Kick boxing with the nifty fifties today. My mum and aunts are leading the family in their exercise drive - jogging, yoga, long walks, kickboxing, trampolining, you name it, they do it all, thus becoming the 'the nifty fifties'. This was exercise retro style. No air-conditioned mirrored gym and logoed towels, just an old school hall, a few mats and some sweaty gloves and pads. We weren't here to pose and look good, no pilates style seductive stretches, instead, jogging, dropping to the floor for push ups and burpees, squats and tension relieving pummeling of the pads. Although perhaps I need more rage. I want to write 'Bang! This is is for...' and 'Bang! For...' But I can't think of anything to fill the dots with. Revision? Well Cyprus kind of washed that away. My room and three days of tidying? That sounds incredibly pathetic (even if by yesterday I was royally fed up with it, at least now I have fully alphabetisised shelves). Maybe this is why my punches weren't always that hard, although at the time I blamed low blood sugar and barely having eaten all day.

Tomorrow I head to a supposedly v trendy and celebrity filled club (yes, I am such a peasant that I google London clubs to see if they are hot or not). Apparently it is a 'svelte combination of mirrored glass & black snakeskin furnishings' and 'London's no 1 Friday night party – and most exclusive weekly party with strong celebrity presence'. Is anything but glass mirrored? I'm not a big fan of posey clubs, velvet ropes and jumped up bouncers. But you never know, maybe it will be fun. I gotta get down with this city girl lifestyle thing - its meant to be all about being one of those beautiful people hopping from party to party. If I could choose I think I would go for the media scene with book launches and film premieres and poetry slams rather than the straight up clubbing with the latest B list celebrity (who would be hidden away somewhere behind that velvet rope anyway)... Aah, the dreams of a wannabe socialite.

Pancakes a la Herman - a how to guide

1) Be prompted by your houseguest to prepare 'your speciality' for breakfast. NB houseguest must be unimpressed by the offer of bacon, sausage and eggs and must instead point you in the direction of pancakes.

2) Fish out a Naked Chef cookbook and find a recipe for 'Pancakes American Stylie' - Pukkah!

3) Assemble required ingredients on patio table.

4) Look quizzically at recipe. 'Whisk the what into the huh? Firm peaks a who? Where??'

5) Enlist helpful parent to the cause by asking a seemingly innocent question cunningly designed to suck them into a web of beating, batter and blueberries.

6) Stand centrally, spoon in hand, 'directing' proceedings as minions seperate and whisk eggs.

7) Entirely misinterpret the instruction to fold in egg whites and instead attempt some kind of mashing action.

8) Wait for whoops of disapproval from aforementioned parent and smile seraphically as parent removes bowl and proceeds to demonstrate by doing.

9) Watch as parent continues to demonstrate by doing until pancake batter and first few pancakes are entirely done.

10) Crack open the jam and syrup and tuck into the pancakes you have so skillfully and lovingly made.

North

Home again. Settling comfortably into this post-finals post-university limbo like existence of hard-core chilling and not much to do. Since getting home from Cyprus I've managed to go to a Big Brother themed barbeque complete with tasks, play some tennis, have a massage, get locked out of the house in my skanky jogging clothes and bed hair (when I jog I imagine that I move so fast that I become a blur '*whoosh* nobody sees me!' my head says - my legs of course say otherwise), and go to liverpool.

I enjoyed Liverpool. Reading 'The Old Patagonian Express' has encouraged me to relish the journey as well as the arrival. The three hours spent travelling north thus became interesting. I never go north. It's always south, to Oxford, or London or possibly Cambridge or wherever else, but never north. I like the English countryside, the rich greens, patchwork fields and wooded hills. I much prefer it to the dun browns and yellows of hotter places like California, or Cyprus - wouldn't it be great to have both, hot sunny rainless days and jeweled green fields rather than an either/or. Riding through Manchester I could see the signs of regeneration, penthouse luxury apartments springing up by the tracks. Through urban areas, comparing the ugly modern houses with their mean boxy shapes to the older, but in my eyes, far more pleasing Victorian terraces with their eaves and higher ceilings.

On the way to Saul's house we drove through Toxteth, one of the most attractive slums I have ever seen - beautiful old redbrick townhouses with huge windows, victims of the riots of the 1980s. The architecture in Liverpool is lovely. Grand old Victorian and Georgian buildings, beautiful old churches (do cities built with blood money attempt to assuage their guilt with the copious construction of churches?) and wide leafy roads. Eating dinner we were wowed twice by sunsets over the Mersey. The Albert Docks are populated with museums and trendy shops whilst the city center is a hive of building activity as the city prepares to be European Capital of Culture in 2008, and to further enforce Saul's well-founded sense of civic pride.



Tate Liverpool has a Summer of Love exhibition on. Rooms of pshchedelic album art and concert posters, light shows and concert footage and video installations. The 60s really were a different time. They paved the way for us, allowed the birth of the teenager and of rebellion, but everything we do now seems to be only a poor copy of then. We hark back, wish to revisit, but have lost much of the magic. In the 60s there was still a sense of innocence and hope. Mind expanding drugs (before the bad trips, addiction and overdoses), sexual experimentation (before the scourge of AIDS), protests and marches (they still thought they could change the world back then). But then it all collapsed, the drugs fucked you up, the wars continued, capitalism took over, the mystical eastern religions were found to be as vicious as the rest and the hope was lost. The baby boomers now wonder why the youth of today is so apathetic. 'Well, you tried, and you failed, we just live with the aftermath. If the 60s and the summer of love came to nought, what hope do we have of making change?'

What's love but a second-rate emotion?

Met up with some of my old school friends today and was struck by how much people are growing up. It's a recurring theme for me isn't it, this transition phase. Catching up on all the gossip - one of the girls in my year became Miss Hooters Nottingham of the year - what a claim to fame huh. Another, one of the really bitchy rich girls is still working in a bar (supposedly deputy manager, but yeah whatever). My friend Kathryn has just moved in with her boyfriend, another school person got married recently, Susanna has four weddings to go to this summer, and everyone else seemed to be in fairly serious long term relationships. Suddenly I'm like 'Woah! Is everyone getting coupled up??' And then there's me. Total commitment-phobe, scared of being tied down, but also who really likes falling asleep next to someone else, wandering around holding hands and the feeling of being loved and in love. Little bundle of conradictions huh. Maybe I'll figure it all out when I meet the right one. Let's hope so. And not just that I'm letting all the potentially right one's pass me by as I try so fervently to hold on to my independence.