Intuition.

After six months without regular employment, it had been confirmed that I'd finally got a job - the same one I left in October of the previous year.

It took a brave, almost-whispered phonecall to my manager, who said he'd be happy to set me back on in my old position. This meant a move 50 miles or so down the motorway, and the prospect of leaving behind Danny (the many times mentioned cat), who would remain in South Yorkshire with my mother.

This left a window of some two or three weeks to not only find a place, but to get the bulk of my possessions shifted down there. I've been thinking about Danny's unusual behaviour over the course f those few weeks, and it raises some questions which are interesting, even if I am uncertain about the conclusions I draw.

I took a big grey bag into my room, intending to fill it with books and clothes. It was the early days of my relationship with Bluefish, though, and she always managed to distract me, so the bag remained on the floor, empty.

I'd always operated an 'open-door' policy with Danny: come into my room whenever you like. I'll never be angry with you for doing so, even if you're jumping on the bed at six o'clock in the morning. The invitation, though, was almost always ignored.

Then, when I'd arranged to move out, I suddenly found that he became my lodger, spending most of his time on top of the luggage bag, which I'd placed next to the radiator (inadvertently). It might be coincidence, and I have no way of ever discovering whether it is the case, but I'd like to think that Danny knew I'd soon be leaving him and wished to spend as much time with me as he could.

I write from the point of view that it is true, and proceed from there. It raises questions about the nature of animal intuition and even into their consciousness or lack of it. If Danny knew that I was to leave him (and I refuse to put the word 'knew' in quote marks in the first instance; a suggestion that a cat's certainties are less than my own) then, a previously latent grasp of spoken English aside, from where did he get his knowledge.

When the Indonesian tsunami struck, legend has it, many animals escaped an almost certain death by moving to higher ground in the hours before the catastrophe. It is said that dogs were frenzied, with their owners unable to silence them. Even if there truly is a sensitivity, in animals, to forces which most humans cannot detect, how could it ever be demonstrated empirically?

These questions interest me, and I'd like to derive the answers, somehow, even if I have to be satisfied with a very tentative framework at the end. I need to sit with Danny when my moods fluctuate between unbearably sad to ecstatically happy, pensive to worried, and see how he responds to them, if indeed he responds at all. Or perhaps him being my lodger was just one of those things, the unpredictable movements of a cat who sleeps one week here, two weeks somewhere else....

Seeds.

When creative prose springs from a single idea, the usual result pertains to events (fictitious or otherwise) involving people (fictitious or otherwise.)

So we read about the Ebenistas in Zagreb, and their re-naming of the month of December as the final blow to the religion they were about to overthrow once and for all. We read about the bad-tempered Preferential Ninkovic and his decision to cut down the atheists in a repetition of every war waged on the grounds of religion throughout history.

What is written correlates roughly with our experience of the real world - events happen in linear time with a start, a middle, and an end. Even if I jumble them up, the reader is still capable of organising them chronologically.

Ideas leading to consequences, and events which took place in a chronological order, even if I later randomise their sequence - this is the currency of our everyday lives; the things we talk about, the things we go over in our minds wishing that they were different, or trying to decide how they might have ever been worse.

This ancient ballast is the kind of thing that a writer needs to toss overboard, in the vain hope of wiping the slate clean. Then instead of extrapolating from experience, we can extrapolate from that which hasn't been experienced, from Joyce's ''Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!'

What happens if this monstrosity - the sound of the heavenly thunderclap which told Adam and Eve that the game was up - is the primary motivation for setting pen to paper, or finger to keyboard?

It is akin to leaving familiar mathematics behind, and immersing oneself in the (to me) unpredictable world of imaginary numbers. The thunderclap's effect might as well have happened prior to its cause, and this is the licence granted when we are pulling at the roots of our creative powers.

I imagine voices shouting out of the void with no speaker; the virgin rumble of thunder signifying that chronological order is only ever to be a myth albeit a very convicing one; objects randomly appearing and disappearing in a cosmic continuity error, and the Rosicrucians travelling into the future and deriving their ideas upon their return to the past - but before I can even think of writing about them, I first have to disabuse myself of the old biases which prevent me doing so.

Shadow.

I am a shadow of my former self: it is though a puppet master has taken control of the shell of my body and made immaterial the wishes of the brain.

This is classic dualism, mind and machine separated at some point in the past, and existing independently. I know what I am supposed to feel, and the body carries out the correct movements, in the correct sequence, but there is little or no emotion behind them.

I expend a ridiculous amount of energy making sure that I transform internal states into expected visual ones - smiles of recognition, nods of affirmation when speaking to someone, even the falsehood that I am pleased to hear from people when I pick up the phone.

With practice, I am able to fake passion and interest and enthusiasm - but it comes at the price of genuine passion, interest and enthusiasm being increasingly less likely to be experienced. Only the true disenlightened can ever hope to lie to the self; only the disciple who has reached the end of the Western alphabet.

