Well, that was mean of me. Kindof like buying a boyfriend a new shirt and parading him around for a minute before shoving him into a dark cupboard for a few weeks.*

And so, yet another edition of The Things I Have Been Doing Instead Of Blogging:

- getting back behind the wheel. I’ve found a new driving instructor who is superextrabonusdeadly and I should hopefully have my shiny pink licence soon. Third time lucky, as they say.

- planning a holiday! The fellah and I are off to Canada next month where we will cruise waterfalls, drink Caesars, eat poutine and club baby seals. (Kidding on the last part.)

- listening to some really great music. 2009 is a banner year for me so far – Fanfarlo, Florence & The Machine, Mayer Hawthorne, Noah & The Whale, Camera Obscura, Ellie Goulding, Dodos, Animal Collective, Phoenix, Passion Pit, Local Natives, Kings Of Convenience, Marina & The Diamonds and Grizzly Bear have all thrilled, delighted and amazed thus far. I’m sure there’s tons I’m forgetting, too.

- rewatching Green Wing, which is just as hilarious as ever.

- shopping. A lot. Way more than normal. Wardrobe clearout imminent.

(*not that I would EVER DO THIS. Obvy.)

I repaired my first bike puncture last week but I still couldn’t tell a spoke nipple from a derailleur. (But I can spell derailleur without needing to resort to Google, how weird does that make me?)

I’ve become rather addicted to watching late night poker games on TV, even though most of the players are misogynistic tossers.

I’ve discovered that banana bread and peanut butter is a dynamite combination, although I now get why Elvis ended up so fat.

I was supposed to go to the gym yesterday but spent the evening drinking rioja and redesigning my blog instead.

Well, I’ve regained the ability to chew, and speak properly, and I’m down to two Nurofen a day. I do still have stitches in my gob, but apparently they’ll fizz away all by their own selves in a couple of days. The chipmunk cheeks are – thankfully – long gone.

Be ye warned, though, the pain was cat, especially after the hi-grade drugs wore off. I’d initially thought I was feeling better and made the mistake of venturing outdoors for the first time – to Tesco of all places – and sure enough, within five minutes my jaws were throbbing and I was threatening to take someone out with the trolley.

By day six I was feeling much less murderous, and after a day spent baking (!) I figured I was probably fit to return to work. And so here I am a week later, still a bit knackered, but pretty much fixed up.

My sickweek in numbers:

Anaesthetists resembling Guy from Green Wing: 1 (bingo!)
Fingers held up when I came round and the nurse asked me how sore I was on a scale of 1 to 10: 7
Types of medication I went through: 5
Plates of scrambled eggs eaten before the sight of them made me want to vom: 3
Litres of ice cream consumed: 1
Episodes of Gilmore Girls watched: 40 (yeah, I know)
Magazines read: 8

Times my surgeon said “they don’t grow back, you know!”: 3. Well, thank goodness for that.

At last, eviction day is almost upon me. The job is to be done tomorrow at sparrowfart, and I am currently packing a bag with trashy magazines and my most decent pyjamas. I’m supposed to be fasting from midnight, so even though I’m stuffed after a delicious Last Supper I am of course dying to run over the road to Spar and stuff my face with an entire yellow Ritter Sport (the cornflakey one) in front of the meek assistant and then ask for another.

Having never had a tooth pulled nor a general anaesthetic applied, I’m picturing all kinds of ridiculous scenarios. For example, I’ve pretty much convinced myself that something like this will be going on while I’m knocked out, and that I’ll resemble a ginger watermelon once the bruises come up.

I’m also wondering if I’ll go a bit like this guy after the event. Needless to say, I’ll be giving the internets a very wide berth until the drugs wear off as I suspect my version would be neither as funny nor as cute. Sayonara, sthuckerth.

Being a gingre, I’m a naturally pale and freckled sort. I have had a natural tan precisely once, after a six-week heatwave in Amsterdam, during which most of my time was spent outdoors drinking rosé. The odds of this recurring back here on home turf are somewhat more remote, although the less clement weather keeps me covered up most of the time anyway.

But then come the rare and glorious days like today, where it’s twenty degrees at nine o’clock in the morning and jeans just won’t do. So, on goes a skirt and out come the milkbottles and the stopwatch, for, invariably, it won’t be long before someone mentions how pale I am, and would I not think about slapping on a little bit of fake tan to “take the edge off”*.

The short, non-rude answer to that is no, not any more.

