I was went to the Christine From Work's office, but it was in a little hut in the middle of nowhere. In it, I saw a piece of paper telling me that she was born in 1967 (which I somehow doubt).

I received a letter from Ellen (who I don't know). Scrawled in capital letters, she told me how annoyed she was because by leaving university, I was copying her. (?) She had enclosed two pages ripped a student planner for the week in October when she had found out, which showed her reactions at the time. Indignant as I was at her obvious inaccuracy (given that I didn't tell anyone until 29th October), I was so scared by the fact that she had my snail mail address that I woke up with terrible stomach pains. I got up, walked around, felt better, then went back to sleep.

Kidpub was an open air cinema and I was watching films of the stories there, sitting next to Noj. I kept putting my arm around him, then remembering that he was my brother. (EEP!)

It was the middle of night and I was in the kitchen at home, trying to cast magic spells, which woke up Noj. I felt so guilty that I gave him a tape of "Divine Madness" with a black and white cover for the troubles I had caused him.

It was Friday 12th February 1998 (even though the twelfth was a Thursday that year), the last day before half term. It just before lunch time and I was in Training Room 1 at work with a few people from school. I loaded ICQ on one of the computers. My friend Twi and someone I didn't know were online and Paul, a boy in my year, asked what the program was.

Someone Who Shall Remain Nameless But You Can Have A Guess came in. I said, "I don't fancy you." He said, "Awww." I said, "All right, I do" and we went into the corridor and kissed. Then I went back into the room and played the computer game Angband, only none of the keys worked and I got killed by a monster in two turns.

Later, I was alone in the room when a mobile phone rang. It was my online friend Helen. We had a good conversation (although Noj kept interrupting) until she said, "Is there something you want to ask me?" "No," I said, and there was silence. A little later, I thought of something to say, but the line was dead.

18 February 2000

I moved house, to one that looked almost identical. But my parents wouldn't let me take much stuff with me and it turned out that I either had about seven siblings or all the residents of swansongs.net were moving in. My online friend Sam instantly put the links from her homepage in the front garden, and I knew from the start that it wasn't going to be big enough for us all. When my parents insisted on placing three computers and a keyboard (of the musical variety) in the garden, I was most annoyed.

I was writing a Verbal Voodoo related novel. But as well as the usual characters it involved a load of other blokes, all of whom died except one called Roger.

A young teenager ran away from her boarding school (St. Joseph's in Durham [?]) and went to live in an alley. She hung door signs from the tall buildings that surrounded her, but when people tried to throw wellington boots to her over the rooftops, they always landed in a river.

19 February 2000

I was at a swimming pool complex with my family, but you had to ride bikes through it. We met two men from work and two men we didn't know, and Mum wrote down their addresses.

We were at a museum where the exhibits concerned our family's history. My brother Noj and I dashed through it, then went to show everything to Mum and Dad. That time round, we noticed everything - a sideways map showing three Europes and three North Americas and everything else out of place, a "Harry Potter" style moving picture of our grandparents wedding - but Mum and Dad weren't interested at all.

We went to Africa. For a few days, we lived in relative civilisation, then set out for the wilderness in our car. We passed a garage, from which a PJ & Duncan song emanated.

Suddenly, in the depth of the countryside, the car evaporated we found ourselves plummeting into an extremely deep and narrow gorge. Looking down gave me extreme vertigo, and when Mum explained that we were falling through the gap between the two halves of the world - we were falling over Africa and under Russia - it blew my mind. Especially when I realised there wasn't a gap in the world, and eventually we'd reach the earth's centre and be stuck there indefinitely. I shut my eyes tightly . . .

And woke up in a house in the countryside. Only it wasn't for a holiday anymore, the following day we would begin a mission, although no one would explain what it was. There were other people staying there, one a girl who told me I'd have to stop taking my werebears and Monkey everywhere and carry a toy buffalo head instead. I agreed, but when she tried to explain that to my parents, they kept interrupting.

A disco began. Noj was dancing, but I sat with my parents. Over a t-shirt and shorts, I was wearing an enormous purple and yellow coat, and although I was really hot, I couldn't be bothered to take it off.

The following morning, I was trying to make "mixed coffee" using filters. I kept stirring it, but it was always made of distinctly light brown and dark brown bits. On closer examination, they were batteries. "Is it meant to look like this?" I asked Dad, but he said no. I continued stirring, except it had now turned into pencils, each one bearing the name of an album owned by a girl staying here. I was well impressed: she had REM and two PJ and Duncan albums.

