Nothing.

This is not the way it was supposed to be; but it is the way things always are.

 

It seems as though this blog is only ever returned to in times of crisis. It is a sump of misery and shit.

 

This is the hottest day of the year by a distance, and I might as well be lying in bed with a fever or a broken leg for all that I have accomplished. All that happens is the sweat continues to rain down my chest, and time itself passes.

 

I am waiting for something to happen, for the work of fiction that eddies in the mind, and stretches the meat of my torso, to write itself. It has not done so, yet if it does not, I no longer feel capable of doing so.

 

The desire to write it, and the stasis in doing so, causes all sorts of problems.

 

I can't be bothered to empty the dishwasher, and I am prepared to let the state of the house deteriorate to the extent that, were it up to me, the three of us would be living in the street. I am unconcerned about everything, and it would not be an acceptable attitude even were I able to write like a genius.

 

I am not able to write like a genius, though. I am not even able to write as well as I could as an 18-year-old journalism student.

 

This is the way it always is. I write nothing of any value, and exhaust myself in the pursuit of it.

Re-direct.

www.lastexittobarnsley.com

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.