It’s Saturday 11th of January 2003 and I’m sitting at my mum’s house, eating melon and listening to ‘United Kingdom’ by American Music Club.  It is just over 3 weeks since the car accident and my leg came out of the splint on Monday.  It’s still very painful and I can’t bend it much.  I’ve been putting the splint back on when I go to bed because, otherwise, the pain wakes me up during the night.  I have been here now since Christmas eve, bar a visit to the hospital last week, where the doctor told me that I would have what’s known as ‘gravel tattoos’ on my face, which is scarring from the road accident.  Now that most of the horrible black scabs have come off, I can see pretty much all of these ‘tattoos’ and very unpleasant looking they are too.  They’re a dark colour, really very noticeable.  As someone who always thought of myself as a rather ugly person, now I really do have a good reason to think that.  The doctor at the facial clinic told me that these scars can be cut out and the skin stitched back together again.  But that, of course, would also leave scars, albeit flesh coloured ones.  My next appointment there is this coming Tuesday so we shall see what the good doctors say then.  The last time I was outside was for the last hospital visit.  There’s nowhere to go and I don’t really want to face anyone either.  I am so incredibly bored.  Every day I get up, have breakfast, read the paper, watch some inane drivel on TV, listen to some music, and that’s about it.  I’ve watched more TV these last couple of weeks that I probably watched in the whole of last year.  Junk like ‘The Weakest Link’, ‘The Bill’, ‘Emmerdale’.  It’s awful.  I’m just so lethargic, I can’t see what else to do.  I have read the Douglas Coupland novel ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’, which I enjoyed, and most of a book about Neil Young, but done nothing much else of note.  I’ve been tidying out my cupboard, ridding it of some of the junk that’s in there.  That was kind of a good feeling.  Cleansing, in a way.  I’ve not been able to write anything much, except the odd letter here and there.  It’s as if there’s a blank space in my head where creativity used to be.  I miss seeing people, doing things.  I don’t know how much longer this is going to last but I really hope it’s not too much longer because I don’t know how much more I can take.