"It was nice meeting you," said the tree.

Just got back from work, which was SO quiet and SO dull that for the last hour all I was doing was standing by the radio, switching from rubbish Xfm to rubbish Heart and having the will to live sapped out of me by Hard-Fi/Daniel Bedingfield/Hard-Fi again. Oh, and after that I went to Body Balance (which is a kind of yoga/pilates/T'ai Chi class that makes me feel all stretched and zen and lovely), although that was a bit of a stressathon today because I've strained my knee a bit and I kept feeling paranoid that the stretching would make it worse, and also I hadn't shaved my armpits so there was a bit of a Welcome To The Jungle moment every time I did a sun salutation. Why am I telling you this?

A writer called Marie Phillips is about to publish her debut novel, Gods Behaving Badly, which imagines what would happen if the Greek gods and goddesses all shared a house in modern-day Hampstead. So in the book Aphrodite is a phone sex operator, Artemis is a professional dog-walker, Dionysus is a DJ who runs a nightclub called Bacchanalia and so on, but they're still gods, so Apollo is apparently responsible for global warming and Ares spends his time trying to figure out how to stir things up in the Middle East. In the middle of all this is woven an Orpheus/Eurydice-style story. It all sounds like hilarious stuff, and although I have to say the extract I read from the book was a little bit disappointing - it was kind of bland and one-dimensional, to be honest - maybe the rest of it will be quite good. In any case I'll hopefully get my hands on it.

Obviously the rest of the world at the moment is devouring or has already devoured Harry Potter (I wonder how many blog entries have mentioned the damn guy this weekend? Gazillions probably), and I'll have to do the same at some point. Dad is in Russia right now, where apparently they're selling copies of HP in English as well as Russian, and not for very much either, so I've asked him to bring me a copy. Gotta know who dies and all that, although I expect it'll be coming to a t-shirt near me soon.

In other news...well, Dom and I are going out. As in, Going Out - yes, with a capital G AND a capital I. It seems so surreal considering...everything. I mean, three months ago seems like three years ago, and, er, yeah - I'm not sure I want to explain. But I'm very very very happy at the moment. (Except he's currently buggered off to Cyprus. But I've been promised a postcard.)

And I'm sprucing up old poems and editing stuff to send to the Foyle Young Poets competition - this is the last year I can enter so I'm firing everything I can at them, so to speak. (Now there's an image in my head of me literally firing poems at the judges with a gun or something...) There's something weirdly satisfying about spending ages doing nothing except looking at a poem, tapping a pen on the table, moving a comma, changing one word, then looking at the poem again...It feels simultaneously like the most productive and unproductive thing in the world.