we'd never hooked up. He was living with his girlfriend, in the top floor of her father's house in Golders Green (he wasn't Jewish, and I always thought this odd. Who'd live in the Volvo heartland if they didn't have to). After a while, they rented a flat together, opposite Hendon bagel bakery.

Then, P got it together with a woman at work: a beautiful older divorcee, S, who was like 50 to our 23. She used to be a model. She was fabulous. I had the inside track, because P and I shared an office, and people kept thinking he was buying these really OTT flowers for me, but they were for S.

So P left his girlfriend, who was bizarrely paying for the whole of their flat in Hendon, and moved in with S in her Kent commuter country home. I went to their wedding. Six months later, he met this woman at work... Same old, same old. They returned the wedding gifts.

I say that it's odd how in what's now like ten years of living in London, he's never, to my knowledge (we've lost touch), paid rent or a mortgage. Some say, in these times of rising property prices, that's a wise move. Others say, does this guy have no sense of responsibility? It's a machlochet. Is the the smart, property savvy guy? Or is he a love-rat, in the language of the tabloids.

Another thing about him: maybe five years ago I was going for a job in an area where he'd done some work when we worked together, and I wanted to remind myself of the issues. I asked him to fax me a brochure from his collection (we all have one), and when it arrived, he'd scrawled his signature right across every page of it. I wasn't planning to show it off as my work in an interview, I just wanted to refresh my memory, but he thought I was going to...

One day next week - which I think may be Monday, but I don't know for sure - is National Liftshare Day. G'waan, you know you want to.

The Day Today
... is looking somewhere between good and not good.

What's not good is...
I've just killed some IMAP processes on my colo box (I am like a UNIX baby now), but Outlook is still tempermental (or, as my Dad would say, exhibiting an intermittent error). I know I have the best setup I could - my pst is 850MB, and that's not even with all my current folders which are on the server, and I know outlook gets cranky with a big file. But I don't know what else to do.

The fixed rate on my mortgage is up in a couple of months, so I called up two weeks ago to get information on their flexible mortgage at 5.5% ... seems like a good deal, and better than jumping through new hoops with another mortgage provider when I'm self employed. They're in the post. At 8am today I realised they never arrived. I check the website, and see not only is there a 5.5% deal, there's a 5.24% deal if you pay £395. I ask about that. Barbara (my friendly CSR) tells me it'll cost me £695. Why? Because I'm an existing customer. So, I ask, it costs me more to get the same product than a new customer? Those are the rates, she tells me. I ask why it costs me nearly twice as much. Barbara tells me some waffle about how it's all do with the cost of getting the customer.

Of course, she shouldn't mess with me. I have a background in direct marketing. I tell her the cost of new customer acquisition far outweighs the cost of getting an existing customer to sign up for a new product, and anyway, since when did financial services firms pass on their marketing costs to customers? She knows I've rumbled her, but doesn't have any answers. I do a quick calculation and realise it'll take me three years to "pay off the arrangement fee", and I'll probably have won the lottery and bought a house in Hampstead by then, so I shouldn't worry.

I was supposed to be having a "week off" to write this week before I start a new project, but everything's overrun because (a) things do, and (b) I spent so much time on my volunteer stuff and fixing my wireless that it took a whole day out of last week, in total.

What's good is...
I have just painted my toenails taupe with pink glitter.

It's a nice day. Scrap that - it's a fabulous day.

I'm going to the library this afternoon for some peace and writing.

And in the time it's taken to write this post, Outlook has miraculously performed the laying-on-of-hands on itself and is better.

Google for hackers. Or should I say H4XoR?

Wifi update: Things have cooled down at the ranch on the you-broke-the-wifi, no-you-broke-the-wifi front, and we think we - touch wood'n all that - have it sorted. And look: we're not alone - Windows XP Bedevils Wi-Fi Users. I have a little script, if anyone wants it.

Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad tonight. Of course. In New York. Of course.

Britney starts keeping kosher. No, really. Whatever next? Jews keeping kosher?

Some notes on Jewish refugees in Wales.

Feedback from Cheadle: it's all very nice, but you've gone back to saying "like" too often, and all the effing detracts from how nice everything is.

While I don't want the whole world to have the same t-shirt as me, I can't help but tell you there's only one place in the UK you can get Rabbi's Daughters t-shirts - Showroom 64 on Great Titchfield Street. And Emma is really nice - she's even hanging on to my t-shirt till next week.

I used to work exactly there, at the junction with Mortimer Street, and what's great about the area is that there's always a fashion wholesaler with a discount sale. Our whole office was one big shopping trip, with people (OK, women) trying things on behind the office dividers so that we could all see what they'd bought. The guys sometimes felt a little out of it. That's publishing for ya.