2010.

The old year, then, has sailed, and with it goes the long tail of misery by which it will always be remembered.

2010 has gone, and in the senselessness which characterises human life, why not use the fact that the earth has just completed another orbit of the sun to wish for an improvement in fortunes?

The arbitrary boundary where one year bleeds into the next is a signal for hope and for change which we feel as a species; which acts as a brake on history.

Even the lonely fall in line with the convention - perhaps we'd prefer to face the future when we've consumed x cups of tea, or ignored three dozen strangers, or petted seventy-nine cats in the street, and yet the rhythmic predictability of a yearly cycle is enough to lure us into conformity.

More than an overhaul of the self - the optimistic predictions of incremental lifestyle changes which seldom endure - the barrier which is the aggregation of sorrow must be removed before any progress at all can be made.

I laughed earlier when I heard the American idea of dumping the past 12 months into a public receptacle in Times Square - much like the contents of this blog, real-world problems which are repeatedly discussed without being solved then become psychological issues which even a gifted professional cannot hope to untangle.

What begins as a serious attempt to confront an impediment quickly descends into the articulation of the same problem over and over again without resolution, and this half-heartedness serves only to re-inforce the very thing we wish to remove.

So there must be seriousness and finality when we make the decision to break with our own history, else the consequence of only partial commitment is to entrench oneself ever-deeper in the pit which has been carved out by your own hands.

Nothing is forever - so reads page 1 of the pessimist's manuscript. All that I have, I am inevitably destined to lose as age and habituation take their toll on everything around me, before eventually collecting the sad-eyed observer to complete the job. We speculate that the earth, and even the universe, are finite, physical objects, living on borrowed time.

If nothing's forever, though, then the events which have damned your author need not cause permanent damage. They are transitory, to be removed with the same automatic motions with which I take off a jacket, and not given a second thought.

In the most cherished tenet of the pessimist's manual, thus do we find the inevitable seed of its own destruction, and we can express the wish that the remnants of the events which have caused instability can be turned towards steadying the self in the arbitrary moment when we declare: enough is enough.

Five.

The reality of cause and effect imposes limits on the world: the firing of the bullet doesn't pull the trigger, and nor does a smashed egg unbreak itself.

Were it otherwise, then anything would be permissible. The just-murdered victim springing back to animation, picking up where they left off, and sparing the killer from prison; people becoming progressively younger as we reverse the videotape of their life.

So the idea of causality is hard-wired into us, and it is no less than the narrative structure by which we connect sequences of events. First I.... and then I.... and then we.... the end. If the sequence of events doesn't make sense then the person describing them is lying, or unwell, or mad, or recounting the images of a dream, or attempting to piece together a work of fiction.

The above, then, is an approximate idea of how one occurrence causes a second, which causes a third, which.... and how human minds come to expect certain outcomes after event a but not others. This is best-encapsulated by the peerless Gaarder:

After a while Mom gets up and goes over to the kitchen sink, and Dad—yes, Dad—flies up and floats around under the ceiling while Thomas sits watching.

What do you think Thomas says? Perhaps he points up at his father and says: “Daddy’s flying!” Thomas will certainly be astonished, but then he very often is. Dad does so many strange things that this business of a little flight over the breakfast table makes no difference to him.

Every day Dad shaves with a funny machine, sometimes he climbs onto the roof and turns the TV aerial—or else he sticks his head under the hood of the car and comes up black in the face. Now it’s Mom’s turn. She hears what Thomas says and turns around abruptly. How do you think she reacts to the sight of Dad floating nonchalantly over the kitchen table?

She drops the jam jar on the floor and screams with fright. It all has to do with habit. (Note this!) Mom has learned that people cannot fly. Thomas has not. (Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World)

Habit and the idea of causality, then, are the boundaries of experience, and anything outside this causes confusion.

So imagine, then, going to sleep in 1878 in Podgorica, then part of Ottoman Montenegro. Upon waking, in the same bed you have been in all night, your little country is independent - no longer a speck on the Eternal State, and not yet a component in the pan-Yugoslav psychosis. Everything has changed, and yet everything remains the same.

To ordinary Montenegrins, it must have seemed as though their independence had fallen clean out of the sky. The decline of the Ottoman Empire and the forces which tore their little country away from imperial clutches are so contentious - and so complicated - that causality breaks down, and the fruits of experience rot at the source.

A Montenegrin, then, could fill the causality gap by concocting the story that a couple of hundred local soldiers routed the Turks, or that God (who is from Montenegro) wrested back the nation in the name of all that is good, right, and just.

Process.

Walking through Barnsley on Christmas Eve, it was hard to believe the place is one of the most economically-deprived in England.

Its traditional industry - coal - is long gone, so Barnsley had to resort to the public sector to keep its head above water. The coalition government's marriage of convenience, though, and the attendant decision to scale back the size of the state, means that this little revival is in imminent danger of being nipped firmly in the bud.

Indeed, several hundred civil servants in Barnsley have been given the festive news that their jobs are being sacrificed in the name of Con-Dem ideology. The letters landed on their doormats just in time for Christmas.

You wouldn't have known it, though, as last-minute shoppers queued out into the streets, thronged around the forty-quid-a-pop perfume stall in the Alhambra, and buses in and out of town necessitated intimate standing room-only proximity with the next passenger.

It occurred to me, then, that just as we are beginning to question the capitalist model and the set of forces and beliefs which sustain it, it proves itself yet again with flying colours.

I had imagined it was the first signs of a terminal illness when Lehman Brothers went kaput, when the venerable old Woolworths was put out of its misery, when suspicious Sheffielders clamoured to pull their savings out of Northern Rock.

It turned out to be nothing more than a sniffle, though. Even in austerity, the presumed or invented birth of Jesus relieves us of much of whatever money's left. When a test of the capitalists' strength is required, it passes every time.

(With a sense of disappointment in myself, I confess to producing these words on a state-of-the-art mobile phone. There was bugger all wrong with my old one, but better was available , so I disabused myself of it. What a laugh - as I express my frustration at the prevailing norms, I am blown along by them, and my trajectory is something shiny, exciting, different.)

I have identified the condition by which capitalism continues to propagate itself - when it is weak, challenge it, and see if it, in its malaise, is nevertheless stronger than its pretenders.

Thus we are akin to scientists in the middle of a paradigm shift. We know that what we've got has run its course, for it no longer fits the experimental data, but for all that, it remains our best effort. Until something testably superior emerges, we are stuck with it, and so we plod on unhappily for years, knowing that by which we live is broken, its apparatus defunct.

Sometimes love is like this too: prove yourself to me, I cry. What is this made of? Show me at once, lover, scientist, money-man, else I shall tip you overboard, you and yours. One false move and you aren't dead, not yet anyway, but the idea that there could be a break with you one day has been considered for the first time.

32.

What exactly is the occasion we are marking on our birthdays?

Depending on our mood at the time, there could be any number of answers to the above question, but I suspect they fall into two broad categories: either an acknowledgement of the day x years ago when a new life took its first faltering breaths; or the sense that it's a miracle you ever managed to get this far.

When a man with the mindset of your author, such that each backward step (be that caused by error, misfortune, or the natural course of events) results in a
complete obliteration of all self-confidence or esteem, then we can understand why the negotiation of another year is met with a degree of astonishment.

I am now assured that the will to live transcends everything else, and this is what I'll celebrate later today. For much of the year, I've had no interest in survival, and yet I endure.

Since my last birthday - the 31st - I have seen three of the markers by which I locate myself taken away, one after the other, and I have thereafter drifted, alone and uncertain.

First, the idea of a meaningful future was extinguished when Bluefish and I not so much decoupled (such is for trains and implies a deliberate and careful separation) as reached a point of exhaustion akin to having fought an illness for so long that the alternatives were to rid oneself of the complaint, or die of sadness.

Thus I knew I should not be going to Australia, the Martian dust-red point of infinite distance which might well have otherwise become home. This made the remaining ties in this country more important - if I cannot float to the antipodes on the heavy, drug-like fug of emotion that is Bluefish, then nail me down here until further notice.

Two of the nails which fasten me permanently to England were whipped out in quick succession: one in August, one in November, and I have become unfixed, existing now everywhere and nowhere.

There is little to live for, yet, against any form of rational judgement, I am still here, like a dose of the clap, or an unpaid bill.

I lost a lot, but the furrowed and self-loathing absorber of those losses remains, grimly prepared to relinquish whatever is left. That I shall do so, eventually, is inevitable, and yet I feel painfully certain I'll reach 33, with the endless seam of despair that I continue to plunge down never quite bottoming out.

Scotland.

No sooner had the chance arisen to travel to Scotland with work than it was quickly withdrawn.

The inference was clear: there was no probability of them sending a non-driver all the way up there (we'd have had to book you a first-class flight! laughed my manager.)

One of my colleagues was instead chosen to visit our Scottish office - though, soon after, it turned out that the gun had been very much jumped, because our assistance wasn't required anyway.

For the rest of the afternoon, I sat in relative (to my usual standards) silence, letting it bother me greatly that I had been overlooked.

Later, it occurred to me that I was bothered that I was bothered - the emotional equivalent of dividing one by three, and getting .33333333333333....., generating copies of itself forever.

