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Sunday 17th August 2003

The weird thing about doing this is that people read it.
And then they come up to me and I don't know them, but they know loads of things about me.
Often it takes me a second to work out why.
A woman in the Pleasance came up to me today and said "How's your leg?"
Now for a second that seems like a weird question to be asked by a stranger. She had no clipboard. She wasn't about to try and fleece me for some leg based charity by adding "Because did you know that one in five people in Britain today have a sore leg and/or legs?" etc.
I realised she was referring to my sunburn. I told her it was much better now.

I didn't tell her the details of how my leg was looking, because that would be personal. But I will tell you, oh secret diary, and no-one will ever know.
After giving me a good deal of discomfort for over a week it is now no longer painful, but has reached a wonderful stage of peeling which almost makes the whole experience worthwhile.
It is no ordinary burn, so it is no ordinary peeling. The entire top layer of my skin has become plasticated (I said plasticated, oh yes you can read). It is not like skin at all, but rather some brittle kind of greaseproof paper that has been in the oven and now breaks when you touch it.
It is freaky.
I am like some kind of Terminator (the old style one that couldn't just repair itself immediately, obviously) except that I do not possess superhuman strength or much of a desire to kill all the women in the phone book who share the same name.
This is great fun of course, because now I can try to pull off strips of my own skin with no pain. Sometimes it breaks quickly and sometimes I can get quite a lot off before the weird plasto-skin shatters and fragments.
It's like being a torturer from the olden days, except you're not hurting anyone and you are torturing yourself for some reason (perhaps trying to find out from yourself where you left your keys. You must know, so why aren't you telling yourself. Perhaps this will refresh your memory. Oh no, it won't, cos it doesn't hurt and it's actually quite freaky and fun.)
Then I can take the bits of dead plastic skin and surreptitiously drop them into the salad bowls in the Pleasance Pasta Bar.
And sit back and watch as people unwittingly eat my plasticised skin.


Sorry I wouldn't do that really.
Would I?
No.
There would be no point. My plasticised skin would be more appetising and easier to chew than anything in those salads anyway.

When I was in the pasta bar today I wondered if anyone working there had read this diary.

I'm probably getting worse than plasticised skin in my drinks aren't I?

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