2004-03-08..11:57 a.m.

Did you know that Thelonius Monk�s middle name is Sphere? Am I the last person in the world to learn this, or am I parting yet more of my infinite wisdom to the unknowing masses? The names of jazz musicians enthral me to no end. But if I were a pirate I�d have to go for Iron Anne Bounty (which you�ve got to admit is better than Millie the Hunch-backed Tea Girl any day)(though Millie the Hunch-backed Tea Girl would likely have some pretty nifty tales to tell the grandkids, because every ship needs a Tea Bitch and thus she would be far less likely to get gored in battle.)(Pirate battles enthral me too).

Sunday was out of the ordinary. I slept fully wholly and completely until half past 11. This never happens ever, I am always always up no later than 9 because of the ingrained notion that I will have somehow wasted the day (despite the fact I could easily tack on those wasted hours to the end of the day and enjoy them, rather than fumble blinding and drool into my coffee as per the current norm) thanks to my mother who gets antsy if she sleeps in past 8. And if it does, I am always always filled with reproachful guilt and suffer internal lectures and disapproving looks. But not yesterday! Instead I was refreshed and beany. That is until my cousin visited with her boyfriend of seven years.

I was supposed to go round to my aunt�s to see them as they�re only over for a few days and slept right through the alarm, so when I called my aunt to say I wouldn�t be coming, but would they like to pop over for a quick coffee, and she said sure they�d love to, and I joked, but not anytime in the next half hour unless they�re keen and eager to see the encrusted frame of an unwashed me answer the door, I was really expecting them to turn up in a couple of hours. They turned up forty-five minutes later. Forty-five minutes. FORTY-FIVE! Who has time to breakfast, drink a pot of coffee, wash, dress, and tidy in forty-five minutes? Not me! As a result I answered the door having only managed breakfast, coffee and the transfer of towels from the back of my bedroom door to the hook in the bathroom. And then has to spend the next hour and a half decidedly underdressed and smelly while they took pains to explain to me the property ladder in Tuscan villages, how one learns to compromise when living with other *people who aren�t your family*, and why if you�re going to have kids you have to get married. Then I gave them a tour of the place, whereupon they ignored my own bare-footedness (which I had helpfully, yet silently presented as an example of House of Emma etiquette) and proceeded to scuff all over my flat in their shoes.

Now the common areas are one thing. One of the first arguments I had with my flatmates was the Shoes In the House thing. You don�t know what you�re bringing in from outside, and I�d rather not have to face the possibility of poo-clad feet. Similarly, the thought of mulch, expelled spittle, and bits of abandoned foodstuffs getting ground unnoticed into the carpet makes me very uncomfortable. You may say, just vacuum it up you big baby. Well, to that I say: living with a vacuum cleaner attached at the hip is simply not feasible. If I could afford to have someone proceed me into every room, anticipating my every move with a multi-nozzled Hoover, I would. But that is a luxury I currently cannot justify (she says as though as soon as she can she will. Yeesh.) However, I have learned to *compromise* and will myself on occasion run into the kitchen/livingroom/bathroom with my shoes on instead of kicking them off into the giant pile of mismatched shoes at the bottom of the stairs. But there is a giant pile of mismatched shoes at the bottom of the stairs for a reason. And this reason is thus: When going upstairs, TAKE OFF YOUR FUCKING SHOES.

Knowing as you now do my Thing about shoes, you ought to see where this is going. Right into my bedroom. I spent the next half hour wincing, and then gagging inside in utter horror when I noticed that the boyfriend of seven years who I had met all of two hours before was thoughtfully depositing his ear gunk on the arm of my chair under the window.

There was a rush of carpet cleaners and furniture wipes the second they left. An antibacterial frenzy if you will.

In other news, I�ve started reading The Great Gatsby, and my sister has recently dropped her French course because it is apparently a genetic defect that neither of us can learn languages out of text books.

I�ll write an actual entry that is in some way conversational later, I just had to get this out of my system. Ah. All better.