I'd no particular interest in going to Scotland anyway - the short notice would have left me scrambling around for the limited supply of clean clothing I have remaining, and I'd then have endured an interminable northbound journey, which would have had a lonely hotel room and solitary confinement as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

I imagine such a hotel room as potentially a final destination: a perfect storm of circumstance for those who are stalked by - or, perhaps more correctly, those who stalk - suicide. December nights in unfamiliar Glasgow, with the whole of the city lagged by layer upon layer of ice; the frozen moon looking on with indifference, and the room's little square proscenium the ideal stage for a man to perform his own death routine.

Yet still, the rejection wounded me - I'd have willingly gone there and been dangerously unhappy in order to do a job. This is familiar.

A couple of years or so ago, my manager's chocolate bar was taken out of the fridge overnight and not only were we expected to react with horror at the great theft which had occurred, but we did precisely that, for the reason that we as a collective felt violated by it.

Similarly, being overlooked for a business-related trip to Glasgow doesn't concern me in the least, because it would have been the worst thing in the world. Yet the false emotions and gestures I am forced to exhibit have a ring of truth to them* - the corporate ghost has been swallowed in its entirety, and it renders us lunatics who believe our own lies.

In the words of Eco: I don't believe it, but it's true.

(*When I'm less tired, I'll attempt to differentiate between obvious falsehoods, and the lies which are true that sustain us - the greatest one of all being Bluefish.)

Four.

It is not enough for the aspiring writer of Ottoman Empire fiction to deliver painful and cruel fates upon his unsuspecting characters.

It isn't enough to describe the decline of Ertugrul Osman, who had the line to immortality ripped out of his juvenile fingers and never wrote off the deficit over the rest of his long life.

As the light of dawn warmed the nascent Turkish republic, it's possible to critique the early leaders for leaving their last Ottoman to take his chances with madness and depression. To have offered him their protection would have been to fail to make a complete break with the past, and the formative years of any nation are spent making a distinction between what there is and what there was. If this is as far as we go, though, we are selling ourselves short.

There are the unsubstantiated stories from sources whose veracity ranges from impeccable to deliberately vague gossip, about the split in Ataturk's government caused by throwing Ertugrul to the wolves, for not all thought that the jettisoning of their history with the bathwater was the way to behave for what aspired to be a mature democracy. It's uncertain exactly how many of these - similar - tales doing the rounds in 1920s Turkey are more than Chinese whispers, though, originated by embittered ex-Ottomans or invented by government members whose lofty ambitions hadn't been realised under the new order.

Furthermore, the writer can ensure that the empire is never quite buried. If the politics has moved on such that its resurrection is impossible, even when we're writing fancifully, there can nevertheless be the bones of something - an idea, or a wish, or the sense of history laying dormant and ready, at some unspecified point in the future, to unfold in exactly the same confusing, mindless state in a different place, to the bewilderment of those upon whom it is inflicted.

If this is the outer limit of the author's talent, alas, then we shall struggle on alone in the painfully bright light of the monitor until God knows what time, busy doing nothing more than running on the spot.

For if you want to write - really write - then you must permit the insanity of what you're thinking to infect you like a disease. It is insufficient to describe situations in a precise yet detached way. No, the only thing to do is to swim with the current, and be at its mercy.

If you want to write about the delusions of a would-be sultan, then firstly you have to become the nearest thing possible to a screaming wreck before pulling back from the edge - complete with enough information about how the madman's mind works to convincingly describe the push and pull of various thoughts, escalating from an insignificant whim to a dangerous compulsion, that characterises Ertugrul's demise. This same gradual drift into madness, expressed in reverse, is analogous to the labour pains of the new Turkey.

Time.

We measure the world in chunks appropriate to the size of human perception, and of course it could never be otherwise.

With our weak eyes, we could only presume the existence of the atom, until we invented a device which delivered it to us in all its glory.

Chunks of time are interpreted in the same way - we read and accept that ice ages happen, but their infrequency relative to the duration of a human lifetime means they are distant concepts. More real to us is the waxing and waning of a full year: the cycle of death and replenishment which is brief enough for us to contemplate. Perhaps if we were creatures with a lifespan of a million years, we'd only celebrate birthdays every ice age.

Whole years fall naturally into the scheme of our activities, and for most of us, this is the end of the matter. There are a few, though, for whom this repeating pattern is dangerously attractive, and such people begin to hoard dates in their minds as the be-all and end-all of everything.

For the last week or so, I've known that the anniversary of Bluefish's departure from England for the last time is imminent - in fact, it's today. I promised that I'd not commemorate it in any way, because it's of no importance. That something happened exactly one year ago is not worthy of time spent reflecting on it, for if we accept that it is, we risk spiralling into absurdity: marking monthly, weekly, daily, hourly repetitions.

On the adjacent road to where I lived this time last year, there is a dog who delights in the company of people. Bluefish and I would stop dead in our tracks and spend a couple of minutes petting him whenever he happened to be outside as we passed.

This morning, as my feet crunched through the remains of the snow on the way to work, the same dog was there, climbing up the gate and overjoyed - a messenger from the past. I stuck my hand through one of the gaps in the bars and stroked his head for a few moments, and then was on my way.

Then it was time to stop and stare at the house on the street named after an Australian city. The person or people who have moved in there now must think I am staking them out because I always look and then walk on, shaking my head sadly.

I assured myself that there would be no further recollection of Bluefish. God, no. I'm stronger than that.

Yet at approaching 6pm, I skulked off, shame-faced and cursing myself, to the works canteen, giving it my best guess as to the exact moment on December 5, 2009 when the lift doors shut, and Bluefish had disappeared forever.

I sat down and tried to close out the television programme about cars which was blaring out around me, and stared at the ceiling for a couple of minutes, quietly. Then, businesslike and rapidly, I got up from my position and returned to work.

Five hours later, the most appropriate song in my limited musical vocabulary - Mike and the Mechanics' Over My Shoulder plays for the seventh or eighth time tonight, having been dug up from the great god of the internet. There is another hour of self-loathing to go yet before the day is finally over.

(At least, beyond midnight, there's some cricket on the radio to distract me. England are playing against - who else? - Australia.)

Decisions.

I was returning home from the supermarket when the snowball hit me firmly on the back of the head.

Startled and angry, I swung around to identify the perpetrator, as a group of teenagers in the vicinity began to laugh at me.

It wasn't any of the teenagers, though. Instead, it was a boy of no more than seven or eight years old, who was in fact lining up another shot as I made eye contact with him.

I exclaimed: "You fucking little cunt! I'm going to rip your fucking arms off!" and it wasn't until a little while later that I realised the exact sequence of events that had led up to this. (It's also interesting to me that it happened in a blur, but for once I am able to winkle out the most salient facts and arrange them into some sort of order.)

When I used the expletives in front of the child, I am now aware that it was a conscious attempt to corrupt him, by using the worst possible word I could think of in the heat of the moment.

In the space of a couple of seconds, I'd weighed up and equated my being struck with a snowball and the idea of furnishing a boy with a new, offensive term, the use of which might get him into trouble further down the line.

It's very rare that I lose my temper, and when I do, the proverbial 'red mist' is the most apt way of describing it. For a short while I become frozen and unable to articulate anything sensible until the feeling has subsided. On this occasion, though, a seam of awareness attenuated the flash of anger, and I was able to be as malicious as possible under the circumstances.

I write this feeling neither proud nor ashamed of what happened. I now realise, though, that not even in anger are emotions unilaterally expressed - like painters, we temper one hue with another, and this process is conscious.

I remember reading about Diego Maradona, the most gifted footballer to have played the game during my lifetime. In a high-pressure World Cup quarter-final with England in 1986, he scored what some have called the greatest goal ever, collecting the ball in his own half, slaloming past helpless men in white shirts, and finishing past Peter Shilton.

Such an astonishing goal was made even more sublime when Maradona revealed how his mind was working as he took possession: he remembered a game seven years earlier when he was in a similar position, but after he'd dismantled the opponent's defence, his shot went the wrong side of the goalkeeper, and he missed.

Recalling this, Maradona made his mind up to go for the far corner against England. That is, as he's busy running past defenders like they're not there in a match of enormous consequence, he remembered what had happened before, processed this information, decided upon one of any number of options he could take, and then carried it out, all at dizzying speed, with desperate Englishmen trying to cut him in two. From receiving the ball to dispatching it beyond Shilton took all of ten seconds, and this genius of a man was able to delve into a game from years ago to assist him in the present.

It is this ability to calculate for the purposes of destruction whilst moving at speed that separates Maradona from the rest of us. The one time I've ever been able to do it, I used my opportunity to swear at a small boy who’d launched a snowball at me.

Three.

Ten-year-old Ertugrul Osman was present in Lausanne on July 24, 1923, when the treaty which divided up the Ottoman Empire was signed, officially bringing to an end more than six centuries of Turkish rule across three continents.

It was at l'Hôtel Cecil in the city where the victorious Allies handed out ancient territory like chunks of meat, with Osman shunted into a back room as the bargaining took place. At any rate, the boy would have struggled to understand the streams of exchanged French, Japanese, Romanian, Greek et al.

He could just about grasp that something important - no, more than important; with a ten-year-old's vocabulary lacking the superlatives to reach it - was happening, but the details were too complex, and ran through his skull and out through his ears again, even when he was inclined to try to take them in.

Yes, he was aware that what he had called home for a decade was about to change; the names of places and their boundaries wiped away like chalk from a board. The traces would remain, for a time, but in fifty years or a hundred, all manner of occurrences - atrocious and heroic alike - would be attributed to the long-dead Ottomans and their expunged lands, with only a handful of people concerned enough to defend or oppose the prevailing view anyway.

