Words.

I have been thinking about the words English-speakers have for love, and the words associated with love - and we are overwhelmingly negative.

We fall in love, in the same way as we fall out of bed or from a computer-table in the middle of the night because it cannot hold our weight. When we fall, it is then that we invent new swearwords and set about enumerating the few body parts which are not bruised beyond repair.

From 'fall' we are led inevitably to 'I fell for him', and the denouement of a magic trick or a swindle. You mean there is no God? Okay, you got me: I fell for it. We walk away, embarrassed, and resolve to be more alert next time.

Similarly, we can be love-sick: it is a malady for which there is no known cure; an affliction which diminishes the self.

More poetically, Cupid's arrow punctures the very flesh, leaving a hole where it entered. It speaks of a sharp dose of pain, and a scar which will never heal properly. Love ought not to be described thus, for we are constrained by our language, which defines the perimeter of our expectations.

Our language itself is insufficient to describe the incremental progression of what it is to love - we don't have enough tenses for the job.

In Serbian (and Spanish, as well as other languages) there are two separate tenses to cover the following two statements, which would both be expressed in the same tense in English:

• I was very thirsty, so I drank the largest glass of semi-skimmed milk I could lay my hands on.


• I drank the largest glass of semi-skimmed milk I could get my hands on, and as I was no longer thirsty I could concentrate on doing something else.

We lack the perfective and imperfective faculties of language, then, that allow a Spaniard to say, without tying themsleves up in knots:

• After a short time, I was permitted to lace my fingers through yours.


• After permitting me to lace my fingers through yours, I then concluded you had shifted both our perceptions in a way which was measurable by an increase in heart-rate.

When talking about love in English, then, we have a negative vocabulary, and no way to describe subtle yet terribly important fluctuations of a quality with respect to time.

I don't know what can be done about this. Being aware of the problems is a start, though. I shall try to arrive at a way to unambiguously talk about the first awakenings of need for another person; the idea that you already belong because you stay awake talking until five o'clock one morning and seven o'clock the next morning; the way in which a set of ideas can be represented by the light glancing from a pair of dark eyes, and that same light is then transmitted inexorably, with no loss of meaning, to your own eyes.

Wish me luck in coming up with the words. I shall need it.

Tension.

In the faked interview transcripts which were 'done' with the former Romania footballer Miodrag Belodedici earlier this year, he went into some detail about the most momentous event of his childhood.

Belodedici recalled, as a five-year-old living on the border between Serbia and Romania, watching the Yugoslav cup final on television, and how he had been swept away with emotion as Red Star Belgrade carried off the trophy.

That day, the 'baby' Miodrag, as he called himself, made it his life's ambition to play football for the biggest club in the old Yugoslavia - and he did so, with his crowning glory coming in Bari in the spring of 1991 as Red Star (or Џрвена Звезда*, Crvena Zvezda, as they are known in Serbia) became European champions - the only team ever to do so from the Balkans.

So this much we know: Belodedici dreamt, and Belodedici eventually did, like a fairytale. When I spoke to him, though, he was less forthcoming about the pressure, both internal and external, that existed as he lived through his greatest night in southern Italy.

It must surely have been there, and he must surely have felt it. I understand pressure and expectation and hope and other such intangible things to be as all-encompassing as the pull of gravity, and I can appreciate how ruinous they are when not respected, or, accordingly, when respected too much.

So for Belodedici to be aware, in the European Cup final against Marseille, that one slip or misjudgement would cost Red Star everything - how did he carry that knowledge with him and manage to function normally? The team were playing anyway with a very defensive mindset; none of the players wanted to be the one who erred fatally and cost Red Star the tournament.

There was, then, a human frailty to the greatest club side the former Yugoslavia ever produced, a collective fear of being beaten. They had iron in the soul, and the unabashed brilliance which had humiliated Bayern Munich in the semi-final had been forgotten, to be replaced with this torpor.

They were not beaten, though, and a goalless draw after extra-time condensed the outcome of the final into a penalty shoot-out. Belodedici took Red Star's third kick, and scored. He was not the master of his own dream, but where he could steer it, he did. It was for Darko Pancev to convert the winning penalty, and to realise what, 20 years later, the fictional Belodedici said was his life's ambition.
______________________________________________________________________________

Pressure for Belodedici, then, is his life rearing up before his eyes as he prepares to take Red Star Belgrade's third penalty in the European Cup final.

Belodedici doesn't miss: he puts the ball in the corner and walks away with his fist pumping, a half-smile crossing his lips. It's placed so perfectly that the goalkeeper can't hope to get close to it, his fingers clutching at the air as the ball flies past him and inside the post.

Pressure for the rest of us comes in more everyday, but no less important, circumstances. I am reminded of this on today, December 5, the second anniversary of the last time I saw Bluefish. There was a moment of tension similar to that experienced by Belodedici as he stepped up to the penalty spot, when all concepts become one, the Perpignan which all roads thus far have led up to.

She and I had spent part of the morning in an antiques shop, and suddenly the impulse was upon me to act. My eye had seen it, and the impetus was there to act, and act immediately.

*I read earlier that, one day, it’s likely Serbians will have to vote on which alphabet(s) they want to use: Latin, Cyrillic, or both? I am already campaigning in my head for the retention of Cyrillic.

Choices.

Your author uses the idea of the persona of Ertugrul Osman to express the concept of having lost something, for few of us, like him, have ever had to relinquish an empire.

This was Ertugrul's fate, for he was born just as the Ottoman Empire he'd have ruled began to take its last shallow breaths, and it had expired before he had the chance to steer it.

The choices open to Ertugrul after this setback are the choices open to all of us after having lost something dear to us, or, perhaps worse still, having seen a dream dashed just at the point when it was close to being realised.

Ertugrul could have:

1) shrugged his shoulders at the loss and carried on without a second thought, in a manner which is uncommon to most of us. The Ottoman state is dead, but I persist without it.

2) accepted his lot with a straight face, beneath which writhed feelings of devastation that were never properly dealt with.

3) summoned such rage that he set about reconstructing the empire from its roots, and made it his life's work - and when there is such an all-consuming imperative, it almost ceases to matter whether or not one succeeds.

4) split his mind into two parts - one which 'knew' the empire was lost, and which more often than not held sway when Ertugrul and the world interact. Sometimes, though, it was easy to believe the falsehood that all was as it had ever been. The Sublime Porte continues to radiate its influence across a vast sweep of the globe, and the culture built up from a tribe of 13th-century Muslim wanderers still strikes fear into its enemies and joy in its acolytes.

The next morning, you wake up with heaviness in the head, and in the limbs, and in the soul, because it was nothing more than a dream. Like being drunk, you can't properly remember all that happened to you last night, and this amnesia prevents the full horrors of your own mental state being drawn into the light.

Bridge.

It was J, my South African ex-girlfriend, who told me that your cats come back to you in the end.

We were sleeping in a tent in Mpumalanga, or cuddled together at her house in Johannesburg, when she broke this news to me.

I dismissed it in my usual way: you and your African shamanism. But she insisted it's true, even if I cannot accept it as being the truth.

That's your problem, said J - if it's not in front of your eyes, you don't care. There are things in the universe, though, that you cannot perceive with sight alone. You must listen to them with your soul and with your intuition, and then all will be revealed.

With that in mind, J continued, it is my contention that your cats return to you after their death. The colours are different, yes, but there is something nevertheless consistent about each one that marks it out as significant.

My eyes rolled mockingly. Are you sure, J? Are you sure? Your talk about evidence that my eyes can't process is a neat cop-out, and I feel it leaves a huge gap in your argument.

Danny was put to sleep on November 10 last year, and as far as I am concerned, that is as far as it goes. There is no extension to his existence; no return, and he sinks ever-further into the recesses of memory.

There is now another cat, and I was astonished when the vet told me this tiny ball of fluff is two years old. It cannot be - I am convinced you're wrong. Later, the vet conceded - yes, I overestimated. I was out by half, and New Cat is no more than 12 months old.

This puts the birth of New Cat at around the same time as the departure of Danny. Like the Dalai Lama, you cannot anoint a new one until the incumbent has died. Now I find myself suppressing the idea that a cat's repertoire is small anyway, and feigning surprise that Danny's dislike of being picked up from the floor is shared by New Cat; that both sniff the breeze before deciding whether to venture outside or not; that both shift into a playful mood when my fingers make ripples on the underside of a rug or blanket.

Intuition tells me there's nothing in it, and I said before that sanity breaks down once we begin to associate everything with everything else. The human in me sees connections, however, and I cannot prove that these connections are no more than flickers of the mind.

Thoughts.

My bedroom is a minefield of a hundred different cluttered objects, and I paid the price for this untidiness on Friday night.

The space is effectively partioned into two distinct sections; with the constituent parts of a bed delineating them, and it so happened I'd seen something I needed across the 'impassable' side of the room.

In order to get it (it was a DVD) I stepped up onto the table which houses the keyboard I am typing on, and then shifted my weight onto an askance computer table, intending to use it as a bridge across to the cabinet on which the DVD sat.

The moment my foot made contact with the computer table, I fell through it, landing on the floor some three or four feet below, back-first.

I lay there for two or three minutes, busy exhausting the supply of expletives that I know, and breathing hard. I wondered idly whether I'd broken something, but in truth the damage is superficial - I can feel my back every time I move sharply, and I wince when obliged to do certain motions with my arms. The (laboured) point I wish to make here is that my movement is restricted. I have to think about how to minimise discomfort prior to doing something - it's all un-natural, and forced.

Trying to learn Serbian is the same, and I was thinking about this when sitting with my note-pad, trying to write words in Cyrillic earlier.

I read Cyrillic letter-by-letter, one at a time, and after a couple of seconds am able to deduce that Восна is 'Bosnia'.

