White-out

I finally painted my bedroom at the weekend. It took three days of shoving a double-dunked paintbrush down the back of the pipes, but I eventually got rid of all the horrendous terracotta. Actually, there's still loads of it behind the massive wardrobe, but until three well-built young men wander into my room offering to move my furniture around, it's going to have to stay like that.

The fucking awful faux-glass and wrought iron lamp-thing full of dust and dead moths has also been ripped down and thrown out. You would have thought that changing a lampshade would be easy. It wasn't. We had to go at it with a hacksaw blade then take off the ceiling rose whatsit and rewire the entire thing. I say we, what I mean is, my flatmate Caroline did it and I helped by standing on a chair saying "ooh, that looks complicated". It was all terribly empowering and just goes to show that you don't need men as long as you live with a girl who has two tool kits and drives a van. I'm the one who isn't scared of spiders though.

I now have a rather minimal look in the newly-white bedroom after having a bit of a moment with the curtains and the curtain rail and throwing them down the stairs. Which would be fine - they're uneven, grubby, the crap plastic runner was dangling off the wall and I couldn't be arsed to wash them. But now I don't have any curtains or any means of hanging any up. I'm not being woken up by the sunlight though, the paint fumes are pretty soporific.

The whole process was made considerably more pleasant by - and I can't believe I'm admitting this - an almost compulsive looping of Girl's Aloud's greatest hits album. Seriously. It's brilliant. I would have Something Kinda Ooooh played at my funeral. I had to play it again and again as it's quite short when you skip though all the slow ones (ballads - eurghhhhh). And I should point out that their version of I Think We're Alone now is the biggest pile of skull-splitting drivel I've ever heard. The only place I can imagine it being played is at the S.L.A.G.S / Chill-Out on a Sunday afternoon at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, where the music of a seven-year-old girl's birthday party combines with 400 sweaty, bald, shirtless, sleep-deprived, bopping, spangled gay men feeling each other up and piling into the grotty toilets for more ketamine.

But apart from that, it is what I believe the lazier music reviewer would describe as a "cracking slice of pop music". I have listened to it so many times I'm almost word perfect. I'm about 700 trips to the gym, a stylist, an bout of body dismorphia, a Fantasy Tan, an assault charge and a go on Calum Best away from being the sixth member of the band.