I am a child of my generation, submerged in the political dialogue which tells us unsurprisingly that the Prime Minister is a demanding individual who expects a lot from the people whom he works alongside; which holds that the cut of a politician's suit is of more significance than his manifesto; that being able to say the right thing - or doing the wrong thing and making an apology which is insincere in its sincerity - carries greater weight than any action.

These inversions are treated as the norm. Who, then, should be surprised that the normal course of behaviour is to imitate that which prevails and behave as a shadow - distant from nature, isolated from stimuli, cherishing the gesture over the rush of energy which contorts the body into the gesture?

This is the new conditioned autism, the path which is invariably reached when the whip that cracks is devoid of either whip or crack.... the 27th letter of the alphabet is autism, designed.

Poetry.

I've always been suspicious of poets and musicians, even as I confess to being strangely drawn to the former.

They take a spark of creation, and use its heat to form pre-existing patterns - the same complaint I always have about shuffling the small stock of existing symbols I have. Nobody should be surprised when there's nothing new under the sun.

Creativity is cut off at the root, so it would appear, when it is constrained into a rhythm or meter. I compare the most elegantly-crafted poem or sequence of lyrics to 'Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronn­tuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!' and to me one represents the edited, controlling influence of the super-ego, and the other is a glimpse into the stale mouth of the id.

Yet it's clear that the world which poets seek to rebuild in their oeuvre is, like the poems themselves, subject to regulation - all the things I've mentioned before, the natural events which caused people to invent God.

The rhythm of nature is reflected in the rhythm of poetry, and the beat of musical instruments - and yet I am still suspicious of it, thinking that the author has one hand tied behind his back. Why suspicious? Is it because I long to work with the unconscious, to fuse together disparate concepts and arrive at their synthesis, their syncretic dying of the light?

Or is it because I've never mastered the language of constancy and timing, watching it from afar with a confused face, as a monoglot would watch a foreigner? What form of autism is it that craves repetition and yet is repelled by music, hearing only dissonance where apparent harmony exists?

Game.

Every generation holds that their existence is a game; a game with shifting parameters that none of our predecessors have ever managed to finish.

Nobody even knows whether the game is finite any more. It used to be, back in the days of the Templars, searching for their slippery Holy Grail. The rules of this game state that either the Holy Grail exists, and once found it shall spill all the secrets of the cosmos; or it does not.

That means that men gave their lives - either during a conflict, or because it expired during the great chase - in the name of a reliquary or ossuary whose very existence is subject to doubt.

Of course, only the most durable and outstanding citizens are able to even participate. God's possession does not fall into the laps of the unworthy. The vast rump of us that remain are consigned to having to watch, and wait anxiously for news.

These days, even the Rosicrucians (one of the groups who searched for the Grail) have a website - complete with a phone number, but the search and the game have progressed. Now, the outstanding ones work at CERN, unpeeling the seemingly infinite onion of sub-atomic particles.

The message is the same, though: there is a secret, and it is up to the most able of us to discover what it is. Upon discovering it, the whole of creation is ours to read.

Some scientists have been bold enough to suggest that we are nothing more than characters in a very elaborate computer game being played out in virtual reality. As such, our deaths are no more serious than the programmer having to reset the deceased, and starting them up again with new parameters.

Taking these unscientific ideas to their conclusion, then, the attempt to re-create the Big Bang at CERN is no more than a subroutine within an incomprehensibly massive piece of code - and its accomplishment has already been described (even if it is not possible) somewhere within that code.

Rituals.

• watching the display on my childhood alarm clocks - first the bright green one, and then the red one - intently, only taking my eyes off it to blink. I had to wait until the sum of the digits on the display was exactly divisible by the number of digits, or the house would burn down and take everyone with it. 9:03, and all was well, likewise 22:57 - but 14:49, and I'd have to wait until 14:52 until I could look away again. Being disturbed meant the certainty of being consumed by fire, that same night.
• think of a number - normally less than 30 - and fix my eyes upon an unused plug socket. Keeping my eyes fixed on the socket, turn my head the number of times I'd just thought of - else a plug would appear, put there by an evil spirit, and disseminate disaster through the length of the cable.
• checking my face in the mirror and feeling surprise that the same one I always see is staring blankly back at me.
• on similar lines, waggling my fingers and being shocked because a hand! and an arm! are present, as though I've never before observed such wonder.
• playing a video game with the intensity and speed of someone possessed, because
• repeatedly praying for the health of Bluefish, even though my most carefully-considered view is that such appeals are never heard by any interventionist deity, let alone acted upon.

