A few years ago, I went through a phase of having celebrities make cameo appearances in my dreams. (I could have sworn that I had lots of blog post from years and years ago about celebrity cameos, but I can’t find them. They are probably there in the archives, somewhere, if you can be bothered to look for them.) Then, for reasons which remain unclear, they went away. Well, now they’re back.

For the last four nights I have had various celebs appear, firstly Mr Neil, who appeared two nights running. Then Iain Baker, DJ and keyboard breaker for Jesus Jones. Last night, it was Simon Le Bon and a rather startled-looking Nick Rhodes.

The odd thing is that these are all people that I’ve met, for varying definitions of the verb ‘to meet’. Neil I’ve had the honour of meeting once, and I would be over the moon if I ever got the chance to meet him again. They say you should never meet your idols, but you should when they are engaging, fascinating and kind. Iain used to be a DJ on XFM, back when it was the best radio station in town, and I had a wee little crush on him for years, mainly because he has an infeasibly sexy voice. He now falls into the ‘mate’ category, thanks to the wonders of Twitter. Simon bought me a drink after a gig once, although if he met me now he wouldn’t know me from Eve now. And Nick I once passed in a corridor. He sported the same startled-deer look in reality as he did in my subconscious.

Now, Mr Neil has been making cameos in my nocturnal meditations for a few years now and I have come to think of him as personifying creativity as he mainly seems to show up when I’m feeling particularly frustrated. I’m therefore guessing that, given that I consider Iain to be enormously talented and am a massive Duran Duran fan, they signify the same thing. Rather than attempting to pass comment, some 10 – 20 years later, on my musical tastes, I prefer to believe that my subconscious is merely pointing out to me that maybe it’s about time I stopped thinking about the bottom of Maslows Hierarchy of Needs and started to consider the top.

I just wonder whether the fact that Neil only appears to me in the context of his house – I’m always at his house, or staying with him, or swimming in his swimming pool, or about to ask him if I can borrow his couch – has something to do with the yearning I have for somewhere to call my own, where perhaps I assume I’ll suddenly be able to start writing again. Although last night’s Duran dream occurred on a geography field trip and involved firstly a music masterclass and then swimming in a mirror-calm sea over tunnels in the sand, so God knows.

But then, sometimes I think dreams are just our subconscious’ way of poking us in the ribs and saying “Nyer”.

I wonder who will have the nerve to show up tonight.

It's been ages since I've blogged a dream, primarily because they've actually all been rather dull lately, but this morning I had one of those surround-sound ultravivid IMAX-type dreams, which I can only summarise poorly in writing.

I'm outside some gates – multiple gates, set into a bay in a limestone wall far too high to look over. I've been here before. I recognise the avenue, the trees. Last time we couldn't get in, and I couldn't read what was above the gates. Now I can:

Arlingham Decrepitorium

It's a museum about death. The Decrepitorium. We're taken in through the gates by a small, balding, ferrety-looking guide, my dad and I, and into what looks like a small limestone mausoleum. Like so many mausoleums, this one is bigger on the inside than it looks and it's full. Of bodies. Mummified bodies. Plasticised bodies. Bodies in formaldehyde. Lots and lots of human bodes.
And death memorabilia. Stuff from Egyptian burials, small models of the embalming process, grave goods from countries I'd never even heard off. Coffin nails (including massive copper ones and ones with little jewels in). Loads of it. Mountains of the stuff.
And then there was the Decrepitorium Mirror. It ranged along a wall, with outlines painted onto it so that you could line yourself up, and when you gazed into it, it showed you what you would look like at various stages of decomposition. For some reason, I resembled Dominic Monaghan (the guy that plays Charlie in Lost), which is odd because he doesn't much look like a decaying corpse.

I love the idea of a Decrepitorium. It really would make a fantastic website – I can see it now, all gothic and Dave McKean-ish. And it's just a great word, although according to Google, it doesn't exist. Or didn't, until I dreamt it.
Thusly do I donate to the world a new word: decrepitorium. Make me proud. Get it into circulation and thence to the dictionary.