See, I’ve tried the fake bake. I’ve even paid someone to spray the stuff on me so I can’t blame my own clumsiness when it turns out badly, as it always does. It looks great on some people, sure – my little sister always manages to look like she’s just spent a week in Lanzarote, not an hour standing like John Wayne. Me, I always end up with streaks, no matter what I do, and the colour is always too dark for my natural pallor, which in turn makes my hair look like straw. And don’t get me started on days two and three, when it starts to wear off, and I begin to resemble a washed-out Tony the Tiger.

So, pale and freckled it is, with added factor 30 lest I burn, which looks way worse than any shade of fake tan.

*yes, I have been asked this question

I will never excel at poker, nor any other game requiring stoneyfacedness or a flawless ability to bluff. I can’t help myself. I start off with the best of intentions, chipping away quietly with so-so hands, but then I get dealt pocket kings and there’s a full house for the taking on the table and I come over all Monica Geller and bellow YESSSSSSSSS as I take the hand and knock out two of my opponents.

It’s only by pure fluke I manage to go on and win the game, but payback comes quickly and I’m first out of the second game in a spectacular crash-and-burn. I’m left sucking on my bottle of beer, silently cursing my big mouth.

I appear to have developed an internet clothes shopping habit where my blogging habit used to be. It’s going really well. My haul so far includes:

- a dress that promised funky, but delivered frumpy
- a tunic top obviously made for girls with giant boobs and a tiny waist (I have neither)
- a t-shirt in the fugliest shade of mustard going (not goldy yellow like the website promised)
- a shirt which mysteriously developed a large bleach stain on the back on its first outing

Perhaps I’m better off blogging – at least it’s free and I can try things on first.

It’s ridiculous really, how attached I’ve become to this little white piece of plastic. I didn’t have much time for it last week, but when I did manage to sit down for a little light blog readin’ and such it threw a mickey fit (abandonment issues much?) and melted its power cable. Proper melted, like, I could smell burning and everything. Lawks.

So offline I stayed. No new music, no feed reader, no food/house porn, no trashy gossip sites. And it didn’t kill me. In fact, I got loads done – crochet, reading, an actual honest-to-god run in the park.

It’s good to be back and all, but I’m starting to think I could definitely manage this.

Elf memetagged me, a while back now, to share six inconsequential things about myself. I figure this extends to birthday parties of yore; birthdays are generally uninteresting unless you are famous and can afford to have other famous people hide in a giant cake before bursting out and serenading you with Happy Birthday and neatly segueing it into their latest Top 40 hit.

That’s what I’d do, at least. And so.

One. I have no memory of it, but the photos tell me I was the only child there (the privilege of the first-born), propped up and grinning in front of a giant strawberry cake and surrounded by doting relatives.

Three. Involved sweetie jewellery, which resulted in a sticky powdery mess everywhere. I wasn’t to know then that I would rediscover sweetie jewellery some twenty years later in a club in Amsterdam, and that it would be just as messy.

Twelve. My last primary school birthday; a dignified affair on my parents’ lawn with the other swotty scholarship girls in attendance. I’ve only kept in touch with one of them.

Fifteen. A sleepover in the sitting room, featuring a VHS double bill of Legends Of The Fall and Don Juan Di Marco. We all preferred Brad to Johnny.

Eighteen. My first legal drink – tequila at five past midnight in the Red Box. Memories of that evening are otherwise hazy.

Twenty-six. Two months before I left Amsterdam, on a rainy Monday night. The people in the room that night haven’t all been together since, and probably never will be again.

Twenty-eight today. I doubt I’d manage so much as a sip of tequila.

Seven forty. Beep. Beep. Beep.

I silence the alarm clock, roll out of bed and go to the bathroom. He’s awake when I come out again. He’s pulled the laptop into bed and is smiling at something on the screen. I grin and roll my eyes and shuffle into the kitchen for a glass of water. I lean back against the sink and swirl the cool liquid round my mouth.

When I get back to the bedroom he’s out of bed, pulling on shirt and slippers. I’m going to make cheesecake, he says, I’ve checked and we have all the ingredients. I tell him to use the Maryland biscuits in the press for the base, and wonder what cake tin will suit. He kisses me quiet and says Hurry up and get ready, it’s a lovely day outside.

Seven forty-five. Beep. Beep. Beep.

I silence the alarm clock, roll out of bed and go to the bathroom. He’s still asleep when I come out again. Curled up in the duvet as usual. I grin and roll my eyes and shuffle into the kitchen for a glass of water. I check the fridge for cheesecake, just in case.