I went and saw the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra playing the other night with a young lad called Ben Folds. It really was quite something, and it made all of us want to go to the orchestra more often. Like, ever. There are some things I never do much, which I possibly should do more. These include:

- Attending orchestra productions

- Attending dance productions

- Reading books without interrupting self by purchasing more exciting book, which I then also don't finish on account of newly purchased and more exciting book

- Messing about in boats

I plan to add to this list. Lists of what I am inadequate at doing are always long and thick and rich with juicy goodness.

Carry on.

My boyfriend's back. Yay internet. How I missed you.

Since not having the internet at home, I have done the following:

1. Cleaned (nay, scrubbed) the bathroom.
2. Cleaned and organised and recategorised everything in my bedroom/office.
3. Done the gardening.
4. Carefully followed the instructions on the hard rubbish collection notice, rather than sneaking out on the night before the collection and stuffing unauthorised materials into other people's neatly presented bundles of twigs and broken desk chairs.
5. Read half of John Banville's book and finished Alan Bennett's.
6. Enjoyed the sunshine, including a rather comical attempt at swimming laps this afternoon (was there ever a Mr Bean episode involving an effort on his part to get fit? If not, there should have been. So much potential in lane ropes, sullen pool attendants, surprising changeroom encounters etc).
7. Almost entirely finished a first draft of something.

Of course, my social life and knowledge of the outside world have both rather collapsed, but it could be said that the former of these wasn't particularly robust to begin with, and the latter was bordering on obsessive. It is therefore with every good intention that I hereby declare I shall only use the internet when I need it.

Possibly doing a YouTube search of "funny animals" qualifies. Perhaps it doesn't. I'll be the judge of that.

So I'm reading Alan Bennett again.

Anais Ninn and Dostoevsky are driving me crazy. They're like two teenage kids in the back seat of the car whinging about how they're depressed and wearing too much eye makeup and colouring their fingernails in with permanent markers.

Alan Bennett, on the other hand, sits next to you and says hilarious things about people you both know.

Anyway, I was reading Alan in the bath and I chucked in a lurid pink bath bomb. Now, from about the water level (my belly button) down to my toes, is a light tinge of pink.

Two tone reading. Nice.

Girls, here's an interesting reason why we rock: we read more.

Also, another reason why The Age (Melbourne's broadsheet newspaper) is simply hilarious to read in the mornings: in an article about Steve Vizard possibly perjuring himself, the reader is confronted with the alarming prospect that, and I quote,

"The possibility of a perjury charge carries a maximum 15-year jail sentence."

The possibility of a charge now carries a sentence! This is huge news. One can only imagine how onerous a conviction based on the actuality of a charge might be. The legal precedent established here is mind boggling. It could almost be argued that the possibility of a charge in relation to a breach of society's regulations exists in all of us. Certainly this is what the Catholics believe. And Dostoevsky.

I intend to stay indoors and live on canned goods until this matter is cleared up by the authorities. I advise you to do the same.

Last week, on the way back from Manly beach to the ferry if you don't mind darling, I spotted a bookshop. I can sense bookshops, just like birds with which way South is.

Anyway. So the bookshop is called Desire Books and it has that warm orange glow that brings you across from the other side of the street to "just have a look". In the window, there was this display. There was a sign on the window that said, NAME THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THESE BOOKS AND WIN ONE OF THEM.

Now, let me say that when Tim recently held a trivia night, I couldn't answer the question about what "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" was the first sentence of. For someone who majored in English, that's not terribly impressive. So when I smugly told Stewart in Manly that I definitely knew what it was that linked the books in the display, I made him promise not to make me go in and say it to the guy in the bookshop.

So Stewart went in and said it to the guy in the bookshop. And - after some discussion regarding the expression of the answer and the terms of reference of the sign on the front window - it was deemed, graciously, to be correct. So then Stew, who had pretended to have thought of the answer himself, had to select a book from the collection.

So now I'm reading Anais Ninn.

And anyway the guy in the bookshop said he'd been doing the "Guess the connection" display in the front window for years. He said it was IMPOSSIBLE to think of new displays. I immediately thought of three or four very (I thought) witty and clever ones he never would have thought of, all of which he had done several variations of. So if you think of any, let me know. I'm making a list. And if you're in Manly, go there. It's a second-hand bookshop with first editions and gorgeous old hard back copies of books they don't really want to sell. It also has a table you can sit at, with copies of The Believer on it and tea cup stains in the wood.

