news in brief

It's pretty hard to get your head round sometimes, for the people I try to explain it to, but also for me.

I get to live in a bungalow with a lovely man. Lovely, very tall. Like an Ent. I have a pet snail, called Stan, who's currently on the roof of his tank, upside down and weeing. We have a big TV and lots of DVDS and I get to sit in the doorstep to smoke so I don't get rained on. Also we might get a dog. Brilliant.

I don't have a job, nor am I studying. There was a cock up with my finances and, oh, lots of things, so I'm going back in September. As for the job - I got bored of doing the work of three people for the pay of one and getting treated about as well as a half, so I left. Then I got ill. It all starts to sound like an opportunity for the world's smallest violin, I know, but it's not. Because of all the things I have, because of the house and the boy and the snail and, well, because I was given a tax rebate the size of Surrey just as I got ill so I don't have to go back to work until I'm ready.

So, once you get your head round it, it's actually pretty damn good. The only thing that I have yet to figure out is why, with all this spare time on my hands, I'm still not writing that novel I keep thinking about.

pennies

"It's not death that you should be afraid of, but living, and how quickly we have to do it," he said.

"And whose quote is that?"

"Some girl's. It's like, that death shouldn't really be scary. There's nothing to be afraid of after the event, nothing you can really believe in anyway. Heaven and hell are just so many rumours, who cares? When you get there, if you get there, you're there and - well, that's that. Trying to aim for one or the other is shooting in the dark, it's dangerous."

"Dodgy insurance policy."

"Exactly. Life? That's scary. What's interesting about death is not the thing itself but everything that's left, everything we do to try and get around it. Believing in heaven isn't half as important as the fact that we do - I mean, there's pennies on gravestones, shrines by roadsides. That's scary. Why exactly do we think that any of that matters? But we do, and we should, because being alive when someone else is dead is scary."

"That's crazy," she said, "you don't think death is scary?"

"Oh yeah, I do, but it's the fact that I do that's terrifying."