OK, so most of you know that my weird spelling started off as a typo, about 10 years ago. I just typo'd it again, ending up with Duw. Which means 'God' in Welsh.
What can I say? Be careful what you do, I'm one letter away from omniscience.

Just watched last night's Dr Who and I have to agree with Tom that not only is Dr Who is a bit of a tart, but he's also a bit free and easy with gender/species/group sex distinctions. Good for him, I say. Bit jealous really. I never get to dance, let alone set up an interesting threesome with aliens.
Last night I had a dream. Yes, another one. I was on a boat, with Christopher Ecclestone. We were on a river, which was all well and good, but it ran along the edge of a cliff… which was at least a mile high. The water slopped over the edge in a 'your boat would go straight over' manner which scared the crap out of me. But it was ok, because Christopher Ecclestone was there to keep me safe and sound.
But anyway, moving on. I was talking to my mate Ewan about this, and more now than ever I think his take is right. Dr Who is is the last survivor of the Time Wars. The Daleks are all dead. The Time Lords are all dead. Dr Who suffers horrendous survivor guilt and that colours everything he does.
This episode, more than any other, exemplifies survivor guilt. “Everybody lives, Rose. Just this once, everybody lives,” says the Doctor as the victims of the poorly adapted nanogenes are finally cured of their ills. The joy in his face is unparalleled by anything else we have seen in this series – he is for the first time truly delighted that he has been able to act as saviour, in however an indirect way.
Consider Father's Day, the episode in which Rose goes back in time to try to save her father's life. The Doctor knows exactly what she has done, he knows the disaster she has caused, and he knows what needs to be done to put it all right, but he can't bring himself to engineer Rose's father's death. He wants him to live, because he feels he can't be responsible for even one more life lost. He's willing to sacrifice the unknown masses in order to safe the known individual – a logic that previous Doctors would never have followed.
For ages with the new series of Dr Who I was really puzzled by the way that the Doctor seemed so passive – very much unlike past Doctors. In the episode The Long Game, with the astonishingly sexy Simon Pegg as The Editor, (why did no one tell me Simon was narrating the Dr Who Confidential series on BBC3? I would have watched them, dammit!), both the Doctor and Rose are helpless and at the mercy of the Editor and his Boss, and they rely upon a secondary character to free them.
This goes totally contrary to our expectations of the Doctor as the Mr Know It All who can fix anything. In fact, I can't think of a single episode in this series where Dr Who has actually taken charge and been directly responsible for the rescue of anyone. Dammit, even the Dalek he tries to rescue, (before he realises it's a Dalek) ends up committing suicide because Rose's DNA has infected it. Damn you, Russell T Davies. Damn your ability to make me cry over a Dalek!
But as soon as you look at this helplessness in terms of survivor guilt, it all makes sense. The Doctor is haunted by memories of the Time Wars. He can't understand why he is still live when everyone else is dead. He has no one left. Nothing left. Just him and his Tardis. Is he a traitor for not dying with the rest? Should he have done thing differently? Sacrificed his life? To what end? Time Lords were always survivors and to die a meaningless death would never have been acceptable.
So instead he is left alone, trying to make sense of what happened, and trying not to repeat what he sees as tragic mistakes. Just how responsible was the Doctor for the death of all those Time Lords, all those Daleks? We heard him crying “It's not my fault!” to the last remaining Dalek. Is that truth, or guilt? Was it his fault? How will Rose react when the truth comes out?
The Doctor is obviously in love with Rose, it's clear as day, and has been for episodes. Will he lose her when all this comes to a head*? It surely must – all the episodes are building up to a climax in which we find out what really happened in the Doctor's past. What were the Time Wars? What happened to the Daleks? The Time Lords? And where was The Master in all this? What part did he have to play? Davros? Is he still kicking about? (Or should that be 'levitating about'?)
I wasn't a Dr Who fan until this series. The old stuff I could take or leave and really not care about, but this series has been fantastic. Russell T Davies has put together a through line that has totally hooked me. He's done something truly different with the Doctor – he's made him human, fallible, vulnerable. For once, the Doctor is not there to save us poor apes, but is instead saved by us. We are going on his personal journey, instead of a journey through space and time that he happens to be taking us on.
As a scriptwriter, I find all this fascinating, and I have to admit to a bit of jealousy. What I wouldn't give to have the opportunity to take a character like the Doctor and turn him on his head, do something really cool and interesting with him. Dr Who is, without doubt, up there with Battlestar Galactica as my all-time favourite scifi.
Anyway, it's 1.20am now – how the hell did that happen? – and whilst I could easily wax lyrical for another hour or so, I shan't. Time for bed. Christopher, are you coming?
* OK, I know Ecclestone leaves at the end of this series, which means a regeneration, which means the relationship is doomed. I was just trying not to think about it, ok?

