We had our future summer party on Friday (and it bled into satruday) and,it being Future’s twentieth anniversary of ‘not going bankrupt yet’ we were all subsumed in the querulous delights of a mini-Glastonbury festival all to ourselves, complete with camping, bands, vaudeville (a fantastic old-fashioned act where a woman hammers a nail into her own head, has an audience member pull it out, then breathes fire, eats fire, and generally depilates her entire body with fire. She was *hot*.)

I spent a large part of the party (or so it seemed) commiserating with a friend who was in love, and unloved. ‘Unrequited’ is such a technical, refined term for this thing that reduced a friend to silent horror for hours on end; there was an unreasoning, lost distraught look that squatted immovable on her face; she’d turn this look to you when you tried talking, and just blast you with it emptily, and then turn back to looking nowhere. I cajoled, I threatened, I pleaded, I reasoned, but nothing would provoke a reaction from, not a word for hours and hours. If you left her alone for five minutes, she would wander off and look for this supposed belov’d, who was (simply put) sick of the attention and trying to hide. Bloody awful situation.