I  seem to spend most of my working hours in a daze. All I really do at work is daydream -sometimes I feel like I don't even bother to wake up until halfway through the week. Such is the career of the life model. When I go home, though, it's finished, it's done, the only residue being the charcoal placing marks of my body on the white sheet I've been sitting on. There's no homework, no stress of things to sort out in my own time. Which is one of the reasons I find it such an ideal job.

I've got my fingers in so many pies at the moment, and I think half the problem is that when I'm not doing a mental shopping list, or playing I-spy with myself, or thinking of how many bands I can name beginning with the letter 'B', or thinking about sex, which of course I do because I've exhausted every other subject matter, or given up on all these strategies and have just let myself fall asleep, I'm planning new ideas, plotting new schemes, envisioning future career paths, creations, movies, books, shows, a new life in a new country; it all gets hatched at work, and half of it never even gets jotted down, forgotten, these great ideas, as they are by lunch break or home time.

January affects people in a strange way. Not only is it a cold, grey winter month full of dreary mornings and early nights, but it's also a time when resolutions have been made and lives recently reviewed. I've been doing too much, perhaps, of that lately. Two weeks' work in Austria at new year left me on my return feeling like fresh air, good health, and maybe even some of those well-behaved, contented Continental children (I think all of this talk about having babies must be affecting me, but don't alter the odds on who's gonna get knocked up just yet), might be a more enjoyable lifestyle than what I have now. I could write, I dunno, travel books or something.

There's points, obviously, where this just ain't gonna happen. I'm not Heidi and I'll never be content being the family type in the country. But the idea of moving abroad is sticking with me. And of living in a place where they speak another language, and I don't have to listen to all the shit spouted around me and understand it all the time. German is my favourite language right now, I just love the sound of it and how there's so many dialects- in Austria we'd have the T.V. on in the kitchen while we were cooking or pottering about, and the babble was somehow reassuring and normal after a while.

I have this fantasy for the summer, a scheme hatched at work but one which seems to have stuck with me, that I'm gonna get an artist to take me abroad, like to the South of France, as a model for the summer. I just gotta pick up a rich artist. I see it as an experiment- kinda like 'Castaway'. Whether it'll happen I don't know. I don't know if it's all too Picasso, if artists do things like that anymore. But I figure it's worth a try.

I've got a bit of photographic modelling work coming up, unfortunately it's students so I don't get paid any more. But suddenly there's a lot more issues, I'm meant to go home and think about them before I make decisions, and like I said before I really don't want to be taking my work home with me. People worry a lot about the politics of photographing a body - and the fact is, as long as no-one's making money out of it which I'm not seeing, I don't really think I care too much if an image could be construed as pornographic or fetishistic. What does it matter? I care more about whether I can leave early and go do my shopping, or if it's warm enough.

It's been crazy enough at work lately, what with getting tied up in Dewsbury (on the premise of helping the students to think of a body 3-dimensionally), and having the fussy East European old woman at Huddersfield rework her oil painting of me in the style of a Victorian, porcelain doll to make me into a mermaid. She told me her grand-daughter said it wasn't right because mermaids do not have short hair- the short shock of red hair was the only thing left of me on it. I coulda done with transporting myself to the tropical island setting she'd placed me in though.

Apparently there's 2 different classes in Dewsbury draw me which alternate each week, with a few coming every time. I recognise the mature students who go every week, but the younger ones are just some generic mass. I'd not even noticed that it was 2 different classes until the tutor said to them, 'see you in 2 weeks,' and I had to check with him he wanted me the following week and he reminded me of the set-up. -Like I say, I'm half asleep most of the time.

I never imagined I'd be working, signed off and trying to put the zine out and god knows what else in the time I can snatch here and there so soon after finishing college. The work routine, the whole getting up every Monday morning, I do find incredibly difficult. I hardly have a 9-5 routine, but this is as near to it as I can manage. I'm realising more and more that the show business lifestyle, even with the smoky pubs that are starting to make me complain like Roy Castle, is something I'm much more suited to than one where I have to get up on a Monday morning.

Shag Stamp no.7 should be out in early March, I'm working on it right now. That's about it I guess. My performing 'career' is coming along nicely, with a few gigs in March and April to look forward to. And no, I do not live a 'double' life, as far as I'm concerned the zines and the shows and my writing are all connected. So watch out for Minx Grill comin' at ya! That's it, write if ya want, Jane S. Stamp, P.O. Box 47, Bradford BD8 7TX.

Jane