I am thinking of making this a piece of my brain that can only be picked by friends, and that demands an introduction.

I angst about life in general, literature and whatever happens to bother me. There are a lot of things I dislike, and some I love. Middle-aged, or simply older, men, for instance. Men in their forties of fifties are inexplicably sexy. I used to think I would become a writer, but I have not written for a long while, and have all but scrapped that idea; Instead I aspire to be a high-brow idiot, with a deathly sexy husband/lover/toy. I love shoes, clothes, make-up, literature, discussions conducted in offices over glasses of wine, sherry or port, semicolons, punctuation, friends, fun and intellectuality. Adding to the list of aspirations-gone-stale is attending Oxford: The personal statement was daunting, the interview insurmountable and I could not quite collect myself enough to get the grades I should have had.

I read Eliot, understand nothing and pretend to analyse him nevertheless. Am still trying to win a bet with my brother by finishing War and Peace. A while ago I hated both modernism and post-modernism. But then I made a carnal mistake in reading both modernists and post-modernists, and ended up absolutely fascinated. And, as I write this, I am not writing a draft for a paper in which I conclude that Aestheticism was never a literary movement, it is an idea prompted by criticism.

I also love the theatre. Its poignancy, strengths, flaws, plays, inventions and wonders. I am, in short, stage-struck.