oneword.: union: "My first pair of jeans were 'Blues Union' brand. Actually they weren't the first pair I had ever owned, just the first that I ever bought new. Mrs Allen in the habedashery in town sold them to me. I tried them on behind the curtain in the little change room and she looked in while I was getting undressed. "

oneword.: reaching: "Sometimes it feels as if i reach out any more my arms will hurt. I cannot reach it, whatever it is, there is nothing there, just a giant empty space filled with loneliness and loss and I am just reaching for the door out but maybe there isn't one? "

oneword.: vacant: "It's vacant now. We have packed and moved and shuffled ourselves out of that space, in a few minutes he will arrive with all his gear and our flat will be full, overflowing with another human being. We are in dissaray up here, trying to fit 11 rooms into 8. "

oneword.: assign: "I kept them home from school today because the teachers requested no kids if the temperature rose beyond 35°C. Instead of school I assigned them tasks and we melted through our hot friday. It was probably hotter here working for me than it would have been at school. "

oneword.: north: "I want to go north, not north in this country where it is so hot that your skin almost melts away, not north further where the malaria might get you in the hot dark afternoon. No, further than that, I want to go north until it gets cold, until the air bites my face. "

oneword.: mislead: "Lie your heart out, go on! In the end it will be only you who will really suffer, in the end, you just mislead yourself. "

oneword.: switch: "I am thinking about switching my blog to upsaid. I like the style of their sites. The clean feel of european design. Though if I do it I will probably pay and design my own anyway. In school they said I was too much of an individualist. How can anyone be too individual? Perhaps that was why I switched schools? "

oneword.: cracked: "So there you have it. I finally cracked, though it didn't take much did it? I was just waiting for a second of weakness where I could let the truth flow out in a torrent of words without meaning and screams of discontented wailing until the harshness of it all forced you to close your ears and walk away. "

oneword.: candy: "I wanted to learn to cook it, the way it said in my children's encyclopedia. It looked so complicated so I never achieved that. Instead we made perfect chocolate fudge on the slow heat of the woodstove in the kitchen. Country kids candy. "

oneword.: late: "He is always late. I like the relaxed way he lives but as we get older I think my time becomes more important to me and I really hate wasting it, unless I am wasting it doing something I enjoy and then of course it is perfectly alright to be late. "

oneword.: bike: "My brother was given an old bike when he was about 12, it was blue and had silver handlebars. When I was about 9 and my brother was away at boarding school, he passed it on to me. It was the greatest gift I was ever given, I cannot even begin to describe how much I loved that bike. I used to ride it over the cattle grids and up the hill and away on the quiet dirt roads, there was no-one there but me and my imagination. Sometimes I want to go back there so much it almost hurts. "

oneword.: anniversary: "We missed the surprise party. They were celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary, we were away at a 40th birthday so all this is making me feel so old that it is almost funny. For christsakes, I remember my parents 20th wedding anniversary, that wasn't that long ago, was it? "

oneword.: channel: "There was only one channel that came through clear, the other would come and go with the weather or the wind. So we sat there and watched a steady stream of Dr Who and the ABC news and british comedy like 'On the buses', and it wasn't until I grew up and saw all the other utter tripe on TV that I realised that we had the best of it, after all. "

oneword.: formal: "Dress will be casual this weekend, though in a way I wish we were getting to dress up. I love nice clothes and crisp white tablecoloths and crystal and silver. This weekend by the beach the party will be food and alcohol and sand and laughter, and thats okay too. Not too formal at all. "

oneword.: launch: "We should launch this new site tomorrow, after weeks of changes and indecision. Sometimes I get so frustrated with my job, why can't everyone just go with the first option the first time, we always seem to come back to it in the end anyway. "

oneword.: eject: "I got my first cassette player the christmas after I turned thirteen, my brother gave me a Simon and Garfunkle cassette to go with it and even after all the times I have hit that eject button, I still love them. "

oneword.: escape: "I used to think about it sometimes, about a suitcase and a ticket. I have a passport, I think about it. I love travel, but lonely travel was never for me, any escape like that would be an escape I would want to escape from. "