Before I move on to the rant of the day, just a bit more about the weekend. I am still just so glad that I bought those convention passes. As already discussed, it was great to hear the Marillion material again, but it was also fantastic to hear Fish's solo material live. I have most of the albums, but in the last few years when I've not been hearing live music, I realise that I really haven't heard his stuff to anything like best advantage. It must have been written to be performed live, and I will not go so long before seeing Fish live again.

Now for the rant. Pretty familiar territory for most of us, I'm afraid. The delivery that doesn't come. A bed for my daughter, ordered seven weeks ago with a delivery period of 3 to 4 weeks. The full price was taken off my card at the time, rather than just the deposit (apparently by mistake). So they have the money for seven weeks and I have no bed. So today, the mattress arrives, the underbed drawers arrive, the pillows arrive, but no bed in the lorry. I'd taken the day off, because full-scale reorganisation of her room is required. Luckily I hadn't (quite) got to the stage of dismantling the cot. I ranted down the phone at the poor guy in the shop with the result that I am promised the bed on Saturday, and have been refunded the delivery charge. I'm half ashamed to be ranting about something that is so pathetically routine, but so it goes.

OK. I was never a cool teenager. But in my late teens my musical tastes, ahem, developed from coolish stuff -- principally Japan, Bowie, etc, towards the quite unspeakably uncool. Towards Classic, British, progressive rock. To clarify, this was 1986. When you watch those talking heads shows about the eighties (I love 1985; you know the kind of thing) you never see prog mentioned. "How could this happen?" you ask yourselves. How could a young female with fledgling cool musical tastes be drawn so far astray? Let me explain. The popularity of prog has been written out of the history of the eighties as told by the Media People (who were all, I suppose, cooler than me at school, and probably not into prog at all). This is how it was for me.

1. White, Middle-class, Sixth Form Boys. I didn't stay on for sixth year myself, as I had completed all the exams I needed by the end of my fifth (which is not uncommon in Scotland). That didn't stop me falling prey to the influence of Sixth Form Boys, so far as their musical preferences were concerned. And I'm talking about the geeks here. The poetry geeks, and the physics geeks. They recommended Emerson, Lake and Palmer. And Yes. And because there was one WM-CSFB (a poetry geek) whom I admired, not to say fancied, I listened. And I got hooked. I never got off with the poetry geek, though.

2. English, White, Middle-class, Sixth Form Boys. I was picked for a TV quiz show for teenagers, and met many of these, a class I'd never encountered before. They were bigger, and more confident than the Scottish ones. All of them (and one lovely guy from Northern Ireland) liked Marillion. One of them, let's call him James, because that was his name, was cute. There was snogging. He even came to visit me in Scotland. I was smitten, my mother less so. He was English. He was at sixth form college. He wore an EARRING ferchrisake. I'd never brought home a boy with one of them before. I spent my prize money from the quiz on an electric guitar. That was a story in itself. The shop, I think, was in Cathcart Road. I got it confused with Clarkston Road, and ended up walking over most of the south side of Glasgow before finally getting my guitar. And I cashed in some Boots tokens on Misplaced Childhood (when Boots was at Union St corner and still sold records). And Marillion became my favourite band in the world, ever.

The James thing came to, as the great man Fish himself might have said, a bitter end. I bought tickets for Marillion at the Barrowlands, Glasgow, for Hogmanay 1986, in the confident expectation that James would join me. He didn't. He never actually chucked me, just wrote to say that he wouldn't be calling in at Glasgow on his winter trip to go ice climbing or whatever it was he was into. I went to the Barras alone. This did not, in the end, diminish my enjoyment of the gig. If anyone reading ever saw Fish-era Marillion live, you will know what a truly superb live act they were.

Why am I telling you all this? Because last night I went to the Fish Convention at Haddington. The Big Man was in fantastic form. For the last, say 15 years, I've kept my prog fixation quiet. Tried to move on, you might say. It appals my husband. But I have decided that there is to be no more dissembling. Fish rocks. He truly does. He commands the stage like no-one else I've ever seen, or expect to see. And hearing the whole of Misplaced Childhood live, followed by Incommunicado, Market Square Heroes and Fugazi, took me to another place; one where I' m not embarrassed to sing along, and put my hands above my head. And it was great, great, fun. Thank you, Fish.

I am ridiculously glad to find that Catherine Newman has started a blog. Reading her weekly postings on parentcenter has become so much a part of life that I was really upset to read two weeks ago that her journal there was coming to an end. Someone I have never met, and who lives on a different continent, feels like a friend. We share a number of paranoias -- thank you Catherine -- I was able to display your posts to my husband as evidence that, no, I am not the only person on the planet with germ phobia and stomach flu phobia.

I live in the UK and work full-time. I have two children, aged two and four, girl and boy respectively. And life sometimes feels good, and sometimes feels less good. Sometimes I ache with resentment that we make a loss on my husband working part-time (I am underwriting his underpaying employers, and subsidising their lousy pay scale), and other times it feels like the right compromise. Sometimes I wish I was underwritten by a high earning partner, as it feels like many women I know (both working and not) are; other times I am better balanced, and just feel that what we do is what we do, that it is right -- well, at least OK -- that the cost of childcare is greater than my husband's take home pay, and that I am glad he is able to keep on working.

It's nearly 9pm here, and I need to go and do some work, preparation for business tomorrow. And I'm tired, but privileged. I do an interesting, challenging job, and even sometimes get paid for it. Eventually. So no more moaning tonight.