CHARACTER BUILDING

The family next door are having a massive row. The father is being picked on by the matriarch and her many daughters and grandaughters. They are playing really loud music too, quite happy, upbeat music. Meanwhile my mother and I are listening to Charles Aznavour, La Boheme, and drinking a little red wine with water, talking about so many things. There are a pair of magpies on the make, jumping and chattering around the terrace. I feel at once so happy and yet so wistful at the same time and then I hear someone shout out the Spanish equivalent of 'go back to your own country!' I'm not sure who it was directed at but Mr van de Ven came out and told me not to rise to it but I am afraid that all I can think of is DO NOT GIVE ME CAUSE FOR REVENGE.

I have had enough. Just got buttonholed by a neighbour. I don't like him because he always strikes me as the intolerant, racist type. Apart from that I caught him taking a sneaky look at my breasts on more than one occasion but what do you do? I just keep shtum, you know, just to keep the peace because if not it could kick of with me headbutting him. Anyway, he is often going on about the 'foreigners' but when I pull him up on this he does that thing of saying he doesn't include me, as if that makes things better or if he thinks I am with him on this one. Prick. Well, I don't know what possessed me but he was going on about some Muslim neighbours who seem alright to me so I told him that contrary to what he thinks they are quite cool people and that I am helping them with the translation of a musical they are working on. I told him, God forgive me, that it's called Jihad The Musical and I am at the jazz stumps bit. It's times like this I wish I smoked a pipe....

Just been introduced to someone new who said something on the lines of 'encantada, delighted to meet you, I have heard so much about you.' To which I replied, 'oh, really, I hope it was all bad, because if it was it's probably true!' For the love of God, what's wrong with me!!!

Nobody knows what happens to you when you die. People say they do know but they don't. Some people say there's nothing. That you die and that's it. Sounds comforting. Yet what if they are wrong? What if there is something? What a nightmare! Or maybe it is just like a dream where you know your true self and are capable of extraordinary feats that seem to go on for ever till you get tired and say, you know what,  think I will get up now and start all over again.