The Uccle Home for the Mildly Deranged

Where were we? Oh yes, I was forgetting to breathe and freebasing Cif. Well, there was more of the same for the rest of the day. I did well, broadly, both on cleaning AND keeping my shit together, bar a small spell of whimpering in the park yesterday evening and welling up at an advert for lightbulbs featuring Chloe Sevigny and Natalie Portman ("this bulb can save monkeys" waaaaaah). Oh, and pop eyed rage at superlative customer service in Delhaize (groceries for the damned), but that comes as standard in Belgian supermarkets. I thought I was doing ok, really, but when I had to take a photograph of myself for Facegoop purposes, it came out like this:

Full on Romanian orphan.

I tried again. I came up with this:

That's not good, is it? In this one, I look like I've just shuffled out of the closed ward to go and do some art therapy (no pointy brushes allowed). Possibly, I might be trying a little light arson in the smokers corner once I have scrawled black obscenities all over my sheet of paper. I am almost certainly squirrelling my meds away in a secret pocket 'for emergencies'.

At this point I removed the gin from the house and put myself on a diet of Ealing comedies, light household chores and toasted goods.

So. I am holed up at home, tending my mental health as if it were a fractious child, with small snacks and scheduled activities and enough sleep and nice music and trying not to piss it off with sweaty palmed thoughts of the future and so on. I am being very grown up between outbreaks of lunacy. It's fine. I can't really tell you what this is all about yet. It'll be fine though. Eventually.

I went out to lunch today with my lovely friend Clutching the Teacup only to be sworn at by ferociously hairy Italian waiters and seated under this:

We pondered stealing it, but the duck behind the owl was attached to the same stand making it hard to steal discreetly, and indescribably creepy.

Then I went, somewhat the worse for lunchtime red wine, and tried on five or six near- identical anonymous dresses in Cos, soothing myself with their pleasing sacklike aspect. I thought I looked very good, but now with hindsight, I think that might have been the wine.

And now I am going to walk the weepette, who has been a faithful, if massively annoying companion all day. I really hope to be able to write something a little less "what I did in my holidays" soon.