I've been watching I'm in a Rock 'n' Roll Band on BBC 2 and thinking about the good old days when guitar riffs would go on for twenty five minutes and apart from times I burned the midnight oil pinching my arms trying not to show anyone how bored I was, it brought back some good moments. But the truth is that long stretches of my erstwhile life wasn't very rock 'n' roll. I worked in offices, supported a young husband through university, typed letters and made tea, did the shopping on the way home before cooking the evening meal, took a weekly bag wash to the launderette. I worked with single homeless people for a bit - helped to find temporary places to live, made sandwiches, ran around trying to make myself useful. Then I lost the plot for a while, went off the rails, broke a heart and got mine broken; sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll, one of the worst periods of my life, but it's a place I can point to and say I was there, I wouldn't have missed it. And everyone survived.

I'm sure I had something to say about all this, but it's gone - as though I'd smoked some very strong weed - ha! Sometimes M.E. brain is so rock 'n' roll (not!)

I will be shuttling back and forth to Brighton for the next week or so. There are things still on the to do list, plus the festival going on, and daughter spending her first night there soon. I am still ticking items off the shopping list but there is a seemingly never-ending catalogue of bits and pieces to go shopping for: waste paper baskets, bins, dustpan and brush, roller blind, innumerable odds and sods for the kitchen. We have a bottle of champagne saved up from some occasion or other, for when all the stuff is done, and I am looking forward to cracking it open, even though I can't actually drink much of the stuff.

Son comes back from India next Sunday. Can't wait.

I'll be back here before then, though - because it's M.E. Awareness Day on the 12th of May, and that's a party I obviously ain't gonna miss. Laters.