I woke up with a jolt this morning. I was having a dream involving a person I actually know talking to me about a situation that actually exists, except that this person was telling me something that could not possibly be true in the waking world. It woke me, because as revelations go, it was pretty damn big and would have had huge implications.
It also left me wondering how much that dream might colour my perceptions of the situation in real life. This is not to say that I am delusional and about to start thinking that dreams are real, or harbingers, or predictive, just that much of the way we react to things is subconscious, and this just seemed to be to me another way in which my subconscious can successfully fuck me about.
I'm not really talking here about what dreams are, why we have them, or what they mean – symbolically or otherwise – but do they have a knock on effect on the way we behave and think once we have awoken? Is the dream simply a manifestation of existing wishful thinking and therefore powerless to affect us in any new way, or can a dream implant such notions? Even if such notions already exist, does bringing them to the fore by playing them out in our dreams make them more entrenched, give them more influence?
Certainly dreams can fuck with my mood.
Years back Sam, my old school friend with whom I am staying right now, and I shared a series of houses and flats in Hounslow. I had a dream once that we had gone out on a speedboat on the sea and she had fallen overboard and drowned. This tragedy was particularly harsh because (in real life) her younger brother Peter had died in a car accident only a few months before. I woke sobbing and stayed tearful and upset the whole day.
Obviously the dream didn't leave me thinking that Sam actually had drowned, or that she was about to drown, or that drowning was even a remote possibility, but it did change my mood quite dramatically, sinking me into a miasma I couldn't shake off.
However, I've also had some fantastic dreams that have woken from feeling all happy and energised. So it cuts both ways.
Then there is the issue of what insights dreams may provide into cognitive problems. This morning I also dreamt of a wonderful model for explaining the cultural change lifecycle in business – complete with a diagram with four quadrants, (for some reason there were pictures of humans, monkeys, chimps and apes in the background of each quadrant), and four conditions that had to be satisfied to progress to the next quadrant. I wish I could remember what those conditions were, because in the dream it all made perfect sense. Unfortunately, I have a very visual memory, but am crap at remembering facts, words, numbers or names.
(Which probably explains why I spent much of yesterday morning staring at Jamie Cowling trying to figure out where the hell I'd met him before, because I swear I have. My visual brain was screaming that we've met before, but my memory refused to tell me where or, indeed, if.)
So anyway, yes. I suppose in one way this is all a rather stupid post. Of course our subconscious affects conscious behaviour. It's just that usually, it doesn't rub our noses in it quite so much.

