Okay, Londoners, I need help. I'm trying to plan a wedding and I'm up against the most horrifying industry I've ever encountered.

It sounds simple enough, right? We'd like to have a civil ceremony somewhere with friends and family present, then go somewhere else and eat. We'd also like not to have to spend many months' income on it. Those two things are astonishingly difficult to reconcile.

Not wanting to marry in a church, we started scoping other places that offer wedding services. Registry offices tend to be small, and while dire necessity may end up driving us to it, the idea of a two-tier guest list where only some people are allowed into the actual marriage ceremony seems against the whole spirit; a wedding is, after all, a community event. But everywhere else - everywhere that has a large room in a reasonably nice setting - has worked out that there's big, big money to be made in leasing it out, secure in the knowledge that we non-churchgoers are really pretty stuck if we don't find somewhere reasonably sized.

The going rate for a wedding and reception seems to start at about ten thousand pounds. That's the baseline rate. For Pete's sake.

It was when the locations we checked out revealed that they only worked with certain catering companies, and those catering companies starting recommending photographers, and marquee hire companies, and lighting technicians, and string quartets, that I got a full sense of what we were up against. I knew the wedding industry was vast and profitable, but I didn't realise the extent to which companies strike deals with each other. Once you engage with any part of it, you're taking on all of it. Every location has ironclad deals with other companies; you simply can't get married in location X, it seems, without signing up for overpriced canapes.

Even if you explain you're on a budget, there's a terrible sense of being railroaded. When the person you're talking to takes it for granted that you want a cake and canapes, it's quite hard to know where to start your explanation that really, you just want a nice, normal meal for a large group. When you explain that you don't feel the need for a formal photographer and your adviser starts recommending photographers who can do informal-looking shots, it feels ungracious to explain that what you meant was that pretty much everyone you know owns a camera and can work out how to use it. When someone starts talking about the champagne toast as if it were just as essential as signing the certificate, it feels positively thuggish to suggest that there's no law against toasting with whatever happens to be in your glass at the time. The wedding business depends on presenting as essentials stuff that you absolutely and truly don't need. I don't know whether any businesses use the word 'essentializing', but that's what seems to be going on. And in locations that actually have a civil license, they're right: they don't let you hire the place without their particular caterers - and caterers charge you for hiring everything, from staff to spoons.

It's driving me crazy. I want to get married, but I'm feeling like a mark.

I've managed to circumnavigate the dress issue, to my relief, because the idea of a wedding dress shop sounds like an ordeal. The whole individual-attention, princess-for-a-day aspect of it makes me very uncomfortable. I'm not a princess, I'm a middle-class adult woman, and people will only treat me like a princess if I pay them large sums to do so. The whole point of royalty is that people bow and scrape at you for free while handing over their tax money; if you're paying for that kind of treatment, somebody's putting somebody on. And I don't enjoy buying clothes at the best of times: the thought of spending hours in some mirror-lined room surrounded by overpriced dresses while some fashionable woman hovers like a vulture, pretending to be my new best friend while separating me from my money ... It all sounds awful. I just don't wanna go there. Consequently, I picked up a skirt I loved in Camden Market and bought a basque off Ebay, all for about a fifteenth of what I'd be expected to spend in a dress shop, and I feel a sense of piratical glee at getting out of that one.

But the location is proving a nightmare. We need a registry office or licensed place that can accommodate eighty to a hundred people without charging two thousand quid (much easier if you get married in a church; personally I'd like to see a foundation for secular wedding locations; the faithful seem to have an unfair advantage), and a place where you can get fed - either a restaurant with a large private room, or a hall you can hire that doesn't insist on you hiring their own particular buddies to cater. I sort of found one of each, but they're prohibitively far apart; I need places within striking distance of each other. Anyone know anything? Anything at all? Please, please help me out.

Mika: Oh noes! End of the world as we know it! Has to climb tree!

Kit: Mika, sweetie, what's the matter?

Mika: Has to run across garden! Wait, maybe it be better up tree!

Kit: Mika, are you bothered by us digging up the garden?

Mika: Earth moves! Kit digs. Hey, diggin, there be a thought. Mika will dig hole and have a pee.

Kit: You know, sweetie, if you could just dig consistently, you could have that big bush up that's giving me such a backache.

Mika: Oh, a spade! What to do? Maybe run in this direction!

Kit: Honey, it's okay, you know, we're just relandscaping the garden. You kept falling into the pond and getting all stinky. Look, there's a picture of you above. We had to wash you in the sink, remember?