Beyond that, though, and the injustice of the whole thing, Ertugrul would have admitted to being bored, puzzled, and desperate for something to distract him. He could have taken it upon himself to sneak into the hotel garden, but for one whose whole life had been a dream anyway, it was appropriate that he thought about doing so without ever acting on the whim.

The garden of the mind was sharper and more full of adventure than the garden of a Swiss hotel could ever be. There are two kinds of people, realised Osman: those who proceed to the garden even when their state is disintegrating, and feel disappointed with what they find there; and those who make a better, purely mental, garden, and re-create an empire within it.

Journalists.

There's a woman who has been suspended in my thoughts for the last few months - as is customary, though, I let events outside of us strangle our relationship at its very birth.

One of the cords which served to choke us was the wish to make us run before we could walk, and I take responsibility for this. In other words, one of us fired an arrow far into the future, before it was anything like appropriate to do so, and the full force of the arrow's impact was taken by a foetal partnership much too young to absorb it.

The second, no less significant, damage was done by these very pages, and the unending references to Bluefish. I feel that I should set the record straight about this now.

There was a time when 'Bluefish' referred to a particular woman, and the constellation of emotions which were derived from her. Distant and unknowable, Bluefish (the word, for it could be no more than a word) represented the intersection between an unfulfilled wish and the living, breathing woman who would one day be its embodiment.

Whenever we use a person's name, or whenever a person's name is replaced by something which later represents it, then the name (or its substitute) floats on a river of memories, or a river of future memories. Each drop of water is a moment in time past, or a moment yet to be experienced, and it so transpired that when I thrust my hand into the blackness, Bluefish emerged wriggling into the daylight of consciousness.

At one point, Bluefish stood for the overblown arrogance which declares it has smashed the pitiful existing tenets of human love, and re-written them in a new language. Later, of course, her name contained the defeat of this idea, and the return to earth from some improbable summit.

Remember, the author of this blog used to be a journalist. It might have been some years ago, but the main trick of the trade - the same one the mathematician uses, when writing an equation, that sees elaborate concepts crunched into an abbreviated series of letters and figures - dies hard.

It's more prevalent in the tabloid Press, and usually pejorative: scientists re-invented as the schoolyard insult 'boffin,' Members of the European Parliament reduced to 'Eurocrats,' and business owners called 'tycoons.' In this way, whole classes of people are given a stereotypical, easy label, which bobs about on its own semantic river.

For your author, now, 'Bluefish' is the same: it is a convention, a mechanism which dredges the bed of the past in the hope of finding something new, it is a set of parentheses of which the leftmost bracket starts in December 2008, and the closing bracket places itself in February or March 2010.

We talk about the Second World War, the Stone Age, and the Victorian era, and everyone knows approximately what we mean. Similarly, when I mention Bluefish, it is these days no more than a method of labelling time.

Realisation.

I stared at my mother for a second as though she had taken leave of her senses.

Upon emerging from the kitchen in her house, she asked me to close the door behind me, and it was at that point that that I froze on the spot and opened my mouth.

Then my brain clicked into gear, and my face lost the look of surprise which it had just registered.

I'd imagined that my mother had gone mad because, had I closed the door behind me, then it would leave Danny unable to cross the boundary between the living room and the kitchen, and I'd only end up having to get up and open it for him anyway.

Danny, of course, is gone, though, and I'd overlooked that fact for a second - his physical being is replaced by a large framed photo which is unlikely to ask to be let into the kitchen any time soon.

It isn't that I don't accept it, but that I have difficulty in processing it. In other words, it takes time for the reality of a situation to separate out from the kaleidoscope of thoughts, and for the separated ideas to be permanently internalised.

When I arrived at my mother's on Thursday afternoon, I was locked out of the house, having forgotten to pick up my key when I left here. It meant I was stood outside for a good ten minutes, and the wind was agitating the shrubbery in the neighbour's garden.

Danny would hide in there a lot, and when I saw the movement caused by the wind, I looked for a few seconds for the black-and-white cat responsible. This time, though, there was no surprise or misinterpretation - I knew I'd not see him, but nevertheless I searched.

Less than two weeks after his departure, Danny is Schrödinger's cat as far as I am concerned - depending on who I am with, or where I am, or my state of mind, he is sometimes alive, and sometimes dead.

I know, truly I know, that the cat represented by the photograph is irretrievable. Likewise, the image of Bluefish which I have saved on my computer - there is no prospect of snapping my fingers, uttering an invocation, and a smiling Australian woman emerging, unflustered, from its perimeter; and banging the plastic fork on the feeding dish won't set Danny in pursuit of his next meal.

When everything else has gone, whole lives are reduced to a batch of photographs, on which we stake everything. Since December 5 last year, Bluefish is no more and no less than three or four flat, dead images. Since November 10, Danny is no more than his two dimensional-photograph, trapped forever behind a wall of glass.

Yet we stake everything on these things, attempting to use the last remnants of history as the platform upon which to build some sort of future. It pains me to report that I don't appear to be doing a very good job of it.

Two.

Had history been other than it was, Ertugrul Osman was destined to become one of the most powerful men on earth.

Had the Ottoman Empire not met its death in 1923, when Ertugrul Osman was only 11 years old, then things would have been very different. Instead of being the one known as the last Ottoman, arriving just too late to stir the embers of the expiring dynasty, his hereditary luck would have immediately granted him a place in history - and not in the way he's currently remembered, if indeed he's remembered at all.

For Ertugrul Osman was fourth in-line to the great throne at the Sublime Porte at the point the Treaty of Lausanne, which divvied up the Osmanic carcass, was signed on July 24, 1923. His great future, and the dream of restoring his empire's hold on an area which once spanned vast swathes of three continents, was over before it had even begun.

Who could have blamed Ertugrul Osman if he had gone mad at that point, and spent the rest of his days moving a series of blue-topped drawing pins (representing Ottoman forces) over a map of southern Europe, North Africa, and parts of Asia, until they vastly outnumbered the red-topped drawing pins (representing the infidels?) It would have been understandable if his mortal hand - it should have been the unimpeachable, lightning-bringing appendage of a godhead but for a kink of history! - had swept away each and every red drawing pin, beyond the very boundaries of the map and into oblivion.

Who could have blamed Ertugrul Osman if he'd kept cats named after all the old imperial capitals: Sögüt, Bursa, Edirne, Constantinople, and drowned the pure white kitten called Istanbul in a bucket of water?

Somewhere along the line, fate kicked Ertugrul squarely in the face, in a double-image both hilarious and tragic: a roundhouse to the chops performed by the devastating offspring of Chuck Norris and Chun-Li from the Streetfighter video games, that caused Ertugrul to comically rear up into the air, a look of exaggerated astonishment fixed permanently to his face.

Everything that we laugh at is simultaneously deadening; there is a darkness that syncopates it, and makes it ordinary. As we hold our sides at the airborne Ertugrul Osman, our conscience is pricked because we make mirth at the demise of an empire, and its slow disaggregating in front of our streaming (with laughter) eyes.

When we laugh at something like this, we are overjoyed because nothing lasts forever, and because everything carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. It is a rare thing to look our own mortality squarely in the eye, and frighten it away with the roaring which comes from within. The tragedy of Ertugrul Osman is the tragedy of the human condition - the only difference being that, for us, it can never be other than it is.

Obituary.

So Danny, then, has gone, and it's as much as I can do to write about it in even a cursory fashion.

The overly-sized, overly-loved cat whose every move I have watched (or demanded reports of) for the last 14 years, was put to sleep on Wednesday at 10am.

Mobility had become a struggle (not impossible, but more difficult) and a long-standing ear infection was causing problems too.

Prescription after prescription did little to solve either complaint, and on Wednesday, it was again an exertion to get into the kitchen for breakfast. After breakfast, I noticed that the troublesome ear was bleeding; and my mother (with whom he lived) and I decided that enough was enough.

I'd imagined it was going to happen on Tuesday, but it was postponed in the hope that the latest anti-inflammatories would fix the limping which had troubled him for the last couple of weeks. That wasn't the case, though. Both Monday and Tuesday nights - when I was supposed to be sleeping - I was trying to work out the probability of either the ear or the limping being resolved satisfactorily and in the long-term, and couldn't help but feel utterly pessimistic.

The love which wants to end suffering is perhaps even more important than romantic love - the difficult, decisive move to deliver permanent darkness (from Danny's perspective) and a heaviness which will lift in time, but the imprint left by the weight will remain in perpetuity (from the perspective of everyone who knew Danny.)

In the early hours of Tuesday, I said a prolonged farewell, resting my head on his back, one of my hands stroking his fur, and wishing him well on the journey he was about to undertake. I explained that he had always been given the best possible life, and it was now our duty to give him the best possible death. In the middle of this sermon, he spun around and tried to bite the hand which was in contact with him. Even in the last 36 hours of his life, he still didn't care too much for his excessively-sentimental co-owner.

You will be well-remembered, Danny: the recalcitrant barrier sitting in the middle of a roll of wrapping paper at 2am on Christmas Day as I was trying to parcel up my last-minute gift ideas. It was quite deliberate; you stepping out of the cardboard box in which you'd been sleeping in order to sabotage my best efforts.

Inevitably, we'd end up with a ticker-tape of paper all over my mother's living room, with any number of shiny, spherical decorations miraculously 'fallen' from the tree and thrown across the floor, catching the light with you in skittish pursuit.

