I had plans to walk up to Hampstead Heath today, and go and visit the Rembrandt at Kenwood, but it's filthy out, and I am poring instead over a chapter that appears to be getting to an unmanageable length and yet not be quite finished. Trying to ward off mid-afternoon sleepiness with tea and Radio 3, but the fact remains that I came home late last night from a second visit to the NT's Much Ado About Nothing, knackered after a second, rather enjoyable, dawn queuing session, to find I. already asleep, after which we had somewhat experimental sex and a long argument about which art form Polyhymnia is muse of, sparked off by having been to see the Bluestocking exhibition at the NPG. (Having been physically prevented from getting out of bed to look this up, I still don't know. Answers on a postcard.) This will tell you as much about our relationship as you might care to know.

Easter has been fairly sociable, in spite or because of seeing so many friends in various forms of trouble. I am sparky with Shakespeare, having embarked on a re-read of my favourite plays, and James Shapiro's excellent 1599, and have endless energy, but am rather twitchy indoors, being nervous about the upcoming revelation of whether or not I have my grant money. R is dealing with a slowly dying grandmother across the Atlantic, and her feelings for her Older Poet ex; J. has just emerged from a stay in the mental hospital she refers to as the Laughing House; the friends who married in Lisbon last year have been flooded out by their stockbroker upstairs neighbour's automatic watering system malfunctioning; D stayed over en route to seeing the woman he left his wife for, but who lives several thousand miles away from him. We have also evolved a running joke about our nice, preternaturally silent upstairs neighbours being Basque separatists running a bomb factory. (We have invited them down for a drink, thrilled by the fact that they are not the Boyband 3 am Karoake Horrors or the Flood-Causing Pothead of last year, but they may of course interpret our Irishness as evidence of shared political ideals...) We finally found the cheap, good, dim sum place in Chinatown which has been eluding us for years, and I., who takes his intern there for lunch, is training the staff not to giggle at vegetarians. I went to St Pauls for the Easter Vigil - I must go there more often for the choir, which is wonderful - having left I., who is distressingly bored by religion, at home baking and watching Cheers re-runs. Which I find distressingly boring, apart from Lilith.

The prospect of going back to teaching keyed-up finalists for three weeks - not that I've been able to forget entirely, as pleas and queries pursue me by e-mail - is making me think about the future and other kinds of life. J. has had a vision, during her time in hospital, of how she wants her life to be, and is starting the esoteric body of London routes and rat-runs known as The Knowledge, to become a cabbie. S. is planning to retrain as a primary school teacher. My sister writes cheerfully of culture shock, drugs and learning Mandarin in Beijing. Unforunately, my own desires are, characteristically, more to do with the impossible, like travelling back in time to be one of the original Bluestockings, or being Richard Burbage, or Isabella Bird.