Paving hell before 9am

I just had a piece of cheesecake and two (admittedly really quite small) brownies for breakfast. I really didn't mean to. I got the cheesecake out of the fridge to cut it into bits and freeze it, but when I had cut the first piece I realised that because it has quite a high proportion of fresh strawberries in it (and I mean in it, not scattered on top) that probably wouldn't work very well. So I was left standing in the kitchen, staring at a piece of cheesecake, at a time when I hadn't already decided what I was going to eat for breakfast. My instincts were therefore at least partly laudable, involving tidiness and avoiding waste. The brownies are harder to explain.

After a month and a bit of really not doing very much at all, I'm meant to be hitting reality again today. Reality for these purposes means trying to write a dissertation about some novels I don't really like very much, which might possibly explain the brownies. Yesterday evening, in a vague attempt at staving off both the dissertation and the ironing, I even read this week's Guardian review section. In theory it's what I buy the Saturday Guardian for, but in reality they accumulate around the flat for months, unread, until I get cross and throw several dozen out at once. It even had some ideas buried in it that I would like time to play with: a quote from Auden, that '' poetry makes nothing happen"; the idea that the structure of Possession was influenced by the reader response to The Name of the Rose; the suggestion that the black death was anthrax or haemorrhagic fever rather than plague; and a quote from a new novel by Michael Thomas called Man Gone Down, that "No true idealist has a back-up plan". However, they will all have to wait until I have re-read a load of stuff I read several months ago, and written about 5,000 words.

Oh, and one day I would like to read David Nicholls' 'One Day' - but given the state of my finances at the moment, that will have to wait until I can get a cheap, second-hand paperback. In the meantime, I'll eat more brownies. And possibly more cheesecake.