Mika: Mika is kind and forgiving. Had agreed not to mention that disagreeable incident.

Kit: Well, that's very lovely of you, darling.

Mika: Mika is kind and lovin. Oh look, a jumpin frog thing! Enjoy your last moments, froggie, for nemesis sneaks up upon you ... Hey, it jumped! Cool! Mika will catch and kill cool toy.

Kit: Oh sweetie, don't do that. We need to rehome them in the park. Frogs are suffering in urban environments, you know.

Mika: Cool toys not suffer. Is for playin. Is jump for Mika! Hey, Kit put Mika down!

Kit: I've got to keep you away from the frogs, baby.

Mika: You is making Mika suffer!

Kit: I don't mean to, baby. But I've got a sore back and I can't keep crouching over you.

Mika: Gardenin is hard on everyone. Why not stop and come pet Mika instead? Look, rolls on stack of slabs, lookin all pretty...

Kit: You know, sweetie, you sometimes have a point.

In between editing takes, we took a day yesterday to remodel the garden. And I am a bundle of aches.

Frog-rescuing has been a feature. We have a small pond in our still-quite-small garden, and as it was getting stagnant and Mika kept leaping into it (anyone who's ever had to wash off a dripping, stinky cat will recognise the domestic upheaval this creates), plus taking up loads of space and being a drowning hazard for any future children we plan to have, we decided it was time to get rid of it. Little did we realise until we'd drained it that this meant we were dispossessing more than half a dozen fully-grown frogs. I hadn't seen any tadpoles this year, so I assumed they'd all gone off to pastures new, but to my deep dismay, this turned out not to be the case. When the water level got down low enough, there they were, handsome green animals all hunching in the remaining water and looking at us accusingly.

Alas, the pond still had to go - among other things, it occurred to us that the main reason Mika kept jumping in the pond was probably to catch and kill them; we'd already found some corpses, so it was hardly a safe garden for them - but I love frogs and my conscience was twinging worse than my lower back.

Luckily we live near a park with several ponds. Out came my biggest cooking pot; I chased the frogs up one end of the pond with a spade, Gareth caught and potted them, and we hobbled down the road to the park, little heads butting against the lid like popcorn.

Finally we reached the park, identified the less heron-friendly pond, and tipped out the frogs. They swam off across the water, kicking their legs with graceful haste, hopefully to a new, cat-free life.

Right now I'm feeling like the villain of some children's novel - Richard Adams is yelling in my head - but at least we moved them to a bigger, cleaner pond. Sorry, froggies. Here's a question: does reading anthropomorphic books as a kid make you more likely to become an environmentalist, or at least a half-assed one who wanders around your local park with a cooking implement? Do loggers just read books about Roman commanders and football stars instead? Or what?

My boyfriend Gareth and I are getting married!

Here's a game: I'm going to give the answers I've been giving a lot since announcing the engagement - but I'm not going to tell you the questions, just the answers. You can make up any questions you like to suit them.

1. Some time next summer.
2 .Under a tree in a park on a lovely sunny day.
3. No, I'm keeping it; probably we'll give both his and mine to any children.
4. It's on order, but it'll look like a flower when it arrives.
5. Actually no, I'm thinking in terms of red and black right now.

What do these mysterious answers betoken...?

Happy Kit. :-)

Credit for this theory goes to my boyfriend Gareth, but it struck me as well worth sharing. It has to do with Stanley Kubrick.

Kubrick's movies are glacially brilliant, works of crystalline misanthropy. His characters are almost all elegant grotesques; it's hard to watch James Mason and Shelley Winters in Lolita, for instance, without feeling a scorching shame for ever having wanted anything. Kubrick's camera lens is like Lucian Freud's paintbrush; seen through it, people are viewed with utter, unforgiving beauty that draws its fascination from all the elements of themselves that they'd least like to show. The art is beautiful, but it's hard not to feel ugly viewing it.

Now, it's generally known that Stephen King thoroughly disliked Kubrick's adaptation of his novel The Shining. King claimed that Kubrick had missed the point and made an empty film, and in fact made a TV version himself (which was much less well received). Handing your work over to Kubrick, this was more or less an occupational hazard - many of Kubrick's films are adaptations, and pretty much none of them are at all close to the spirit of the books he adapted: if you let Kubrick adapt your book, you got a Kubrick film rather than a film adaptation, and there wasn't much to be done about that. But among other reasons why King might have disliked the film - he claimed that Kubrick 'set out to make a horror picture with no apparent understanding of the genre', while actually Kubrick's house contained a copy of just about every horror story ever composed, and it seems likely that King's concept of the horror genre was just more, well, genre-ish than Kubrick's - there's a good reason why King might have felt upset by the film. The central character, Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, is an alcoholic writer. So, of course, is King. In On Writing, King remarks that 'I was, after all, the guy who had written The Shining without even realising (at least until that night) that I was writing about myself.' - which suggests an emotional attachment to Torrance's problems that went deeper than conscious self-portraiture. ('That night' refers to the night he realised he was an alcoholic; The Shining had been written several years previously.)

