It's almost four o'clock. My nights are getting later and later. I just minced over to the bathroom and i look like a panda. A panda with fluffy hair and blonde highlights, but a panda nonetheless. I don't mind too much though. At four o'clock in the morning my eyesight is blurry enough that even pandas are attractive. But it just gets easier and easier to stay up this late. Especially when kept company by the wonderful sexblogs (I believe that is the general term.) Pussy Ranch and Belle de Jour, a good friend (The recently introduced C) and the music of Ojos de Brujos (Wizard's Eyes, i believe, though the word 'wizard' can be replaced with any other male practioner of magic of your choice, as alternative translations have had it as 'sorceror' and 'magician'.), which i have only recently discovered. I was enamoured after seeing them perform only one song on Glastonbury's Jazz World Stage. I immediately went into a downloading frenzy and spent most of the first half of today listening to the magnificent "Rumba dub style" over and over again.

There seems little point now in going to bed, as i would have to get up only three hours later to go into school and hand in all the books i've accumulated (For 'accumulated' read 'had thrust at me by over-enthusiastic French and English teachers.) over the last two years. I decided, for the protection of my spine, that book-collection day refers to books and nothing else, especially not the mountain of French magazines and newspapers currently contributing to the mass of paper which, judging by the immense cracks in my wall, may actually be holding up the ceiling.

In fact, this overstuffing of my room with books is the strongest argument i have actually considered for going to university. I will be granted a whole new room to fill with books. Naturally some of my old friends will be accompanying me from my current abode, along with the pile of books i have bought but not yet read. I do, i think buy too many books, and perhaps not always for quite the right reasons. But i still hold that the old "Don't judge a book by it's cover" idiom is nonsense, and often buy books almost solely based on the fact that they are pretty. It's a method that has served me well, i think. 'Cloud Atlas', for example, my most recent choice for forcing on every reader i know, was bought at least partially because of its cover, particularly the pale green (I may not follow fashion quite as ably as your stereotypical homosexual, but the fifties revival has not passed me by.) typography and scrolly clouds and the wonderfully art nouveau-esque trees which adorn it. And now i love it.

This doesn't always hold true, of course. Jon McGregor's 'If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things' had a brilliant name, quite a good cover, but turned out to actually be quite dull. I suppose that may be deliberate; if you choose the quotidian as your subject mundanity of language may help to convey this. But i'd have thought that if you were trying to accentuate their remarkable aspects you might not draw all your characters in a bleary charcoal.

I feel like my blog recently has taken on something of McGregor's style. It is, or the last couple of entries have been, rather dull. Perhaps due to the fact that I am writing them so late at night that blogger counts them as the next day. I would normally criticise this, but this entry is being written so far into the next day that through the window,in the crevice between two houses, the sky is discernibly pink. It is, without doubt, the next day. I suppose that's proved what a slow writer i am. This thing will probably claim to have been posted at three o'clock when it is now ten to five. Time to find out, i suppose. I wonder what they'll make of my panda look in school.