Time. On Sunday night I hated it. I suddenly got very frustrated as I sorted out my college work and found a list of all the things I was meant to do over the weekend... Why hadn't I done them? Where had the time gone? It wasn't like I'd done loads of things at the weekend or had been really tired. In fact, I'd been living my life at a nice steady "me pace". But that relaxed pace just isn't fast enough to fit everything in.

That's what I hated about London. When I stayed in all day like I did on Sunday, I always felt rubbish because I wasn't part of the whirlwind of activity that was going on around me. There's always so much going on that you can't even begin to keep up with it - plays, exhibitions, films (bars and clubs don't even enter my radar) - and the pressure to do things started to suffocate me. How do you (me) do it all? I couldn't. I was overwhelmed. Thank God, I left.

Now, there may be an exhibition at Leeds Art Gallery every couple of months that I want to go to and which I have a reasonable chance of getting to. Or even, the luxury of just going to look at the permanent collection and that's good. It makes me feel like I've achieved something.

I still get frustrated though. But there's a good way of looking at my frustration and it's really a very positive one. In the past, I hated time. Not because I couldn't fit everything in but because I didn't know how to fill the time. I couldn't fill it. Hours, days, weekends became huge voids that I didn't know how I would survive. They were painful and filling them required a lot of effort and tears. Sometimes days seemed to go on for weeks and when you'd made it through one day, you'd wake up and realise you had to go through it all again and again and again...

So, I'll try not to get cross that I don't have time to read a newspaper regularly, or that it takes me so long to write these blogs or that I can't remember when I last read a book, and remember that while time may not be on my side, it's no longer my enemy.