Couldn’t wait any longer for Random House to hire me and offer me the keys to their corporate sports centre, so I signed up today, finally, not at the big gay gym down the street where the guy giving the tour said, when he showed me the women’s change rooms and I, noting only manly men as far as the eye could see, asked if there were many women at all: “A handful...which means the change rooms will always be clean and free for you!”—

I signed up not at that gym but at the gym round the corner with the pool and all. The pool is small—twenty-one metres—and has just one slow lane and one fast lane, but the fact is, people, it is a POOL.

The first workout in six? seven? eight? months seemed to go okay; I can still touch my forehead to my knee, I can still run, the sit-ups still suck. Tomorrow everything will probably hurt to high heaven, but oh it will be a good hurt.

So, but, I was talking to my mum on the phone this afternoon, and I said, “I joined a gym. Fifty-one pounds a month,” and she said, “That is money well spent. And if you just go without a haircut, I’m sure that will take care of it.” “Hey!” I said. “I need my haircuts!” “Aiyah,” she said, and let’s just keep in mind that this is the woman who, every time I used to go home after a Fancy New York Fashion Cut from Norman, would say, “Your fringe is very long, do you want me to trim it?”—

“Aiyah,” she said, this afternoon, “your kind of hairstyle, you can just grab chunks of it and take the scissors and—” and here you could hear the gleam of the cut in her voice—“chiak!”