Most of my days have soundtracks. We put on Abraxas this morning to eat muffins. That’s a throwback to our Hattiesburg days listening to a CD of a string quartet we found playing in Covent Garden and had as a voice-level background at breakfast most mornings. Abraxas makes me think of the linoleum beneath my feet, the click-whirr of the air conditioner, the voice of the intercom at the drive-thru bank outside the kitchen window, the sound of lilting voices outside, and the smell of pine and heat.

Then I nipped out to buy a paper (The Calling in the car) and shuffled the iPod a little while reading The Times. My iPod has moods. Today it decided there was a surprising amount of Anna Nalick, Sarah McLachlan, and French café music on my music list, which is quite odd. I sometimes wonder why I started by putting every song I own on that little machine (it must have been Christmas novelty), and slowly I have erased them. There are still a few that made it through the cracks though. Case in point, the sideways glance Lori and I gave each other at a wayward Bee Gees song that started playing about 11:30.

I caught up on a few pages of world events before skipping to the Books section, browsed online for a while and sang aloud to a few favourites that started to play: 3 Doors Down’s Landing in London and Here By Me. Café Nero opens in Exeter tomorrow, incidentally. That’s one of the things I found out online this morning.

The music last night was Cuban, because apparently Louise is obsessed with a recent trip to Brazil (which also explains the Brazilian flag that spans the entire hallway wall). It was rather surreal being inside our apartment in reverse with completely different décor. They still have the same bay window in the lounge, and the room is a similar size, but they have so much more stuff in there. The only features of our living room are a small round table in the window, two rather large bookcases against the wall, a small couch, Ikea’s cheapest coffee table and the TV cabinet. Rob and Louise have a (wonderfully comfortable) wraparound couch that takes up half the room and a home entertainment centre that explains their house security system. The flat was cosy but I realise I need my space. I don’t do ornaments: a few plants and candles for ambience does it for me. I liked their pictures. I realise anyone walking into our apartment would think I was rather egotistical in my art choices, since all but one frame contains my own photos. This was partly inspiration from our travels, partly cost-effectiveness.

There are only three flats out of six in the block occupied at the moment. Rob and Louise live across the hall – she is a postgraduate law student and he does project work in Bristol. They have been together for a couple of years and decided to buy a place together to make a commitment this year. Upstairs are Bev and Cat, radiologists at Devon County Hospital, who share an upstairs flat with their two goldfish and a med student who pops in and out whenever he gets time off. He doesn’t actually live there, but I think he might be with Cat (that would explain the way she propped herself on his knee and became more friendly with each sip of rosé). We discussed the idiosyncrasies of our flats (the leaking baths, lack of storage space, lack of light outside the front door to find the keyhole) and Bev told an amusing tale about a dehumidifier and hasty refilling of an almost empty goldfish tank. All the while I made mental notes: they don’t have a glass door leading to the kitchen but their kitchen is bigger; I’m glad we have carpet in our living room; I’m glad I’m doing an MA and not working in a hospital; I’m glad we’re renting and didn’t buy. The soundtrack changed to Bob Marley and we didn’t leave until late.

Back to today: we kept the music on at lunch and ate a baguette with brie (Lori had goat's cheese, but it reminds me too much of the goat farm in Pontlevoy and I can’t dissociate the smell of the cheese from the smell of goat), tomato basil salad (tiny pomodoro tomatoes cut in half with a pinch of chopped basil, basil olive oil and a drop of balsamic vinegar) and German pepper salami. The soundtrack to Something’s Gotta Give played in the background and made me want to collect pebbles from a beach and live the life of a famous writer in the Hamptons. We drove to Dart’s Farm instead.

When I have my house in the Hamptons, incidentally, I will have to furnish it from Dart’s Farm. I want a cream coloured Aga with the kitchen island they have on show, Nigella Lawson kitchen ware with a huge KitchenAid mixer in baby blue or pink (the ones that donate to breast cancer) and lots of recipe books. We browsed for a while and bought some fruit, shallots for dinner, balsamic vinegar because we’d used the last for lunch, and we indulged on some Lime Daiquiri sorbet, which is heavenly. I wish we’d forked out for the Strawberry Daiquiri too, because the two would make a wonderful combination. That reminds me of “limone e fragola” in Venice.

One of my favourite possessions is a little cream teapot with red writing across the belly: i’m a little teapot. I’m reminded of this because Dart’s Farm sells them (for twice the price I paid, and even then I thought it was expensive. Tell me who would pay £30 for a teapot!? I love the thing, but that’s just too much). Anyway, back to the subject. My little teapot is part of a range of creamware with cute writing, for example a butter dish that says ‘butterfingers’ and a milk jug that says ‘no use crying over spilt milk’. Well, one milk jug proudly stated: ‘the cats got the cream’. No apostrophe. I’m turning into Lynne Truss.

So there is a newspaper article today related to my milk jug story. Apparently there is going to be a move towards preventing children getting above a C at GCSE if they can’t punctuate. This has caused an outcry from some teachers who say that’s not fair on bright pupils who just don’t know how to punctuate (studies show some A-grade pupils get punctuation wrong over 50% of the time). Employers, on the other hand, are saying they’d like it very much, please, if people who made it through an education knew how to spell and punctuate. I think I have to agree with the employers here. How can you give someone an A-grade if they can’t use an apostrophe at least most of the time? I’m not saying everything has to be perfect… I mean, I know I’m no punctuation angel. But… ‘the cats got the cream’??!