And that's the rub. In King's novel, the hero is the alcoholic writer, who eventually saves himself from his inner demons. It's a very personal tale; King says 'So when I wrote this book I wrote a lot of that down and tried to get it out of my system, but it was also a confession. Yes, there are times when I felt very angry toward my children and have even felt as though I could hurt them.' - and a confession is a vulnerable thing. Not something you'd be happy to see painted by Freud - or filmed by Kubrick. Because in Kubrick's adaptation, the father is the villain.

Nicholson's edgy, aggressive performance portrays a man whose problems aren't just alcoholism, but an undirected, barely-restrained, chronic state of anger. The incident of breaking his son's arm, described to the barman, Nicholson represents by a single, horrific gesture: having mimed pulling the boy up with an angry lurch, he shrugs impatiently, and snaps his fingers. It's the sound of a breaking bone, and also the sign of how little that broken bone really means to him. Nicholson's Torrance goes into the hotel a dark man: 'You have always been the caretaker', his ghostly predecessor tells him, and it's true. Torrance has always been part of the Overlook's horror. The hero is his son, in terrified flight from a father whose love cannot be trusted and whose evil cannot be controlled. In effect, Kubrick takes King's self-portrait and says: You aren't the hero, King. You're a bad man. You're a danger to your family. The harm you do is not forgiveable. You cannot save yourself. You would be better out of the world.

A superb film, undoubtedly better than King's TV version, but you can hardly blame King for having his feelings hurt.

Now, not every Kubrick film does it quite this way. His Humbert Humbert is altogether a more pathetic and forgiveable creation than Nabokov's brutal, self-flattering paedophile. Full Metal Jacket is upbeat compared with Gustav Hasford's elegantly written, bitterly angry The Short Timers, even though a lot of dialogue is lifted directly out of the book. (You can read an extract from it here, crudely processed but well worth a read.) Hasford's voice is both harsher - he describes the suicide of a comrade thus:

I know that Leonard is too weak to control his instrument of death. It is a hard heart that kills, not the weapon. Leonard is a defective instrument for the power that is flowing through him. Sergeant Gerheim's mistake was in not seeing that Leonard was like a glass rifle which would shatter when fired. Leonard is not hard enough to harness the power of an interior explosion to propel the cold black bullet of his will.

Leonard is grinning at us, the final grin that is on the face of death,
the terrible grin of the skull.

- while also describing vivid nightmares, and commenting on the receipt of encouraging letters from children back home:

Rafter Man reads the letters out loud. He can still be touched by them.
To me, the letters are like shoes for the dead, who do not walk.

Compared with this, Kubrick's comedic adaptation is almost cheerful; Hasford's rhetoric becomes the patter of maniacal sergeant, and the result is a black farce, not a tragedy, closest in spirit to the gleeful excesses of A Clockwork Orange - two films that portray male violence with an unapologetic, deadpan relentlessness.

But there is another film, surprisingly, where Kubrick's eye turns coldly on another artist. And, most surprisingly of all, he got that artist himself to direct it. I'm speaking of AI, Kubrick's late-in-life collaboration with Steven Spielberg.

The story of AI is a tragedy in itself: a robotic little boy, engineered to be the perfect suburban child, is cast out into an adult world that he cannot possibly understand. Trapped under the frozen sea, staring for millenia at a fairy-tale statue and begging for help, he eventually is found by the last civilisation: hyper-intelligent robots who cannot make him understand anything beyond his longing to return to his brief, perfect childhood. All that can be done for him is to reconstruct, artificially and for one day only, a facsimile of his home and mother. He spends a day in this perfect dream, after which he 'went to sleep', with a strong suggestion that there's nothing left to do but turn him off.

Doesn't that sound like the harshest possible interpretation of Spielberg, that genius of the family movie? The desire to reconstruct the perfect suburban childhood, replete with small details of Americana, fascinated with magical tales and always more beloved for his family tales than his adult-only films? The real Spielberg, of course, is an exceptionally successful adult man who seems to have a happy family life as well, so it's hardly a fair assessment - any more than it's fair to say that King's alcoholism destroyed his family, as his family appear to be fine - but Kubrick's eye is merciless: just as it says to King, Your sins are unforgiveable, it says to Spielberg, Your dreams are infantile, synthetic, cannot last, and all you're capable of.

