Celebration.

A plastic bowler hat cracked along its diameter and trampled into the muck, and a flag which had its staff snapped into two and the whole thing committed to the floor.

Those were the only visible remnants of the preceding St. George's Day celebrations: trinkets which hold so much meaning as to become meaningless and so they must be cast aside.

English people don't know how to mark the occasion, anyway. We say that we're not allowed to - 'they' stop us doing it in case some minority group or other takes offence - but in reality there is increasingly less to commemorate with the passing of each year.

I've lived here all my life, and I don't know what it means to be English. I am from here but not of here. I speak English, but do not feel English. I think everyone else, if they are brave enough to admit it, is in the same boat. This is why I say that the flag and the hat are so rich in symbolism that all their power is lost, for there is not one single thing which anyone can point to as encapsulating a nation. There are instead millions of disparate, floating ideas: the queen, tea, Wembley, slavery, the bulldog, Michael Faraday, perma-drizzle, the BBC.

If one's parameters are narrowed, the same problem rears its head. Let's say that instead of the whole of England, London is sufficiently representative of the country to stand in as a suitable replacement for the purposes of 'what it means to be English.'

The weight and severity of the city, indivisible, is again too much, though. and our thought capsizes before we manage to grab it. And selecting one possibility from the billions of physical objects and abstract ideals which comprise London (which represents England) seems cruel and arbitrary. The Underground? Being called a cunt by a random stranger? The Old Bailey? The Houses of Parliament? No one single case - except perhaps the second - explains what it is to be English.

Perhaps that is it. Instead of focusing on the golden, precious ideal of a nation state, we should instead dispense with sentiment and speak with the breath of truth in our lungs. To be English is to be persistently worried about having a knife stuck in you; is about being called a cunt; is about the atomised war of omnia contra omnes, and coughing up one's guts happily at quarter to two in the morning. The noise of my coughing is the perpetual music to which I exist, and I blame the English weather.

I started out trying to find positive or neutral sentiments which represent the whole of England, and I couldn't do it. I can, though, find hundreds of ideas or statements in the negative which every crappy little village all the way through to the biggest conurbations, has in common. What better way, then, to remember such traits than by getting drunk, snapping your flag in half and stamping your bowler hat into the ground?

Protection.

I spoke to one of my colleagues ('P') earlier about the reason why I ended up moving house (hence the lack of posts recently. My handful of readers will, I'm sure, not have died of loneliness in the intervening time.)

I explained: because I can't drive a car, I found that commuting from Yorkshire every day was slowly draining me of energy and spirit. Permanently tired and irritable, something had to change, so I moved close enough to work that I can now walk there and back.

My colleague looked surprised. Walk? It's still quite a distance to the office from where you're living - have you thought about riding a bicycle to cut down on your travel time? I laughed and commented that I wasn't capable of balancing on a two-wheeled bike. I had been born with a weak left eye, the weakness of which was exacerbated when the all-encompassing 'they' operated on it two years too soon.

There was a pause as 'P' thought of a response to this. He said something like he had a weak left eye too, but it had never prevented him from getting around on an unstabilised bicycle. This revelation temporarily shocked me into silence.

Is it possible, I asked him out loud, that my parents (for it is from them that the 'can't balance' conjecture arrived) were simply protecting me from the realisation of my own uselessness when they cooked up this story? Might it be that a mediocre eye is no barrier to the completion of all manner of acrobatics, but the presence of a different, unspecified deficit precludes them?

I never even thought until a few hours ago that my mediocre eye might be something whose existence is hiding a wider malaise. It had always been such a certain plank of my world-view that I haven't once sought to question it. Information we take in at a very young age has a habit of being absorbed uncritically - there exists a vengeful Catholic god who bears witness to everything; electricity is created by little electrified blue men emptying the contents of buckets; mushy peas are an acquired taste, son.

I now realise the sacrifices made by parents in order to protect their offspring from troubling situations or information. Rather than the straightforward declaration of '(unlike absolutely everyone your age) you cannot ride a bicycle,' it was cleverly orientated with my 'condition' in order that I felt not disappointment but privilege.

'You cannot ride a bicycle because your eye refuses to permit you to balance' was interpreted, in the way my parents intended or otherwise, as a grand superlative, akin to being told that if anyone else had an eye like that, they'd barely be able to stand up! The truth, meanwhile, is that I can't ride a bike because I was a contrary, awkward child who was reluctant to even try. If you could be bothered, you'd probably be able to do it but we don't love you any less for having a lazy left eye and a lazy disposition.

Namesake.

It was there in bold letters in my Hotmail inbox, unmistakeable - an e-mail from my mother.