Incidentally, I notice I keep switching back and forth between American and British punctuation, which can’t be good. The Internet seems to be a no man’s land (there’s a feminist deep inside me who wants to correct that to ‘no woman’s land’, but that would be pedantic, so I won’t), somewhere between America and England, so I never can decide which to use.

Back to today, and I’m in the car on the way back home from Dart’s Farm, debating with Lori over whether to head to town to browse Waterstone’s or to go back home. We decide home because of the sorbet.

The soundtrack in the car was some shuffled songs, The Calling, a couple from the Garden State soundtrack, and, for a completely different sound, “Because of You”, which is surprisingly honest:

Because of you I never stray too far from the sidewalk
Because of you I learned to play on the safe side so I won’t get hurt

Back home for a cup of tea and to find that ScreenSelect had sent a terrible movie, which confused me because I can’t figure out how it made its way onto our list. Probably something to do with Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. Ladies in Lavender. It was very strange, but I liked the music. That’s about all I’ll say about that. At least we had West Wing to watch during dinner, which was balsamic (today’s theme?) pork with red wine, shallots, and a baked potato (scrolling back to see the last time we had that, which was probably less than a week ago – it’s so good. I think I might have even written a paragraph about it last week…!)

Tony Blair on Parkinson tonight. I was rather surprised at how human he appeared. Kevin Spacey sat beside him, which in itself must have been an interesting chemistry (not quite as interesting as Andrea Botticelli singing with Christina Aguilera!). When conversation turned to Bush, Spacey moved his chair across the stage. So I learned a couple of things, including the fact that Blair told the French prime minister that he desired him in a number of positions. A good reminder not to run before you can walk in a language.

The news came on afterwards and made a terrible spectacle over a broken marriage which it in a roundabout way claimed to have caused. “Poor things, they split up because that blasted media has been getting to them. Let’s show images of said media peering through the letter box [cut to family home] and get a couple of people to say how terrible the media have been to these poor people. Tessa just couldn’t cope with the media”. ITV, of course, denying its position in the food chain.

And then I heard that Salman Rushdie is calling for the abolition of religion in favour of everyone turning to “secular values”, which has such a lovely ring to it, don’t you think? Speaking of which, the advert that keeps playing for a new series of Dispatches is going to make me crazy. So, [cue sinister music], there’s this new breed of people called [sinister drums] evangelical Christians who are terrorizing our schools [show picture of school desks piled up like bonfire]. They’re teaching us all that homosexuality is evil, everyone is going to hell, the world was made by God, and, yes, we’re all going to hell. [Show apple sitting on top of Bible, a wonderful visual aid for the confused audience, in case they miss the zoom-out at the end where we see the desks actually form the most sinister shape of all: the cross]. What is the world going to come to with all these evil evangelical Christians about? I felt like throwing something at the television. Make a commercial about how Muslims are leading the world into evil (which, by the way, is certainly not my opinion) and you’d have an uproar. But say evangelical Christians are terrorizing our children, and, well, no problems. This idea of a bunch of homophobic, anti-science ignoramuses seems to be ever more popular. I try to understand the impetus behind all this, but it just gets frustrating. I have some extremely close gay friends, I don’t go around condemning people to hell, and I most certainly do not oppose science. Since when did belief in God become equated with the spreading of hate? So there’s my soapbox for the evening.

Oh, I lied earlier. I did open a book today… a couple actually. I still haven’t read half of Rereadings, Anne Fadiman’s new book. She edited rather than wrote this one, which means it no where near equals Ex Libris (one of those books that I would save first from a fire), but it reminds me how reading can change lives. She picked a collection of authors to write essays on re-reading their favourite books from childhood or early adulthood, giving their perspectives now as opposed to back then. Some of the books are quite obscure, although there are the obvious ones slipped in there (Pride and Prejudice, for example). One is a nature book identifying various flower species, and the author writes about her obsession with identifying nature. I love the image she creates of this well thumbed, referenced, post-it noted book with a broken spine and a continent full of pressed flowers between its pages. That’s when book turns to scrapbook. My favourite books are the ones where you have your own input as you read; the ones with mementoes of reading shoved in random pages or marking favourite spots. In Ex Libris, Fadiman writes of her love for books being quite the opposite to courtly love (the kind resulting in rapped knuckles for laying down a book open, pages down, spine to ceiling). She writes in the margins, dog ears, spills, and bends. I share with her a love of cookbooks splattered with first attempts and novels punctuated with those first reactions (often wonderfully eloquent: ‘Yeah!’ or ‘Grrr’ or ‘What?!’ More often with me it is smiley faces or frowns, but occasionally I fill up margins with miniature essays. The other day I picked up a theory book on Kristeva for my Narrative and Subjectivity essay. We bought the book for our Literary Theory course at USM, back when the name Kristeva meant nothing and Lacan’s mirrors would have sounded like an obscure store name. In the margin next to a paragraph about the chora and pre-linguistic communication I had written a very loud ‘What?!’, echoed at the top of the page with ‘No Sense!!’ The two exclamation marks had heavy anchors. Now I read it with ease, and part of me wants to erase my annotations in embarrassment at my ignorance, but I realize I can’t honestly do that. It would be erasing a process, a record of my learning.

Now the soundtrack is Je t’aime encore and I’m singing about girolles. Mushrooms. Absurd.

It’s late and I was planning to take a bath.