I blame the job. It was a boring job with long hours and little mental stimulation. I have to blame something. Otherwise how do I excuse my raging crush on a man who looked like a badger and wasn't particularly nice to me? It wasn't love at first sight. It wasn't love at all. A crush isn't love-it doesn't have anything to do with love. It wasn't a bolt out of the blue, it was a mounting fixation fuelled by boredom and romantic novels. The interminable number-checking . . .

It can be a daunting prospect, getting to know someone. Cousins and birthmarks and old relationships and the songs they like and the movies they hate and the places they like to go to think. It's exhausting. Then all of a sudden the relationship ends and it's like you've learnt a language to a country you're never going to visit again. What use do I have from knowing that one person's favourite colour, or what their childhood fears were, or how they like their tea? All . . .

At school I fancied the head boy. Harbouring a crush on him was a team sport: half my class shared the infatuation. "I really fancy you," I told him one day after lunch, all heart in mouth, hair in a ponytail and skin decorated not with make-up but with acne. "That's so nice of you," he said, and then after a pause added, "We don't even know each other." Despite his polite put-down, it felt good to be a spokesman for my heart. At university there were library crushes. . . .

His name was Rory. He was the second thing I saw when I walked into the office, after the water cooler. I'll swear he clocked me. Clocking him. "Yes, I'd really like the job," I said. Is it wrong to choose a job because you fancy the bloke sitting on the left hand side as you're facing the watercooler? I'd come from an office of women and gay men-great for clothing tips but nobody worth putting your make up on for. And my boyfriend had just dumped me. I needed a change . . .

Salma eats fish for breakfast, Denny drinks whisky and Lorna sits in prayer. I eat cereal, and cake on Mondays. We all like biscuits.
They say C2s buy bourbons and live in flats, and C1s earn £30,000+ and eat out twice a week. Averages frustrate me; we're all exceptions. People have always intrigued me. I wanted to know everyone at school, out of school, the exchange students, anyone that entered my world. I once had ten pen friends. It started with books, . . .

Professor Apocalypse is going to die soon. I give him a year at most. I fear that one day I will come home to find him lying motionless in his cage, sprawled across a pile of cotton wool with his tiny hand clutching at his chest. Maybe his heart will give out. Maybe he'll choke on a particularly large monkey nut. I still haven't ruled out the possibility of cancer, having discovered a couple of scaly brown moles on his furry hindquarters. Or maybe it will simply be old . . .

A few weeks ago, I quit my Saturday job in a bakery. I'd had it for two years after leaving university. I miss it there, but every Saturday morning I am still relieved that I don't have to get up. My alarm would go at 4 am, and I'd leave the house by 4:30. I would walk through empty streets, meeting a few tipsy clubbers and very early joggers. I would pass the newspaper stand man setting up his stall, and the sickly smell of our rival cooking its inferior pastries. I . . .

You don't expect to see a biscuit on display in a museum, among the sculptures and paintings. But at Reading Museum, I find myself staring at just that. It is large, round and a hundred years old. Impressed into the dusty topside of this centenarian cookie is the name "Huntley & Palmers." They once made biscuits for the royal family, for soldiers going to war and for people at home in the kitchen. Fifty-two digestives are eaten a second in Britain. Yet, day in and . . .