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.