You, the catapult which would invade my room at 5:20am, and crash into the middle of my 'sleeping' body. I was wide awake, because the creaking of the door had given you away long ago, and was waiting for the impact to arrive. I'd still pretend to be asleep, though, until your head was so close to mine that your whiskers were tickling my face; then I'd exclaim: what the hell's going on here! and you'd purr ecstatically as my arms closed around you.

Even you, though, were subject to the brutal law of impermanence which brings low everything in the end. At least I take solace in the fact that human intervention saved you from the further ravages of age (for you were 98 in human years) and this relinquishing of your vessel at the 'right' time is the greatest symbol of how much you are loved.

One.

The flyer that came through the door stood out amongst the piles of unopened letters from broadband companies, Chinese takeaways, and threatening missives from the TV Licensing people.

It stood out because it was made up of cut-out letters from a newspaper, like the reminder of an IOU from an irate Mafia boss, and it stood out because of its original take on the spelling of English words:

GONE MISSIN. BELOVVED FAMILY PET. CAT. GINJER WIT WHITE MARKINS. ANSWERS T NAME OF FLUFY. LAST SIN NR MARKIT. PLEZE CALL 07766....

Jason Tipler looked at the note for a couple of seconds, and then put it on the table with all the other unsolicited junk. Cats were always going missing in this part of Yorkshire - they'd not got a chance on the main road that led out of town and towards civilisation.

That's just how it is, thought Jason Tipler, an unsentimental man in his early forties. You go out into the road, and you get eaten by a car. Or a van. Doesn't matter whether you're a cat, or a man - if you take a step too far, you're done for. He yawned, stretching his arms towards the sky, and considered some more how this is the one rule of the universe - horses for courses. And cats for roads. Or not.

This part of the world, whose boundaries consist of four corners in a rough parallelogram, respectively: the post office, which opened for business when the local youth weren't burning its innards out for fun; the convenience store owned by the wizened and sunken old Ken; a green expanse for recreation (and recreation, as far as we are concerned, involves shooting up, with the competitive part entailing not being caught); and the road out of here that leads elsewhere; yes, this part of the world, they make them tough and unsympathetic.

There used to be more markers here, and in years gone by we could've described the shape of the world in different terms. It was never Buckingham bloody Palace, but there was at least a garage, and a pet shop, and even what you might have almost called a supermarket. Not anymore, though. Most people had taken their business elsewhere long ago.... downsizing, they called it, or upscaling, but the outcome was the same for those who live here.

Confidence.

When writing, we are attempting to correct the asymmetry between the internal world of our thoughts, and the powers of understanding of our hypothetical audience.

But wait: there are issues that I have to resolve with myself first, before I can even think about those who want to read the things I have to say. I must be certain that my own expressive powers are the best they can be, else how can I ever hope for an anonymous other to pick up the thread I leave dangling?

When these powers of expression are at their peak, the outcome is pleasing, for a moment or two. At such times, it feels (misleadingly) as though I’m capable of writing forever – the catch-all word ‘confidence’ is present and correct, and I sit upon its magic carpet and fly along for a short while.

Confidence, what is it? We’ve been here before, in the dim and distant recesses of the thousands of words on here. It is nothing more than the repetition of an act, time after time, so that it can be reproduced perfectly at any given moment: the human-turned-machine turns out copy after copy of the only thing it has an aptitude for, and never breaks down. (For this is the definition of a machine – it has a limited repertoire, but performs brilliantly to its specifications. So a powerful chess computer can crush even a grand master, but the same computer couldn’t boil a packet of Super Noodles, or do the washing-up afterwards.)

Confidence, then, equates roughly to the following (incorrect) maxim that practice makes perfect - and, yet, the more your author writes, the less confident I am in what's produced. It's the law of diminishing returns - the more I strive to produce, the more ordinary I become.

Over the last days, the thought of writing something - anything - has occupied my mind relentlessly, and yet I cower away from the keyboard as if it's burning hot. I'll go into the kitchen to make a drink, come back again with a drink I didn't want in the first place, and then fail to write anything.

It's not a shortage of ideas, or a shortage of desire or interest - it's just exhaustion caused by the striated unavoidability of event after event after event, delivered upon a person who's too weak to tolerate their aggregation. When I say 'event' I'm referring to an intrusive thought, a work-related mistake, a broken promise to the self to get up and go to the gym. The little things add up, and the result is the spiritual death of a thousand cuts.

Writing is the most important thing in the world, and by far the least important. It at once saves any remaining sanity, whilst sending the unfortunate completely mad. I believe I can continue this way forever, and yet I know there's not a single world left in me.

Stag.

The largest single example of a wild creature in the English countryside is the magnificent emperor stag which can be found on Exmoor.

Or, rather, he could be found there up until a week or two ago, when he was shot dead by a hunter. The great emperor's antlers are presumably now sitting over someone's fireplace like a halo - a testament to the powerful beauty of nature, and humanity's knack of curtailing it.

The strange thing about the death of the stag, though, is that no carcass has yet been found. The newspapers in England have all reported the incident as a fait accompli without any corroborating evidence.

This is the victimless crime; the murder in cold blood without a body; the accusation without proof. Subsequent back-tracking from the papers suggests that the stag has been sighted, alive and awe-inspiring. So what's going on?

There is a narrative here, and whether it's happened by accident or not, it differs from what I understand to be the usual position of a cynical and mocking Press. Or, perhaps, your author is feeling too sensitive to reason with at the moment, and observes the world through an improbably soft focus.

It's like the plot of a Hollywood film, observed through the prism of the one group of people (journalists) who like good-news stories the least. Never can a journalist be more true to their profession than when they are writing an obituary with its solemn black border, and the flaring capitals which read: DEXTER THE EXMOOR STAG 2004-2010 - the gentle giant with his glorious turrets who was snatched away from us all too soon. We're offering a bumper reward of £20,000 for anyone who leads us to Dexter's killer. Call the newsdesk on 0208....

Yet the kink in this story is that the stag might still be alive, and we are thus no longer able to project our loathing onto the banker or hedge fund manager or Premiership footballer's agent who perpetrated the crime - a member of the moneyed, insulated classes who are the subject of much distaste.

The stag is a metaphor for everything that we feel has been taken away from us by distant, anonymous figures - our civil liberties, even more of our meagre wages, and our proximity to nature, eroded by boredom, technology, and the pressure to step into line by effacing our ugliness and insignificance with a quick shot of money.

But look: he lives! in the same way that we too persist, even as (we are sure) our lives are being progressively reduced to a nub by forces beyond our control. The stag is, if you want to believe it, a message for the 21st century, along with the birds who happily divebomb from telegraph poles, that all hope is not yet lost.

Confusion.

I have never liked the way I look, and yet paradoxically find that I check my appearance a lot.

This unusual state of affairs never really occurred to me until bedtime the other night, when I was cleaning my teeth and caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror. Everything's okay, I confirmed to myself, because I'm still there.

Sometimes I am struck by amazement that I can command a finger to move, and indeed it waves obediently in front of me. Why should this be - eppur si muove! I'm still there, I realised, and made a face. Of course, the reversed face in the mirror responded, and I went to bed with a heightened sense of self.

What is 'a heightened sense of self?' It is no less than the temporary resolution of the puzzle whereby someone unsure of his physical appearance constantly reminds himself of it by looking into the mirror. It is a respite from the battle of significance against nothingness with both factions agreeing to call a truce for a while.

I hold that human life - or any life at all, for that matter - is of no consequence whatsoever. Yet I mourn the loss of my grandmother, dote over a particular cat, and I miss Bluefish. Again, the battle of significance as against nothingness manifests itself.

In the same way that I am trying to accept the course of events (whatever they are - as a general statement) without resorting to excessive sadness or gratitude, it is possible to accept that the battle of significance against nothingness has two simultaneous, opposite answers, and not be too astonished by this realisation.

The first answer lies in my own irrelevance. I look in the mirror because I've progressively reduced myself to nothing with a barrage of negative thoughts, and I'm keen to see if something - anything - remains behind after the onslaught. What remains, of course, inevitably displeases. And yet, completely negating the first premise, I am living proof of the miracle of existence, with my wiggling fingers and Latin outbursts.

Similarly, I can say that human life is insignificant - a joke, even - and still concede that Bluefish is missed. In this case, I can happily hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously in my mind, and, having become aware of my own hypocrisy, now I must learn to not be frightened of, ashamed of, or overawed by them.

I wave to myself in the mirror, and it feels like nothing short of a miracle. Here I am, with Kundera's air-nozzle for a nose, and a face which is nothing more than a register of the emotions, and I am both nothing and everything. The cat, apropos of his nothingness, matters more because of his meaningless, temporary beauty. Suddenly, when everything begins to makes sense, nothing at all has any logical order or consistency, and it is this truth which we must all internalise.

Cat.

Sunday night, and the screech of a distressed cat outside the flat - once, then twice.

I at once rushed outside, falling over my own body as I threw on clothing, but there was nothing to be seen. It was perfectly dark, and gone 11pm, so I soon gave up the search.

For the rest of the night, though, I was unable to stop thinking about the terrified sounds I'd heard. I sat up until three in the morning, trying to distract myself with books and online newspapers, but the mystery cat superimposed itself over every other experience.

And, of course, my dreams were littered with cats making the noise of a siren - I slept terribly, waking with a headache that has hardly gone away since.

What a hostage to circumstance I am. Only last week I suggested an awakening of sorts: the realisation that events happen independently of us, and the only consistent is that we can react to them in a measured and non-dramatic manner.

