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.