I looked away again and when I returned I was a student living in Italy and it had turned to water with orange bits in.

20 February 2000

I went to visit my friend Smill. She was living with an abusive stepfather.

I was in an unfamiliar town with my friend Chris. We went to the cinema. I wanted to buy a Yorkie Bar, but the only ones they had were in pink wrappers and watermelon flavoured. I didn't have any money anyway, so he had to grudgingly pay for my ticket.

The film was really psychedelic. A lot of it was just like watching a screen saver, but at the end, my online friend Twi, who was a goddess [kEwEliEZ!], came to earth and flew along a pier. I was now in the film and tried to talk to her, but I only caught up at the end of the pier, by which point she'd degenerated into a pile of black clothes. There was a note to me attached to her shirt though. Later, I chatted online to her about it, and she was dead annoyed that it hadn't been more prominently displayed.

21 February 2000

I was staying in a Travel Lodge with my parents, when I realised it was half term and I had loads of homework to do.

I was wandering around a refectory (which resembled Churchill College) when I met my friend Marion. We sat down next to each other, and Chris sat on my other side. "Tell me about your friends," he said.

"Friends? Moi? What friends?" I protested. Then I remembered Marion. "Oh yeah, this is Marion. I don't suppose you've met."

22 February 2000

My friend Katrina and I were in a school musical. Between the end of school and the performance, we went to the house of one of the girls in her school year, who she hated. She hid the girl's modem cable in the glove compartment (?) in another room and replaced it with a black wire. Then we borrowed this girl's clothes and dressed up like six year olds.

23 February 2000

I was doing a Geography project, where I had to ask people six questions about what they thought of Physics. I went to Jane's house (Jane being a girl I haven't seen since I was seven) and asked her. To the first two questions, her responses indicated that she hated Physics. I couldn't remember the other questions so I said, "I'll be exactly twelve minutes", ran home, spent ages trying to find the sheet of paper on my desk bearing the questions, and ran back.

In the meantime, my parents had appeared in her sitting room, and were arguing.

24 February 2000

My brother Noj and I were writing and playing very simple computer games. In one of them, the aim was to drown Bruce Dickinson, a member of Iron Maiden.

Members of Oasis were sorting out my collection of not-particularly-floppy discs.

25 February 2000

I was studying at the University of Kent. I really liked it, although the cost of living was high. In the town, I kept running into the singer Andreas Johnson.

I went to France with my parents, brother and grandparents. We travelled in two vehicles, our Landrover and a Peugeot 505, except everyone insisted it was a 515.

26 February 2000

I was watching a film about a fifteen year old girl who ate without using her hands - she could make food travel from the plate to her mouth using telekinetic powers. She befriended a thirteen year old boy, whose parents found it strange. The film ended with the father taking a photo of the girl in action, so he could show people. However, they came to an understanding.

It was my birthday and I had a party at my house. I invited a lot of girls from school, and we all acted like little kids.

There was a lego sculpture in Norway, a bit of which looked wrong. My friend Chris and I worked out what it was, so we went to there to fix it. After that, we visited Helen Wi, a girl in my school year, who told us that the hotel in which we were staying (yes, in separate rooms) - The Ysgol Gyfun (which, I believe, means "High School" in Welsh) in Dyfed (a county in Wales) - was really nice but insisted on you having breakfast at eight o'clock.

The next morning, I woke up at about 8.45, and thought, "Oh well." But I could hear a man who owned a lot of cats arguing with the proprietor over this practice.

27 February 2000

I was at work, only my parents ran the business. I was supposed to be typing letters to a new client, a group of refugees from Afghanistan who had set up camp in Cumbria, the county where we live, but I kept getting distracted and playing a computer game. My mother was annoyed and reminded me how much these people were suffering by telling me the temperature was currently negative five degrees in Cumbria and five thousand degrees in Afghanistan. So I finished composing the letters, but when I tried to print them out, the printer didn't work.

(So I never do any work, it's rather cold in Cumbria, and I have no joy with printers. Highly realistic, really.)

28 February 2000

I was lying on the floor of the living room of my friend Katrina's old house with Marion, Katie and Natalie, girls in my year at school. Marion was putting on lipstick and complaining about how no colours suited her.

I thought, "We all have REM CDs. We're such a cliché." (?)

On the road from Naworth Castle (where I used to live) to Brampton (where I now live), my former biology teacher / pseudo-godfather was telling me about his holiday in Crete. I found it hard to concentrate since two dogs were rubbing against my legs and causing immense pain.

