A little bit of this/ A little bit of that.

Things I hated before I went on holiday.
1. Work (for reasons too numerous and mind-numbing to enumerate).
2. The weather in Madras (for making it impossible to live, breathe, work, drink, or whine without sweating copiously and unglamorously).
3. Chelsea (for finishing on top of the EPL and relegating Arsenal to second place).
4. Douglas Adams (for dying).
5. The Government of India (for taxes).
6. Shops (for stocking stuff that rightfully belonged in my closet).
7. Rich people (for not having fine lines and wrinkles caused by retail therapy).
8. Jasper Fforde (for writing like I wished I did).
9. Owen Wilson (for living miles and miles away).
10. People who are cruel to animals (for being the scum de la scum of the universe).

Things I hated after I returned from holiday.
1. Work (for not changing).
2. My bank balance (for changing).
3. The Third World (for making it impossible to sip a three-euro espresso without mentally tut-tutting at the hopelessness of a three hundred-rupee coffee).
4. The rest of 2005 and some part of 2006 (for making it impossible to even dream of another holiday in the immediate future).
5. Mad Chinese lady at the salon (for attributing my tan to Goa).
6. Monaco (for being too beautiful to be true and keeping me up nights, wondering when, how, if I could ever live there).
7. Italian men (for being tacky and lecherous instead of impossibly and unattainably dishy).
8. Stairs (for not being escalators).
9. The creep who stole my mobile phone (for being the ugliest, darkest cloud in the sunshine of my life).
10. Myself (for being uncharacteristically stupid and leaving my phone lying on the bar counter instead of clutching onto it for dear life).

After/ You get what you want/ You don't want it.

Got visa. Now to wrap up the truckloads of work that has been piling up on my desk while I fretted and fumed.

Serves me right.

I try to stay awake/ And remember my name/ But everybody's changing/ And I don't feel the same.

In a parallel universe fairly close to ours, things are falling apart. And a bloke called Tom Chaplin's singing stuff that vaguely makes sense to me.

Here's something I do to keep my angst down to controllable levels: loop a single track endlessly. It becomes my Song of the Day, and acts as a theme/ counterpoint/ silly comment/ distracting thought/ antidote to whatever ails me at the moment of listening.

Does it work? But then, does anything?