I hate buying clothes. And shoes. I'm just not very good at it. Where some women delight in trying on a gazillion outfits, I would rather that the first one fit so that I can buy it and get down the pub/to the Apple store/back online.
I have hardly any clothes at all – if you've met me more than once you have basically seen my entire wardrobe. I have male geek friends who have more clothes than I do. In fact, I have male geek friends whom I suspect have more skirts than I do, and who wear them more often.
I live in dread of the day when I am suddenly struck by the need to purchase an item of clothing because I know that what will ensue will be nothing more than tedium, back pain and suffering. Indeed, so reticent am I that my friend Kate usually has to frogmarch me from shop to shop. That girl's armlock is second to none, I can tell you.
Usually, the only things that can make me buy clothes are weddings, the threat of imminent clothing malfunction, or a sudden and uncomfortable change in the weather. Such as, for example, the precipitous arrival of a summery day which forces me to accept that my ten year old Adidas Campus are just not suitable footware for the current climate. Thus did I today decide that it was time to buy a new pair of sandals.
I knew exactly what I wanted – simple strappy heels in baby blue. I think, in retrospect, that was the problem. I knew what I wanted and all I had to do was find them. Except that this season, sandals are either flat flip-flops or covered in crap – butterflies or flowers or equally vile manifestations of too much oestrogen (or, in fact, a vile manifestation of the projection by shoe designers of too much oestrogen onto the female sandal-buying population).
So I trudged round Richmond, trying not to throw up over huge bejewelled dragonfly-encrusted sandals and generally failing to find what I really wanted. By the time I'd run out of shops to look in, I started to downsize my expectations. Maybe I could live without them being blue. Maybe I could cope without strappy. Possibly, just possibly, I could live without heels.
No, sorry, some things cannot be compromised. I don't have too bad a pair of pins, but heels really do make them look longer and slimmer and sometimes a girl likes to persist in the delusion that her legs are worth showing off to the world once in a while.
Having failed to find the perfect pair, I end up going back to the very first shop that I went into to reassess a less than perfect pair which were the only ones I'd seen that didn't look like they were designed by a rabid hippy. Whilst waiting for the assistant to locate a pair of the turquoise sparkly sandals in the right size, I spotted a pair which were not blue and not strappy, but which somehow looked really nice.
I tried on the turquoise sandals and they were nice, but felt a bit wobbly. So I tried on the non-blue sandals and they were far more comfortable – I've always been a sucker for wood and leather shoes for one, and they felt so much more stable. Trouble is, they could only locate one size 6, and the other sizes patently didn't fit. Gah. I find a pair that I actually want and I can't sodding have them.
Thus am I now the less than proud owner of a pair of turquoise sparkly strappy sandals which may well break my ankle before the week is out, but which are at least not too vile. Even if they do make me look pigeon-toed.

Why is it that the night you really want to have good night's sleep, because you have to get up early the next day to go to London, is always the night you toss and turn and wake up too early and can't get back to sleep?
I made the mistake of giving in to chocolate fudge cake last night. I shouldn't have. Now I ache from head to foot, as if whilst I was sleeping someone had given me a good going over with a cricket bat.
And the dreams. Oh god, the dreams. Every single dream was basically the same. All about the same thing. Message to my subconscious: Yes, ok, ok, I get it. Now shut up!
Can I go back to bed now, please? No? Damn.
Anyway, off to London today, back on Saturday probably. Lots of meetings. Wish me luck.

I woke up again before 7am this morning, after only six hours' sleep. It's now 8am and the chances of me nodding off once more to blissful sleep are nil. (Well, it'd probably be less than blissful because my subconscious has been playing nasty tricks on me lately by making me dream that the thing I most want in life is actually real, which means when I wake up I feel somewhat disappointed to discover that reality is not what my subconscious says it it. Thing is, what I want most in life now is incredibly simple but not something I can arrange.)
So either I snuggle down under the duvet and pretend to be asleep for an hour, or I get up and pretend to be awake.

Weird, weird dreams last night, containing a rather scary zombie attack from zombies who weren't quite as shambolic as Shaun of the Dead would have you believe. They knew where I was and they were coming to get me and doors and windows and walls weren't going to stop them.
I was only hiding out in that small triangular-shaped flat, high above the city cos I was trying to keep away from the rozzers after murdering two nasty men who had been following me with nothing but my own strength and a rather over-effective Vulcan nerve pinch. In retrospect I should possibly have got rid of their bodies more discretely, rather than carry them round with me for a bit and then just tossing them in the river. But my excuse is that the stars made me do it.
It was a beautiful night, but the stars seemed to be flickering. A lot. And moving. The city's skyscrapers shimmered prettily in the distance, and the big zooming asteroid that came hurtling through the sky to eventually flatten half the CBD leant a sort of apocalyptic beauty to everything. But it was ok, because a small talking fox with a passion for the number 9 joined me in the garden. We only had six chairs at the table at that point, but we managed to locate another three to make the fox happy.
However, it was deeply unfortunate that the fox should end up at immigration, only to be zipped up into a spare, empty suitcase to be taken to quarantine. They were going to burn the suitcase afterwards, but I worried that they might forget to let Mr Fox out first.
No celebrity cameos as far as I can remember, although I have had a couple in recent weeks, they weren't worthy of mention here.
Time for breakfast.

