It's been an odd week that ended in my turning 24, and the cards I received confirmed that 24 is old: all were entirely sensible cards adorned with flowers and butterfiles and suchlike, and not one had the word "arse" in it. Only two, in fact, included humour. The first, from Rachel and Chees'm, informing me (in case I'd forgotten) that I was abnormal, and the second, from a work colleague, including the rather delightful "Birthdays are good for you. Statistics show you that those who have the most live the longest."

This is among several things that bring home to me how fantastic my colleagues are, which is irritating since I may well be leaving in a few weeks' time. Not, though, to go to King's to provide welfare advice: I received a nice letter which told me how absolutely super the candidates were and how terribly sorry they were not to be able to employ me. The gist, then, could have saved considerable amounts of paper if summed up in two words: "bugger off."

This letter, delivered on my birthday, might have been more upsetting had the week not started with me receiving a letter from Alan Bennett, who lives just around the corner, and to whom I sent a slightly soppy fan letter (not being an adept fan-letter-writer) after I read "Untold Stories" over Christmas. I picked up the letter on my way to Mass on Monday night and walked the lovely streets of Camden paranoid I would get mugged. Wallets and phones can be replaced; postcards from eminent authors cannot.

The text of said (slightly indecipherably handwritten) postcard was:
"Thank you for your letter and the kind things you said. I'm glad the book was some help - that it rang bells. I like the undertaker's remark" (a reference to the undertaker who, at my grandmother's funeral, greeted us with the comment "we've had two new ones come in last night!") "they are (I suppose necessarily) an unsentimental lot. Your grandmother seeing you as someone else isn't uncommon. Thora Hird used to do it (and knew she was doing it) and it didn't bother her. All good wishes and thanks for writing, Alan Bennett."

Which puts him at the top of the list and Morrissey (to whom I wrote last year and who used incidentally to live next door to Alan Bennett) who never wrote back quite a long way down it.

New Year's resolutions aside, my "things to do" list is getting ever longer. Not only do I have a wedding to go to and a 2nd division football team to meet next week, I have three films on my list I need to see, two job applications to finish and send off, a play which I am half way through, a dissertation to plan and a presentation to write on the evils of advertising.