Saw Shaila on Monday evening. Walked along the river to the Dove for a cold glass of wine and fortifying plates of roasted vegetables and goats cheese. She attribes her manifest health and vitality to a weekly one day fast and a strict vegetarian diet, but I suspect she has a wizened Dorian Gray style portrait in an attic. Really nice to talk to her about school days and so on, and how, thirty years ago, our teenage friendship was a bridge that helped each other understand one other's cultures.

Swimming again on Monday and Tuesday. Lost my locker key in the deep end, lots of sumoesque padding about trying to organise the retrieval of clothes etc.

Tuesday went out with Anton in Brighton. Good news is that it looks like he will be able to secure work. He was ill though, and we had a restrained Chinese meal and a fairly early night. Today feeling very underpowered and drained myself, which I blame entirely on Anton, and left work early to return home.

Working on poems on the train lately and reading interesting books. Read an essay by Theodore W Adorno called The stars down to earth, about an astrology column in a Los Angeles newspaper in the 1950s and how irrationality is connected to perversions of power such as fascism. Quite interesting and absolutely barking mad by turns. Like this: "Indulgence in astrology may provide those who fall for it with a substitute for sexual pleasure of a passive nature."

However the major flaw in it, was the usual one: that the column he was critiquing was clearly not based on astrological method at all. I would be happy to read something dismissing astrology if the writer had made even the remotest attempt to understand it in the first place. It's just lazy and tautological thinking. You state your prejudice that astrology is nonsense, and then attack it for being nonsense. What has been proved?