Of course, when I see the word in my familiar Latin alphabet, there is no hiatus for calculation, and I am not even able to understand how I read what I read, such is the rapidity of the action. It is like magic, with no conscious process taking place at all.

It is as though my mind fell off the computer table, too, and is having to be deliberate in all that it does lest it sustains further damage.

As I write, there is only one word in Cyrillic that I can read as naturally as I can its English equivalent, and that is the name of Croatia: Хрватска.I don't know why this should be the case, but it is.

I don't know which is best, to read B-O-S-N-A letter-by-letter, or to see 'HRVATSKA' as a composite, beautiful whole, because there is no philosophy or science of language learning that I have happened upon. You just have to sit copying out the alphabet, and the names of countries, and cities, and 'I don't speak Serbian' and 'it is a pleasure to meet you' in these awkward barbed-wire characters.

My back will heal long before the alphabetic schism in my brain is resolved. I take it as a good sign that I am reading the Latin 'y' as a Cyrillic 'u', though - this is the first of many steps.

Draft (2).

5) In my teenage years, I had a flair for picking up foreign languages very quickly.

Since those halcyon days, I have turned into Rabbit Angstrom, and the strange new words slide off the glassy surface of my brain and into oblivion.

There can be no arrogant assumptions about taking short-cuts, and information being retained first time, every time, as before - the years have made me wiser, but less of a learning-sponge, and I am aware that amendments need to be made.

I succeeded in re-learning some of the Spanish I knew thanks to a régime of flashcards and repeatedly testing myself with a computer program which asked for the English-Spanish or Spanish-English translation of various idioms, words, or verb-endings, or whatever.

It's laborious, but it works, and I'm prepared to sit and do the same thing for longer until the Serbian tems, and structure, sink in. The talent is still there - I just need someone to believe in it.

If I lock myself away for months, as I intend to do if the School of Slavonic and East European Studies accepts me, then I shall certainly learn to speak and write Serbian to a high level (even if I am presently confounded by the Cyrillic alphabet.... one step at a time.)

That is: I am conscious of the challenge and sacrifice required. Overawed by it I am not.

6) It would be a lie designed to impress you to state that I think of nothing other than Serbia and Croatia; but I do think about them more than I should. Neither of them are my mother-country, but nevertheless they call to me on a regular basis.

I sit here and think I know something: about Tito, about Milosevic, about Milos Obrenovic, about Karadjordje, about Prince Lazar, about the existence of Serbian epic poetry; about Stjepan Rodic; about Gavrilo Princip; about the Ottoman annexation of Bosnia; about the Austro-Hungarians' meddling in Balkan affairs; I think I understand what the four Cyrillic C's on the Serbian flag mean; I think I know why the Bosnian Football Association until recently had not one president but three.

In reality, I know little, and it will take me but days, but hours, with you, to realise this. Nevertheless, I have had a taste of history, and I hope for more than just snatched paragraphs on trains to and from work; when I am falling asleep.

Draft.

Six reasons why I wish to begin Serbian/Croatian Studies at SSEES and why I should prove to be an asset to your institution.

Each reason represents one the six republics of the former Yugoslavia.

1) Although I was born in the United Kingdom, I have a decent working knowledge of south-eastern European history, from Stephan Dusan's loss of the Serbian Empire followed by the Battle of Kosovo Polje in the CE14 to the one state of two faiths in the 1840s; from Gavrilo Princip triggering the Second World War, to the machinations of Slobodan Milosevic arguably causing the fission of the Yugoslav state in the late CE20.

2) By the time the course starts, I should already have some sort of grasp of Serbian language, having self-started thanks to one of Jelena Calic's audio-books for beginners. I don't pretend I shall be speaking like a native, but it will be a small buffer of knowledge nevertheless.

3) Such is my level of interest in the language, history and culture of the region that I am prepared to forego secure employment, with decent prospects, in order to learn more. This isn't something I'd do lightly. I realise I shall be most likely working in an off-licence or in a low-ranking office job for the duration of the course, and it is something I accept as necessary if I am to fulfill this ambition, which grows increasingly within me as time passes.

4) I expect that I have more life experience than the majority of applicants to SSEES. Having held down a job since the age of 19, and spent some of the time since that period engaging in Open University courses ranging from Spanish to history, I feel this equips me to re-align myself with full-time study, and yet I retain an interest in and knowledge of the former Yugoslavia gleaned from extensive reading, and the realisation that life throws up challenges unrelated to the results of examinations and the existence of deadlines.

Insanity.

Having allowed The Bell Jar to leak into my bones again in all its bleakness, I set myself wondering what it is that separates (mental) wellness from illness.

It differs for each of us, I imagine, but I can at least begin to enumerate the moments when I feel health begin to drain away from me as a consequence of some thought or other which has just been endured.

The night Bluefish underwent her neck operation is a case in point.

I was 12000 miles away from her during her ordeal, and I might as well have been on Neptune, or stuck in the Andromeda Galaxy for all the support I was able to offer.

When that's the reality, anything I can do is the equivalent of pushing chess pieces around a board in order to influence the outcome, one way or another, on a real battlefield. It is the same as printing a few Monopoly notes and then being puzzled when their introduction doesn't fix the economy.

Yet I played online games throughout the night and set myself high-score targets that had to be met if Bluefish was to get out of the hospital alive. Make a double-century in Little Master Cricket within the next hour, else she'll die. Beat three consecutive real-life players on some word game or other, else she'll die.

This is the point where causality ceases to exist, and it is the start of the long, winding path to mental destruction.

I can envisage the day when I shall need to recite the name of every Ottoman sultan before I permit myself to eat dinner; recite every nation in east Europe and its capital city before I drift off to sleep.

Once cause and effect are gone, so is the illusion of humanity, and every day I am more aware of its recession.

Plath.

Whenever I feel so sad that I want to jump out of the window, there is only one place to turn.

The flow of time has taught me that certain varities of low mood can be matched with certain songs, and I reach for these at the right moment and feel the condensed fog of misery loosen.

There are occasions - once every couple of years or so - when music is no longer sufficient, and I need a more severe remedy.

And it always happens randomly that I put my hand on my copy of The Bell Jar, which for months at a time sits quietly breathing next to Gough Whitlam's account of the end of his Australian premiership; next to Milan Kundera; next to Eco.

As ever, I fished out Plath by accident, and stared at the profile picture on the cover with its blonde halo: a familiar stranger; the longest shadow ever cast by our species.

Plath is the balancer of forces, pushing her reader closer to suicide as she simultaneously discourages it. In the end, I arrive back where I started, but increasingly sure of the fate which one day awaits.

Throughout the book, there is a sense of inevitability, a mere holding-back of the tide which must come and sweep everything away. We know now that Plath did eventually succumb, that her descent as a teenager was no one-off and would instead sharpen her legacy.

Some of our number spend a lifetime swallowing back the suicidal urge, and, for now, Plath returns it to the depths.

I already know it will bob back to the surface, though, a dead weight shimmering with my own reflection, and a reminder of what is yet to be done.

Normality.

As if ever confirmation was needed that life is well and truly back to normal post-San Francisco, Saturday saw my first away match with Barnsley since landing back in the country.

The 600-mile round trip to Portsmouth meant an 18-hour day from leaving home to returning there, and the team lost 2-0.

Only a small number of fans made the journey to the other end of the country, and spent the game backing the team noisily, even when it was clear defeat was inevitable.

I made the return trip north with no voice left, having exhausted it at some point early in the second half. We are the post-religious, singing hymns and believing what is clearly nonsense, but the glue of the crowd makes it so.

So life is as it ever was - I visited San Francisco, was mugged, had a ride in a police car, and left again. Now I spend my free time as I have spent it since my mid-teens - at away games, cold, lonely, frustrated, pensive, springing up from my seat at the merest sign of encouragement.

I am a human jack-in-the-box at times, animal noises coming out of my throat when we look like we might be about to do something positive: a long, hopeful growl.

Most of the time, our moves break down, and I re-attach myself to my seat muttering expletives to no-one in particular - fucking hell, eh? At Fratton Park, Barnsley were set for a draw, and conceded two goals in the space of about 90 seconds. Fuck me, eh? Fucking typical.

It is at these times, when everything is as it has ever been, that the momentum of change is somehow at its greatest.

As I mark time watching football matches, I am nonetheless aware of the push which was set in motion last week. I can feel the shove in the back, which guarantees nothing in itself, but holds out at least the probability that everything will be inverted.

I half-promised that if I came back from San Francisco in the grip of misery - which, when I listened to my heart beforehand, was so obvious that it hardly needed to be expressed - I would try to do something about a long-held ambition I have kindled.

Now the wheels are in motion. There can be no flinching when it seems as though they are about to roll over the top of you, for this is what happens when one makes eye contact with risk.

Eidos.

One morning, I went to check on Eidos, and I noticed that he had trouble with one of his legs.

He was in some distress, and I was still learning to communicate properly with him, so it was a struggle to find out exactly what had happened during the night.

It turned out that Eidos had slipped over on the wet ground at some time after midnight, and turned his carpus. It took 20 minutes or so to establish this, such was my inexperience in horse-language, but we got there in the end.

Eidos told me that he was sore, but would recover eventually, and I began to relax.

Then it struck me: Eidos is a fictitious horse, and the injury he had sustained was trying to point me towards something novel; something important. It either hadn't happened yet, or I was missing it.

In the same way as Misha Glenny's heavy (both materially and intellectually) book was an arrow directed into the past, and a portent that my American journey was hopelessly dommed, the damage toEidos was the beginning of the journey ended by Misha Glenny's survey of the declining Ottoman Empire.

A few days later, a woman with dark hair and dark eyes made herself known to me and the first time we spoke, she was recovering from a broken foot.