Sneaky and Crafty (my fictional characters) went on a car-stealing spree.

Loads of people were living in my uncle's house, but a few were always disappearing or turning other people. One girl, a few years to my senior, told me she'd been abused and was moving into a house near my friend Smill's.

1 March 2000: The Night Before The Driving Test

I must have driven down every road I know.

I was supposed to have a driving lesson at eight fifteen, starting from outside work, but instead I entered the building and kept finding things to do. My subconscious skipped the test part of the day, clearly not wanting to give anything away, but in the afternoon, the office turned into my room at Churchill College and my online friend Helen and some of her friends visited. We went for a walk in a forest that was divided into squares by high barbed wire fences.

I walked to the end of the road where I work, in order to buy some fish food, only to realise I didn't have any money.

3 March 2000

My mother went psychotic with rage and went to Tesco to buy a load of stuff she knew the rest of the family wouldn't like. For me, she brought back two bottles of horrible orange squash and a computer with a disproportionately big monitor and an oddly shaped tower.

I was on holiday and typing a story really good story. Typically, I lost the plot as soon as I woke up (well, I lost the plot years ago), but it concerned a boy who played a lot of musical instruments.

8 March 2000

Alice's house was Liz's, and my brother Noj and I were invited to a party there. He chose to play football in the school gym instead, but I was desperate to go. Unfortunately, it cost £10.70 to get in. I asked my mother (who was divorced) for money, but she was too busy playing roulette and being chatted up by a man advising her where to play her chips to listen to me.

When I eventually arrived, everyone had gone to Laserquest. So I went to a shop in apocolypse!London and got very scared by bathroom suites.

12 March 2000

My friend Chris visited but my house was full of strange people (so that made another).

I went to see the school play. It was on at midday and I found it hard to follow.

Still at school, I started to watch a special episode of Grange Hill / Byker Grove with Sweet Valley High characters in it. I was Elizabeth Wakefield and I was standing in a lay by-not far from a roundabout. My mother, who was with me, lectured me about how to travel round them properly, so I tried to follow her instructions. However, the road was so snowy that I lost it and ended up on the grass verge beside it. For some reason, I couldn't escape from it. I was with about four other people, but they were all struggling.

However, we managed it, and the next day when we were at school, five teachers summoned us to the library in order to get a report of our adventure. We were unwilling to say anything, so they made things up. One teacher removed some bricks from a wall and started rooting about in a secret chimney. One of the boys tapped him on the back, and he leapt away.

Then another teacher stood up and started shooting at people. I squeezed myself into a corner, and heard a voiceover. "He shot everyone in the room including himself." At this point, a bullet struck me in the chest, but my first thought was, "How can the series continue if so many major characters are dead?" But the program skipped to fifteen years later then came to an end.

Together with a lot of classmates, I went to audition for the next school production. Everyone else was really enthusiastic but I didn't think I'd be good enough to have a part.

I got in a car taking me back home, with some other people. Gemma, who I knew at primary school, started complaining about the times she'd slept with certain females she now despised. "Remember that time we went camping?" I said, referring to an occasion when we'd set up a tent in the field behind what was our friend Yolande's house. "Yeah," she said, and we agreed that it had been a thoroughly pointless exercise.

At home, Dad kept telling me that we were going to London the following day.

When I woke up, and he asked what my plans were, I said, "Aren't we going to London?"

13 March 2000

Chris and I were trapped in a Rubix Cube made of Lego.

I went for a walk in a forest with two girls, one of whom was accompanied by a sheep. This involved climbing up a really long staircase in a tower.

After the walk, we entered a changing room to change our clothes, but it was occupied by three boys. After a bit of confusion over whose clothes were whose, sheepless girl went to do the washing up in the local pub.

(Aw, woog, I'm dreaming about Lego! Because, really, there must have been a heck of a lot of lego involved, if the Lego structure could fit two people inside. However, the presence of a sheep in an emotionally satisfying dream is quite worrying. As is the cross-dressing.)

16 March 2000

I was male and playing Monopoly with my family. I got a "Chance" telling me I had inherited a million pounds in the shape of my father's estate, which looked remarkably like my Lego pirate ship.

(Interpretation: the greatest fortune I'll ever run into is the plastic gold pieces that game with my Lego kits? Still, Lego is worth its weight in gold anyway.)

20 March 2000

I was doing this course which involved an element of creative writing on Monday mornings. It took place in a church in a forest, and I was taken there and back by people at work. But it was the third week, and we'd done no writing, only treasure hunts and drama.

