i am spitting out all my bitterness along with half of my last drink

It's gotta be said that I love my room.

I love that it's mine, that there's a lock on the door, that the bathroom is mine, the toilet is mine, the shower is mine, the sink and the toothpaste and the bin and the diary on the floor.

The walls are covered in my photos and newspaper clippings, it's my dirty cutlery, my empty tin of peaches, my books on the floor.

I don't even have to say 'fuck off and leave me alone' because if the door's locked then people just have to.

Switch your phone off, sign out of msn, lock the door, turn up the music, curl up under the desk and don't wish to be somewhere else for once.

Today I hate Madonna. Specifically, I hate 'What it feels like for a girl' by Madonna. The bit at the beginning I really love, "you think that being a girl is degrading", so much so that I didn't really listen to the rest of the song's lyrics for a few weeks after I downloaded the song.

Silky smooth / lips as sweet as candy, baby / tight blue jeans / skin that shows in patches / strong inside but you don't know it / good little girls they never show it.

Do you know what it feels like for a girl?

Does she know?

Piss off. I don't think being a girl has ever felt like tight blue jeans, silky smoothness and lips that are sweet like candy. That is what it feels like to be an image in a magazine.

I would never presume to be able to define what being a girl is like in one 3 minute pop song, or even a book several thousand pages long, but I know that it's never felt anything like that for me. Feeling like a girl is something utterly different. You'd think Madonna had never had a period in her life.

Sweet as candy indeed. How fucking patronising.

I can just sit here in my room in whatever state of undress I choose, listening to Suzanne Vega and New Young Pony Club and Madonna can piss off.

I love my room.

Next year's house, very nice indeed, I think, I've only seen it once. Four bedrooms, only two of them filled. At least now that both the boys have dropped out, Kate and I are definitely getting the big rooms.

Would I trade in my en-suite for a double bed?

Maybe. These are good problems to have. Silly little problems, not life and death problems. I could die happy with stupid problems like Madonna's misrepresentation of the female psyche and having to share a toilet.

With PMT this bad, a girl can be forgiven for thinking about comfort.