Lipstick turns into green eyeliner

ME gives me crazy dreams, cinematic, and it's a boring sin to tell your dreams to others - unless they are actually in them - but I'm telling you anyway. I was enrolled at an Italian university and needed photos, there was a booth across the road, and I put on lipstick but it was not lipstick but green eyeliner, no matter how many times I tried to smudge it off and reapply. Eventually, I said to the booth woman, I don't care, please take the photo anyway and she was not happy. I've started reading The Stranger in the Mirror by Jane Shilling, perhaps the dream comes from there. She was 47 when she started writing the book, a year younger than I am now (well, I'm only 48 and four months, I do, sadly, count the months now).

I love the cover, Shilling herself, posing naked, she looks fabulous.

I don't look my age - and I'm glad of that - though it's all down to genes and having to sleep a lot, not by being virtuous in any way. Still, I am my age and, in truth, the thought of middle-age creeping up horrifies me quietly, I think because it underlines that much of my adult life has been shaped by illness and it's honestly depressing to think back to what could have been - that's why I don't. I often think these days I have one foot in the well world and one foot in the ill world - am sure I've said this before - and I hop between them, constantly losing balance (although it probably appears that I am balancing more easily than I actually am).

I'm told The State of Me Kindle version is going up from 99p to £2.99, so if you want a bargain now's your chance (you can barely get a cup of coffee for £2.99, so it's still a bargain). My brother just gave me an Amazon voucher (he gifted me the Kindle, he's a real convert) and said - only half-joking - it's for e-books not shiny hardbacks. I've (slightly) guiltily just bought a shiny hardback cos it's not available in Kindle (and the paperback is not out 'til autumn). I've ordered 'On Being Ill', the essay by Virgina Woolf.

Shilling's book is full of lovely literary references - she speaks of the importance of the comfort to be found in reading fiction - and I was struck by Virginia's words, which she quotes: Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed . . . when we think of this . . . it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

I was trying to say something similar here.

If a dream > 2 sentences I don't read it

Other people's dreams are dull, in real life and in fiction. I wish writers would confine their characters' dreams to one sentence or two. I skip over them if they are any longer.

Unimaginable

I've been dipping into Philip Gourevitch's brilliant book about Rwanda for six months now. I can only read a little at a time, not just because the events are so horrific but there are a lot of facts to absorb, my head is not really up to it. Still, having seen the films Shooting Dogs and Hotel Rwanda on television recently, it makes the events more imaginable, if that is the right word - the films are almost like study aids. Last night, I came across a description of a corpse - the man had had his feet and hands chopped off before he died. This apparently was a common torture, the Hutu extremists called it cutting down to size. Crowds would gather to cheer and watch the victims die in agony. I dropped the book on the floor and know it will be a while before I go back. Sure I would have nightmares about machetes I dreamt instead that I'd written a novel about Iran and it was just out in hardback, it had a lovely red and gold cover but I cannot remember its title.

Birds & an Ex-Prime Minister

There was one black bird and one white one - let's call them dreambirds - and I had to judge them in an international competition. They were playful like dogs and big and cheeky, rolling over to be tickled. We were all in a pen - the birds, me and the spectators. We linked up, hands on each others' shoulders, and Tony Blair was behind me, crying. I dream about birds a lot, but I don't recall ever having dreamt about Tony Blair.