In a case which has stunned and shocked the blogging world, long-time blogger and self-proclaimed blog 'expert' Suw Charman was today fired by the Blogosphere for alleged gross moral turpitude. Ms Charman was brought before a disciplinary hearing late last night, long after she should have been in bed, and summarily dismissed, sources close to the blogger said.
In a statement read to the press today, a tearful Ms Charman said, “This is an outrageous abuse of power and the Blogosphere should be ashamed of itself. This isn't about gross moral turpitude, it's just a vendetta against me because I never wrote my own blog software in BBEdit back in 1998. I can't help not being a l33t haX0r. It's just the way I am.”
The Blogosphere refused to comment on the case, saying that there were privacy laws to be abided by, and besides, the less it said the quicker the whining old cow would vanish off the news radar.
The forcible removal of Ms Charman from the Blogosphere was effected by Mr K Marks, of Technorati fame.
“We have been following Ms Charman closely since she first started to leave the tail of the power law curve,” said Mr Marks, speaking off the record. “When it became clear that she had pretensions to the A-List we took action and have now removed every trace of her from our databases, including the two anonymous blogs she thought she had deleted, and the new one she thinks no one knows about.”
Mr Marks has admitted, however, to keeping copies of Ms Charman's anonymous writing, particularly that juicy post about waxing her bikini line, 'in case it comes in handy later'.
Ms Charman has strongly protested her innocence, refuting claims that her blog was bland, boring and a waste of pixels, a view shared by Mr R Ojisan, resident of Hasch Joeetoh. Mr Ojisan defied the Blogosphere by saying “Ms Charman's blog is no worse than most other blogs out there. The truth is that the vast majority of blogs are bunch of arse and that's nothing to be ashamed of. Only one blog out of the five million that have been created is actually any good, and that's mine haytchteeteepeecolonslashslash…”
Another Hasch Joeetohnian, who agreed to talk to us only after strict conditions were met and a large sum of money handed over, promised that if Ms Charman started a new blog it would be hunted down and spammed off the face of the planet.
“She can run, but she can't hide,” said our anonymous source by the name of T Roll. “We have ways of discerning the identity of a blogger purely from a sample of their writing. The way that she overuses commas and her unhealthy preference for the passive tense gives her away every time. She thinks she is a grammar queen, but she can't use a quote mark properly to save her life and we will use this against her. She should give in gracefully and take up knitting instead.”
Meanwhile, Charman's supporters rallied to her defence. “Thank fuck it wasn't me,” said one, just after the news broke. “Yeah, I think I'm gonna take a break from blogging for a while,” said the other.
Ms Charman's partner, Mr C Rw, who has just recovered from groundbreaking surgery after a small stroke, has stood by her side throughout this devastating time. “Wubba wubba wubba wubba wubba,” he said vehemently, until he was lead back to his hospital bed for further observation.
In an astounding revelation, however, Ms Charman was heard to say – via the latest miniaturised listening devices recommended by so-cool-it-hurts blog BingBong – that she wished she had been fired earlier.
“I was working my pert little arse off for fuck all dosh,” she said to a far more talented friend when she thought no one could hear, “so frankly I'm delighted. I was starting to think that I was going to have to start posting taudry, poorly written fabrications of my life as a slut, or become an x-rated vidcamgirl, in order to get myself a book deal, but being fired by the Blogosphere is a far easier way of doing it. Not only do I now no longer need to get my tits out for the lads, I can pretend to be hard done by and feed off everyone's sympathy. I wonder if I can get the suckers to pay off my credit cards for me too.”
When confronted with this by an official certified professional proper journalist, Ms Charman jabbed her fingers into his eye-sockets and said, “Ffyc off, cont”, which apparently translates from the Welsh as 'Please leave the vicinity, you objectionable person'.
Ms Charman has since been offered a cool half mil to write a pile of steaming shite about her experiences as an internet underdog popular folk hero for a well known international publishing house who really should know better. Her blog has been posthumously given the Blog of the Year award by The Guardian. She will be the first blogger to appear on Question of Sport, and is widely tipped to become the new permanent host of Have I Got New For You.
In other news, The Guardian's Online editor and the Director General of the BBC were today both found bound and gagged in an abandoned squat, tautologically repeating over and over again, “Not the Fflwff stories! Please god! Not the Fflwff stories! We'll give you anything you want!”