Border.

The US border control were very interested in me when I arrived in San Francisco.

A suspicious-looking Englishman, who couldn't answer specific questions about my plans there, and who had to look up the address I was staying at on my mobile.

They asked me to provide evidence that I'd ever leave the country again - requesting to see the e-mail with my return flight details - and questioned me about my job, interests, and the woman I was meeting. Who is she, sir? Friend? Girlfriend? How do you two know each other, sir?

More than anything, though, the US border control were keen to learn more about the book I had chosen as my in-flight reading: The Balkans by Misha Glenny.

So you have an interest in the Balkans, do you, sir?

I do, sir, yes - I find the area fascinating.

Seems like rather a large book for a flight, sir, don't you think?

I agree, I agree. It is very heavy! I kept falling asleep, waking up, reading a bit, and then drifting off back to sleep.

It can't be that interesting a book, then, sir?

On the contrary, sir, it is very interesting to me.

The conversation went on in this way for some time, and I was waved through after all my luggage had been opened and thoroughly searched.

Of course, it is only now that I realise my choice of book had given away my sub-conscious thoughts about going to the USA at all - I am more interested in the past than the present, and so the events in the present will never be permitted to proceed harmoniously.

This was confirmed two days into my trip, when I announced that I ought to have never fucking travelled in the first place, and my wish was to go back to England.

I dream of the past, and the past that never was: reading about the Ottomans and the Yugoslavs, and sitting on a bed in San Francisco declaring my love for the woman I haven't seen in almost two years, and will never see again.

I dream of the future that never will be, and this is the third horse, as yet unmentioned - it holds the other two in check and yet scares them sufficiently that they run amok.

It is enough to acknowledge that the third horse exists; an aggregation of hope and pain and failure. Perhaps it isn't so much a horse as a fence - Eidos and Onto look at it, and it seems as though it can be scaled. In reality, nothing they can ever do will see them emerge over the other side.

It seems as though it can be scaled because it constitute no more than a series of memory-traces - the image of a smile, a pair of eyes, fingers pushing through hair. Bodies who try to leap over it, though, find that is far higher and much more solid than they imagine, and they fall back to earth, hurt and bruised.

Horses (2).

When I tend to my two horses before bed-time, I am always reminded of the things I cannot do.

I am not able to drive a car; I cannot even be trusted on a bicycle. These tasks are beyond me. Yet I have looked after the pair of horses for as long as I am able to remember, and neither they nor I are yet to come to any harm.

That is not to say that I don't sometimes complain about having to organise them before I can organise myself - night after night, without fail, I must check that their box is draught-proof and escape-proof, and I need to be sure that the two of them - particularly Eidos - are serene. If anything frightens them, I clamber bitterly from my bed-clothes, swearing.

One horse at a time, I put my hand in front of their noses, and the air blowing from the nostrils tells me how quickly they are breathing; I then do what I can to restore normality. Talking to them, my voice is flat and gentle, though I am startled and displeased.

This took the longest time to learn - keeping the voice steady and the body immobile, even when suffering with the hallucinations which are caused by being woken suddenly. These ghosts of the night have to be temporarily suspended, for fear of disquieting the horses.

Calm belying inner turmoil must ensue, poker-face denying the horrors itching just below the skin.

It takes practice to do it properly but is worth getting right, for when I take the horses out the next day, they are well-rested and tend not to take me on the aimless magical mystery tours characteristic of an equine shaken from its natural state.

Jittery, scared horses do not make for a fun outing. Once, when Eidos was spooked, after I had learned to communicate with him unambiguously, he told me about a woman with dark hair and dark eyes, who lived across a body of water, and insisted that I should meet her, no matter what the cost.

Sleep.

Every night before sleep, I am obliged to secure my pair of horses lest they escape.

Years ago, I was naive enough to imagine they would not be able to think of anywhere they would like to go once I left them unattended, but the horses had more of a lust for seeing new places than I had anticipated.

They ran wild for a time, through the neighbouring fields, thundering over gates and dry-stone walls, and I had to get out of bed and bring them back into the stable.

Now I make sure the two of them are safely boxed-in, without means of escape, and I am able to rest until the sun comes up.

What fun they had when I foolishly allowed them to run free, though!

Learning about where they went, and what they did, was a slow process. Humans and horses don't communicate very well; and so it took time to learn the little unfortunate kinks of the equine language.

The horses' names are Onto and Eidos - I named them this when looking up Latin words in the dictionary, and they seemed as good as anything else I might call them.

There will be trouble in the village if either of them slips away again on an evening, though I would rather the more ponderous Onto make good his escape than the other one.

Most likely, I should catch Onto a hundred yards down the road, eating oats from a bucket. Eidos being turned loose does not bear thinking about for me.

Airport.

San Francisco International Airport, where crying had ceased to be a reaction and turned into a process.

No long, exhausting howls of pain here; no, I sat with my dust-grey sweatshirt and two bottles of lemonade, and re-invented the whole thing.

A bit of crying; a sip of drink; and the sweatshirt clearing the eyes; a bit of crying; a sip of drink; and the sweatshirt clearing the eyes; the liquid from the lemonade sustaining the fuel for the tears, and this was the case for a good half-an-hour.

People had stopped by my seat to ask if I was alright on a couple of occasions, at which I nodded slowly or grunted, assured them there was nothing to be concerned about, and at once continued the cry-drink-dry repertoire.

No-one took their line of questioning any further after I had dismissed them in the cold, practised way I have, for talking to a distressed person is difficult and unrewarding anyway, and this is more still the case when the distressed individual shows no desire to communicate.

No-one took their line of questioning any further, that is, until I was approached by two American employees of British Airways: Pamela and Maria.

Pamela and Maria refused to leave me alone until I had told them my story - yeah, I came here and contrived to fail in the most magnificent way; yeah, I got mugged when I was blogging on a bench - but the reason I am going home early is to do with the former and not the latter.

Maria hugged me and told me it isn't the end of the world, and she is of course correct. Relationships more substantial than the one which never happened in San Francisco come to an end every hour of every day.

She and Pamela tried to get a free upgrade for my flight back to London, and put me in one of the pre take-off executive lounges, where I could console myself with food and alcohol courtesy of the airline.

Pamela and Maria were on hand to demonstrate that, even when all seems lost, friendship can be found in the darkest corners; they showed empathy for a lost and heartbroken fellow human being at the point when it was needed most; they surpassed any corporate imperative with their cuddles and good humour.

Pamela and Maria are the unlikely saviours of a man who had refused to distribute his misery amongst others despite their best efforts - if an atheist is permitted to throw off his world-view for a moment and postulate the existence of angels, then this is the time to do so.

Horses.

Wednesday afternoon in San Francisco and the heat-haze silvered all the cars as far as my struggling eyes could see.

It was too sickeningly hot for any European that day; I had no thermometer but estimated that the temperature must have exceeded a hundred. Being weighed down by luggage and misery made it seem warmer still.

This was as good a time as any to die, I imagined - might as well get hit on the short journey from Stonestown to the nearest municipal train stop, or be cut to ribbons by a nimble chancer, obvious tourist that I am, on the ride from Balboa Park to the airport.

What a romance there is in the idea of dying far away from home: dessicated on a street corner even as the sun searches without success for more moisture to suck away. He died for an idea, people would say, and this place would serve as both a warning siren and a magnet for those who are still to come.

The mind is like a pair of racehorses - one at the peak of its powers which corresponds to ideas, hurdling them all with ease and rushing along to the next jump, always higher than the one preceding it. The second is past its best and canters at a more sedate pace, and this horse corresponds to how events evolve in front of the eyes.

It is for me to rein in the horse which corresponds to ideas, and to encourage the other horse which trots instead of gallops.

It is for me to put the brakes on the wild horse which suggests I could conceivably dehydrate in the middle of San Francisco; and, more importantly, it is for me to force the second horse to match the pace of the former.

When this is done, and the two creatures are neck-and-neck, then what is experienced and what is idealised will be equated - and strange San Francisco, or anywhere else, will not be as fearsome in future.

Exeunt.

Pier 39 in San Francisco, where the gulls cry, and the sea-lions shunt comically back and forth on the raised platforms where they have lived since the earthquake in 1986.

I hear the gulls, over me and around me, their voices holding in the air, and think it is the saddest sound I have ever heard.

What music could someone with the correct gift produce with the long seagull-notes as the basis of an elegy? How serious, how moving, would it be to write the music of San Francisco's seagulls?

This will be my abiding memory of the city, for I cut my visit here short, miserable and frustrating creature that I am, and return to England tomorrow.

Since Saturday, I had not been able to shake the idea that I had no business here. Heavy-headed and heavy-hearted, silent and difficult company, the fear of the unknown was always stronger than the desire to explore, experiment, get lost, learn, interact.

Fear bolts me to the present; fear defines the psychological problems from which I undoubtedly suffer. Fear has triumphed again, as it usually does. It is stronger than I am, more resilient, bigger, and I can find no way around it.

Since booking the early flight home, I cried, felt better, and went out to do things, without a care in the world. It is only when the game is nearly up that I can summon the energy to topple the demon who laughs endlessly at me. He fell over with barely a fight, and just as I am ready to start an adventure, it is all over. Now I sit under the starlight and type myself into something approaching stability, with fear seeming to be a distant and unlikely adversary.

This version of me might have even been worth loving - open, able, creative, proximate. It only ever happens when it is already too late, for paralysis sets in while the opportunity is still live.

Your author's experience of life is that of pressure - a self-inflicted, illogical pressure which has no bearing on the situation at hand. At Pier 39, I was free to think, and speak pleasantly to strangers, and imagine what might happen if I knew anything at all about music.