There was an religious opera type thing on (similar to "Peter Grimes") and Katie and Natalie (girls in my school year) and myself were taking it in turn to narrate scenes. The first scene I could hardly get my words out, and by scene eight, I'd lost track of whose turn it was.

My class at school were having an orgy in Alice's room (!) This bloke called Steve (who bore no resemblance AevilSteve, I'll have you know) wanted to shag Natalie while lying upsidedown on a flight of stairs, but she asked me to do it instead. But after a couple of seconds of foreplay, we all realised the weirdness of the situation, and I backed out.

Everyone else was otherwise involved, but I spotted one of my teddy bears across the room. So, accidentally standing on Alice ("Ow!" she yelled), I retrieved it and tried to get to sleep. Later on, however, I found myself making out with two blokes (not at the same time though).

At 8.15am, Bloke #2 and myself went down to the kitchen to do a jigsaw. I was dead impressed by his jigsaw-doing skills. It was quite easy, and I'd done it before, but it was like a computer game: if you made a certain number of wrong moves, you lost a life. We both ran out of lives and had to start again.

I was sitting in a café with some girls from my year, when my parents game in to pick me up, two hours earlier than I'd hoped. They didn't look very happy and I didn't want to leave.

(Meaning: I was right not to apply for a creative writing course at university. Getting involved with anyone called Steve is a seriously bad idea. I don't mind not getting laid as long as I have a teddy bear, and I'd rather do jigsaws than have sex, anyway.)

23 March 2000

I was putting on some sort of show in a big restaurant in front of a lot of people. A boy of about twelve read out a really long religious poem, to critical exclaim (as opposed to acclaim).

24 March 2000

I spent a few days living in fields and really liked it.

There was a power cut in central Cumbria, affecting my friend Smill and online friend Tim who lived in the nearby town of Wigton.

I was walking / running along the A66 (a road), trying to get to Smill's house and wondering how I had got this far, as I seemed to be without vehicle. I went into a building, which was a mixed up Carlisle Music Centre, where Carlisle Youth Concert Band were playing. When I walked past them the first time, they laughed at me. The second time, the conductor told me to join in, but I explained my plight.

I couldn't get out of the building, but eventually a man pointed to the door, which was well hidden. Eventually, I found my mother and waited with her in a field, although I didn't know what for. I told her that my online friend Krysten had married a bloke called Thomas.

27 March 2000

My brother Noj had a hamster which had loads of babies.

My online friend Laurie wrote a really long journal entry, causing the scroll bar to be in its most shrunken state.

The girls from my year at school were in Alice's room watching videos. I spent most of the time writing gossip-filled notes to the others.

(Interpretation: Solitaire-addicted Noj needs a new hobby. It had been seventy hours since my Internet fix, so I was hallucinating about updations. And Alice's room demanded to be used for a less dodgy purpose after what we did to it on 20th March.)

28 March 2000

I was in Virgin in Carlisle and died twice, the first time through second hand smoke, the second time through suicide. "Is this what that film 'The Virgin Suicides' is about?" I wondered.

The girls in my year at school went to a restaurant in Kent, where all of them apart from Smill and myself had been before, to celebrate Katie's eighteenth birthday nine months before it took place.

29 March 2000

I was travelling to Kent University with my parents in our car, but on the way there, I went into a supermarket in Cambridge. I had an unwanted possession of some description residing there, which I had told my readers they could have if they wanted, but Andy told me he couldn't find it and Julian had downloaded it but couldn't unzip it.

I bought two loaves of bread, asking the guy at the cash desk if there were ten slices in each, but he insisted on cutting each existing slice into ten pieces. I was on my mobile phone to my friend Chris, but I wasn't able to talk, so he drew pictures on the supermarket walls down the phone instead.

Back in the car, I tried to call him, but I couldn't get the phone to work [no surprise there]. We arrived at Kent and went to my room. It was fairly big, but only contained a bed, a chair and a large window-sill. I explored the corridor bathroom, finding a bath, a bed and blue fluffy carpet.

30 March 2000

My ex stepbrother (from Churchill College) was working in the technical department at work.

I had lunch in a canteen with the second clarinets from Carlisle Youth Concert Band.

Chris and myself were in a text adventure where you had to collect armour and make buildings.

I was involved in / producing a show. A complex dance sequence was involved and when I realised I'd have to perform it, I panicked. People kept dropping out too.

(My constant involvement with performances could indicate that I'm putting on a show and I'm worried about being found out. However, a more likely explanation would be that my subconscious is insane.)