I was shocked for a second, and then I remembered how it got there and what it was about.

In that second before the dawning, during the confusion, I asked myself where and when she had learned to use a computer - she had never shown the slightest interest in the 'dazzling thing.'

Then, the light of comprehension. This is what happens when your father has an affair with a woman who has the same forename as your mother, and then, in defiance of all the conventions of adulterous relationships, goes onto marry her.

No quick knee-trembler for those two; no, instead they yoked themselves together one autumn, and there they remain. I suppose I should be pleased. Sticky bodies unwilling to be separated in the cold of the guilty morning.

There are two women who share the same name now, and it is my father who's responsible for both. Like a photocopier, he churns them out one at a time. If he could live for a millennium, there would be hundreds of namesakes. Beyond their names, they diverge utterly, but they are reluctantly fused in the most fundamental definition of their identities.

Hi Paul

Just a quick message to say hello and leave you our email address. Your dad's practising his I.T skill.

X

Eyes.

I turned in disgust to walk down the steps and out of the football ground: two minutes left and we were certainly going to lose.

Hearing the celebrations of the home supporters was more than I could bear - in fact it made me feel sick - and I had no wish to hang around to listen to them shoving it down my throat.

Then a roar went up. Penalty! To us! I rushed back up the gangway and teetered unsteadily on the end of the top step, moving my head from right to left as I tried to separate the crowd of people I was trying to stare through from the bit of the pitch I could see. In this variegated, shifting scene I observed our player run up to strike the ball, a gloved hand extending towards the goalpost to my left, and the home crowd going crazy again. Fuck! Saved it!

That really is it, then. I stumped away miserably to find my coach, and once on board I got talking to a man and his grandson (they'd also left early and we were the only ones on the coach) about the night's events:

Me: Might have been a different story if he'd stuck that penalty away, yeah?
Them: Penalty? What penalty? [We'd also missed one the previous game, and at first it was assumed I was referring to that.]
Me: I was just about to leave when it happened. I didn't see what it was given for - but we missed it anyway.
Them: You mean the one on Saturday?
Me: No. Just now - about two minutes ago.
Them: [laugh] You're not serious, right? We didn't get a penalty tonight.
Me: We did. [pause] I did see it and I'm not joking.

By this point, I had begun to doubt what I was moments before convinced I had seen. I spiralled forward decades into my future as a sick, confused old man, reporting all manner of visions and phenomena as being valid for discussion.

A sense of panic and uncertainty became me - I even confessed that I would feel more stupid than I have ever felt in my life if it was the case that no penalty had been given. I knew full well that one had been: I saw it and walked away swearing angrily when it had been missed; yet my grandmother knows full well that she's won £26,000 for the umpteenth week in a row, and that there is a queue of children who need supplying with drinks so for God's sake don't leave them outside, thirsty.

The evidence of our very eyes crumbles to dust when pressured by the incredulity of others - the more vehemently the refutation, the more we doubt. If a thousand people had shouted me down about there never having been a penalty, I'd have travelled home in confusion - no less certain of what I'd witnessed, but unsure as to how it could be possible.

No man is an island - we demand at all times corroboration for the events which make up our lives. Without corroboration, there is no event at all.

I.

I am infinity, and infinitely unmeasureable. What I am is unresolved.

The 'I' which I perceive is the flimsiest sliver of being, rocking horribly against infinity. When I say 'I am,' I speak of the being which is, which was, which could have been. The being which could never have been is relegated to droplets in the ocean, and I am the vessel which cuts through the water.

I am the possible floating atop the sublime. The 'I' which I perceive as being the total of my existence accelerates ever-further away from the improbable at a rate of knots.

The sliver of I lists on the infinite waters, and I become mentally sea-sick. I am no match for the sickness, the swaying, and I hold out no hope of a cure on my own.

The failures of the past - choosing the wrong career, the wrong woman, reflections of moments when I should have done more, or less - are the scum and the misery upon which I am suspended.

Without cataloguing every single thought and experience I've ever had, without being able to rebuild the sea wave by wave, then I am unmeasurable. What doctor wishes to piece together the water, the force, the spume which condems me?

Leaving.

It was confirmed to me earlier that I shall leave Barnsley in a week, assuming I can find somewhere else to live in the meantime.

Lack of employment opportunities here mean that I'm jumping at the chance to take my old job back. I need them, and they need me - so it makes perfect sense. Sadly, the distance between here and the town I'll be working in is too large to bridge every day by train. I did it before and the travelling and late nights obliterated me.