There are two sorts of blog post: posts written for the reader, and posts written for the writer. This is definitely in the latter category. Equally, there are two best sorts of dreams. Flying dreams and lucid dreams. This post concerns both.
I dream of flying fairly frequently, but not as often as I would like. As a child, I would pray for wings. I could think of nothing better than soaring like a bird over the world below, independent, free, alone. I'd also pray for a tail and antlers, but that's a slightly different story.
I don't remember precisely when I had my first flying dream, but I do remember it. Flying over a river delta with a flock of geese. I remember another too, leaping from the top of a cliff that was miles high, and soaring down through the air to swoop up again long before the ground reached up to claim me.
And so the flying dreams have continued. Recently, I have had quite a few, but they've been sad attempts at flying. I've had a hard time getting far off the ground. Last week I had a flying dream where I could barely get as high as the tree tops, could barely feel the air around me.
Lucid dreams, too, are fun. In case you don't already know, a lucid dream is one where you know you are dreaming and you can control the dream to some extent. Usually when I have a lucid dream I wake up fairly rapidly after realising I am dreaming. This pisses me off no end.
There are tricks to lucid dreaming, and the first is how you realise that you are in a dream in the first place – abnormal things happen, clocks change times, text on signs changes or is gobbledegook. And there are tricks to staying in the dream, although none have worked for me. The key, apparently, is to keep moving.
Last night – or rather this morning, as I woke from it at 7am on the dot – I had a lucid flying dream, and it doesn't get better than that.
So, here is my self-indulgence, my dream. There's no onus on you to read – this really is for my benefit more than yours.
I'm sitting in a typical English pub. It's dark, smoky, the wallpaper is strongly embossed and painted a nicotine colour. In the corner by the bar sits my flatmate, a woman of my age (here, mid 20s I'd say) whom I obviously know, yet do not know.
We sit watching some cooking programme on the flatscreen TV that's mounted on the wall. The chef bones a fillet of salmon. As he pulls free the fine bones, he throws them to one side, straight at the camera. Except, the bones come through the TV and land with a rustle on the copy of the TV Times that I am reading.
“That's peculiar,” I think. “That doesn't happen in real life.”
I pick them up and feel them and I look at my flatmate.
“You know what this means?” I say. “I'm in a dream. This is a dream. And you know what that means? It means I can fly!”
I leap upwards, and yes, I can fly. I run out of the door into a dark, dingy alleyway, turn up and run towards a park. There I throw myself into the air and fly, round the trees, up into the sky, then back down again.
But, of course, parks aren't safe places for pretty blondes late at night. As I delight in my new abilities, a nasty, brutish guy, only a teenager, makes for me. He attacks, but I leap upwards. My standing leap is not so good, and I make it only just out of his grasp. He swears at me, and I strive to fly higher. With no wings to flap, it's just me and my mind.
He circles below, cursing, and straining I alight on a treetop. There is a broken branch balanced precariously there and momentarily I consider heaving it from its perch to crush the brute below, but I don't. I have not the strength.
I wait a while, until he has given up and gone, then I fly myself down. I must learn to control this new gift, to improve my take-offs. I start to walk home.
I get as far as the pub, and I turn down the dingy alleyway, narrow, dark, forbidding. Strung across from tenement to tenement are wires – electricity, phone, whatever. I take notice of them now. They are in my way.
I hear footsteps behind me. This is not good. I start to run. I'm not far from home. I can't fly – the wires stop me taking off. The man chasing me is getting nearer. I struggle with the door to my tenement building and run up the stairs to my apartment.
I push open the door, its lock is broken. Hurriedly I pile up as much furniture as I can in front of the door. A coffee table. A chair. A bookcase. Then I turn to the desk in front of me. Four beige PCs, networked together, and a single Mac. Scared, but desperate, I open up the Mac and take out the hard drive which I know I have to save. I shove it into a bag, and push up the sash window.
There is a long drop below me. Above me is freedom. I clamber out of the window. Behind me, I can hear the man pushing at the door. The precariously stacked furniture won't hold for long. I put the bag across my shoulder and glance back at the door.
I have no choice. I have to trust my ability to fly. I have to jump. Or I will die. Yet if I jump, I might die anyway. It is a long way down. I ready myself, I prepare to launch myself into the void, to commit myself to trusting this inexplicable, illogical ability to fly.
If this were a crappy novel, this sequence would end here with an 'and then I woke up'. Sadly, my subconscious is about on a level with the crappy novel, and I actually did wake up at this point. I wasn't woken up, I woke up naturally. So I don't know if I made it, although my lingering feeling is that I did.
All I hope is that I get to fly again. It's the closest I'll ever be to true freedom.

