If you do more, it lasts longer. Biking around Richmond Park on Saturday, walking close to stags with spring fur still clinging to their antlers. Beautiful. Then went to Deep Impact in the evening, which was… terrible. Awful, awful film.

"Daddy…!" Best thing that could have happened to the whingeing woman. Although, alright - yeah, the acting was ok, even if they had all had it explained to them very clearly that they were only doing it for the cash.

If you do less, it lasts shorter. Danny was asleep all day Sunday so couldn't do any decorating. On Saturday night, he tugged on my trouser leg and looked up at me with puppy eyes asking me to please get him up on Sunday morning so he could experience daylight.

Hmmm.

Turned out it was me who was freaking out. It's because of this.
Now is the time to introduce the first in the series of "asides". I toyed with the idea of "soliloquies", but my rational side shouted up from the blackness, and it said "Wank!" to that .

So the idea with "asides" is that they are explanations. They will live in "me" for want of a better place to put them. They are… uh… short biographical details pertaining to topics that may come up once or regularly. If you collect the whole series, you'll have the perfect psychological make-up of Cait, and you needn't even bother reading what is happening on a daily basis.

This is another example of trying to make this environment the one I stick with, but it growing organically. Will it become unwieldy? Who knows… this is interesting all the way. I like the paired-down-ness of this, and the way in a year's time it should be a free-wheeling linkathon with little in the way of linear progression, unless you happen to read my diaries as they come.

Yes, I am in a state Dan. I think it might be this. Confronting some things and having to talk about them. But hey - no one's listening to I may as well spill the beanies. Unfortunately Danny's taking some flak for a... a slightly sine-wave emotional state this week, simply because he is 'around'. Sorry. You know I love you really.

Oh, fer crissakes - this is the most irritating damn thing - Michael was due to come to Ireland with Paddy, Kai and me - Kai bought the tickets and paid for car hire on his plastic, then Michael, the stupid… he phoned up yesterday and told Kai he wasn't coming. Oh, grrrrrrrreat. The search is on for someone else to come. It's an idyll. It's Eden, and no one seems to want to come. The strangest thing.

OK, so here it is:
The very south-western tip of Ireland
Sunny, clean air
Mountains
No tourists
No phone
The Atlantic Ocean, clear as spring water
Butterflies, palm trees, lochs
The Skelligs and Valencia

What sort of dumbass wouldn't want to go. The cottage we rent is 6 miles away from the village, surrounded by mountains, not a person to be found, un-ecologically sound peat fires….

You can nominate yourself to go if you can think of a good enough reason why by mailing me. We go on June 19th, so this is a strictly limited offer.

What is everybody on? I feel like I'm surrounded by defenso-children. It's freaking me out.

Purdeys is now marketed in a 1litre wide neck bottle. Sex. It sounds like the sea, and echoes your voice like some sort of spook out machine.

The Japanese flags are still up. I'm telling you, there's something going on.

Tired.

A day like driving my head in to the surface of my desk for 12 hours.

Carl ICQ'd me with a short question replying, then ignored my reply. Perhaps it was because I lost patience with his recalcitrance half way through and told him to "do what you like". I think I've been guilty of being over friendly. Well, for Jaysus' sake, who cares anyway.

Spoke to Tony yesterday. First time for anything approaching a conversation since mid-March. He said he was "optimistic". No idea what that means, given his demeanour recently.

I can feel my neck's insides now. If I lean down, it's there. If I swallow, it pulls.
I'm scared. Not... I'm scared in many ways.

Got the tickets for The Montrose Avenue. Surprise, surprise, it's on the evening of the Virgin Net 100,000 party (cunningly re-named "Summer Party" because of course, we have much more than 100,000 subbees now). So I'll have to leave half way through and come back. I don't think I'll be missed, now I'm the exiled employee.