Yet an imperilled cat whom I cannot rescue casts a shadow over an entire day. When my grandmother died, I know people were very close to saying: you simply can't let it affect everything in the way you are doing.

Even if it was never said, voices began to talk more slowly; the better, apparently, to convey information into my unheeding mind. Sentences began with the plaintive: Paul, love.... and thereafter an explanation that she isn't coming back.

Now the unknown cat has struck in the night, and I am edgy and ready to leap through my own shadow.

What hope is there for those of us who fail to deal with events? I am overwhelmed by them, the perfect autistic in Bluefish's paradigm. Dare to disturb the surface of the water even slightly, and I panic.

I need Groundhog Day, preferably without any compromised family pets, in a silent, blind universe.

Belonging.

I am beginning to believe that it was the idea of a Greater Serbia which contributed to the destruction of the former Yugoslavia.

Slobodan Milosevic's Greater Serbian vision was derived, seemingly, from the medieval Serbian Empire but with its boundaries re-drawn in a 'creative' way to swallow up as much of modern-day Croatia and Bosnia as possible, as well as all of Montenegro and all of (of course) Kosovo.

The Serbian Empire, meanwhile, began to dissolve after the loss of the Battle of Kosovo Polje to the Ottomans inside a single day in 1389; and hence its reconciliation with Serbia is an important part of that country's national identity. Indeed, on the 600th anniversary of the battle, Milosevic made a speech at its site in which he invoked the spirit of the defeated Serbs, inferring that their qualities as fighters would most likely be needed in the future.

Your author isn't particularly able to comment upon the political reasons for this speech, but I'm interested in how internalised ideas or wishes can accumulate, with the resulting aggregation being what we call 'national consciousness.' That is: in the case of Milosevic, and the ensuing meme which he spread, a Serb is a lesser Serb until and unless Kosovo is returned to Serbian hands.

I have lived in England all my life, but have never felt particularly English. The great symbols which form the national consciousness in this country have always felt alien, and I have been forced to cast the net wider, to other places, in order to find an imaginary land to which I can attach roots; which I can call home. The Queen is a redundant figurehead, whose only purpose is to parrot platitudes to incoming Prime Ministers, the dead of our wars, and to her subjects on Christmas Day.

At school, details of the history which shaped us - Bosworth Field, Hastings, Flanders - left me cold. I could think of nothing worse than having to recite lists of dates of ancient conflicts.

It is the case, then, that I am an ahistorical creature, for whom there is no such thing as England. The narrative which trickles down through the generations is unendingly tedious, and I struggle to be gripped by it, no matter how hard I try.

Furthermore, since August, I've done everything possible to jettison the objects from my own past. They at once sicken me, and shock me, these psychological trinkets whose circularity leads inevitably back to the self who originated them - these photographs, this memory, this heirloom. They appal me with their ordinariness, and I discard them.

It is not so much an effort to ignore history - my own, my country's - but instead there is an urge to rip it from its moorings and let it float or sink as it chooses, for it is not mine. What happened in the Balkans a couple of hundred years ago is fascinating, because I can append to it a narrative which I have never lived through. From Black George to Milosevic, it seems through my 21st-century eyes that the schisms of conflict could never have been any other way. The narrative, of course, is an imaginary one, and far more appealing it is for that.

Yet I, here in England, am detached from everything. Devoid of nationality, and a willing iconoclast of the treasured pointers which could give at least some bearings on an earth which has so many arrows saying 'you are here' that we are at once everywhere and nowhere, I turn about the little filament of the self, and ask why nothing seems to matter any more.

Immaturity.

It is no use someone else pointing out to you the depths of your own immaturity: no, they can cajole but the awareness of the matter must be realised independently.

So it was on Monday night, when I spoke to the woman who gave birth to these words back in 2008.

I mentioned to her that I still had a score to settle with the past; someone who barred the way to my first girlfriend when I was still a teenager.

Yes, leaping from the pages of every work of fiction, but very real to me, is the dramatis personae of the distrusting mother, fearful of the influence which an older male has over her daughter, and inclined to condemn as guilty until proven innocent.

One (alleged) comment caused me to resent this woman for years, and the feeling has only gone away since Monday.

What apparently happened is that her daughter and I were out some place or other, and were seen (doing nothing inappropriate) from a distance by this girl's mother.

The mother commented to a neighbour, so I was told, that this lad looks an idiot, and isn't good enough for her daughter.

I was affronted, and utterly livid. Why, I asked myself for years, did she not bother to speak to me before drawing her erroneous fucking conclusions?

Two things now come to mind. Firstly, if she had troubled herself to talk to me, it is the case that I was the trainee journalist with a fear of telephones, and a still greater fear of making conversation. So her worst fears about my general idiocy would likely have been solidified.

Secondly, appearances can deceive. Bluefish, of course, set our ill-starred ball rolling by questioning whether I might be autistic. I may or may not be (I never found out because the one frozen, horrendous e-mail I sent happened to bounce) but that is how I am perceived.

From this detached perspective, it is difficult to argue with the Medusa who has hissed in my ear for a decade, and so I shall argue no longer. You had a point, even if it ought to have been expressed with more care (assuming it had been said at all. Those for whom confidence is a stranger easily absorb second-hand, unsubstantiated criticism.)

I cast off my immaturity in a piecemeal way. Today, I react with an appalled, half-grief waiting to be fulfilled when I think about having to relinquish someone close to me.Tomorrow, I will shrug, blank-faced and monolithically unmoved.

When the younger girl in question ended our epic seven-week relationship, my response was the former: annihilated by sadness, I swore no female would ever similarly cause such damage again, and averted my eyes until three days ago.

No woman would take all of me for a second time - I shall always hold back in future, because if I'm excoriated in that manner again, I shall certainly die.

Of course, the late onset of maturity as I approach my 32nd birthday now makes the correct path apparent: give freely, without a second thought, to the outermost extremities of one's talents.

Be aware that even this exertion may not be enough, so the possibility of a relationship breaking down is theoretically possible - and yet do not permit this thought to obstruct all others.

The long, articulated tail of others who have been and gone is neither here nor there - they cannot condemn the present, and I extract the happy memories of them to feed today.

Even so, I shall not be free of mistakes, no matter how much positive ballast there is, but I can accept my errors and those of others, for such tests are our yardstick.

The mistakes of the past do not define us, and we ought not to align ourselves with an impossible future that glitters, only for it to certainly recede into a mirage, time after predictable time.

No, all we have is now, uncomplicated by distant, cherished ghosts and free of the guilt-inducing, unobtainable It.

There is nothing but the moment, and thus I am free.

Experiment.

I have been asking myself for days what the limitations of writing are.

The limits of your author's writing are apparent - perhaps they've been reached once or twice - but that isn't of any great interest. The boundaries of writing as a whole are what concern me, and how they might look.

As I type, the first thing that comes to mind is the work of Hubert Selby Jr., with its broken-down repertoire of punctuation, and words running into one another: all the time fuckaround. I'm thinking too of stream-of-consciousness - Beckett's 'How It Is.'

Yet still we are no further forward. If we were to multiply 'How It Is' by 'The Room' then we would have some idea of my idea of the extremities of writing, but I have read nowhere near deeply enough to state whether or not I cite good examples of the far recesses of expression.

Perhaps the hybrid of Beckett and Selby Jr. would be akin to the automatic writing practised by the Surrealists in the 1920s and 1930s; that is, the attempted release of the unconscious by writing the first thing that comes to mind.

About six months ago, I had an idea, but I've never had the time nor courage to follow it through. I wanted to act upon every thought I had, noting it down as I did so:

• You're pretty. Even though I've never seen you before, I think we should sleep together.


• I want to lay England in the next Ashes series for £500.


• How many times is that I've listened to John Lennon's Imagine tonight? Perhaps I should stop now.


• Sometimes this atheist is filled with religious sentiment. To be a real atheist, you have to get over that.


• I miss the woman who suggested I should start this blog. I should ask her to meet me again.


• I actually like David Cameron. Maybe you'll get my vote next time, you odious Conservative bastard.

Now this is getting somewhere close to where I imagine the end of the line is. Indeed, perhaps these simple, tedious outpourings of my own boring mind - no less than the very antithesis of creativity and akin to the Vienna Circle's generating of logical-positivist statements - might be the answer I seek.

I need to work on it some more, and not fall asleep at 3am when my thoughts are at their most ripe. I must learn to defy sleep, that enemy of the writer, and instead pick the thoughts and then labour over the skeletons and shadows which were scribbled into the notebook I keep next to my bed (there isn't yet a notebook.)

To truly create, you must let go of the handbrake, the handbrake imposed by society and by morals and by embarrassment. As long as it remains jammed fast against the fingers and the brain, everything that is written will be derivative and miserable and shallow.

Music.

All the public spaces in the western world will soon be polluted with the sound of popular music, and most of the private ones already are.

The 40 hours a week I work are spent listening to how love was lost, how it can be recaptured, how it feels to be currently loved, and the peculiar tensions of all three of those situations. When I go to the toilet, the volume in there is turned up relative to that in the office, akin to a nightclub.

Furthermore, I have the misfortune of living next to a pub. If I leave my flat during the evening, I can of course hear Keisha and Katy Perry blasting through the walls of the establishment.

There is no hiding place from it; not in the street, not on the train, not in the supermarket. This comes from someone whose exposure to chart music is reduced by virtue of not owning a television, and yet I still feel overwhelmed.

All public spaces will soon be places where it is impossible to think. There must be a reason for this, other than the blind desire to fill the silence, or the smaller sounds of people going about their lives.