Now the situation is beyond help, and I must exeunt.

Farce.

The second time, history repeats itself as farce.

The lure of San Francisco proved too much in the end - what a betrayal of Bluefish that I should have even travelled here at all.

How is it possible to betray someone who is but a distant dot located somewhere in 2009, space increasing with every breath that is taken? Ah, but the dot is the eye of the storm, quietly seething as events coalesce around it; an organising principle emerging from chaos.

Even when occurrences fall into the void of history, as they all do in the end, the principles which caused them to hang together in their pomp can still be violated, and we can still be criticised for our lack of respect.

You can laugh at the idea of Yugoslavia if you want - what utter insanity it was to draw together six disparate countries and yoke them all under the one flag, these Christians, Muslims and Orthodox Serbs - and defend your giggling on the basis of lessons learned since the early part of the 1990s.

There is a difference between laughing at the failure of something, and mocking representations of it. You should never laugh at Doris Dragovic singing the old national anthem, Hej Jugosloveni, not even when she reaches the line about nothing ever being able to break the blue unity.

You should never laugh at the raising of the Yugoslav flag, even as you detect the punchline inherent in its central feature, the red star. One by one, all the star's points were snapped off, and all that remains are the old videos, and the memories, both invented and real.

This is the debt owed to old girlfriends: you can laugh at the hilarious circumstances which brought you together, and take the piss out of the history itself; but the little river of sentiment which perseveres after death, if you like, is sacrosanct.

Yet here I am in San Francisco, with perhaps the last person you would have ever have wished for me to spend time with. I am awkward and quiet and out-of-place. A redfish out of water, no less, and longing for the grit and rain and misery of England.

This repetition of history is farce, at once hilarious and sad, simultaneously significant and meaningless, everything and nothing.

Repetition.

History repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

First, there was a South African woman. She was the first experience of history as I mean it here.

The greatest humiliation, steering a shopping trolley around a car-park and being screamed at, in public, as though I was an ill-behaving child, and not, instead, someone doing his best with the very limited tools with which I had to work.

With a sigh, in the present, I reflect sadly on the limited tools I speak of.

Your author is capable of much - I can produce stellar academic essays in a single evening; I can at times write with clarity and purpose; I can become sometimes so close to other people or animals that it is enough to draw tears.

And yet, just as those talents seem certain to flower without limit, I am immolated by an inability to perform everyday, obvious tasks.

It is beyond me to steer a shopping-trolley in the right direction, even when mentally steeling the self for the task ahead; even with the caveat that such a simple task cannot possibly fail to be accomplished. With a pump of the fist and an invocation, I inevitably fail, every time. There is a inverse break between the magnitude of a task, and the efficiency with which it is carried out. At 13, I could speak perfect French, but could not draw a circle with a compass, dress myself, or tie up my shoelaces.

History repeated itself with Bluefish. I made it my obsessive goal to immortalise her. I will write you into permanence, my darling, even if it should kill me. You were born in the waters of a creation-myth, but your name is not writ upon water.

That I could not do so is still painful. There should have been a book written at least two years ago, a story of a pretty Australian woman's metamorphosis into the prophetic, painful Bluefish, and the stages of development therein. I wanted to save you, and observe with sad eyes and held breath the astonishing creature you had become. It never happened.

On a flight to Budapest, I shamed myself by being unable to stow our luggage into an overhead locker. I stood, watching others do it, and when it came to our turn, I failed magnificently. Don't fail by a whisker, do it properly; turning around and looking hopelessly, staring at the floor, shaking the head. Yet I used to be able to express you with such intensity that you would cry, and the wedding vows we got part of the way to constructing were heart-breaking, at least for us.

History repeated, first time as tragedy.

I lost you over nothing. It was a temporary blip, I think, and I wouldn't permit it, even though I told you to expect them from me.

Superior and haughty, I would declare - the fact is that I orbit you, Bluefish, and, like the planets, my orbit is elliptical. Some days I am in such intimate proximity to you that you'll be aware of it every moment that you wake, and at other times I am more difficult to detect. Be patient, and I shall inevitably swing back towards you.

I could not allow you to have an orbit of your own. No, you must be static, else I shall begin to fear that you no longer love me. Be static, else I'll kill us with my striated, polymorphous inadequacies. I lost you when I typed the words: get out of my life! after a drunken evening when the pain of the previous few days had at last caught up with the private, internal imperatives which had been hammering at the consciousness, and we never spoke again. The jolt into action comes at the moment when pain superimposes itself on the imperative which asks: for how much longer can this be allowed to continue?

Then, for night after night, I wound myself, snake-like, around the leg of the kitchen table, and screamed my loss at the ceiling, the indifferent ceiling. No God existed up there to listen to my cries. Even up in the heights, wherein the religious figures are supposed to be, there was no consolation whatever.

Truth.

An ocean away, but the recurrence of age-old mental tics continues.

They recur here, in San Francisco; even as I hoped they would be left behind in crisis-torn, chilly Europe.

Europe as we know it is set to splinter apart at any moment, that much is inevitable. It is the banks, this time, and those with some sort of knowledge hold out no hope. Nations seem to exist at an almost-permanent crossroads, tipping one way or the other, and the promise made that this hiatus is the last one before glory, before the coming-together of ambitious historicised plans. Hold your nerve, Europeans: the day is near.

I recur in San Francisco, existing at the last crossroads before glory, but the day remains as far away as ever. How many millions of souls have expired without ever crossing the last hiatus, and given up out of sheer disappointment?

Here, the nervous foreigner is not to be understood, and exists as a perpetual outsider. Even the food conspires against him, bursting apart like a bomb. Uncomprehending and unsteady, I take the form of a human but have the essence of something else; something less.

A person removed once; removed twice. Once from the species, and the second time from all that is famIliar.

This is what it is like to be mad - to travel to an English-speaking country, and to emit garbled and incomprehensible streams of rubbish. To your own ears, it makes sense to ask for a specific coffee, at a listed, fixed price, but the look of astonishment tells you the request has not been understood.

Astonishment's half-life turns to pity, and stabilises at disgust. Fucking stupid Englishman, weighed-down by ancient and obsolete values. No wonder your continent's wheezing its death-rattle if this is the sort of citizen it turns out.

Sylvia Plath had it right all along, in her clear, North American tones. How ironic that I should think of you just as your homeland accentuates the banality and churlishness of the tourist.

You can never escape the bell jar, not even for a moment. Its canopy is too enormous and too heavy to lift, and the attempt leads to exhaustion. You can never escape, and so you might as well go back to England - as sad as ever, but at least able to speak there.

Epilogue.

I have over-used the fact that starlight takes a long time to strike the eyes on this blog, and I make no apologies for that.

'Bad news comes from the stars,' I said in the past: by the time I realised that the relationship with Bluefish was in need of repair, it was already too late. Something had broken us long before, and I was only ever aware of the fracture when nothing could be done except to say my goodbyes.

'Bad news comes from the stars,' I said in the past: the domino effect whose denouement was the end of Yugoslavia had been set in motion long before most people realised that Slobodan Milosevic's June 15 speech was more than just posturing. By then, it was too late; too late to stop the movement which had already begun but had not yet completed.

To stop a punch from hitting you in the face, you must be able to anticipate. It is no use moving when the knuckles are inches from your nose. No, you need to duck while the arm is just starting its swing. In such situations, speed of thought is everything.

Even after the fist had made its impact, and Slovenia had announced its secession from the federation, people were still filling in their nationality as 'Yugoslav' on the census. This is to reject the status quo, and to embrace history. It is to look into the eyes of the dead, and smile instead of recoiling.

I wonder what the reaction would be in Podgorica, or Novi Sad, or Split, or Banja Luka, if a present-day citizen announced himself as a proud Yugoslav? You're showing your age, you fucking dinosaur - she's been dead for almost two decades!

In my mind, not only would there be laughter at the fossil making a pledge towards such a long-gone entity, but there would be questions raised as to how real Yugoslavia was anyway.

This post-First World War relic, thrown together to appease various national interests? This is how you define yourself? You are worshipping an accident!

The past has traction, and it is spine-tinglingly exciting when we feel it beneath our feet. Yet answering its call can lead only to misery, confusion, and ridicule. Better to throw the census in the bin than to answer 'Yugoslav'.

Serbia.

Things have never been the same in Serbia since June 15, 1389, the day their empire died.

I'll spare you the details of the Battle of Kosovo Polje, when the Serbs, led by Prince Lazar, were butchered in a matter of hours by Ottoman forces on their own land.

Every June 15 in Serbia sees a commemoration of the events of more than 600 years ago, and, in the minds of at least some, the wish for a restitution of the pre-1389 state of affairs.

There are two things here apparent about the nature of people and their relationship with the past - two things I shall expand upon if the energy to write properly ever returns. Perhaps this morning is the start of that process, but most likely not.

It seems there is a psychological tic which causes us to mark the end of events, when everything is almost played out and only the tragic denouement is acknowledged. The point in history where the decline of some system or other set in, presaging an inevitable conclusion, is usually overlooked, perhaps in the case of Serbia, the death of Dusan the Mighty some three decades earlier,

Secondly, the longing for a return to the pre-1389 Serbia: without Kosovo, there exists but a trepanned microstate, embarrassing in its illegitimacy. Only the restoration of the 14th-century borders can cure it.

Again, we (because the brief history of Serbia is an analogy for the history of everything) are guilty of selecting an arbitrary point in time, and declaring that it represents a zenith.

Thus affected, the only aim of the future is a recapitulation to a specific past. Macroscopically, the politics of entire nations can be fuelled by this mania. Zooming inwards, the lives of individuals can roil on similar private, internal drama.

Progression.

In life, the illusion of progress is one of the things which sustains us: indeed, sometimes it's the only thing.

