My poor friend Fielding has galloping high blood pressure. So have several more friends, and more friends of friends and acquaintances. I go out and within minutes, odds on I hear of someone else with high blood pressure. That is Fielding's only consolation: nearly everyone else has it. But still he lives on a knife edge, expecting a stroke at any minute, then possible death or, worse still, sitting dribbling in his chair for the rest of his life, a useless blob version of his former self. And the doctor is no help. This is the trouble with blood pressure. The minute Fielding hits the surgery for a check-up, his anxiety becomes so intense that the BP goes rocketing up to red-alert. Same if he watches QPR play, or women wandering about in party frocks, or the Ashes. His whole life is risk and fear.

So Fielding, like nearly everybody else, has ended up taking the tablets, for ever, because without them he was stuck in a vicious spiral of terror, which pumped up the blood pressure, which increased the terror ... But why concentrate on one just ailment? If one has a tendency to mull over worst-case scenarios, then one can be scared witless more or less full time.

Yesterday, I was eating some seaweed peanut crackers that Daughter had rejected, when suddenly I remembered that peanut allergy can strike out of the blue. All your life you can eat peanuts in a carefree way, then along comes a killer peanut and you've had it. I know because I read it somewhere. I stopped eating those peanuts at once.

Naturally, there are days when I start off not worrying about a thing. The sun shines, nothing goes wrong, my daughter and I and the dogs are all healthy and relatively cheerful, I'm not overdrawn, I have a heavenly new home. But this is when the Terror becomes most acute, when I'm in a joyful mood, because things are obviously too good to last. Just my luck that the minute I find happiness, some ghastly event will put a stop to it, and when you're on a high, the only way is down.

My friend Rosemary feels the same. Because she's had her lavatory superbly redecorated with some rather posh wallpaper and has been thrilled with herself and her decor, she's now expecting some sort of nemesis - as a punishment for showing off and feeling too clever and cheerful. On a more practical level, Fielding suspects that the endless Terror is just down to being over 60 and knowing that one's personal plumbing is bound to be wearing out, and at our backs, Time's wingèd chariot is hurrying near. "Hurrying - present tense," says Fielding ominously. But let's end on an up, if we can still manage one. There is a bonus to all this constant fear of tragedy and death: it tends to get us going. Fielding has begun to dress smartly, Rosemary is sorting out her affairs, I am having piano lessons again - quick, before the arthritis sets in, and everything seems a little bit more charming: trees, fluffy clouds, birdsong, babies. Not too charming, of course. Let's not push our luck.

· Yesterday, the mice ate our Ryvita Multigrain. They prefer it to the tasty bait in the scores of traps that we have stuck in every possible route that they may take on their way to crap and trail urine and Weil's disease liberally all over the cooker, breadboard and work surfaces. Once upon a time, I used to love mice and kept some dinky little pet ones in the garden shed, but now, as the poisonous droppings pile up, my love is fading and my methods of pest control grow more ruthless. But still nothing works.

How are we to get rid of the wretched things? Several people have advised me to get a cat. A pointless suggestion, because the dogs would attack and murder it, hopefully before it scratched their eyes out. They like to attack most small and medium-sized moving creatures - cats, frogs, squirrels, hamsters, birds, geese, ducks, wasps, worms, flies - but not mice. I have known a dog chew at my tortoise like a bone, scarring it for life; last week, our big dog wrecked its toenails by viciously digging for voles. It will run like a bullet after squirrels, pounce fiercely on frogs and other, weedier dogs, pinning them to the ground with its ramrod paws, but should a mouse saunter by, munching and crapping, zero response from both dogs. I point the mice out, but the dogs are unmoved. They can barely be fagged to look.

So I cleanse all shelves and cupboards, disinfect the kitchen, place all dry foodstuffs and chocs in jars and plastic boxes, and leave the mice alone to play and defile it all over again while I take the dogs out to the park. There I meet a small cluster of local dog walkers. Who has mice? Everyone. So does the whole street alongside the park, so does most of Islington. We live in Plague City, but not a full-on plague. It could be worse. In Queensland, Australia, says one fellow, they have proper mouse plagues. He was out there driving along the road one day, when suddenly, spread out before him, was a moving brown carpet. Square acres of solid mice. Too late to brake, his car glided across the mouse carpet as if on rollers, sinking occasionally on to lumpy stretches, where the mice had thinned out. How lucky we are not to have such a horror here in England. Yet.

· This week Michele watched The Magdalene Sisters: "Excellent acting, makes the blood boil, but the last Magdalene Laundry closed only in 1996. Disgraceful. How does anyone still manage to be a Catholic?" Michele read Blackbird, by Jennifer Lauck: "A riveting and poignant memoir. More intense misery, another abandoned child, another heartless church. A gruelling week."