My mother? I'll tell you about my mother.

One of things I've inherited from my mother, along with the character-building but periodically demoralising micrognathism, is a hormonal response to stress that causes me to wake up at 5.00am. This is great you see, because it means that at key moments in my life I get to be exhausted as well as anxious. Just now my body is jollying me awake at this time especially so that I can lie prone and panicking about how to continue the very long essay about Kingsley Amis that is the less fun bit of my MA dissertation.

But see this morning instead of doing that I though I'd write on here, because I feel bad about not blogging, in that peculiar gnawing way that I feel bad about not watching the rest of the Michael Haneke film about a sexually repressed pianist that I've had from LoveFilm for the last eight months.

I'm not entirely sure who reads this blog any more, most of the referrals are from Corporal Punishment Daily or Ben's blog, so I suppose you're probably some advertising or design punter in which case you'd love to hear about my tattoo wouldn't you? I knew you would.

So for some time I've wanted to have a skull tattoo on my chest, along the lines of the Monday Morning Memento Mori, but on a more every-morning-when-I-look-in-the-mirror-type basis. I had a look around and discovered this lady, Valerie Vargas, who works out of Frith Street Tattoo where, by coincidence, Ben Kay had his arms done. I've been on her waiting list, now closed, since October 09 and in the meantime she's got quite famous, which is pleasing. Her website emphasises the feminine stuff that she does, presumably because there's a market for women that want a top notch female tattooist, but she also does all the traditional ships and skulls and ravens in this very characterful way. I did go in there the other day to see how close to the end of the list I was (probably be another 3 or 4 months) and saw Keith Flint from the Prodigy who now looks like a heavily pierced and tattooed Essex minicab driver.

But because I'd quite like her to do me a big one, and I don't want it to be my first, I thought I'd get another one in the meantime. What I decided upon was having the word LOVE tattooed on my wrist. My reasons for doing this are:

• I like, in a perverse way, the idea of having to live with and sort of defend having quite a glib instruction written on my body. Which just goes to show that if you value perversity you can talk yourself into anything - that's the great thing about it.
  
• I wanted to have a word and that was the only one I could think of that was always applicable. I thought of having 'write', but that might just make me feel awful and also like I just wanted to tell people that I am actually a writer you know.
• I believe in the power of words to change the way that people behave, I have to otherwise I'd end up thinking the last 5 years of my life had been a waste of time, and I reckon this might help me to behave better.
• As regular readers will know my default setting is not wholly positive and I thought this might remind me to amend my thinking .
• It is not original - but tattoos aren't ads see, they're not meant to be original, they're like a language of their own innit.
  

Anyway, most people I've spoken to think it's a terrible idea. One my friends said, 'Won't it look a bit Angelina Jolie?', but I'm fairly confident that, on me, it won't.

Maybe it will, and then I'll have to have a swastika on a skull to cover it up.

At any rate, this seems to be what happens to you when you turn 30, you start craving permanence. Can't think why that would be.

I got this book in the Soho Book Store that I remember was like a poser's coffee table book about 5 years ago - but it's really good, I recommend it.

Right, I'm off to the British Library to read the 'International Handbook of Anger.'