Oh, Barnsley, I hate to leave you. Such a caricature with your rainy sky-coloured rooftops and horizons the colour of slate; squadrons of pigeons in various states of disrepair begging or stealing stale bread and cold chips. Others might mock you - I think my suspicion that they do so is far in excess of the reality - but I adore your twisted vowels and recite them as a catechism: ee, ah, eh.

Almost everything I know is here. Almost every memory, many of them formed as my blood turned to rain inside Oakwell on some horrendous December day or night, watching us surrender pathetically to Grimsby or Blackpool or Doncaster. That's it. I've fucking had it with them now, seething up the hill on the way to the station, secretly proud of the silent deal I'd struck - my bewilderment and shock for your mediocrity.

This must be the only place in the world where half the town stops because a train has to be let through, the barriers sliding smoothly down into position and leaving me partitioned on one side of the great divide. Sometimes it can take three or four minutes before crossing the railway line is possible, the time punctuated by sighs and glances at watches and each other, and by swearing.

I shall miss the humour with which we suspend ourselves ever so slightly above the misery and awareness of our ordinary lives; the feeling that this is everything and smiling grimly. An ordinary life spent under your unblinking eye, watching the world spin from the plinth; the giant base of a statue which for years has sat unoccupied, waiting for the likeness of someone uncontentious enough to adorn it. Its circumference is now home to a percentage of the aforementioned glut of pigeons, and I suspect it'll never be otherwise.

Unpretentious streets, hard streets, cynical streets, I shall continue to exhale your bone-sapping winds even when I am away. It is the case that I shall be separated from you by only 50 miles, but it may as well be 50 light years. I shall mourn you 50 times. You are forever carried on my breath, my tongue unapologetically forming the shapes of the dialect I left behind but continue to cling onto, reluctant to relinquish another one of the threads which threatens to unravel my identity.

Purpose.

It comes from somewhere, the certainty that our existence has a purpose and is being directed in particular ways, towards particular goals.

Like religion, our certainty may be nothing more than a delusion based on flimsy premises, or no premises as all - but it is there.

It comes from somewhere: the aggregation of my personal biases, piled on top of one another for years; sedimentary rocks, layer on layer. Certainty is strengthened by co-incidence, and by the accumulation of events which accord with my particular world-view, even as I ignore those which run counter to it.

I'm in love with you because you were wearing red on the first night we met; because you had a bag with a picture of a cat on it; because when I caught your eye it co-incided with the playing of 'The Planets' inside a pretentious bar. You're in love with me because I remind you of the dead brother you never knew; because I was reading a copy of The Guardian when you bundled into me; because I smell of Joop!

From this moment on, then, my raison d'etre is to love, for example, the woman with the cat-themed bag. The delusion turns on convincing oneself that our love would have ever taken alight if I'd met her in other circumstances - if she'd been buying tinned ravioli; if she'd wanted a Spaniard instead of an Englishman; if the boat hadn't capsized and I'd not had to be rescued.

The inviolability of the co-incidence strengthens the inevitability of the love that follows. The woman with the cat-bag (a black-and-white cat with yellow eyes) understands this on the day she meets the black-and-white cat with yellow eyes. If the real-life cat had grey fur, I'd have never acknowledged you.

It is luck. In luck, we assign purpose and meaning.

Circularity.

Ever-decreasing circles, and the ever-more rapid return to the same pin-prick which lies on the circumference of each one.

This time it took three months for me to come back on myself. If there's a next time, it'll be two months. The time after that - a fortnight.

The pin-prick is a tiny flesh-wound, the historical marker of a single afternoon 10 summers ago where I was bitten half to death, and my bloodstream poisoned irreversibly. The sun had sent me mad, anyway, causing my senses to at once heighten terrifically and sharply bottom out, the superficial conversation which I'd got into the habit of dispensing had collapsed into a singularity. The little red mark on my consciouness is the only evidence of the major surgery I performed on myself as I cried so hard that the shit flowed out of me like a river.

The moths of my vanity gather around the light of the wound and congregate there, spreading discord and misery. The beating of their papery, ragged wings accords with the beating of my own heart. I've come back to myself, pulling the suit of pale skin over my own head, sliding my arms through its arms, the unpleasant clamminess, the night-sweats, their ugly perfection the way things always were.

Ever-decreasing circles, back where I was before, rubbing my eyes in painful astonishment. How on earth did it happen this time, I wonder, as I expertly pick apart whatever masculinity, talent and assuredness remains, burning it promptly.

It's all burnt and all gone, and I, a ghost with painted-on eyes and borrowed clothes and borrowed feelings and borrowed words, pass through everyone I meet. There is no halting or slowing my centripetal motion - I have to go back to myself, ad nauseum.