That Spielberg himself directed this might suggest either Machiavellian genius on Kubrick's part or exceptional good will on Spielberg's, neither of which, based on their work, seems out of the question. But to assume either would be making the mistake of assuming conscious authorial intention, and that's a fast route to saying something silly. Let's consider it, instead, an interesting effect of the collaboration between artists, especially when one of them has so unblinking an eye.

My boyfriend Gareth has introduced me to an entertaining internet game, by the name of 'creepypasta': making up realistic-sounding urban legends and horror stories. Apparently the name comes from 'copy paste' stories, which became 'copypasta', meaning stories that people pasted and forwarded to each other a lot, hence 'creepypasta'. Click on the link and you can see some examples.

So, who wants to play? Here are a few from me:

Kissing a Mirror

If there's someone you want to make your own, there's a simple spell you can do. Press your mouth against a mirror at sunset and whisper the name of your beloved; then draw back and look at the shape your lips have left in the steam of your breath. If they form a perfect circle, your beloved will kiss you before the month is out.

But be very careful when whispering the name. If your teeth touch the glass, it will bring the kiss - but it will come at night, in your dreams. The creature that appears will have the face of your beloved, but its kiss will suck our your heart.


The Concrete House

There's a building in Lewisham they call Concrete House. It's overgrown with ivy, the walls cracked and the struts all fallen in, but the local council preserves it because it's one of the first houses ever built entirely of that material in the country. If you look in the council records, you will see that it's marked 'undergoing renovation', and indeed, there are walls around it, with barbed wire along the top – but the funny thing is, night or day, nobody has ever seen builders working there.

The walls are too high to see easily over, but if you stand on tiptoe, you can see the uppermost window of the house. Whatever led to the last owners leaving, they must have left in a hurry, because they didn't take all their stuff; there's a cork board still on the upper wall, papers on it fluttering in the wind. That's all most people see.

Sometimes kids go there on Halloween, peep over the fence with their torches, and swear they've seen faces looking out of the window, but there's no way that could be. The house is a shell, and the floors fell in long ago.

They say that on windy autumn days, the ivy rattles with a sound like scratching nails. The board through that window has dozens of papers pinned to it, but the rain and time must do their work. Sometimes they come loose. If ever you go near the Concrete House and see a paper blowing in the wind, pass on by. Whatever you do, don't pick it up. You will not recover from what you read there.


The Suicide Shoes (worked out in collaboration with Gareth, credit where it's due)

In 2006 there was a wave of suicides among young men in Bristol, all of whom had jumped off buildings, screaming they could fly. None of them knew each other, and all they seemed to have in common was that, at the time of their deaths, every one of them was out jogging.

Finally, an observant police officer noticed that there was a strange symbol, like a cross with eyes, written with permanent ink and hidden under the insole of one of the victims' shoes. When they investigated further, they found the same mark, always in a different place but always somewhere you wouldn't normally see, in every pair of suicides' shoes.

Forensic scientists examined the shoes, and found that their fabric had been saturated in some unidentified drug that looked a bit like a hallucinogen. The victims had suffered no ill effect when trying the shoes on before buying them, but once they started running, the sweat from their feet made the shoes damp, and the drug soaked into their skin.

Interpol traced all these shoes back to a single batch, produced in a particularly harsh sweatshop in South America. When asked about them, all the workers could say was that 'Papa Bird' had visited the day they were made.

'Papa Bird' has never been identified, and no arrests have taken place.

A while ago, I described having woken up screaming after watching a horror movie that didn't scare me; well, last night, it happened again. Over the evening, I was watching a horror movie that shall remain nameless, as I'm about to say bad things about it: the storyline was confused, the source of the horror poorly worked out, and the action wandered around in an unclear sort of way. It wasn't that scary, either; a few tense moments, but most of them overplayed, and all in all, not that great.

Yet at about half past midnight, I sat up in bed, screaming so loud my throat still hurts this morning.

I'm evolving a theory about this. Genuinely frightening films scare me into wakefulness - I had to sleep with the radio on for two days after I first saw Hideo Nakata's Ring - but if they get into my dreams, they do so in a less dramatic way. I might twitch in my sleep, but I don't wake up shrieking. The ones that really get me going seem to be ones that, not to put too fine a point on it, don't entirely hold my attention or convince me with their plots.

