Today I feel utterly scattered. Things I want to say, thoughts I can't shape, conflicting ideas that I can't satisfactorily resolve, and nameless tasks nagging at the back of my mind which refuse to be dispelled even by to-do lists so comprehensive that they include basic bodily functions.

In the half-asleep wake of my clock radio I dreamed that I was catching a huge spider in a Cambridge Beer Festival pint-glass, this year's commemorative glass; the only thing I had to put over the end of the glass was a plastic bag, and as I stopped to talk to Owen on the stairs I felt the spider's leg reaching out and touching my finger, and I squealed and dropped the glass, and watched it and the spider go bouncing down the stairs, until at the bottom the glass shattered and the spider was impaled on an umbrella, and I saw it suddenly grown larger and rigid with death, and I woke to find that I was nearly late for work.

Work feels fragmented, too. I'm still in various kinds of limbo, waiting for decisions to be made, not wanting to start anything major until strategies are in place, getting on with what I can in the meantime, and increasingly wondering if by the end of it all I'll still want to be where I'm fighting to get to. I feel like I'm trying to cram the expanding balloon of someone else's elastic schedules into a small wooden box.

Cup after cup after cup of coffee. My emotions are all over the place, angry one minute, aroused the next, tearful over trivialities, confused all the time. Unfinished sentences.