A new concept or way of thinking allows us to vault effortlessly above and beyond our certainties or fears - these have been insurmountable in the past, and yet we overcome them as though they are made of air.

Yet still, at a given point later in time, the old concerns push themselves back into our dreams, and we are then back at the point where we started - all our work for nothing!

This is the illusion of progress; we are dogs on leashes who emerge so far from our shelter, and howl with joy at the daylight, only to return surely whence we came.

I too am its victim. I have fled the kennel, progressive creature that I am, but my master calls me home.

I shall once again make the effort to vault over myself. I shall once again make the attempt to be brave. For three years, I have written alone, a shaft of light which can hurt the eyes if you let it, or which you can ignore if you please.

Nobody is self-contained, though, and I can no longer create alone. It is with this, then, that this blog comes to an end. I am, though, not gone, and nor am I diminished by the new path that I - we - are about to take.

I can put words together, and I often do it badly. Why, then, should I refuse to collaborate with someone who can do such at least as well as I am able, often better, and who brings to the task of expression an additional, visual, layer which is well beyond my capabilities?

When we were discussing the idea, I laughed: if we go ahead with this, we are fucking Communists! I meant it in the sense of division of labour, and recouping only what our talents permit, but we are furthermore implementing something unnatural (collective writing as opposed to atomised, mapping onto Communism when compared with western political systems - not that the latter works well, either.)

We are fucking Communists, and we see ourselves carrying the torch of expressive, as opposed to human, progress. It is for us to ensure that it does not burn out.

We are fucking Communists, elusive and delicate.

http://theelusivethedelicate.tumblr.com/

Tension (I).

The meaninglessness of our lives and the non-existence of God: never proven, particularly the first one, but we can make a pretty good case for the plausibility of both, based on circumstantial evidence.

If I am important, and I presumably am if I am an offcut of some heavenly manifestation, then the events which change the course of this existence for better or worse must be massive enough to cause a part-god to shudder, either with pleasure or with horror.

For your author, though, the inevitable death of a cat or an old woman; the mistaken belief that I could pick up a handful of impenetrable Hungarian words; these events are enough to make the self plummet through the veneer of the self and reveal the void which lies below. Each time I confirm my own mediocrity, it is a little suicide. It is the tragedy of an insect accidentally killing itself with its own venom. It is the hilarity of a police officer's incapacitation as he turns his pepper spray on himself.

There are three or four moments which have come to define me, which, in the absence of everything else can stand quite nicely for what I am:



at the age of four, I was told under no circumstances must I put my hand into the exposed mechanism of the vacuum cleaner which my father was fixing. Do you understand? You don't go near it! The next thing I recall was my own scream as I was dragged away and/or struck, with my fingers edging ever-closer to the parts which would have severed them.

when I was expected to declare my undying love for my partner, in the form of a declaration that I would 'fight for her', and I not only refused, but said the opposite, precipitating the end of our relationship.

when I took the leaflet from the man in a Budapest street, and tried to read it. This entirely innocuous act changed Bluefish, and changed me.

In each case, it could have been otherwise. In each case, it was the difference between thought and action - even my four-year-old self knew that the rumbling, ancient vacuum cleaner was a clear and present danger.

Knowing, and not acting on that knowledge, is what condemns us. It accelerates the banal and the nondescript, and its new, temporary weight changes lives irreversibly. I am a vacuum cleaner part, a leaflet, an act of desertion, and these are not the concerns of a god-fragment: thus I contend it all counts for nothing.

Height.

In the last two weeks, I have become more like myself than ever.

More like myself than ever: scared to make progress from where I currently am, and yet thinking about very little else.

So, with the deadline of April 15 to get in the second of seven Open University assignments, it was at 5am on the day itself when I finally sent it off to my tutor.

It went, as did the first one, not with a feeling of relief that it had been completed at all, but with a sense that it's a matter of time, just a matter of time, before one of them doesn't get submitted. It isn't that I lack the willingness to do it, or arguably even the talent - it is instead the case that I am paralysed by fear.

I can no longer write, am incapable of study, and find myself thinking so much that I end up exhausted, and I hold that it is the result of being scared.

Scared of what, exactly? I could write for hours about the things that terrify me, if only I had the energy to actually do so.

There is a sense of shame when I send off a piece of work which is less than perfect. If it fails to astonish and delight, then I want nothing to do with it. Not in my name.

I return to the point of departure of a thousand, a hundred thousand, depressive thoughts: I am not a machine, and am thus unable to turn out perfection, over and over, without apparent effort.

Why demand perfection from one whose species persistently demonstrates inbuilt flaws, from nasal passages which fail to drain correctly, to faulty decision-making?

There is a lack of confidence in your author, attenuated by a paradoxical arrogance - as usual, the two contrary ideas co-exist quite happily in the mind. There is utter certainty that I was born for a purpose, and the simultaneous tension which states it was all an unhappy accident.

I am one who feels that everything must, at some point, come to an end. Like Kundera's poor Teresa, I am indeed scared of heights.

Fickle.

Where is the boundary between what is categorised as normal behaviour, and something more uncommon?

I remind myself here of when I studied libel as a journalism student. I don't know what the standard is these days, but when I was learning, the benchmark was set at whether the 'reasonable man' would be likely to find that something written had exposed the complainant to hatred, ridicule, or contempt. If this hypothetical creature answered 'yes' then the seeds of a defamation case could theoretically be sown in the English or Welsh civil courts.

Similarly, the 'reasonable man' is a useful tool when trying to answer the question I pose in the first sentence. It is obvious, but worth stating - normal behaviour is characterised by a lack of extremes. From this simple premise, there is more to be said about the word 'normal': yes, it implies that someone acts within accepted parameters, but furthermore that they do so consistently.

Such a lack of consistent action causes no end of concern to your author, who seemingly lacks the means to remedy it. Perhaps a lack of certainty, of conviction, and of priorities which fluctuate without reason, is indeed no more than can be expected from a flung-together bag of DNA.

There are times, for instance, when the excitement of constructing Platonic syllogisms (it's part of what I am expected to do for my next assignment) is almost overwhelming. I am at those moments replete with a devastatingly accurate vision of what the completed work will look like. The inner eye is capable of scanning the pages, and I more-or-less vibrate with anticipation at the thought of being able to leave work and set about it.

Inevitably, though, I freeze with fear when the time comes to actually start doing what I expect of myself. The grand vision is no more, and I sit as heavy as stone with the blood whooshing uselessly through my head - I can hear it.

Similarly, one would only need to ask the American girl - the one who complains I never write about her - for evidence of my own fickle sensibilities. Would the fictitious 'reasonable man' see it as normal that, over the course of x years, I have been able to cease communication with her at will, often for weeks, and yet at other times it is more than I can stand to not send her an SMS which just reads: I am thinking of you.

There are numerous problems here. I have a limited attention span, an interest in others which fluctuates from being non-existent to all-consuming, and my ambition to write, to learn, is visible in my mad eyes one morning, and tomorrow everything will be extinguished.

If this is normality, then I have no wish to be normal. If it is not, I wish to be fixed.

Psychiatry.

It was an unmitigated failure, the one time I ever visited a psychiatrist.

I'd told the doctor several times that I was contemplating carrying out serious harm to myself, and was not of the opinion that these thoughts were of the fanciful, speculative type.

I was prescribed escitalopram under the brand name of Cipralex, and these had the effect of ensuring that the edge was taken off the depressive feelings. I say feelings and not merely thoughts, because the prevailing characteristic I experienced was a sensation of dread rising upwards from my feet - in the way I assume a gas must propagate - with thoughts separate, but concurrent. The 'gas' has sufficient force to cause me to slump over my desk in the office, or to sink further into my bedclothes.

The Cipralex prevented the worst of these excesses, at the cost of being able to feel anything at all. The usual pleasures of an atmospheric football match, an absorbing book or article, an unexpected meeting with an ambling, purring cat gave no pleasure. For weeks, I was akin to a machine, completing processes in a detached manner. If any sentiment ever shattered this glass, it was inevitably something which confirmed the hopelessness and futility of existence, but not the opposite.

Nevertheless, I had undeniably been stabilised in some way: thoughts of self-harm were less frequent and less strong, and after a period of relative improvement, my GP made an appointment for me to speak with a psychiatrist.

I no longer recall every nuance of my conversation with her but do remember bemoaning the pointlessness of everything, and the certainty that my own life is worth nothing at all. I think I spoke briefly about childhood, and any ambitions I had left. The outcome of this was the conclusion that I must be suffering from stress, with the attendant instruction to attend counselling.

Stress counselling took the form of hour-long classes on six consecutive Thursdays: I was taught how to inflate a paper bag in the event of a panic attack, and given a mass of documentation about how I might cope with novel or difficult situations. From my statement to a GP that I wanted to die, I had thus washed up here, despite never having been close to a panic attack at any point I can recall.

So much for those dim and distant memories. Inspired by a Facebook post from a woman I don't even know, I want to ask what might be learned from it, and whether or not we can derive any general principles which could theoretically be applied.

It seems to me there is a straightforward correspondence which the mental health practitioner hopes to carry out: their first principle is that the past and the present do not commute, and thus the resolution to any psychological issues involves healing the discrepancy between memories and the present. It can be worded in whichever way - mending a break, removing a blockage. So from the perspective of the psychiatrist I had been allocated, there must have been some unpleasant experience in the past which had caused me to suffer from panic attacks. It can be dealt with either by working against the specific, particular incident or incidents, or by equipping me with general principles in order to deal with the past when it flares up in the here and now. We are aware, then, that there are two dimensions: the mind maps onto the world we experience.