Did the imagemap (see above, huh). I can concentrate on writing now. James decided he wanted to do a diary today after he had seen mine. Don't know how I feel about that - I asked him his opinion for early improvement's sake. Freaks me out a little. "Hey, this is my ruminated and thought out idea I've been putting off for about six months all because I couldn't be bothered to work out how to FTP!". Or something.

Cold, rainy, fluey. Ick.

A cat played trad jazz in Piccadilly Circus yesterday. The suit looked hot.

Owen says, "Godzilla" is rubbish, but he enjoyed "Fear and Loathing".

John was 58. Two years from 60. I bought him a book of Groucho Marx letters. Owen had forgotten. Of course.

I got myself "Shock Corridor" at last. It is as good and bad as I remembered it. The pieces in colour - astounding. The raining corridor. The other actors playing 'mad'. To counter that, the 'girlfriend as stripper' with "Johnny!" singing in the background. Hmm.

The Jeff Buckley album is touching and patchy. Listening to someone breathing on a record, in between mouthfuls of words... you can hardly believe that the person you're listening to, taking in the stuff that makes them alive... isn't. It reminded me of listening for the breaths on 1932 Duke Ellington recordings. If you can hear Cootie Williams breathing, it suddenly feels like yesterday.

I have to get a ticket to see "The Montrose Avenue". Curses, I forgot.

Peace in Ireland? I don't know. Perhaps all the skilled IRA members will go and be mercenaries for money, leaving the clodhoppers to look after the drug dealers back home. But what about the Unionists...

Cycling down the Mall on Friday night, it had been festooned with Japanese flags. Made me think of cycling through there the day before capitulation, with a defeated government making way for the new power. Welcoming them in with flags and stiff smiles.

Headache, knee hurts and chin lumpy.
Killer Net tonight. I'm... hurting inside to know what happens. No, really.

I still have trouble remembering that it's 1998. My instinct is to write... well, any random year number from 1986 on, typically.

So yes. It's a diary. Sorry I'm not being more original. The rest of the site is boring from today... onward? I just wanted to get the thing up - to 'make my mark' on the world I have come to know and love. You may as well check here if you can be bothered and as and when I update things, I'll let you know. Today, there is only a friends page and the personal homepage. I haven't got the CV together, because I have to translate all my articles from old Mac discs. I'll take a photo of my baby Mac one day - it's the cutest - an old Performa. A very old Performa. A hugely famous sit-com was written on it once, before it was passed on to me for the lowly price of a bottle of Champagne. I may tell you about that some time. Well, obviously I will.

It occurs to me immediately that for the first time, the creation of a diary using the word "you" constantly suddenly makes sense. Perhaps a millennia of diary writers were waiting for this moment in history.

So - the reason. Well, meeting this man made me less afraid of being myself, and made me proud that a world exists where harmless ego-mania and brazen insecurity are deemed to be not only acceptable, but strangely entertaining. I've always wanted to do this, but I didn't have enough confidence in my abilities to make reasonable looking pages. Well, now, I have skills, I have my Homesite and well, it's more of the usual. I'm also obviously an egomaniac. But that's hardly original, is it?

There are no frames because I have an absolute hatred of the bloody things. The world has too many left hand menus. I'm looking in to alternative navigational structures, but at the moment, this loose comfortable framework suits me. I've handily compartmentalised my life in to noun-centred directories to make things easier for you to create a personal profile of me, and you can even mail me if you want. If you want an instant reply, forget it.

What else - I won't be updating at weekends, and don't expect an every day change. Or to see "Cait naked" anywhere - you'll be damn lucky - I save that for my special friends.

By the way, I might not stick with white - it feels a bit 'early 97'. However, I have no idea what a suitable alternative is, without filling this whole damn thing full of a load of dross. Clean and serene is ok up to a point I suppose.

By the way, if you subscribe to here, you'll probably love this… but, I'm not saying "Scandal city". Merely that I obviously work there. Hence the short earl.

More whenever.