Yesterday an episode of me chasing the ball in the garden ended with me falling down the stairs, having first landed on the sharp edge of said stairs with my gluteal/lower back region.

Sometimes it is difficult to talk when you are blinded by exploding fireballs of pain, but I managed quite admirably to release a torrent of swearwords so prolific that the baby's vocabulary is sure to advance in leaps and bounds.

Despite the awesome cushioning capacity of my ass, the force of the blow was enough to move my pelvis slightly out of position and send my muscles into spasm, but thankfully my trusted beloved osteopath (whose children's college education is undoubtedly being financed by my inability to remain perpendicular when confronted with obstacles) managed to correct the damage and undoubtedly saved me from having to be ferried to my exam tomorrow in a wheelbarrow.

There are bruises of such size and lurid colouring covering my ass that propriety is the only thing that stands between me and their appearance on the internet.

If I could have my way, I would confine my encounters with post and politics to reading birthday cards and webofevil.

My aversion to the post is so extreme that one might guess I had spent a childhood as an indentured servant made to lick mountains of envelopes, or that my mailbox administered electric shocks. In truth, what terrifies me about post is the weight of expectation that it comes with: whether it's to pay another extortionate yet unexpected bill from my council, respond to urgent queries, send (and locate!) obscure haunting documents from Home Office or Institutions of Higher Learning, or deal with the haunting guilt of not responding to my pen-pals speedily enough (if at all). The postal service is as a long ode to my failure, interspersed here and there with bittersweet memories of my grandmother and the increasingly unreadable letters she wrote me when I moved to England, each of which began with "This is surely the last letter I will write to you, because I will die soon."

Post and its pushers terrify me, but it remains inescapable (down to the fact that two of my neighbours are postmen, which doesn't seem to increase the frequency of the right post actually getting delivered to my address), forcing me to engage in elaborate rituals of avoidance and confrontation, wrapped in futility and stapled with anxiety. The weight of unopened envelopes with Generally Threatening Contents is heavy on my conscience, and afixes me with its humorless malevolent eye every single time I exit the front door (to outwit it, I haven't left the house in two days).

The only thing guaranteed to raise my blood pressure higher than encounters with mail are encounters with current events. Therefore I don't watch the news, I spurn broadsheets, I immerse myself in reality television - and largely this works well for me, as I drift through the world in a state of what I would like to consider as benign ignorance.

However, despite my efforts, the real world frequently breaks through and (as last Friday) I find myself googling news sites attempting to discover why an angry mob and a Police Presence are congregated not far from my office shouting in a lively but disconcerting manner. (It was something to do with the Iranian elections, as it turned out. Although why they had picked as the focal point for the frenzy an Iranian Corner Shop I suspect I will never find out).

What is your most ridiculous phobia?

The mess in my house is currently unquantifiable. Z and I are painting one of the rooms, because we are hardcore profoundly insane. The painting may sound relatively simple to the childless but it involved the following:

-Z looking after the baby while I cleaned out our storage area. (A process rendered more enjoyable by the fact that I could finally move around in there, and find and pair all my shoes; so pleasurable did I find it in fact that I may have gotten a bit carried away with lining up all my ballet flats and lost track of the main task. Fortunately both Matei and Z were on hand to howl at me).

-Z and I working as a team to take everything off the shelves in the room and put it in the newly-cleared storage. In order to be able to complete this task we let Matei amuse himself by doing whatever he wanted that wouldn’t actually lead to the destruction of himself or the house. He chose to spend his time dismantling the living room and creating a breadcrumb trail of CDs to mark his passage through the house.

-Z dismantling shelves and painting while I fed, pyjamad and lulled to sleep the baby.

- Both adults collapsing in bed freezing cold and tired.

So at the end of all that, the walls look lovely but the rest of the house looks like it’s been looted and ransacked. It is debatable whether I will have the strength or time to amend this state of affairs tonight.

Also, Z has paint all over his hands, my hair is standing up at odd angles, my throat is sore from the dust and my son is high from the pleasure of having been permitted to tip out the contents of every box in the coffee table and hasn’t had a bath in three days.

Stay tuned for the pictures of the finished product and please don’t come visit me yet.