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At the top of the back staircase in the east wing of my mind, there is a secret attic where I keep a pretty girl. She lives among the furniture that doesn't fit elsewhere, the rusting wrought iron daybed and the mahogany commode, the elephant's foot umbrella stand and the spavined rocking horse.

I pop up there from time to time to tease the ribbons from her hair, to lie her down on the candlewick covers of her musty single bed. She is the paper ghosts of peonies, a scentless potpourri. We share moth wine and macaroons and kiss like kittens beneath a dusty bust of me. When I am gone she sleeps again, barely breathing on a drift of shredded lace.

Monday, Bloody Monday

For the last couple of weeks I have been stalking the barren plains where the exegeses roam, trying to lasso myself a plumptious one. Seldom have I been out of my pyjamas and my once-white slipper-boots and I have drunk more cups of tea than there are teenage mothers in the north of England. Yesterday I helped LoH sew a tiny felt mouse, and that is the closest I have come to normality. I feel like a fly buzzing around my own head.

I have been working on my MRes for ten months now, only two more to go. The next fortnight sees a return to fiction, to my sweet little killer, reeking and glowering in her scabby old Parka. She’s hiding somewhere in the dank cellars of my mind, breathing through her mouth and picking her teeth with a carving knife. I stand at the top of the mossy and treacherous stairs, clutching a single, guttering tea light, and take a deep, deep breath.

The best thing at the moment is the music that my beloved Snout is making and trapping inside his new magic box (a ‘digital eight-track recorder’, if you’ll believe that kind of talk). It’s music that sounds like what you see in the sky on smudged and hallowed mornings when you’ve been up all night carousing under the communion-cup moon. It sounds like our love.

But, to quote Captain Spalding, I must be going. There is a killer at large in my cellar and something must be done.

Look Back in Envy

Here I sit, beneath the ‘Crabs & Lobsters’ wall-chart that I got free with the Guardian, toking on a fat one and pondering the future of the female serial killer. Today I read three books about murderous women and shelled a pound of peas straight into my mouth. I lunched on Ritz crackers smeared with Gentleman’s Relish and Danish Blue and I had a soft-boiled egg for breakfast. Why does violence make me so hungry?

Last night I dreamt I went to Junior School again, back to the spire and the hills surrounding. Junior School was a wonderful place. I might not have learnt my times tables, but I did learn how to sew a guinea pig from brown velvet curtains and how to make chocolate mint creams. Sometimes the man who lived as a Roundhead came to give us a history lesson, and once the Great Jam Sandwich Machine rolled in, operated by men riding ostriches, and with much clanking and juddering and eruptions of glitter it produced a perfect sandwich for every last child.

Halcyon days. I still like to sew funny animals and draw lopsided pictures, but these days I try and intersperse my daydreaming and playing with more grown-up activities like washing pants and growing herbs and taking the cat for her jabs and, of course, reading my Children’s Encyclopaedia, because education should never stop. Although if I ever see that Great Jam Sandwich Machine again I will jump up on it and I will ride it to the ends of the Earth.