There is another dimension which I don't believe psychiatrists have much interest in, and yet it is as valid as the other two mentioned above. There is a real past, and an imagined one - not the collective consciousness postulated by Jung, but a private, internalized fiction, signposted by hope, expectation and disappointment. It is accessible at will, and thus does not form part of any latent system as, say, Freud would hold.

If I ever visited Belgrade, I should be disappointed that there is no zoo on Humska Street and no plaque marking the territory of Veljko the deceased lion. That there is not, and that it nevertheless forms part of my psyche, is as worthy of discussion as the fact that the life of a woman I called Bluefish once overlapped into my own, or that I never felt I belonged in the east midlands.

What didn't happen, and what never could have happened, are fruitful terrain for debate and insight. Academics regularly purge the works of writers or painters for insights into their personalities. Such assessments are able to be made for us all, though, and I wonder if it is worth trying to establish a framework of some description so that it might be pursued further.

Eight.

When I was 14, I didn't want to do any homework because I'd just discovered something far more interesting.

I was able enough at school, but beyond French and Spanish classes found little to stimulate my interest. Only in my third decade did I realise the beauty and complexity of physics. Now, at 32, it is too late to do anything with that fascination other than read the works of popular scientists, and screw up my face in displeasure when the mathematical side of it kicks in. I perhaps give myself too much credit when I state I am aware of beauty and complexity - for me, they are but shadows, without substance, yet I at least know they are there at all.

The same went for history - a list of which king had superceded which king, and details of the power they wielded over the lives of millions of long-dead citizens. Now, I find history exciting, but it has again taken a shift of the mind to bring about this happy accident. In my early teenage years, I repeat, I was distracted by something far more interesting. I want to write about this briefly, and the circles we make in our own minds; returning to the same centre but the circumference is sometimes greater, sometimes smaller.

I didn't want to do any homework because my best friend and I were riotously entertained by the latest football game to hit the market in 1994 or therebouts - Sensible World of Soccer. When we played against each other, sometimes I'd win, and other times I'd lose. When I was on my own, though, and competing against the computer, I excelled. The limited Amiga couldn't cope with the speed of my hands, and I found glitches in the game which meant winning became easier. I estimate I would win eight or nine times out of ten, with maybe two draws or a draw and the odd loss making up the remainder.

There was one exception to my dominance, though, and I confess I didn't much like it. I swept aside Brazil, Italy, Germany, Argentina and England - I could get off to a bad start and still do enough to at least finish level at the end of the two three-minute halves. One country, though, regularly tripped up my proud Romanian team that I'd always select - I had fallen in love with the brilliant Gheorghe Hagi in his sunflower-yellow shirt, and I wanted to emulate him on my little 12-inch television set.

The fly in the ointment was Croatia. I had heard the name of that country mentioned on the news, and I knew there was a long war going on wherever in Europe Croatia happened to be. Srebrenica? Is that Croatia? If it isn't, it must be adjacent, and what's apparently happening there is beyond my comprehension. Back at my computer, the anger I felt at having been dismantled by the little football players in red-and-white was replaced by a grudging interest: who are you? Why do you flit in and out of my consciousness? Why do I feel a connection with you, even though you should mean nothing to me?

Seven.

The decline of the Ottoman Empire was rooted in inevitability, so the simplistic and easy thinking goes.

All empires contain the seed of their own destruction, from Rome to Austria-Hungary - it could never have been otherwise with Constantinople, based on the evidence of everything that had been and gone before it.

If this is true (and I suspect it might not be, but am nevertheless interested in following the premise to its conclusion) then it is a statement not just about Turks, and their separate existence outside the Ottoman bubble, but a statement about psychology, and humanity.

I think of Croatia, and the war that nation underwent in the 1840s with Hungary. The latter's suppression of Croatian culture and tradition was too much of an insult to bear - indeed, the local language was not even used in Croatia's parliament until 1847. Amongst other things, then, the Croats fought for their own identity - or, to borrow the term favoured by Misha Glenny, their national consciousness was at stake.

Glenny feels that, at that point, the Serbian sense of self was more sharply-defined: they had at least written epic poems about the time when their golden age ended, when the battle of Kosovo Polje was lost in the 14th century. Hence, the Croatians had fought for an idea which was not yet fully in bloom - the lightbulb of inspiration had gone off collectively, but the emerging conclusions of what it means to be a Croat had not yet been realised.

To be a nation, then, there must be a reference point, real or imagined, in the past around which the idea of what it is to be a Croat coalesces, and they had very little.

The opposite extreme of this is the Ottoman Empire itself, which has so many connections to a glorious history that we become overwhelmed. The Croatians had no narrative; the Ottomans had too many. Which outstanding achievement should we select to represent ourselves that will have relevance for the vast and disparate lands we call ours? What one characteristic unites one in Sarajevo, one in Bursa, one in the Maghreb, one in Yerevan?

If there is no narrative, then the Croatian state and the Ottoman state are doomed. It is a requirement, then, of a nation that the idea of it is upheld by myth, perpetuated by heroes, else it falls down.

Might we conclude, then, that the fragmenting of the globe into arbitrary, bounded regions we call countries is unnatural, and goes against our instincts, if it needs the ballast of a plotline to maintain it? Instead of clumping five million people in the western Balkans together, and calling their territory Croatia, might there be another way of labelling humans, one that doesn't condemn them from birth? The question will most likely keep me awake tonight.

Figment.

As far as depressive tendencies go, I have reduced them over the years to mere figments of existence.

I accept the bodily requirements of homeostasis - eat regularly, sleep regularly, urinate regularly. Similarly, I am aware of the oscillations of my own mood, and I manage these as best I am able.

This morning, I woke up after a decent sleep feeling as though I had not slept at all. The consequence of this was not just tiredness, but the impression that the whole of existence is a futile improbability which I am unfortunate to experience at all. The miracle of life can sometimes be a weight which we drag along with ourselves, to no definite purpose.

The sense of despair lasted until well into the afternoon, and only by 2pm I was just about re-emerging through my surface. Feeling better now, I can reflect an over-dramatic nature, and ponder the paradox of reason against instinct.

I hurt when I do not get answers to everything, even to questions whose answers are painful or unknowable. The hurt takes the form of disgust and shame at my lack of knowledge, and the reconciliation with a self which is incomplete. I consider that I am a being constructed of facts; and these facts guide and justify whatever decisions I make. Yet this is surely incorrect.

There is no understanding which supports most of what I do, and usually this is a comfortable enough situation. When my demeanour is more stable, I shrug dismissively, because it's just the human condition in all its emptiness. Some days, this vacuum is almost joyful.

Attention and motivation and confidence fluctuate without explanation. These too are mere figments of a self which endures without knowing why. The ship and the water are each unconscious of themselves, and of each other, influencing each other blindly and incessantly, until the former is overwhelmed.

I am at times the ship and at times the water, a bisected self either about to capsize, or asserting the pressure which causes the listing. The listing, I call the world, and the aggregation of expectancy, and assumed expectancy disguised as the mind's own wishes.

In reality, the ship and the water never existed, and just stand as images of what it must mean to live at all.

Fear.

I intended that 2011 would be the year of self-improvement, and I set three specific goals to help me become a better person.

'Better' is subjective, of course, and even the idea that we can, all of us, jettison that which prevents us reaching some ideal state, is rooted in fiction. It sounds like a Victorian imperative, and yet it is something which endures.

I promised myself I would think less of the ex-girlfriend who has been done to death on this blog; I promised I would react better to negative situations; and I began another Open University course, with a start date in February.

A February start meant a March deadline for the first assignment - in fact Friday was the cut-off point. I had everything done well in advance, and even had time to carry out numerous re-writes, fretting and editing and indeed tackling the whole thing from scratch on more than one occasion.

There comes a point when further refinement is futile. It is instead a test of character to publish and be damned, and this I found harder than the work itself. If the desire to learn something new, and to demonstrate it, is the theoretical desire to better oneself, then I can only conclude that my inclination to do so is limited. There were times, indeed, when I was so terrified of letting go of the thing that I stated I would let the deadline pass, fail the course at the first hurdle, and at least be free of the stomach-tightening anguish which heralded every thought of Doctor Faustus.

In the dim and distant past, I recall reading about the concept of homeostasis. The context in which I encountered it was in some psychological literature, but I suspect it can be applied to medicine as well as numerous other disciplines. It is nothing more than the need to return the body to some sort of equilibrium - Le Chatelier's Principle for the self. When we are too hot, we sweat in the hope of reaching a more ambient temperature. Even hunger can be expressed as the requirement to restore stability. If the self is analogous to a machine, then, homeostasis is the response to a red warning light.

For your author, the desire to remain rooted in hopelessness is a marker of identity; there is safety and comfort in the grim repetition of self-destructive habits, and that which threatens the ritual is greeted with suspicion.

Open University work is tough enough. Trying to do it whilst being pulled apart: simultaneously wishing to rise as I am pinned to the ground, requires a mental shift which will entail more than acquiring or not acquiring a qualification - it will, in the end, kill or cure.

Children.

What happens to us when we are children remains with us for the rest of our lives.

It is a rather Freudian perspective, but I nevertheless feel as though it has some merit to it. That isn't a statement about sexual motivation, though the argument can be made that such desires are formed, like most others, in the early years.

No, I am more interested here in how self-perceptions come to be, and the difficulty in overturning them once they have been allowed to settle. It is too simplistic to conclude that the revelation of our own beauty - or its opposite - sets us down one path or the other without fail, towards confidence in the self we project, or not. However, the realisation that we are judged on what we present, and that the outcome of that judgement matters, is the end of childhood innocence.

I mentioned before about the eye-patch that was the motif of my own childhood. When you are five years old, the opinion of other five-year-olds matters, and they are inevitably clinical in their assessment. For years, I cursed the broken, ruined eye and asked how things might have been different had I not had to spend my days 'like a pirate'. At an early age, you are already an outsider, already under adult pressures but without the experience or wit to cope with them.

