Monday 3 July 4:30pm

Disaster! While I was at school Mum took my Dostoyevsky book back to the library and exchanged it for a Biggles book (which by the way I had read years ago, when I was young.) She said she had looked inside the Dostoyevsky book and it was horrible, all about how to bump off pawnbrokers if they were little old ladies. She said it was not suitable for young people to read that sort of thing in case it gave them Ideas and turned them into Annerchists and she has complained to the Librarian about Dostoyevsky. I am very annoyed that Mum took it upon herself to interfere in my studies, but secretly relieved because actually it was a very hard book to follow. Even the names were hard to read. It also turns out that Dostoyevsky is Russian, so it is most unlikely that any of his books would turn up in Eng Lit.

But it is no use trying to explain about Culture and English Literature to Mum, who watches Coronation Street all the time. I cannot abide Coronation Street myself because I have decided that I am intellectually inclined as well as extremely sensitive, thanks mainly to a recent emotional upheaval from which I am not yet fully recovered.

I wrote a poem after our little argument. It went:

Mum is a fish

who watches Coronation

Street & stuff like that

from inside a little glass

bowl that

is

her world.

At least I think that is how it went, because I tore it up and flushed it down the loo as soon as I had finished writing and admiring it, in case Mum saw it. I had not realised that as well as being a Musician, I am also a poet-in-the-making.

memo to self: must find better hiding-place for my James Bond book. Also this diary.

PS. The new Television came today. It is of course second-hand, but it seems to receive the same programmes as the other one, which is a profound relief. It is on rental, and I have to pay Mum £1 a month out of my measly stipend. I shall be much more careful the next time I have sardines.