Am I the only member of staff lonely and insomniacal enough to update her blog, I wonder to myself. I commission features and sub submissions and try to sort stuff out, and this is the place where all the leftover energy goes. The bits of energy that don’t go into writing songs about flying ants and making evil noises on my synth.

Today, though. It suddenly got a bit too much. I read a friend’s online diary about his life in Johannesburg. There were pictures. His room was clean and white with books and a view of bright hills and sunshine. Suddenly I started crying and couldn’t stop. It was unnerving. I tried to figure out what was going on. I really missed my friend in Johannesburg, sure, and it would be nice to see him, but that wasn’t it. I have a deadline to write 1400 words about Matmos by the end of today, but that isn’t it either, in fact that’s a nice task. Likewise with some subbing for this site, that’s a nice thing to do too. I just had breakfast with an ex-boyfriend whose life seems to be turning into some kind of underground hippy version of Sex and the City, but that only bothered me in an ‘is there no karmic justice and why are women so easily fooled?’ way, not any kind of real way. I made sure I wasn’t listening to anything really sad. In the end, as I coughed and sniffled and laughed at my teary face in the mirror, I surmised that I was crying because I am tired and I need a holiday. It was as simple and as boring as that.

I have a beautiful new book I bought at our local church summer fete yesterday, about the Wildernesses of Europe. There are fantastic pictures of glaciers and lakes and places I want to go to. My eyes are literally longing to see some mountains again. I spent last summer marvelling at the Pyrenees and walking all the way across Cornwall in a heatwave. I seem to have spent this one staring at a laptop and marvelling at the contents of my own head. That’s fine, until your eyes get hungry for new pictures and fresh vistas and your ears just want to hear the grey-green whoosh of the English sea on a shingle beach. Away from the wilderness too long, I feel like I’m out of practice somehow, losing a language. I feel like, if I don’t see it enough, it will just go away and won’t exist for me anymore. Of course, that isn’t true, but tiredness and needing-a-holidayness has turned everything a little personal. I’m really sick of the personal today. I want to ge in the presence of something so big and awesome, or so weird and old, that I can’t even begin to ‘engage’ with it. I don’t want to engage. Engagement’s for…well, it’s for people who want to get married, I suppose. Enough said.