March 13

On one of my rare forays into the alcoholic land these days I ran into Marcelle and Brendan's friend Damien and his girlfriend in the Town Hall. Damien is fresh back from Guatemala and south America, with a moustache to prove it, and I stayed until two in the morning trying to inhale some odor of foreign parts. Unfortunately I drank so much and was so consumed by misery and regret the following day that all that remains is a vague impression of the physical similarity of Damien and Anna, who exhibit the same uncanny convergence of behaviour and features as the bandy-legged man who walks his bulldog in Camperdown Park.

In other news I've completed my first full week of work in about five years and although it's engaging I'm suffering from the constriction of social life that inevitably follows. I feel as though I have no time. I leave home just after sunrise and come home late in the afternoon : the year is growing old, the light is shrinking and fading, and I'm feeling coming-of-age pangs. I've got a live-in lover, a full-time job, and the tendency to feel a periodic stab of loss when I think of my spinster student life.