Until today, the whole car-crashed undead zombie that is my lovelife made no sense to me, or anyone else for that matter. Not alive, but not actually dead either, it just limped along, losing limbs as a matter of course and getting progressively fuglier and fuglier.
Today, however, I was pointed in the direction of Ladder Theory, and like a ray of sunshine cutting through the gloom to light up a new penny lying in the manure, the reasons for the perma-disaster that is my lovelife miraculously became clear. I shan't explain Ladder Theory in full here, because that would deny you the need to go to the site, and that would be just wrong. Instead, let me tease you, minx that I am, with a few flashes of ankle and a promise of cleavage.

Well most guys know that women dig guys with money. Would Donald Trump be fucking models if he wasn't rich? That question is rhetorical. Now I don't even believe this is wrong, I think it is just nature. But I also think women who are this way (and it is almost all of you) should be honest and admit that they are basically whores, and stop saying bad things about the so-called “actual whores” who are just trying to earn an honest living.
Most women read this and say something like, “Well I'm not the average woman because… blah… blah… not true… blah blah… my boyfriend/lover/husband/masseuse was poor… blah… blah.”
If you thought something like this you are very likely the average woman. If you read it and went “Hmmm…” and then you went back to doing physics, then you have a case.

Luckily for me, I read, went 'Hmmm…' and went back to IRC, which is just like physics, so I think I have a case. But anyway…

You can see that a lot of problems can be avoided [...] by declaring as soon as possible to a girl that you will not be friends under any circumstances. You can explain that she is too attractive or you can be blunt and say you don't want to bend your “friends” over a table and fuck them, but would rather play poker and go to the races with them, thus disqualifying her from friendship. As long as you are clear. This may scare a girl away. But if it does what would you want with such a skittish little twit anyway?

