My body and I have a hate / hate relationship. It bears me about with no small amount of groaning, creaking and the odd alarming cracking sound. I, in turn, stuff it full of Brie and red wine and then berate it soundly for not looking like Kate Moss. I look more like Ian Moss (sorry - small Cold Chisel joke there for those in the know).

Summer is a particularly bad time for me and my body. To paraphrase the world's greatest comedian, Billy Connolly; “Being half-Scottish, I am normally a kind of pale blue - it takes me two weeks of sun baking to become white”. I'm sorry - did I say "sun baking" ?!?!?! What a ridiculous concept...if I go out in the sun for more than 30 seconds, you can actually hear me sizzling. I'm like bacon...in heels.

I am an Anglo-Saxon Celt. I have Scottish, Irish, Swedish, French, English and some good old Viking blood in me. My sister, however, ended up with the beautiful Swedish skin that turns a light golden in the sun. I, lucky bunny that I am, grew up to be a deranged pale blue midget, with hair whose default setting is what my mother refers to as “Madwoman in the Attic Hair”.

In temperatures over 25 degrees, I turn into a Rubber Chicken and have to be gently draped over the back of a chair or folded neatly and popped into the fridge for a while. If I stop breathing, I imagine a paramedic would leap out of an ambulance, apply two Cold Packs from the freezer and yell "Clear". It's about the only thing that could revive me.

I shared my feelings about me and the Australian weather with my mother, who told me I should be living in a hole in the ground in Tasmania. To this day, I'm not sure if this was a distracted comment on the unforgiving nature of the Australian sun and my genetic make-up, or if she was just trying to get rid of me. Best not think too much about it...or my mother.

My body and I disagree wildly on its uses and abilities. I watch 'Cirque de Soleil' on TV and say to my body, "Ooooooh - we could do a bit of that". It merely smirks at me and points out that they already have enough pale blue midgets with crazy hair...and that I haven't been able to do a handstand since I took up eating my own body weight in Brie and drinking enough red wine to seriously impede a Frenchman.

Then I thought I could perhaps do a good Ophelia on the stage - being all pale and translucent and deranged. But my body reminded me that Helena Bonham Carter and HER crazy hair had beaten me to it. She also doesn't look as though she eats brie for a living....I don't think she eats at all. I, on the other hand, might be a wee bit too buoyant to drown. There would have to be a couple of Danish footmen holding me underwater to make that come off (mind you, if I was Ophelia, I would have told Hamlet he was a complete tool and found myself a nice sane boy, who could make a decision and didn't have so many oedipal issues… but that is by the by).

My body also likes to taunt me. It feels all trim and terrific and then ambushes me in changing rooms with multiple mirrors. Trust me - you don't have to go to a theme park for a terrifying turn in a Hall of Mirrors - just go to Myer and try on some bathers. There are too many mirrors, too many lights and too many reflections of my bottom - multiplied and receding into the distance. It's enough to make one wake at night in a cold sweat...if I could sleep.

This brings me to another complaint about my body - insomnia. I LOVE to sleep. I would do it for a living; I would do it for Gold in the Olympics; I would do it in a perspex box above Fed Square...but my body has other plans. It keeps me awake when I desperately want to sleep. It keeps me awake when I am even more deranged and pale blue than usual. It makes my teeth itch and my hair ache. I end up crawling into work with eyes black, like John English, a head that feels ten sizes too big for my body (finally - a resemblance to Kate Moss !!!) and the demeanour of a Doberman who has been starved for a week and then kicked in the cajones.

My poor workmates are forced to hang a sign above my desk, warning people not to approach me directly, not to make eye contact and not to make any sudden movements. Then they have to shoot me in the bottom with a long-range tranquilizer rifle, put in an IV drip of espresso and prop me in my chair until it is time to release me back into the wild. It's no way to run a convent...

My body and I manage to co-exist in an uneasy cease-fire most of the time. But then it will haul me off, make me eat a Cadbury Family Block and then drag me off to Myers to try on bathers.

Is it bored? Is it sado-masochistic? Is it deranged? Or is it the troubled child, acting out because it got stuck with me, instead of a slender, smooth-haired golden child like Heidi Klum?

I guess I'll never know why my body and I hate each other so much, but I would really like to lose a few kilos and go to one of those circus skills courses for adults. Hopefully, my body will grudgingly agree to participate and we can finally put this pale blue deranged midget with crazy hair through its paces.

Cirque de Soleil, here we come !!!

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