In a valiant effort to avoid the subject of politics, and because I have been involuntarily been under the Stepmother Stress Diet, I start the day by clicking on the BBC website to get some weird funny news around the world. Why does this religious guy swallow goldfish and blow them out through his nose? That’s quite the religion.

And there’s more. IKEA is opening up in Iran. IKEA makes me crazy. Its latest wheeze is to have replaced the Out of Stock sign on whatever I want to buy with Oversold, thus implicitly blaming the customer for the store’s incompetence. Vile Canadian, your bourgeois object lust has ruined the pleasure of other hapless customers who merely wanted the practical if slightly wobbly and thus aptly named Gorm shelving.

Also, I hate the way they play music I had sex to when I was a teenager in the seventies. It makes me compare the sleek, carefree young woman I was then with the filthy-tempered Gorm-less git I am now, walking around a store with a stupid wrinkled yellow bag and a dead expression on my shell-shocked face.

Anyhoo, I was gleeful. IKEA’s opening in a country that has nuclear weapons. Yeah, you try telling an Ayatollah he’s Oversold.

As it turned out, I had misread the headline, as I often do under stress. Iran was not being visited by IKEA, but by the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency. Oh.

There’s a song I love called Walking in Memphis. No, it wasn’t around when I was a teenager, but it is a brilliant song, with its tribute to the blues, with Marc Cohn’s wonderful voice singing about walking in Memphis with his feet halfway off the ground and the elation it inspires in my sore heart.

The BBC informs me that Marc Cohn was shot in the head in a carjacking after a concert the night before. Apparently, the bullet ricocheted past two objects, thus saving Mr. Cohn’s life, but I doubt he’ll be walking in Memphis or anywhere else for a while.

I now feel 50 times worse. So I follow the instructions of my dentist (I broke my tooth at a Bruce Springsteen concert) who is fed up with my inability to cope with X-rays. I’m a gagger. I’ll throw up on you, I say. He has given me an X-ray pad with its little paper holder. I am to practise at home. I am to shove it in my mouth and keep it there, presumably until I choke to death.

Maybe I can play Walking in Memphis as I choke.

I write a fan e-mail (trust me, it’s not a habit) to American essayist Ariel Leve at The Guardian who writes a column entitled Half Empty: A Pessimist’s View of the World.

She replies.

“Dear Heather,

Thank you so much for your e-mail. I am so pleased to hear that there are half-empties in Canada. Who knew? It worries me though that I give you reason to live. What if the column is cancelled?

Keep frowning. Ariel.”

Now that’s a woman after my own heart.

One of my beautiful wonderful godlike readers has just sent me a gift. Yes, it is a CD of Bruce Springsteen’s concert at the Royal Albert Hall. So I could listen to that to distract me from choking on my X-ray pad, I could watch Indecision 2004, Jon Stewart’s new Daily Show DVD just delivered from my bookstore. Or I could tell you about a tense, terrifying story titled Words of Warning on The Guardian front page days ago, a Monty Pythonesque dialogue between a bomber suspect and a London copper (I pick Michael Palin) telling him via megaphone why he should give up.

Police: “Muhammad, come out with your hands up.”

Suspect: “If I do, you’ll shoot me” (apparently referring to the shooting of the innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes by police).

Police: (Pause.) “That was a mistake.”

If you don’t think that line was funny, you are helping the terrorists.

My agent calls. I have not yet cashed my advance cheque for the wonderful book deal he set up, as the publisher wants a witty book and I’m in this mood, you know. (Only an author with a Scottish mother would think it wrong to cash a cheque I am entitled to but don’t morally deserve.) Bruce tells me he has signed me up for another fabulous book deal, this one on a subject dear to my heart: feminism.

Here’s the problem. When American writers get news like this, they buy a sackload of cocaine, do vodka snorters to impress bartenders, sleep with the bartender, have a threesome with their nanny and their brother-in-law, and spend the remaining pittance on surgical reconstruction of their rotted nose cartilage.

When Canadians get news like this, they go out and buy a new filing cabinet. I know, because that’s what I did with my last book.

I’ve gotta go all-out. I know. I’ll buy a new office chair, to replace my $25 IKEA chair that had a wobbly leg when I purchased it in 1986.

The Globe‘s Style editor calls. I mumble (dental X-ray tab). Unhappy. Very. Retail therapy. How unhappy are you, she asks.

“Five grand. Do chairs cost that much?”

“Do a feature,” she says. “The Aeron, the Contessa. The Concord, which Bush had redone because it wasn’t presidential enough. Chairs! Lots of lovely chairs!”

I don’t know if she realizes this last phrase is a running gag in our family, from an Absolutely Fabulous episode about an editorial meeting at an idiotic fashion magazine.

(Tangent: I no longer read fashion magazines since a recent one I won’t name did a feature on orange eye shadow. Guess the headline? “Agent Orange.” I told the editor this was about as tasteful as “Zyklon B” but I don’t think she caught either reference.)

Done. I’m off to buy a vibrating office chair, Canadian writer-style. I am. Next week, back to politics. Yes, I’m sorry too.