Perhaps there is no longer anything to say - and if conversation is dead, then it makes sense to delay that revelation for as much as possible by playing pop music over our humiliation.

Yet the embarrassment of having exhausted ourselves intellectually is compounded by the awareness of what first superimposes itself over our words, and then replaces them. We don't surrender to a great ideal, or a thing of beauty - instead, we bow to the repetition of fictitious love stories, and their fictitious resolution.

To rebel against this is to become a madman, because its ubiquity is so great that we never even think about it any more. That public spaces equate to an aural assault is a given, and, like with Pope Benedict, there's no point fighting against it. Even to comment upon it is to condemn oneself as old-fashioned, a refusenik - but for all that, I confess it feels strange when the radio at work breaks down, or when the pub karaoke machine pauses to change tracks.

It's a social disease, akin to smoking, where the will of the few impacts upon the many. Unlike the smoking ban, however, asking for a music hiatus would be greeted with a sneer by those who impose it upon us in the first place.

I, we, all of us, are trapped in a prison of music; not great music or moving music, but the sort which will be forgotten in another six months, to be replaced by something only slightly different. It is the accompaniment to all our lives, and there's not a thing that can be done about it.

Slow.

All my life, I have tried and failed to resist the urge to do things too quickly.

Food is shovelled down the throat without interest in how it tastes or appears - the point is to consume the lot as quickly as possible, so that I might move onto.... well, nothing.

I have been unable to read properly for years, eyes blistering across the page and absorbing a handful of syllables at best.

Places and events whizz by in a blur, normally because I am moving far too quickly. The objective is to travel, but never to arrive.

I realised this, anew, earlier when I was racing through the streets to collect a prescription. I zig-zagged, swearing, in between pedestrians, moving out into the road to get around them. There were four hours before the surgery closed, and I started my journey some three minutes away.

This can't continue. It is too much insanity for no gain as I skim the surface of existence. I am a series of brief flickers, with no idea how one motivates the next.

It was with such things in mind that I abruptly cancelled my date for Saturday. It was amorphous, anyway - no time, no itinerary - because to be too enthusiastic is to court disaster.

After almost two years, I now know why Bluefish towers above all women. I have isolated the very thing which sets her apart, and I eye it greedily, knowing it is accessible to me once again.

Bluefish, the Australian girl at the far-flung end of the rainbow, was by her very geography the definition of unhurried. A day to get here, via South Korea, means nothing can be done in haste.

Bluefish, your spark was your infrequency. I did not even set eyes on you for more than six months, and it is this long ache which separates you from all others.

Now I must find it again, the deepest expression of human love, the prolonged note that builds to a crescendo before a wish is realised.

Only the slow can accomplish it, for it is not inevitable or a birthright. Through it, all desires are contingent, even if it entails the denial of your author's instinct.

Childhood.

I had a red octopus on a length of elastic and a series of imaginary cats as my childhood friends.

The above is stated without bitterness, and nor do I accept this is the lot of an only child.

No, there was a choice to be made at the age of seven or eight, and I went with the elastic-powered octopus and not my peers.

The octopus had a name, Ochie, which I could pronounce but have never attempted to spell until today. Between us, we were the rulers of all the seas. When the sea was very rough, Ochie could make the motions of being tossed in a storm by jerking at his elastic.

The earthly seas became dull - we had all that was in them, and nobody could take it away. Yet we were greedy for more, this amulet and I. There were vast bodies of water in space, until I turned 11 or 12 and they dried up.

We swam them all, and never feared anything we encountered, not even aquatic dinosaurs. I don't even know how we got up there, because I was just a slender child in glasses with an eye-patch, but we'd make it a nightly ritual.

I loved to spend time with my octopus. It stopped the Turin Shroud falling in front of my face like the curtain marking the end of an act, stinking of death and piety.

It floated into my vision often, the shroud, the sacred relic of a godhead I could not be sure was not a hoax. Even the word - shroud - sounded ancient and final and frightening.

If such darkness caused a child to jump out of his skin and throw up because of the great, sapping sobs whose rhythm shifted my torso to its music, then why would I not choose Ochie, and the water, and the dinosaurs that fled, awe-struck, when we made an appearance? Swim away, you fucking cowards!

I'd go cold with fear when I even thought the word 'fucking.' God's watching you, boy, and he don't miss owt. God's watching you, and he'll turn your lungs to mush like in the anti-smoking advert. His celestial bullet with your name on it will cabbage you for that, like Kennedy, and they'll be spooning up your brains from the pavement.

Ochie, no surprise I turned to you. I think you still live in the wardrobe at my mother's, and the passing of time won't have aged you a day. You are the key to the sadness which I totter beneath even today, the other self which I fed the badness I splintered off.

Perhaps we ought to sleep together again one night soon, and see if I do better than normal with your elastic tied around my finger.

Breakup.

The book currently occupying my attention the most is Misha Glenny's 'The Balkans.'

Put briefly, it charts the breakup of the Ottoman Empire from 1804, and explains how what had become Yugoslavia (or the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes) then splintered into the present day nations of Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, Montenegro and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

I'm not a historian, and so many of Glenny's arguments for the demise of the Ottoman Empire are alien to me. Without knowing the reasons, however, I can predict that the habit of countries splitting into smaller ones will continue, until the world map with which we are familiar becomes meaningless.

It's happening in Belgium, where the two halves of the country speak different languages, watch different television programmes, and read different newspapers.

The 70,000 or so South Ossetians are willing to create war in order to secede from Georgia, itself only an international baby after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Even in England, some of the inhabitants of Cornwall feel their apparent economic deprivation could be eased by separating from the United Kingdom and becoming the province of Kernow. This follows the political devolution of Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland.

For some reason, I am imagining this ties in with Saturday's news that Ed Miliband has been elected the new leader of the Labour Party.

Certainly in this country, the general feeling is that both Labour and the Conservatives have become ideologically indistinguishable, and Liberal Democrat voters (such as your author) are disappointed that our vote in the last election was used as a lever to get the Tories in through the back door.

Miliband, then, has a job on his hands to return Labour to their previous pre-eminence, but suspicion over the coalition means the normal Conservative-Labour binary argument is likely to become dominant in British politics again come 2015, with the chastened Liberal Democrats cut adrift as they take the blame for the coalition's cuts in public services. That is: those who don't instinctively want to vote Tory or Labour are likely to remain voiceless, perhaps for a generation.

There are alternatives, but they're not encouraging at first glance. The Campaign For A New Workers' Party boasts on its website that it has 4000 members - this compares to the hundreds of thousands which caused the Press to comment on the Labour Party's all-time low membership in the run-up to the last election. I must either be silent, my vote rendered a triviality as I cast it for a tiny minority party, or refuse to vote at all.

The other thing that could happen, of course, is that like-minded people petition for the breakup of England into autonomous, self-governed areas, and this would thus re-enthuse the vocal cords of those who hanker after a different sort of politics.

Having had the inkling, I confess to having no idea how a group of politically-motivated people could jemmy apart an entire nation - especially when their aims, and their ambitions for change, would be of course ill-defined and contradictory to begin with.

What is apparent is that the murderers of England would be regarded by many as the perpetrators of a true crime, a heinous one, no matter how noble their aims. Yet perhaps if we can accept that nationality is something conferred by the accident of birth, and nothing to be proud of, then a genuine revolution, one which would transform the English political landscape, and the lives of millions, might be on the cards.

One day soon, someone with greater oratory skills than I needs to declare England dead, and then we'll see what we can do about replacing it.

Birth.

I remember the chaotic birth-spark of this blog more than two years ago: a bottle of wine drained in a hotel room, a quick exit, and the feeling it had all been a mistake anyway.

The first time you saw me, you decided I presented no danger to you: that is, the probability of a sexual encounter was zero, or very close to zero. This you told me later, after the idea of going to bed together had ceased to be the elephant in the room (it never happened, not even close, despite my most persistent attempts) and we parted, never to see each other again.

It is interesting to me to enumerate the remaining memories of that day. Most of them are stretched and fat and blurred by now, in the same way as looking at objects immersed in water - I can make guesses as to what they are, without ever being certain. Yet one or two are perfectly reproducible at my will.

I know we looked at the gargoyles on some of the old buildings, and speculated about what might cause someone to spend time making something so hideous. At that moment, I felt inferior to you. You seemed to be able to talk about what was in front of you with authority, a result of your superior education and intellect.

I remember the pair of us sneaking into the hotel like thieves, hugging the walls and trying not to be seen together. It was akin to something in a dark, subtitled French comedy. Merde! Les gens ne sont pas chauves!

You made the suggestion that I ought to start writing, in lieu of seeing your dark stars of eyes again, and this is what I did. You were the shiver which caused its engine to cough into life, and it has kept turning ever since.

You are struggling, though, rootless and sad and vulnerable. It falls to me, in light of a recent instant message you left, to point out that the consequences of one - just one - day in your company persist after more than two years, no matter how amateurish the results published on here. You are capable of changing lives, even as you seemingly cannot change your own.

If it's any consolation, we all suffer like this, and there's no visible end to it. When my grandmother died, the message of support was there from you, slipped under my pillow by an angel in the middle of the night. I'll never forget how you touched my despair - for a second I ceased to mourn and said thankyou to the forces which created you.

Now you too must hang on, no matter how the choir of grim voices in your mind implore you to do otherwise. The sadness which crushes you is unique to you, but a similar weight is experienced by a teeming mass of billions of sorrowful, guilty humans. There are no answers, and I can't lift the heaviness with even the best-chosen words, but at least you are not alone. If thoughts could cure, you'd wake up later with a new realisation of your own significance.

