Extracts from private diary:
17 June 2018
Diary is getting fits-and-starty again. It’s gone grey outside again; no rain yet. M said it’s not been raining but she thinks it’s GOING to rain. The cats have invited themselves back in.
The following comment on YouTube tickled my funny bone: “I like how the EU is such a wonderful place that they have to barricade the doors to stop people from getting out.”
18 June 2018
Life is more interesting than I thought. Apparently intelligent and successful people make a real hash of things, including the very things they are celebrated for. It’s not just that we can make errors with far-reaching consequences for billions of people, it’s that what you think you know can turn out to be wrong, and the fate you think you have can be changed just by changing something simple and close to home. Unless you look into it and try different things, you never know for sure.
19 June 2018
There’s another reason why life is more interesting than I realized: when everything’s perfect and goes the way you expect, you learn nothing. There’s all this ‘in depth’ stuff to know about and experience, and you don’t even get a glimpse of it if things are going smoothly. You just assume people think the same way you do; that everybody behaves the same way; that you all know the same things; that everything you all know is true and always has been true and that there’s nothing more to it.
Then things go wrong! People don’t behave the way you expect; you do your best and things still don’t work out; you show people trust and affection and it’s thrown back in your face; everybody around you suddenly goes crazy and seems to be living in an alternative universe. You thought life would be easy, and it’s not. You make mistakes you always swore you’d avoid… and even though you can see they’re mistakes, you can’t get out of them no matter how you try. Or you realize they weren’t really mistakes; they were an inevitable outcome of a lifestyle that everybody lives because we’re all actually living out ‘one gigantic mistake’.
You take a closer look at people to try and suss out what went wrong, and realize many are as lost as you but some have crazy-good ideas which could change your life for the better. Others are too controlling and assume terrible ideas that could destroy all humankind or at least all quality of life, which is most likely the same thing. The whole point is, it’s not till things go wrong or the unexpected happens that you learn anything about yourself and how the rest of the world works.
Sometimes you don’t understand for a long time just what it was that occurred, and it takes experience as well as fresh input from others to help you work it out. If life was as straightforward as you assume at the beginning, it would be dull in contrast with the reality.
23 June 2018
02:49: Sat up in bed. I seem to (secretly) get mad with everybody on my birthday for getting me the wrong thing. In this case I said I’ve always wanted an art journal. I pictured myself sitting on a bench, sketching in a little black Moleskine, but what I received was a large white scrapbook. It came along with gilded scrap paper to paste inside and a Pritt Stick to do the pasting.
Just before trying to sleep, I was flipping through a papercrafts book and tried to imagine myself taking photos of trees and printing them out; pasting them into the scrapbook with fiddly decorations… dead leaves; sketched maps; illustrated mushrooms; quotations; snippets of my own story.
Nah…
Turned off the light and tried to sleep, but all the time I was thinking crossly about scrapbooks. I thought I might while away the time planning out what sort of scrapbook I could do, but got more angry instead of less. I thought about the book I was reading and everything in the world that was going wrong that didn’t need to go wrong, and I could feel a scream rising in my head. I got far too hot and had to push the blanket back, and my new birthday watch got caught in the folds and I struggled for a while to pull my wrist free.
Suddenly I had an idea…
Well, I didn’t say I would say what the idea was. 
Even would-be scrapbookers are cagey like that.