Eyebrows

We've had a very good day on the mystery project... whilst the ghastly contract business chugs along in the background, we're getting on with the work, which today involved spending tim with a wonderful and brilliantly effervescent pianist called Katharine. We worked in our loft. I forget how lucky we are to have a loft. It's a bit too hot in the summer, and perhaps a little cold in the winter, but there's a bed up there (where Fiona and Cindy stay when they're in London), a whole library of books, all our childhood soft toys, an electric piano, an autoharp, a theremin and most of the other things you might expect to find in a loft like suitcases, boxes of photos, videos we can't play any more, a broken telly and an entirely impractical book case in primary colours that Nathan made when he was younger and which various members of his family have been kindly looking after ever since. Until they got bored of it, of course... And now it's ours. Lucky us...

I took myself to the gym in the afternoon and marvelled at the mildew on the ceiling of the showers, which is now an unbroken swirl of over-lapping black clouds. Someone had left a copy of some sort of official email in the changing rooms which informed the recipients that our gym is shortly to lose its swimming pool. Hurrah! I'm slightly beyond caring, although it is outrageous beyond words. Member consultation? Of course not. The place is sinking underneath homophobic customers, anti-Semitic graffiti, lads in the weights room who sound like they're giving birth and a group of tits who shout across the changing rooms, flick each other with towels and call each other "bro." The next time one of them addresses me, I'm going to call him "sister" in my finest Duke of Portland accent. I got so frustrated yesterday about the lack of anyone attempting to wash away the mould spores in the showers that I waited until one of the LA Fitness staff members passed by showing a potential new customer around and bounded up to her to complain and watch her face flush red (well it would have flushed red had she not been caked in a teapot-coloured foundation...) As I spoke to her, I became increasingly transfixed by her eyebrows which had entirely square edges and were surrounded by smudges of white. Her forehead looked like a piano. I walked away, feeling grateful to be alive.