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.