Seems I'm tempermentally suited to having a heavy cold, sitting at home with the curtains pulled, the heating full on, and eating chocolate covered walnut marzipan, one of the four blocks of turron I bought back from Vigo. It feels like drugs actually, a diconnectedness from the necessity of having to engage with the world, a drifty, fuzzy, cotton woolled sort of experience, with a wonderfully languid bit of Bach violin in the background. The best bit of it is that I feel absolutely no compulsion to clear up, wash up or tidy up ... everything tends downwards. Lying downwards in particular. Some particularly nasty person might ask, so how exactly is that different from any other weekend? Particularly nasty. Well, the difference is that normally I will spend the weekend in a tyranny of tension over the fact that I'm not getting round to all the things I've listed throughout the week as 'what I will do in my free time at the weekend'. So you see I'm in luxuree on the setee so cosee just with mee. And my intellectual friends in the pub at the first Sunday of the month job, and my spiritual friends at Andy's birthday at Jonathan's and Chris and Trish just getting on with having more sex I expect and I dont give a fig for any of them. Or at least for being with them at the moment. The very idea of leaving this warm womb of a room for the cold dark waste of the street!

Have been surfing a bit, looking up references to TOT experiences. That's tip of the tongue for the uninitiated. I've always been fascinated by the fact that I cannot remember Joan Armatrading's name for the life of me. I have started numerous conversations which go 'Who was that woman who was supposed to have had an affair with Valerie Singleton, she lived in Haslemere, she was a singer songwriter, had hits at the beginning of the eighties, mixed race woman, what was her name, damn I can never remember' ... And try as I might I never can, except today when it came to me as I was sat on the toilet. Not sure of the causal relationships there - very complicated. What was interesting was a point that someone made about how the things that most often TOT experiences are to do with people's names - because there is no logical connection between a person and a name. No previous experience, learnt or hard wired will equip you to predict that the Prime Minister is called Tony (if you didnt know before I mean). I find it extremely hard to remember anything which doesnt have an emotional meaning. Being a kinaesthetic learner, simple facts just dont do it for me. Names are a bugger though cos you cant invest a feeling into a name per se - though I have had conversations about how someone looked like an Ian, not a Simon, but I think that generally they're conversations for conversations' sake as my father might have said. The only thing that will help you remember them is the particualar person they belong to, and that's not a lot to go on. Especially if their name is Ian or Simon - or Tony for that matter.

Google doesnt work in the same way as memory. It doesnt give you things that sound like the thing you are searching for, or examples of the same things, because if you cant remember it you can only put those things in as the things to search for, and you have to be hugely lucky to find the one bit of connection you actually wanted. So when I was trying to remember Joan Armatrading's name I put into Google 'Haslemere singer Valerie Singleton'. Not very helpful. Just a couple of entries which include lists with someone called Valerie and a Mr Singer and an address in Haslemere. Totally useless.

But what I did come across was this which came via something to do with nudism in Haslemere (I cant remember how or why). I loved the bit about:

'The Forum recognizes the role of Christian nudists as "salt and light" within the larger social nudist community. It encourages readers to uphold and preserve high moral values within social nudist environments and, whenever appropriate opportunities present themselves, to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with fellow nudists willing to receive it. '

This reduced me to cackling. What a wonderful image - I could see Mr Carter, pastor from Haslemere, bollock naked, holding a bible open before him preaching on top of the dunes at Swanage, while the queens scattered into the bushes ....