I’m going to get a T-shirt made that says Home is Hell. When I got up this morning not only were all the dirty dishes etc. exactly where they were last night, but Sigmund was still in the Bunker playing Bob Dylan at a volume more appropriate to dance music. Loyal friend that she is, D came round to console me. She wanted to tidy up, but I said I reckoned Sigmund should do it, since it’s his fault the MC left. Neither of us could stand the doom and gloom or Dylan for long, so we arranged to meet Marcus and Flynn for lunch so I could get my mind off my woes. That didn’t exactly happen, since my woes were mainly what we talked about. Flynn and Marcus were well shocked about Sigmund and also about the MC’s behaviour. They agreed with me that though leaving home is pretty typical for MEN, mothers aren’t meant to do things like that. If you ask me, it’s unnatural for a mother to just walk out on her children without even a little warning. I can understand her abandoning Justin – if you ask me she waited eighteen years more than she should have – but I’m her DAUGHTER. How could she do this to me? Neither Marcus nor Flynn knows the answer to that question. (The only one who disagrees is Disha, who is showing some feminist tendencies heretofore unsuspected. D says she reckons the mistake the Mad Cow made was in not tarring and feathering Sigmund before she left!!!) Anyway, we had a v interesting discussion about marriage over lunch. I said the thing that really got me was how SUDDEN this all was. I mean, my parents argued a lot, but they always argued a lot, especially lately, so how was I meant to know it was different this time? That’s what married couples do, isn’t it? They argue. Everybody agreed. Marcus said his parents once had a four-day argument over the right way to boil an egg, and Flynn said his mother once threw a Weight Watchers chicken dinner at his dad, straight from the oven. Even Disha agreed that though the government’s always telling everybody that they should be married, it’s probably a lot less stressful to join an army in combat.