sunday 15 january

9st (excellent), alcohol units 0, cigarettes 29 (v.v. bad, esp. in 2 hours), caloriess 3879 (repulsive), negative thoughts 942 (approx. based on av. per minute), minutes spent counting negative thoughts 127 (approx.).

6 p.m. completely exhausted by entire day of date-prep?aration. being a woman is worse than being a farmer ?there is so much harvesting and crop spraying to be done: legs to be waxed, underarms shaved, eyebrows plucked, feet pumiced, skin exfoliated and moisturized, spots cleansed, roots dyed, eyelashes tinted, nails filed, cellulite massaged, stomach muscles exercised. the whole perform?ance is so highly tuned you only need to neglect it for a few days for the whole thing to go to seed. sometimes i wonder what i would be like if left to revert to nature — with a full beard and handlebar moustache on each shin, dennis healey eyebrows, face a graveyard of dead skin cells, spots erupting, long curly fingernails like struwelpeter, blind as bat and stupid runt of species as no contact lenses, flabby body flobbering around. ugh, ugh. is it any wonder girls have no confidence?

7 p.m. cannot believe this has happened. on the way to the bathroom, to complete final farming touches, i noticed the answerphone light was flashing: daniel.

'look, jones. i'm really sorry. i think i'm going to have give tonight a miss. i've got a presentation at ten in the morn?ing and a pile of forty-five spreadsheets to get through,'

cannot believe it. am stood up. entire waste of whole day's bloody effort and hydroelectric body-generated power. however, one must not live one's life through men but must be complete in oneself as a woman of substance.

9 p.m. still, he is in top-level job. maybe be didn't want to ruin first date with underlying work-panic.

11 p.m. humph. he might have bloody well rung again, though. is probably out with someone thinner.

5 a.m. what s wrong with me? i'm completely alone. hate daniel cleaver. am going to have nothing more to do with him. am going to get weighed.

monday 16 january

9 st 2 (from where? why? why?), alcohol units 0, cigarettes 20, calories 1500, positive thoughts 0.

10.36 a.m. office. daniel is still locked in his meeting. maybe it was a genuine excuse.

1 p.m. just saw daniel leaving for lunch. he has not messaged me or anything. v. depressed. going shopping.

11.50 p.m. just had dinner with tom in harvey nichols fifth floor, who was obsessing about a pretentious?-sounding 'freelance film maker' called jerome. moaned to him about daniel, who was in meetings all afternoon and only managed to say, 'hi, jones, how's the skirt?' at 4.30. tom said not to be paranoid, give it time, but i could tell he was not concentrating and only wanted to talk about jerome as suffused with sex-lust.