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.