Intermission
Now, at this point, if you haven't followed the link then now would be a really good time to do so, because I'm about to tell you how all emotional angst (and thus my trainwreck of a lovelife) can be explained by two facets of Ladder Theory – Ladder Disparity and Jumping the Ladder.
Ladder Disparity
This explains almost everything. Essentially, you have placed your intended higher up the ladder than they have placed you on theirs. This disparity is the root cause of every single instance of rejection you or I have ever had.
For guys, the rejection is because they are on the Friends Ladder, instead the Fucking Ladder (also called the 'Real' ladder in Ladder Theory, but real doesn't begin with F, and I like alliteration). For girls, it's because the guy thinks that he can pull someone higher up his Ladder than you are, even if the person that he thinks he can pull is Claudia Schiffer. She exists, therefore there is a real possibility that he may bump into her on the way to work and impress the pants off her, therefore she trumps you. (You're better off without these guys anyway – their grip on reality is gossamer.)
So, when your ex told you 'It's not you, it's me', what they really meant to say was 'It's not you, it's just that you're right at the bottom of my ladder and I think I've got a chance with that new bird in Accounts, so you no longer stand a snowflake's hope in hell of getting your leg over'.
Jumping the Ladder
Jumping the Ladder is when a guy either attempts to, or does, move from the Friends Ladder to the Fucking Ladder, or visa versa. This can happen for a variety of reasons, and causes much angst.
As we saw above, guys trying to move from the Friends Ladder to the Fucking Ladder deliberately often results in rejection. This is a bit crap for you guys, cos you usually have no way of knowing which ladder you're on unless you test it. So, either you give it a shot and risk getting rejected, or you assume you're on the Friends Ladder and learn to live with your frustration.
This is life, and the sooner you guys get to grips with it, the better. Us women have to get to grips with having Claudia Fucking Schiffer on the ladder above us, so fair's fair.
A different sort of problem is caused by guys who actually do manage to move from the Friends Ladder to the Fucking Ladder. Sometimes this happens organically (pun intended, sorry) and when it does, well, it's a lovely thing. Everyone gets an attack of the warm and fuzzies and love blossoms.
Some guys change ladders quite surprisingly, and this can cause Sudden Ladder Jump Shock. It's that getting drunk and snogging your mate only to discover that oh my god he's actually really hawt and why the fuck didn't you spot it before sort of thing. Never actually happens, but theories are all about positing potentialities, and this is one.
Then some guys move from the Friends Ladder to the Fucking Ladder when they really should stay on a portion of the Friends Ladder which I would like to propose is labelled the Not Fucking Available Rung, or the Not Available For Fucking Rung. I think it's pretty clear who goes on this rung – guys who are gay, married (or as good as), or dead.
This is where many of your best friends' boyfriends live and it's where they should stay. For if these men jump the ladder, well, it's a world of pain for all of us, but particularly for those sad sods that have to listen to all the crappy angst it creates.
Of course, if circumstances change, so does the Ladder, and if a guy previously nailed to the NFA Rung has the good sense to see that you're a far better catch, (i.e. if you're further up the ladder than his current shag), then it's only fair to allow movement, but it's still going to be a world of pain for someone. Best avoided.
Finally, there's the awkwardness of a Backwards Ladder Jump, from the Fucking Ladder to the Friends Ladder. This can happen for all sorts of reasons, but usually it's just because the girl has 'gone off' you. That's quite natural – it means that hormone levels have dropped and she's stopped being duped by her ovaries. No need to be offended at all – it's not personal, it's biological.
Actually, that's a lie. It may be because you're a twat, in which case, feel free to be offended all you like.
So, there we have it. Ladder Theory explains all. Many of my disastrous attempts at 'romance' have failed due to the hypotenuse being too bloody long – they're way too high up my ladder compared to where I am on theirs. Well, that's easily fixed – I'll just start ranking all you fuckwits at the bottom. Simple.
Other failures have been down to guilt over someone else's ill-advised attempt to Ladder Jump. Well, that's dealt with easily too. If you Ladder Jump and it goes wrong, that's your fault, not mine. I refuse to be made to feel responsible for the fact I don't want to fuck you.
(This, actually, has been something that has perplexed me immensely over the years. How is it that I feel crap when I get dumped, but I feel crappest when I dump? Screwed. Totally fucking screwed.)
Now I know that I have, in one fell swoop, just destroyed any chance I may ever have had of ever pulling ever again. My life is totally online these days so all potential suitors will at some point swing past this blog and this post will effectively move me from the 'cute blonde bird' category into the 'fucking nutter' category. Which is fine, actually, because I am. I mean, do I have to mention Simon Pegg again in order to prove the point? If you can't take the heat, don't stick your hand in the bunsen burner.
Obviously all theories are open to modification in the light of new data, so if you do have any proposals, please do comment. So long as they're not proposals of marriage.

Last night I had a dream that a very small frog was stuck in my right ear. I couldn't get a hold of it to pull it out, but neither could it wriggle out by itself. It was a bit like having a Babel Fish stuck in one's ear, with all the sliminess but without any of the advantages, the frog being monolingual and all. I woke up with a rather strong feeling of frog-in-ear-ness, and when I fell asleep again the dream just continued. It was so vivid, I still can feel the frog there, wriggling and slimy and cold.
I would tell you to post your analyses in the comments, but on second thoughts, please don't. I'm not sure I want to know what dreaming of having a frog in my ear tells you about me.