Dear Diary. Girlfriend’s birthday is in two days, and, once again, I've left the presents until the last minute. Saying that, I've bought her a vibrator. So I have one present already. She's never used a vibrator before. And I'm not very familiar with these kinds of things either. I had to walk into a sex shop to buy it, which was a new experience.

I just went to a physiotherapist to try to book her a back massage as a present, but when I rang the doorbell, no one answered.

It'll probably come as no surprise that I hate buying presents, just as I hate most things in life. And it's come to the point where I've had to make a database of the presents that I've bought Girlfriend. Not an Excel spreadsheet, mind you. No — I've made a database. And a MySQL database at that.

Each row has the details of a present I bought her, plus a rating of how much she liked (or didn't like) the present. And then I use this database to give me ideas. She likes jewellery, even though she never wears it. I would get her some jewellery but and favourite jewellery shop closed this year.

Even with this database, I still don't know what to buy for Girlfriend. Usually, this results in a last-minute rush before her birthday to buy a present for her. Preferably something that will arrive the next day on Amazon. Right now, it's a tough one.

I'm trying to leave the house to go swimming. But I can't find the cap that I wear. Not my swimming cap but my hat to keep the sun off my face when I'm walking to and from the pool. The cleaner has put it somewhere. That's the problem with having a house cleaner come every week: she moves things around and I can't find anything. I've lost my phone charger too, I don't know where she put that, plus my hat's disappeared. Okay, never mind I just found my hat. It was my fault: I left it in a rucksack yesterday. And the phone charger? That was me who lost it actually; that's not the cleaner's fault.

3 pm

I just went swimming. I haven't eaten anything all day; I'm trying to make every Wednesday a fast day. I don't mean I run fast on Wednesdays; I mean I don't eat anything. It's supposed to be good for your health. But I keep getting cravings for food. Like just now, I had a craving for Jacob’s cream crackers with cheese on. That was my go-to snack when I was a kid when I was hungry. We had a tin of Jacob's crackers in the kitchen, and a block of cheddar cheese in the fridge, and whenever I was hungry, I'd take some crackers out the tin, take the cheese from the fridge and cut some slices, and hey presto: cream crackers with cheese on. Either that or I'd eat a bag of crisps.

Just now, I had a craving for a school dinner. It's weird because I used to hate school dinners as a kid. The dinners at my primary school used to smell of baked beans. and the only food I hated as a kid was baked beans. I would never eat baked beans. But I'd eat them now, because I'm bloody hungry.

I've been going there for six months now and I'm getting to know the names of the people there. There's Albert, a gym instructor. He lived in Exeter for a few months. Then there's Danny, a mentally retarded man who goes to the gym every day apart from Sunday. He said he likes Pilates classes. There's Zaida, a new gym instructor who I have a crush on. She does things like dance classes and unfortunately, I'm shit at dancing so I don't go to those classes. Well, I went once but never again. Then there's Sergei who does the body combat classes. The name Sergei makes him sound Russian, but he's actually Catalan. There's Javi ho does cross-training and things like that. And there's Ana who's a lifeguard and she also does some of the gym classes. She wears big glasses like an old granny even though she's only in her early 20s.

So I've learned six names in six months, which is not very good really. Yesterday I paid another €365 for another six months of a gym membership. So maybe I can learn another six names in the next six months.