Storylines are a structure, they require order and control. Watch Rosemary's Baby, and the chain of cause and effect is frightening precisely because it's so ruthless. Even The Shining, the story of characters trapped in a building of obscure and incomprehensible malice, has a precision to its structure. Exactly how the Overlook is next going to express its hostility is up for grabs, exactly what kind of horror we'll run into next is an open question, but the overall trend is clear: the hotel wants to destroy six-year-old Danny and consume his father Jack, and will use whatever attacks and manipulations will work best. Some of what the hotel throws has a random element - a naked woman in a bathtub, a bartender - but they all make a certain kind of sense: they're all things that will get Jack's attention and draw him into the hotel, and the random horrors we see at the end are after Jack's mind has broken and anything can come flooding in. The hotel undoubtedly has its own logic: we don't fully understand it, but there's no doubt that it's there, and that's part of the nightmare.

Most horror stories, in fact, take place in a world of rules. Different rules, harsh rules - you shouldn't get your face sucked off just for remarking a few times that you'd like to meet Count Magnus - but rules nonetheless, and even all-bets-are-off rules like in The Shining have a kind of precision to them. The implacability of such rules is often part of the horror: without realising it, by watching Sadako's tape or opening the Cenobites' box, the victim has effectively signed a contract. The fact that they didn't read it correctly and don't like what they find they've signed up to is beside the point: they signed, and the party of the second part is not about to release them from the agreement. It's not fair, but it's got a by-the-book narrative justice. The logic of horror stories is presided over by a hanging judge.

We emerge from such stories into our own world, where we know the rules. A good horror movie can convey its rules so convincingly, dovetail them so neatly with the rules we live in, that it gets into your thinking: you remain jumpy because, after all, the characters began living in the same rules that we do, and they only discovered new ones once the horror started closing in. Probably Michael Myers won't break into your house, but then, you never see him until it's too late. Probably there's no Freddy Kruger, but we do dream, don't we? Probably there's no Sadako, but I watched the film on tape and breathed a slight sigh of relief after a full week had passed and Sadako didn't come to get me. Good horror stories mess with your sense of the rules: they start with the reality everybody accepts, and then add on some nasty little fine print to make you worry that you might just have missed it. After all, the characters didn't realise what they were signing until it was too late either.

That's good horror stories. But in the end, you can reason with those. We know, deep down, that the odds are in our favour, and the narrative logic speaks to our conscious understanding. When we get into the subconscious, it's different. Watching a not-very-coherent horror movie, I tend to comment on it as it goes along (in my own mind if people want me to shut up, aloud if not): That doesn't make sense. Those two claims about the supernatural seem to contradict each other. The monster doesn't seem consistent in its motivations. Most of what I feel a sense of narrative frustration.

Then I go to sleep, and it would seem that my subconscious hasn't been listening to anything I said. The subsconscious, too, has its own sense of structure. Good storywriting involves the subconscious, but it comes out in grammatical sentences and shaped plots: our brains are wired to create order. This is why they don't suddenly decide that maybe today they'll give breathing a miss, just to see what happens. Predictability is what keeps us alive. We're orderly creatures, and the creative brain delights, not in chaos, but in creating new and surprising patterns. But throw an incoherent horror movie at the subconscious, or at least at mine, and it picks up a different message: Things are confusing. The rules don't make sense. You can't predict what's going to happen next. And, alarmed by this disordered state, my dreaming brain starts assuming that if a monster can turn up for no reason in a horror movie - not just for an unlikely reason, but no reason, backed up not even by story-logic - then perhaps it can turn up in my bed as well.

Hence, I suspect, the maniacally snarling face that loomed over me last night. I tend to hallucinate stuff hanging over my head when I'm half-asleep anyway, but it's usually grey glittery lights or vague shapes (once I saw a furry snake with a mouse's head, which was startling but not exactly scary). This time my brain, primed to anticipate unjustified spooks, put a scary face on it. The vague sense of menace had lingered from the film, and the garbled logic, that seemed so unconvincing when I was awake, suddenly seemed threatening in my sleep. I suspect, too, that this may be one reason why children are so prone to nightmares: the rules of the world are complicated and take a long time to learn, and until they've got the hang of them, kids have far fewer defenses against the suspicion that the world might suddenly lurch. Confusion is debilitating, and it would seem that if you confuse me enough, I regress to childhood dreams.

There's a joke in here somewhere - what makes a writer wake up screaming? Bad plots - but it's an interesting thought, anyway. Anyone else have this experience?