Of course, nothing would have been different: there would have just been some other imperfection to have been highlighted. That is to say, we all get some, every last one of us. I even imagine it possible that a child could be singled out for being too pretty. We all get some, and we all give it back.

Realisation is knowing that we all get some. I had mine. Realisation is knowing that people die, that relationships end, and that it is your own response which decides whether the memory holds you back forever, or whether you can progress in spite of it. As Nietzsche would have it: whether it flourishes in a weak mind, or a strong one.

I say this now because I have a five-year-old friend, the child of a neighbour. He is just learning that he, too, is different in some way, and the tears follow inevitably. This boy is darker-skinned than his peers, and hence they call him chocolate muffin-head. I wish I could tell him we're all different, and hence this makes him unique, unique in his sameness.

You'd get it if you were lighter-skinned, or were taller, or were shorter, or fatter, or thinner, or more intelligent, or more stupid, or older, or younger, or prettier, or uglier, or more talkative, or too quiet, or if you had an eye-patch. From speaking to you, I know you have a quick wit and a sense of humour. I don't know yet whether your mind is weak or strong, though, and it is this which will let you shrug it off in the end, or not.

One day, you will see things for what they are. By then it might be too late, because the mirror throws back disgusting images that don't recede even when you are told by a woman how beautiful you are, and that you'd be precious and worth having even if that wasn't the case. You need to be able to see before the certainty of your own appalling vision fixes itself irreversibly, else it'll be like a fog over everything - a fog that not even genuine, abiding love can lift, at least not for very long.

Capability.

For the next week, and no more than that, the office where I work is located in the middle of a large warehouse.

It was moved there at the behest of a director towards the end of last year, and I was never happy with the idea. For one, there's no natural light (I always half-joke that it's a fucking prison) and secondly the noise from the forklift trucks is loud enough to hear even from two flights of steps above.

The worst thing, though, is that the warehouse is so vast that I can easily get lost in there for a good half-hour or so, making me embarrassingly late for the start of my shift, or delayed coming back from lunch. Earlier, I couldn't find my way out when I was trying to leave for the night, with the net result that I arrived home even more frustrated with myself than normal.

I've tried to do two things: I told my manager I have an appalling sense of direction, and am thus certain to get swallowed up from time to time, so please don't be too hard on me when I roll in miles past my allotted start time, humiliated. It occurred to me that if I had some obvious impediment, the company would have no choice but to exercise some patience with me - but I do not and thus my manager has seen fit to ignore me.

Secondly, I've tried to find 'markers' in the warehouse to give me a rough idea of where I am going. One vast bank of plasma-screen televisions here looks the same as these adjacent ones, though, and so I have given up the ghost on that. I am no further forward.

My manager can't believe I would struggle to get from one place to another inside the warehouse because I am otherwise capable of doing everything asked of me (and more) but it is true. In other words, people don't accept that I find it hard to do things which other people take for granted, but this instance is one of many that I can recall throughout my life:

• at the age of five, I could read books written for 11-year-olds, but could neither tie my shoelaces nor dress myself.


• at 13, I could speak fluent French but was unable to put on my school tie even when standing in front of a mirror.


• at 14, I was sent to the remedial class because I was incapable of drawing a circle with a compass.


• at 30, I didn't know what to do with a piece of luggage on a flight, despite the fact that I was standing in front of an overhead luggage rack, watching other people load their belongings onto it. I stood there, frozen, for what seemed like forever, and can still remember Bluefish's anger and disappointment that I couldn't carry out such a straightforward job.

I am capable but useless; clever but interminably stupid; talented but beyond help. The warehouse is none other than the continuation of a thread which refuses to be broken. This is more uncharted territory, in the ossuary of my own behaviour.

Truth.

The blog as confessional: unchartered territory and yet I do it all the time.

That means, then, there are two categories of confession - there are the things which lie just underneath my most conscious experience (I do it all the time) and those of which I am painfully aware but never speak of (unchartered territory).

Examples in the first category which I have mentioned on here in the past are: I am attracted to a work colleague; I called a child a cunt in the hope of corrupting him; I didn't dare to look at my grandmother's body because I knew it would haunt me forever. These are small, individual statements which give an insight into the character of the person blogging, but which are too broad and insufficiently regular to permit general conclusions to be drawn.

Unchartered territory, then, implies something more serious, and more difficult - something which suggests a trait, and exists at least semi-permanently. It silently expresses the hope that a change can be made, once the unvarnished truth is upon us, even though the last time I ever imparted something particularly weighty, life continued much as normal. (This was the fear that I might have Asperger's Syndrome, and I never progressed further than an e-mail to some society or other, which bounced. The desire to be diagnosed, then, was weaker than the inertia which does not want to change. More than two years later, I remain as I was.)

Enough prevaricating. Your author is hopelessly addicted to the internet, and has been for years. The most amusing thing is the use of the internet to confirm my own need for it - what more evidence could anyone require?

I could happily never touch another drop of alcohol, I have never had a cigarette in my mouth, and have never taken a drug other than those prescribed by a doctor or bought in a chemist's. They do nothing for me, and those who depend on them are weak-willed. Yet the internet? I should be lost without the glut of information upon which I gorge, the forums, the anonymity, the instant messengers, the blogs.

I don't even know if I want it to change, let alone whether I could. The truth is writ large, though, now, and I can hardly be a worse person for it.

Politics.

What possible benefit is there in acknowledging the existence of the British National Party by turning out to protest against them this coming weekend?

As much as the media love to scaremonger by warning of a very right-wing tide coming to sweep away politics, we are still talking about a party which will do well, at its zenith, to scrape a million votes nationwide in a general election. The whole democratic process seems skewed so much in favour of red or blue (with yellow ballast in the lean years) that any would-be gatecrasher discovers the first-past-the-post system is their undoing.

It isn't for me to arrogantly point out the error of other people's ways: those whom I tutor would be able to fully reciprocate. You might not have an irrational fear of Muslims (for that is what it is) but you lack x, y and z, hence you are no less human than us. Where I wrote about the preservation of the cat in the cat, now I argue that I seek to extinguish the man in the man.

All the above has occurred to me since the weekend; yet so too do I realise that I might be generating excuse after excuse to avoid doing morally what I feel to be correct. This is hardly new, of course: I elected to attend a dreary goalless draw at home to Derby instead of travelling to London to abuse the Pope in September of last year. Instinct told me that giving some to Benedict was the only choice, but familiarity and cowardice held me to the stultifying beat of routine.

Speaking truth to power does not, of course, begin and end with a public display of excoriation or support. I eat neither KFC nor McDonalds, and yet have never felt the urge to join in anti-animal cruelty or anti-capitalist demonstrations; nor have I protested about the ease with which one can begin a libel case in the English courts. As with religion, some beliefs are better practiced in private, and yet I feel unconvinced that being uncomfortable with racists is one of them.

Morally, I ought to be there at the weekend, in the names of the Australian and Zimbabwean muses of the past; in the names of my friends from Ghana and Iran; in the name of the woman whose parting gift was to ask me to write for her. All would theoretically attract the interest of the British National Party should they ever gain significant power, and I must express my disquiet on their behalf.

Yet England is no Egypt, where an ancient and fossilised leader can be unseated in 18 days of protest, the contagious revolution spreading across North Africa and Asia to terrify the old despots. Here, millions poured into the streets to protest against an illegal war, with the outcome that it went ahead anyway.

I am, then, voiceless, castrated as far as politics goes. Any sound I make goes unheard, like the tree falling in the forest when nobody is around to hear its death. Yet still there is purpose, even pleasure, in the act of vocalising, and it is to this notion that I must reconcile myself to before Saturday, else I shall never get out of bed.

Politics.

Barnsley on the second Saturday in February, and your author's head thick with the toxins of the night before.

Four, maybe five, drinks had been consumed in the evening, with a glass of neat fire-water truncating each end; and I had paid the price.

There was a long, yawning gap between mid-morning and the game kicking off, and I didn't know what to do with myself. Any diversion to escape the terrible drum-beat in my skull would be gratefully-received, overhung disgrace that I am.

I walked up the main street and noticed that the British National Party were out in force again: here was the distraction I had been waiting for. Not that I am brave enough to even yell abuse, let alone ambush them, but I could pace up and down glaring at them menacingly. Hail the political animal who won't countenance getting a good kicking for his beliefs.

Barnsley is a political hotbed at present: the town centre MP was jailed last week for falsely claiming expenses, and that event triggered a by-election. Labour have always been strong here, and yet, as ever, the far-right are hopeful of the breakthrough which will legitimise them - a first, monumental, seat in the House of Commons.

It won't happen, not here, and not yet, but a relatively poor northern town like it is the most probable site of the BNP's big moment. I have wondered before how we can head them off, and I was soon to find the answer.

Outlawing the party is not the answer. It would kill off once and for all the ambition to enter mainstream political debate, but it would not curtail the wishes of their supporters - in fact, the sense of injustice would strengthen allegiance. Instead, holding their policies up to scrutiny and dismantling them should be the method. Responding to hatred with repression does not rid us of hate.

Accept that they are here to stay, and then formulate an answer. At the far end of the same street was the response - a softly-spoken pagan lady representing Unite Against Fascism, who had turned up with a handful of others to swim against the tide. In the 15 minutes I spent with her, people approached her to vocalise their fears. One had never met a nice Muslim; another said he would vote BNP because he had been told sharia law was the norm in Leicester these days; another said the Muslims are trying to ban Christmas and he wanted to uphold traditional values.

