this morning, at my grandmother's, i devoured a large pomegranate by myself, hesitating for a moment at first, superstitiously, thinking of persephone undone and how many days this means, the fruit brimming full of deep red seeds.

hanging in the tree in our garden is a baby bat, velvety and wary.

i am getting brown.

i watched my grandmother sign her name on a cpf form this morning, concentrating hard, making her strokes very heavily and spacing them wide, the way new learners of chinese form their strokes, stopping to ask my mother a dozen times if she has got it right, whether to add another stroke here or there. you hear about people who've never gone to school having difficulty writing their own names, but when i watched her trying hard to draw the shape of the characters out of her memory - my mother taught her years ago - i thought how especially difficult it is to learn to write in chinese, not even a matter of spelling phonetically. but having to know exactly where to place your strokes. and how effortlessly we write - those of us who can write - we are not fearful of writing - we don't even think about it - we pick up a pencil and dash off line after line - we're careless about writing. i do not know what it would be like not being able to write, and to memorise the shape of your name.

it is so ghastly hot, and humid, that being indoors all day i still need a bath thrice a day.

just finished pat barker's regeneration. a very different book from what i expected. i saw the next two books in orchard library when i took this one out i will go back for those. when i got to yealland's treatment of mutism with electricity and cold nastiness i was horribly upset and in a way frightened and furious.

i want to find out more about w.h.r. rivers.

i don't think i'll ever think of wilfred owen or siegfried sassoon the same way again.