Another reason to love Melbourne: yesterday I purchased two torsos made of plastic (one lovely lady and one hunk of man with a vineleaf covering his bits) for seven bucks fifty each. My next few costume parties just got a hell of a lot easier. Also, I got a single bed head with a light in it (dunno, but I'm sure it will be useful) for $2, a sun hat with half a (strange) sentence on it (fifty cents), a massive big bunch of fake daisies in a basket (free, sort of forced on me), an instamatic camera with film in it that had been taking photos of people's feet all day (fifty cents), and all because the ladies at the garage sale down the road had imbibed a significant quantity of wine. "Are you sure you don't want an orange doily and a small, dusty religious figure?" they asked as I left.

Also, went to the Writers' Festival, which was fun because it was opening and there were books and also many fabulous people (ie my friends).

Yay for the purple sky.

I'm back in Melbourne today after being more or less stolen and forced to have a week long holiday, very much contrary to my original intentions.

Stew's instructions for packing were: you'll need to wear very warm clothes but take your bathers because it will be hot.

For a control freak like me, that's about as infuriating as packing instructions get.

Anyway, so in the past week I've been to the top of Mount Wellington in Tasmania (wear warm clothes), Manly beach (take your bathers), the Sydney (Art) Biennale (take your black skivvy) and Newcastle (take a camera).

And the answer is yes, I am definitely pretentious enough to tell everyone that I went to the Sydney Writers' Festival, the Melbourne Film Festival, the Sydney Biennale and the Melbourne Writers' Festival, all in a row. I suspect there was a craft festival somewhere in Tasmania or a cheese forum in Newcastle that I can take credit for as well. I really am culturally enriched, if a little pasty around the gills.

The biennale was a bit hit and miss actually. "Zones of Contact" not really the most inspiring theme, however ambitious. Having said that, some of it was excellent. The curator's tour, though, which we had planned our whole day around, was cancelled due to the fact that "he decided it wasn't worth coming". Inspiring words.

By the way, I've cheated on Crime and Punishment. I just couldn't cope with it anymore. Instead, I read the following while on my mystery birthday holiday:

- The History Boys, by Alan Bennett, one of my favourite playwrights.

- An Article in The New Yorker about Wikipedia (it's fascinating and it's here for any fellow nerds who might be interested)

- The start of The Sea, by John Banville.

Excellent holiday. Only one verdict really. Stew's hired.

On the days I work from home, I quite often only ever speak to one person for the entire day. Sometimes that person can be the woman calling from India to tell me about the exciting deal I've secured by being randomly selected, sometimes the person can be the girl at the gym who swipes my card and says "locker?". But most days, it's the guy in the cafe on the corner of the street who is also struggling through Crime and Punishment , and who shares my impatience about, well, the length of the damn thing and the fairly consistent conditions of the novel (ie nothing happens - protagonist worries a lot, goes on walks, is antisocial, falls asleep for hours, is Russian and poor, and altogether rather cranky).

Don't get me wrong, I know how important the whole existentialism-before-his-time stuff is, and the fact that Dostoevsky was writing during what my old literature teacher used to call "a period of great social upheaval" *, but Camus managed to write about the existential crisis of a man stuck with the consequences of a crime and he kept it punchy, Fydor.

As any Trivial Pursuit player knows, a quick game's a good game.

Having said that, I love reading a Dickens novel, no matter how long. I wonder if it's different reading Crime and Punishment in Russian. It would probably take me less time to learn Russian than it would to finish the book so perhaps I've gone about this the hard way.

But to take the blame back from one of the most celebrated novelists in the history of the world, and to reclaim the blame a little bit for myself, Coffee Guy and I agreed today that it's probably partly the fact that we're from the instant-information-generation (I could look up Crime and Punishment on Spark Notes or just google it without having to read it). But this is part of my new regime. No starting another book until I've finished this. No skipping pages. No infidelity of any kind to any book. Treat it with respect, and then when you've finished it (much like when you've ended a relationship) you can politely, with measured consideration, trash it over dinner with your close friends.

Still, those other, younger, better-looking books are really tempting me.

* By the way, my (rather amusing) literature teacher also insisted that any era, at whatever point in history, could be described as "a period of great social upheaval". He promised (he was teaching first year literature) that every lecturer we ever had in any humanities subject would begin the opening lecture of the year with the words "You must understand, we're talking about a period of great social upheaval here". For anyone still studying, pop it in an exam. Never lost a customer.