Lethargy.

For months, I had been planning to visit London to abuse the Pope on his trip to the United Kingdom.

There are many reasons to go after Benedict, some personal and some a consequence of the office he holds. Thinking of them provokes the idea of rage; a wan hiss of displeasure freighted on a terrible-looking dragon straight out of the dark storm of mythology.

The idea that every new soul is a gift from God, and thus its prevention a sin, is appalling. Far better to have a pathetic life which last six hopeless weeks than never to have had it at all. This is the logic of the meek romantic, blinded by love and unable to think clearly.

Let us continue to see our women as empty vessels to be filled with children, thus says the Pope. And let us vilify the couples who intentionally remain childless, for they are scooped-out mannequins in the eyes of the Vatican.

None of this should matter to the atheist: he is not above such discussions, but removed from them, in the way that others greet cosmology or the West Lothian question with a shrug.

Yet it does matter, for the Pope only on Friday warned of the rise of secularism here. This, of course, is analogous to the tree surgeon asking what will become of him if the trees should wither, and advocating the planting of more trees without further ado.

Organisations exist only for their own propagation, no matter what the cost, and so it is with Catholicism. As long as there are sinners with a conscience, new sins will be invented to round up the unfortunates, and the self-referential nature of religion will continue unbroken. Those who invent the malaise own the antidote, delivered by the frightening appeal to a higher power.

In the end, though, I did not go. Going there or remaining here changes nothing, and the loudest protest I could muster would not alter one Catholic mind - and similarly I should remain unmoved by opposite views.

Truly, your author is supine, and accepts with a shrug that instututions and minds are immutable. There is not a flicker of protest left these days, nor a dissenting word, and not even the consolation that a few unpleasant words directed at Benedict would have been a lifter of my own mood, even as the whole of the rest of the cosmos trundles on in stark indifference.

Milestones.

The mark of an obsessive is found in the fact that he permits the subject of his mania to leak into all aspects of his life.

It is presumably evidence of a lack of sound mind to superimpose trivialities over apparently significant events, but that's how it is; and of course the major and minor premises are inverted such that the obsessive shudder comes first when the two things are associated.

For your author, then, Barnsley's results are the signpost that I ever existed at all, and they take precedence over everything else:

• 17 January 1998 - Barnsley 1 Crystal Palace 0 (oh, by the way, my father announced yesterday he'd ran away with another woman.)


• 5 December 2009 - Blackpool 1 Barnsley 2 (did I mention that Bluefish left today, and I'll never see her again?)


• 14 September 2010 - Barnsley 5 Leeds United 2 (the first time I've felt anything like normal in four or five months, a turning point of sorts.)

If there is a good thing about an obsession, it is that this surrogate can improve the outlook of an individual instantaneously, without effort from the sufferer. Of course, the reciprocal of this to realise all the effort in the world cannot change a mindset, because the cure is external to the self, and must be awaited patiently.

I did myself an injury when the equalising goal went in on Tuesday night, and lost control of my emotions completely. The experience of stepping outside oneself, with the joy vibrating through my entire body, is how I imagine it must be to ingest a strong recreational drug. Oh, pantheism, at that moment I was in you and of you as the stand shook with delirium.

Now it is painful to even sit down, because the small movements of my arms and hips propagate through my sore right shoulder and bruised ribs, causing my face to screw up in anguish.

Yet a few bruises is a small price to pay if the result is the lifting of this months-old fog for a few days.... a week.... perhaps longer?

Nothing is forever, and there is no significance or importance to be attached to anything. When contemplated too intensely, everything floats away like a flourescent, airy balloon.... mathematics, love, passion, reading, cats, language, football, history, science, politics, art, sleep, beauty, goodness, aesthetics, romance, knowledge, philosophy, religion, life, death, the moon, the stars.

At least, though, the obsessive can leave his calling card on each of them: hello, insignificant mathematics. Your greatest gift was to teach me that five exceeds two. Greetings, downcast moon - I can't remember whether or not you were shining as the fifth goal went in.

I am a dull individual, and what I have to say is boring. For now, though, I'll take that tedium as an improvement on much of the year thus far, and hold out hope that I'll be merely tedious tomorrow instead of tedious and unbearably unhappy.

Reset.

For the past month, I have been bitterly trying to reset my existence in the hope of escaping the nightmares (sleeping) and sense of displacement (waking).

In the absence of a button which can be depressed to implement starting again, and in the absence of suicide, I am condemned to fret around the edges of consciousness, re-arranging the furniture.

As I think about it more, I conclude that 'reset' means 'to break as many links as possible with the past,' and this is indeed what I have set out to do.

For this reason, then, I jettisoned my best friend, unable to look at him and the uncountable number of links to a shared past any longer. I am sick of history, and its habit of digging up my precious sleep.

I am sick of history with its predictable elasticity: I progress only so far from my origins, only to be dragged back to where I started like a dog on a leash.

To exist at all as a human is to be condemned to repeat the same mistakes, over and over, without remotely learning from them. The same pathetic tics which were condemning at the age of 20 continue to condemn, and it shall be ever thus, no matter to what extent I am able to wriggle from the quicksand.

Running away from history is as futile as running away from one's own shadow, and yet I cannot resist the urge to try it just one more time. A game of hide-and-seek, where no sooner dare I open my eyes than the same old spectres are crowding in again: surprise!

The I can never escape its I. As Barthes would have it, it's the same as asking the image to jump off its photographic paper and maintain an independent existence. It's the same as blaming the mirror for reporting back displeasing sights. There is no way out, and I am done for.

Doctor.

Me: Good morning, doctor. Herr Doctor - Herr Enemy!

Doctor: Good morning, Mr *********. What have you come to see me about today?

Me: I want to tell you that I sleep for hours and hours, and yet I wake up exhausted. The sleep is so hot, and so pressured - I imagine it's like being down a mine.

Doctor: What are you hoping that I can do for you?

Me: Well, the doctor is a magic box. He prescribes a mouthful of starlight three times a day, or some little crystals that die on the tongue, and abracadabra! Before you know it, you're out of the mine. I don't know why starlight or little crystals work, but they do.

Doctor: Hmmmm, so you're hoping I'll fix you, and then you'll not be the least little bit grateful.

Me: On the contrary. The return to normality is the greatest gift. I'll send you Christmas cards, and I'll talk with you about the weather if I happen to meet you in the street.

Doctor: You're a bloody hypocrite. Always the first to complain when the government makes you pay a penny too much tax, or when a girlfriend wounds you with her eyes. Why me, you say? I don't understand why they tax me! I wish I knew what I'd done to be looked at with such pity! Yet you've no interest in understanding how your own body can be coaxed from sickness!

Me: I admit it, I admit it! It doesn't matter whether I'm cured with an invocation, or with the latest in Swiss pharmaceuticals! If you can stop the nightmares, doctor, then I don't care about anything else.

Doctor: The nightmares, you say? What are these nightmares?

Me: My late grandmother, and one of my ex-girlfriends co-incide in the same dream sequence. The ex-girlfriend is levitating. My tiredness rages like a thirst, and yet I'm scared to go to sleep. There is no rest.

Doctor: Do you not see the beautiful symbolism? What an ordinary mind you have!

Me: You'll have to spell the symbolism out for me, Herr Doctor.

Doctor: They are the ghosts of your mind, fluttering in the unconscious. One dead, and one gone, as imagined by him knocked senseless with sleep. The sleeping mind gives equality to all things - a raindrop is as moving as a poem, and a triangle as frightening as hell raised.

Me: I do not care for the ghosts! Make them stop!

Doctor: Unfortunately they will persist, for there is no medicine.

Me: You mean to say that you can't silence them, or pull them out through my ear? I don't think you're much of a doctor.

Doctor: You are the sum of your past. If I kill the ghosts, I kill you, too. The truth is you must sleep with your ghosts, and make room in the bed for them.

Me: Not even a little sleeping-pill?

Doctor: Medicine is not the answer. Indeed, you are still to formulate the question. Perhaps the ghosts might tell you tonight. Now go - you are wasting my time.

With that, I left the surgery, and the blank ghosts waited just under your author's surface, trapped for now in their prison of natural light.

Court.

Two stories in the news today which show that the society in which I live is as serious as a bubble, floating away into insignificance as more advanced civilisations look upon us and laugh.

Firstly, the foreign secretary in the coalition government, the former Conservative leader William Hague, has been obliged to make a statement denying he is a homosexual, after a Labour Party blogger stated Hague had spent the night in the same hotel room as one of his male special aides.

As if spending the night in the same room as another male were not confirmation enough of Hague's gay tendencies, a photograph of he and the special advisor Christopher Myers appeared in the Press last weekend, showing the pair of them laughing, and Hague wearing a pair of wrap-around sunglasses. In 21st-century England, then, sleeping in the same room as another man, and being seen publicly laughing in your sunglasses with him is proof of homosexuality, at least as far as some sections of the media are concerned.

The default reaction of anyone who has been libelled is to go to the civil court, assuming they can actually afford to do so. The difficulty is in demonstrating (on the balance of probabilities) that what has been written is sufficient to cause the reasonable man to feel hatred, ridicule or contempt for the libelled individual.

Fifty years ago, perhaps, when being gay was more of a social taboo than it is now, it might have been possible to sue for libel and win. Today, perhaps not, leaving Hague to either do nothing and let the rumours continue to circulate, or release a statement in which he said his wife had suffered a number of miscarriages, and that there had been no improper relationship with Myers. Myers, incidentally, resigned.