Without condemning, the pagan lady tried to debunk each argument in her unthreatening way, and those she spoke with went away with their beliefs shaken - but not fatally undermined. It will take many more of her ilk to weaken the base of a minority party which receives more attention than it should, and it is not enough to torpedo the BNP in the by-election and then return to normal.

Yet political involvement is a tough ask. Only half the population go out to vote in a General Election, so motivating people to give their time is often a wasted request. Extreme parties can occupy this vacuum, and there is little will to stop them. I now must decide whether to join the anti-fascists in a march on Saturday, or remain inert myself.

It ought not to be even a question, but it is. Your cowardly author needs to make a positive decision for once. Why it is open to debate still, I shall speak of later.

Want.

Three months after the death of Danny, are there any new insights that can be made now that the pressure of mourning has been removed and the psychological adjustment which acknowledges his departure has been made?

I remember writing about the wind agitating the bushes in the adjacent garden and, as Danny used to hide in there at times, I expected to see him causing the movement of the bush as he tried to bring down a butterfly, or because he'd just seen a bird. That is to say, there was a genuine belief that, if I looked hard enough or long enough, I should see Danny present in his usual position.

However, this genuine belief was drowned out by an opposing, stronger realisation that of course he'd not be there. He's dead, you fool, as of November 10.

I mentioned, too how I half-thought (perhaps that's the arrangement of words I'm looking for) that tapping the glass front of the photograph which remains of him would bring him back to life. Unsurprisingly, it didn't work. After a shorter or greater period of time, the realisation dawns that no amount of wishing or catechism can return the past to us.

We are now in the realms of splitting thoughts into sub-thoughts: 1) I accept that no amount of wishing can recover the past and yet I am little better off than I was before because 2) I still wish that wishing could do so. The distinction between 1) and 2) is not an unimportant one, and it takes me to the shore where the waves of my own thoughts in recent days have lapped, without ever escaping the realm of thought itself and rumbling into consciousness.

At some point, there must come - bear with me as I become more convoluted - the desire to do away with desire. In other words, I accept 1) that no amount of wishing can recover the past and 2) even if it were possible, I have no inclination or longing to disturb the present.

The manner of my upbringing, the peer groups I (even now) am around, and the expectations placed on me by what I loosely call society mean that I am a creature of massive desire, and the ultimate goal is to accumulate. If I change the world, it is only in order that I may manipulate it so that even greater accumulations are shaken my way.

I must invert this, and breathe slowly, and not let my culture leach into the nature of the thoughts I should be having. Danny has gone, and this is not only something I accept, but it is good, for his time on earth was done. Nature brings meter to all things, and it is for my sick and tortured mind to learn to respect this, instead of rebelling against it.

Six.

What a strange sex act this is! In bed with
The plot straight from the pages of a book - mine.
In the throes am I with the old, dead Turks;
And my life now caught up in theirs for good.
The black Serb I know, the star of daydreams
Don't go back to Belgrade, else you'll soon die.

My life caught up with poor Black George - long gone
Engine of Serbia's first Uprising
Whose calculations scarred the Ottomans
Whose maths now disrupts my hope of sleep.
The British opened up the scar tissue
The penniless Empire bled to its death.

How did it happen, I ask myself, confused?
They must have lacerated you all ways.
Fate decided in a great Balkan mess
Like so many others before yourself.
Yet you clung on for years: ten, they say, more.
But time had long since caught you up. It's done.

Except in the minds of those who think you.
Bed-time cleaved by Karadjordje and England.
I wonder about the butterfly effect.
The law of unintended consequence.
I dare to smile at a stranger else I
Utter an unwise oath at the wrong time.

And the squeezed world in which I live is stretched
Asunder. Who wants to re-align it?
Not me - but these borders are mine to skew.
I don't detonate hell with just one kiss.
Such is for the empire-stealing classes.
I to the universe does not commute.

2003.

Your author's last day as a journalist was the third Thursday in June of 2003.

I was 24 years old, and unlikely to ever reach the pinnacle of my profession. The endless brushes with deadlines had worn me down to a nub of directionless energy, and I was ever-more aware that I felt physically sick every time I had to pick up the telephone.

For all that, I'd achieved what I'd set out to do when I was 16, and I could always hold out the hope that one day I'd wake up and my phone-illness would be cured, or that my restless and nervous being could be made to focus itself more narrowly. I was talented enough to have been head-hunted at 21, even though I often looked in the mirror and mouthed to myself that those who'd identified me were out of their fucking minds.

It was all to become irrelevant anyway, by around noon on that particular summer's day. I was a sports journalist, and the third Thursday in June is important for football followers in England: the fixtures are released, and supporters up and down the country more-or-less crash the internet speculating where they'll be going on the forthcoming season's first day, final day, and when the enemy from down the road is coming to park its tanks on their lawn.

These fixtures are released at 10am, and I had agreed to come into work for eight that morning to help prepare them, so that at ten on the dot we could publish them to the website for whom I worked. Of course, it meant that I got an advance look - in other words, I had prior knowledge about the particular order in which my club were playing next season's fixtures, two hours ahead of almost everyone else.

At about 9am, BBC Radio Five began to give out some of the bigger football clubs' itineraries, couched in a particularly cautious language. 'We understand Manchester United are playing such-and-such an opponent on the first day of the season, whilst Arsenal's opening fixture is said to be against such-and-such.' This gave me the confidence to carry out the idea that had been forming in mind for most of the morning - what harm could it do?

I duly logged onto an unofficial messageboard used by Barnsley supporters, signing in with my nickname of 'Imago.' At 09:06, I posted that our first fixture would be at home to Colchester United, and, at 09:14, followed this up with the other 45 dates and opponents, for the duration of the season from August to May. I then carried on with my work.

At between half-past eleven and noon, I was called away from my desk by my line manager and taken into an upstairs office - my line manager and his boss were present. I was told that Barnsley FC had made a complaint about me in the form of an e-mail, stating that I had broken the 10am embargo. I was asked if I'd anything to say. I shrugged my shoulders and said: "No, not really," or words to that effect.

I was then asked if I was responsible for posting the fixtures onto the messageboard, and I replied that I had indeed done so. At that point, I was taken back to my desk, and I continued with my duties for a further twenty minutes, or perhaps half-an-hour.

My line manager again asked to speak to me, and told me that he was going to have to suspend me from work for a week. I was told to go back downstairs, collect my belongings, and leave the building. It was made clear I should not speak to anyone about what had happened until the company had concluded its investigation, after which I would be asked to attend a disciplinary hearing.

The disciplinary took place the following Thursday, with the outcome that I was sacked on three counts of gross misconduct: breaking e-mail policy, disclosing embargoed information, and damaging the business with regard to the Football League (the governing body for lower-division clubs in the English game.)

My opinion about the way I lost my job has changed over the years. At first, I was astonished that I could be sacked for what I saw as a minor aberration; these days I reckon I was probably asking for it. Regardless, the fact is that I've not been paid to write since.

I mention all this, years after the event, because I have always been aware of the identity of the person who send the initial e-mail to my line manager stating that the embargo had been broken - the press officer of Barnsley FC themselves. As above, my opinion of this person (whom I've never met, or seen) has changed as time has passed. Initially, I wanted him to die in an accident, then later I imagined buying him a drink and asking him to explain what motivated him to do it. Latterly, I have been grateful that he helped to lever me out of a profession which was gradually edging me towards suicide, if I ever think of him, or that day, at all.

I mention it now because it's come to my attention that this person has himself been suspended from his job - the one at Barnsley FC which he still holds - for being over-critical of a match referee in one of his website match reports. He is the first journalist to have ever been charged with bringing the game into disrepute. A member of the public alerted the football authorities to some apparently inflammatory language, and this has been enough to jeopardise his future career.

When I daydream, I sometimes wonder how I'd react to the news that someone whom I have crossed in the past has died in suspicious circumstances. Would I ever be brave enough to tell a police officer: No, officer, his death was nothing to do with me - but I wish it had been? I am clean, but I long to shake the blood-covered hand of the person who carried out this nice bit of work!

It is true - I swear it on everything that I hold dear - that I didn't report this man to the football authorities, and nor did I prompt anyone else to do so on my behalf. The first I knew of it was a web link I clicked on Friday. For a brief moment, I did curse the fact that I wasn't the one to have landed him firmly in the shit, but it was a short-lived sentiment.

There is no glory in revenge, in lying stock-still in the darkness for years, and then leaping from the gloom to throttle someone, silently, like a coward. There is no reward in either unrequited hate, or unrequited love. I obsessed about Bluefish for months, when I should have turned my energies and abilities elsewhere. For what seemed like an eternity, my thoughts were utterly wasted on a woman who had neither need nor want of me, and it is only since the New Year that I've extinguished her.

Similarly, I don't (any longer) squander many thoughts on the manner of my sacking or the person whom I always complained had instigated it. In actuality, I was the instigator, and it is for me to take responsibility for my own actions.

There is no progress to be made in recycling the past over and over again - it is as purposeful an exercise as imagining what I'll do with all my riches when I win the Lottery (when I never actually trouble myself to buy a ticket in the first place.) The past and the future are mere ghosts of the mind, which shift and slide as the driving force of my present disposition instructs them.

My atheist self is now troubled, because it does seem as though some kind of equalising Other is at play. Co-incidences are the mother of gods, and the mother of love. What other explanation can there be for all the above other than the existence of a subtle, karmic god? What else can it be other than an expression of love from the outermost circle of heaven that I think of my hypothetical partner, and immediately the song with which I most associate her comes on the radio?

No. No. These are just co-incidences, and we bring all sorts of trouble upon ourselves when we ascribe such events to an interventionist, levelling God, or to the angels of romantic love. One day we'll associate everything with everything else, and at that point our sanity will have broken down, beyond all repair.