Reasons to be cheerful...

'Well, that's simply marvellous! I would LOVE to hear your avant-garde Hegelian haiku!'

1. I just had (and paid for) a posh boozy London lunch with my pater familias, and did not have a panic attack.

2. I was hungover and premenstrual (sorry chaps) on Sunday, and did not have a panic attack

.

3. I bought a book called 'Optimum Nutrition for the Mind'* which will tell me about loads of costly supplements I should take that will take away the panics and cure me forever. Woop! I can't wait to go and splurge in a health food store on loads of panaceas that have been extracted from rare Guatemalan jungle flowers and cold-pressed by the light of the moon. I will keep you updated on my miraculous recovery.

4.  My friends think I'm insane because I am absolutely not afraid of all the poisonous Aussie things that freak them out ('whaat, you went and played netball even though you had a paralysis tick in your ear?!') but get freaked out by being on the tube or getting on a plane or being stuck somewhere. You see, I AM brave and fearless dagnabbit, just about dangerous things. I am only frightened by non-dangerous, non-life threatening things that probably won't happen. Duh.

5.  I make my friends laugh a lot (I am sometimes witty), I give my boyfriend hysterics  and I am mostly the life and soul of parties. That makes up for occasionally crying in toilets and backing out of things at the last minute and curling up with my lavender oil and back-to-back HBO series. Shit - everybody's got to have SOMETHING, and this, girls and boys, is mine (and yours).

6. The new Bruce Springsteen album is out. 

7. On Sunday I had a raspberry ripple chocolate brownie and some codeine headache pills and found them to be a very medicinal and soothing PMS combination (sorry again chaps - might work for the manopause too).

8. I have had a fringe cut by my gorgeous gay pal (every girl's got to have one you know) in his 1950's style dining room (listening to Judy Garland - it's like gay bingo), and now I look less like a tramp and more like a poor man's Zooey Deschanel. 

9. One day I will own one of those cats that are like dogs, and I will call it Walter, and we will have a love like no other (not like that you filthmongers) and I will walk it everywhere on a leash.

10. Nutella exists.  And when you are an adult no-one can tell you off for eating it from the spoon until you feel sick. And the ads say it is nutritious and full of calcium, which is really good for anxiety. So there.

*Note that the boyfriend has already pointed out the irony of my using a sweet wrapper as a marker in my  'food for the brain' book...