The next story which caught your author's eye involves The Stig, an unnamed professional racing driver on the television programme 'Top Gear.' The Stig's job is to set lap times for cars tested on the programme, and Wikipedia tells me the character plays on the running joke of it being difficult to identify exactly who or what is inside a racing suit which covers the whole body.

It turns out that now the unidentified racing driver wishes to publish his autobiography, The Man In The White Suit, much to the disappointment of the BBC, who tried to take out an injunction to prevent the book being released.

The BBC said that the release of the book, and the unmasking of The Stig, would spoil the fun of Top Gear viewers, hence the reason for attempting to take out the injunction, which was refused.

So, in modern England, a man who is unfairly called homosexual doesn't have any legal redress against the blogger who made the allegation, and must resort to releasing difficult statements about the nature of the relationship he has with his wife, a statement which will presumably do little to make the rumours go away.

Yet it's perfectly acceptable to go to court to avoid spoiling television viewers' fun, and to spend public money doing so (even if the BBC failed, they made the effort). We are gradually being infantilised, and the likes of the BBC are complicit in this - we must be allowed to have our fun watching television programmes which keep us in suspense, so that there is something to talk about at work the next morning. Let me have my fun: this is worthy of the court's time.

We have our priorities wrong. Say what you like about another person, even if it compromises his career and damages his marriage and causes people to nudge each other for as long as William Hague lives. Dare to reveal yourself as The Stig, a prop in a television programme, and the full might of an injunction will narrowly miss you.

Ashes.

It was Wednesday night, and my grandmother's ashes were running through my hand like the sand in an egg-timer.

In this case, though, when they are gone, there is no inverting the egg-timer to watch them dribble away anew: it is over.

The ashes came in an olive-green cardboard box, heavy and impersonal, and I was handed them by my father with the words: there's your gran, and a gesture which suggested we should go ahead and do what was inevitable.

My father is full of very difficult love: I suspect it is unique to the north of England, or to men of his generation, or to men of his generation from the north of England. It is a love which speaks of anything other than what it is. 'There's your gran' is not designed to wound the recipient, and is more than a mere statement of fact. It is in actuality a tribute, and a paean to loss.

'There's your gran' are the words of a man who is frozen with grief; who can't dislodge the bullet of having had to watch his mother die in a hospital bed. To my father, love is expressed with a mock aggression which overlays a river of tenderness. I am told that as my grandmother opened her eyes for the last time, my dad said: you've decided to have a bloody look at me, have you? and moments later, she had ceased to be.

Sometimes, in the madness of a kiss, the rage of the moment causes us to utter: I love you, as soon as the kiss is broken, and then immediately regret it. In those instances, word gets the better of deed, and we admonish ourselves. In the case of my father, there is no case of tongue outflanking censorship - it is just difficult love, consisting of five going on six decades of reinforcement of the idea that emotion is tantamount to a sin for a man, an unwelcome refinement.

Yet, inadvertently, my wonderful father, despite his best efforts, unthinkingly made the gesture that absolves him of any historical grievances. That is, dad's emotions rushed upwards to speak to me, and in doing so made the once-in-a-lifetime offer which signified the enduring love a father has for his (frustrating and under-achieving) offspring.

We were each taking some ash, and sprinkling it on the land behind my grandmother's house. The other side of the neighbour's chicken run, over the grass, beneath the apple tree; the blowback was covering our faces and hair; my hands were grey.

When the plastic container was down to a handful, he asked: does tha want the last bit? and I refused, watching the last remnants dwindle away, pressing my head into his back in tears and knowing that his question had changed the nature of our relationship forever.

Distance.

To sympathise with someone whose long-distance (initiated-online) relationship has just ended, it takes someone who has experienced the same thing.

I've seen the reaction of others for myself - trying their hardest but failing to understand how losing someone who lives an ocean away is more painful than splitting with a partner who lives on the next street.

It is more painful because people in long-distance relationships eventually exhaust themselves in the name of the beloved. Conventionally, it is sufficient to say: this is what I am, and I hope it's acceptable to you. If not, we can cut our losses without too much trauma.

When the beloved is thousands of miles away, however, everything is acceptable and everything is permissible. I always warned Bluefish not to expect a god, but just a man. Not an infallible, but someone who has to go to work, and has suffered with depression, and struggles to complete basic tasks. Without such frequent warnings, I feared that Bluefish's most cherished wishes would come to be projected upon me, and of course I should fail to live up to them.

The difference is, then: when in a conventional relationship, it is normal to demonstrate your best qualities in order to become more desirable. When in a long-distance relationship, these qualities have to be suppressed, and their suppression leads to exhaustion due to the mental exertion required to keep them in check.

The energies which sustain the two types of relationship differ, too. Conventionally, we exist in the moment, like Buddhists. I feel love, and so I express it. I feel sadness, until your eyes solve the misery. You can't sleep until my voice delivers rest. We exist, here and now, and nothing is more important than the present.

Long-distance, however, only the future is of any consequence. Just three more months, darling. What I live for is the moment we are brought together; you exiled from your hot, dusty land and flung into this cold, impersonal one. The present is insignificant, because you are not physically in my present, with your appearance of an angel, and so I turn my back on the present, and hibernate until such time as you arrive. Only another month now. Keep holding on for me, for us, against the odds.

Yes, only someone who's experienced those dynamics can truly sympathise when someone else's long-distance relationship ends. It's the difference between an uncertain future and no future at all; the difference between a subliminal flicker of beauty across the eyeball and no beauty at all.

I know the sickness, and the misery, and the lack of closure, and the sense that it's all been for nothing anyway. Like everything, though - even love itself - I know those feelings don't last forever, and once you've begun to make a recovery, then you can hoard the memories and sentiments that are inviolable, and speak to you of a truth which no-one else can share.

An unbreakable truth? Surely, then, there is nowhere else to go, and you might as well give up on men - both local and online - forever, because the most pious symbols of love have already been written and arranged? Not so.

Human beings are creatures of the present. Ask them for their best 100 songs or books of all time, and close to the top you'll inevitably find music and literature released within the last few months, because the zeitgeist is so overwhelming. This bias towards the very recent is understandable, but if it can be overcome, then the future is not so bleak, and we can face it with the lessons of the past - most of them positive - as ballast for the unknown, exciting future.

Evidence.

If anyone wanted circumstantial evidence for the non-existence of God, it is there in their own synapses.

Buddhists apart, all Gods that have ever been created are covered in the fingerprints of human creativity - there's the one who was given birth to by a mere mortal, there are the ones with the human qualities of vengeance and jealousy, and there are the ones who take an unhealthy interest in our comings and goings.

No, there is nothing there worth worshipping in such a creature, who stands over us like an imposing, admonishing colossus, but a colossus with the same seeds of downfall as the scurrying ants he surveys.

Are we, in the 21st century, supposed to suspend our disbelief to the extent that petitioning a deity could ever have real, measurable results?

Oh, Lord, I am suffering, for someone dear to me has departed and now rests eternally in your kingdom. I throw myself upon your wisdom as I seek not only explanation, but comfort - and, in return, I pledge absolutely nothing. Not only an omniscient God, but a benevolent one, a foolish God providing the ultimate free lunch.

The funeral, and the beautiful words of the charming Reverend Sue; the poetry readings and the committal of the body to Christ; the singing of Abide With Me and the journey to the crematorium on a day when it seemed the whole of nature had come out to say goodbye - crows circling the hearse in respect, and fields of corn bowing in the wind - what greater tribute to the glory of religion could one ever wish for?

And yet, I suspect it's nothing more than a sham, akin to the veneer of civilisation, the result of penetrating which is to fall helplessly out of one's species, to become an outsider. We are not condemned as outsiders when we prick the bubble of religion, but we instead must steel ourselves to look at a universe which is indifferent to the plight of humanity, a plight which is summed up by Reverend Sue: we know and understand 'life's little day.'

A true god should be incomprehensible to us, and be far too un-human to care who dies, and who's in anguish. This sort of entity would be no less than the mechanistic universe itself, creating and destroying stars and galaxies and planets, and meanwhile the inhabitants of thisplanet proselytise and beg for comfort, like children.

Emergence.

The last thing in the world I want to do at the moment is to write, and yet I know I must do it if I'm to avoid descending into illness.

All week, those who care about my well-being have been asking how I am. There's only so many ways to say you're fucking awful before boredom sets in. Grief is tedious, orbiting unendingly around the same small flame, so that nothing new is gained.

It's odd that I mention repetition and tedium in the same sentence. Normally, we say that practising something over and over is the road to perfection, and is seen as a virtue. Yet in this case it's nothing more than a tiresome mental tic which it is best to put a stop to.

I recall stating before that it's possible to listen to a significant piece of music so many times that it eventually loses all its emotional power, and I'm now beginning to think that grief is just an extension of this process.

Grief is about draining the attachment to the past, and its network of associations, until we can think of that which has departed without collapsing in tears. And, for your author, charting the progress as the attachment diminishes is important.

At 03:37, the last thing in the world I want to do is write, and yet I am left with no choice because each word promises a return to normality - somehow, eventually, inevitably.

I am not yet able to write properly, with conviction and the whole gamut of emotions condensed into a sentence - but it is better than nothing. Words make me feel sick, and yet despite the nausea I can still shape them, even though the tiredness and lack of confidence is there for all to see.