Gods were invented as a way of explaining the cyclical, and the frightening - the apparent dip and ascension of the sun thanks to the solar god, the changing of the seasons because the god of winter puts on her summer clothes; the lord of the clouds causing the sky to split apart in thunderstorm, the one who was born of fire burning up the earthly terrain in a message of foreboding for those living on it.

In most places, polytheism gave way to monotheism over the course of time, but the principle never changed - to bring predictive power and understanding where before there was none.

As there was no explanation before, it stands to reason that any explanation for the events which regulate nature is desirable: the displeasure or good temper of a god being as simple and convenient as any. Ah, pre-scientific people - how badly the modern era judges you, mocking your sacrifices and rituals!

Yet I'm as bad, coalescing repetitive tasks into a narrow, specific narrative, the completion of which will levitate Bluefish out of her hospital bed for good. Forget the painstaking deliberation of talented surgeons performing complicated strokes of dexterity. Not even the reaction of Bluefish's own prone body dictates what happens next - it all rests on my abilty to win on a 1990s video game, or type a whole sentence, correctly, with my eyes closed.

When I fail to type the sentence, and Bluefish is released from hospital in as good a state as anyone could reasonably expect, what then? As the desirable Amparo, constrained in Eco's novel, declared: I don't believe it, but it's true.

Hospital.

For 15 years I've played the victim as Barnsley sent me through a rainbow of emotions, the power of my will alone unable to redirect the bounce of the football either away from or towards the goal as per my desire.

I've watched the last embers of games through variegated fingers, or in a screaming, gesticulating half-dance whose symbols I don't pretend to be able to decode. The significant idea here is that, throughout all of the above, I have acted with the utmost seriousness, because I was convinced that what was unfolding before me mattered.

In the past six weeks or so, the games have been drained of significance and emotion - each one is a dead rubber. I have probed my mental apparatus as best I can, and my conclusions are senseless; words vomited into the air and landing in no particular order.

Now an event is about to take place the outcome of which might as well dictate that the sun's gravitational pull will cease to be felt; that the universe will be pricked by a cosmic pin and deflate to the size of an atom.

In the course of the next 24 hours, Bluefish goes into hospital overnight for the first time in her life, and her nerves are already taut. We've known what's coming for weeks now, of course, but understandably, no amount of long-distance reassurance or support can ease her mind.

When you are 12,000 miles away from the person you love, a mere sneeze is interpreted as an earthquake, meaning that a night in hospital is way off anything the Richter scale can report.

As with the other nights of my life that I used to consider were important, I am again reduced to the role of a partisan, terrified observer, waiting for a news bulletin as the faithful await updates on the condition of a sick Pope.

Yugoslavia.

I sit here sifting through my memories of Yugoslavia - a country which no longer exists, and which I never visited anyway.

I remember the death of Tito, from which day the artificially-packed constituents of Yugoslavia began to separate out once again. Six minds which had been encouraged - no, forced - to think along the same collective, communitised lines sought their independence, at no matter what cost.

I remember Zvonimir Boban kicking a Serbian policeman in the face at Maksimir Stadium, the event which they say tipped the country into civil war and led to its eventual dissolution. 'Yugoslavia' now represents not just a defunct place in south-eastern Europe, but a duration, spanning the dates from its aggregation to its disintegration.

The same fissures are appearing in present-day Belgium, but without the genocide. One day in the not too distant future, the Walloons and the Flemish will separate, and the unity we are so familiar with will be no more than a historical footnote. Of course, both groups will claim the spirit and history of the former nation as their birthright.

In another hundred years, people will express surprise that Yugoslavia ever existed at all, in the same way that Austria-Hungary sounds like an ancient experiment to my ears.

What of my false memories of Yugoslavia? The power station at Golubovci, Podgorica, in what's now Montenegro; the zoo just off Humska Street in Belgrade; the small plaque in Bosansko Grahovo marking the life and death of Gavrilo Princep, and warning that it must never happen again; the day out I spent at the army barracks in Skopje?

These are no more the derivation of my own experience than the story of my most recent trip to the moon - but I wonder to what extent a list of real placenames filled with fictitious attractions is any less valid than a defunct kingdom which is receding unstoppably into anecdote as the people who recall it grow older, and fewer?

This is the danger of history - we are condemned to repeat its mistakes as soon as even unspeakable and horrific actions are far enough in the past to be condemned as irrelevant to our modern society which, in possession of superior knowledge and ethics compared to our barbarian ancestors, now knows better.

One day, if we are not careful, someone in the future will write about Humska Street Zoo as being the flashpoint which lit up the Balkans - when Croatian dissidents kidnapped Veljko the lion and starved him to death by way of antagonising the Serbs into conflict. There are no records of it because the Tudjman government later expunged it from all official documentation; but the Serbs have long memories and are aware that no apology, even a brief, informal one, has ever been made by Zagreb. Until they get it, for some Serbs, the war is never over.