Reset.

For the past month, I have been bitterly trying to reset my existence in the hope of escaping the nightmares (sleeping) and sense of displacement (waking).

In the absence of a button which can be depressed to implement starting again, and in the absence of suicide, I am condemned to fret around the edges of consciousness, re-arranging the furniture.

As I think about it more, I conclude that 'reset' means 'to break as many links as possible with the past,' and this is indeed what I have set out to do.

For this reason, then, I jettisoned my best friend, unable to look at him and the uncountable number of links to a shared past any longer. I am sick of history, and its habit of digging up my precious sleep.

I am sick of history with its predictable elasticity: I progress only so far from my origins, only to be dragged back to where I started like a dog on a leash.

To exist at all as a human is to be condemned to repeat the same mistakes, over and over, without remotely learning from them. The same pathetic tics which were condemning at the age of 20 continue to condemn, and it shall be ever thus, no matter to what extent I am able to wriggle from the quicksand.

Running away from history is as futile as running away from one's own shadow, and yet I cannot resist the urge to try it just one more time. A game of hide-and-seek, where no sooner dare I open my eyes than the same old spectres are crowding in again: surprise!

The I can never escape its I. As Barthes would have it, it's the same as asking the image to jump off its photographic paper and maintain an independent existence. It's the same as blaming the mirror for reporting back displeasing sights. There is no way out, and I am done for.

Doctor.

Me: Good morning, doctor. Herr Doctor - Herr Enemy!

Doctor: Good morning, Mr *********. What have you come to see me about today?

Me: I want to tell you that I sleep for hours and hours, and yet I wake up exhausted. The sleep is so hot, and so pressured - I imagine it's like being down a mine.

Doctor: What are you hoping that I can do for you?

Me: Well, the doctor is a magic box. He prescribes a mouthful of starlight three times a day, or some little crystals that die on the tongue, and abracadabra! Before you know it, you're out of the mine. I don't know why starlight or little crystals work, but they do.

Doctor: Hmmmm, so you're hoping I'll fix you, and then you'll not be the least little bit grateful.

Me: On the contrary. The return to normality is the greatest gift. I'll send you Christmas cards, and I'll talk with you about the weather if I happen to meet you in the street.

Doctor: You're a bloody hypocrite. Always the first to complain when the government makes you pay a penny too much tax, or when a girlfriend wounds you with her eyes. Why me, you say? I don't understand why they tax me! I wish I knew what I'd done to be looked at with such pity! Yet you've no interest in understanding how your own body can be coaxed from sickness!

Me: I admit it, I admit it! It doesn't matter whether I'm cured with an invocation, or with the latest in Swiss pharmaceuticals! If you can stop the nightmares, doctor, then I don't care about anything else.

Doctor: The nightmares, you say? What are these nightmares?

Me: My late grandmother, and one of my ex-girlfriends co-incide in the same dream sequence. The ex-girlfriend is levitating. My tiredness rages like a thirst, and yet I'm scared to go to sleep. There is no rest.

Doctor: Do you not see the beautiful symbolism? What an ordinary mind you have!

Me: You'll have to spell the symbolism out for me, Herr Doctor.

Doctor: They are the ghosts of your mind, fluttering in the unconscious. One dead, and one gone, as imagined by him knocked senseless with sleep. The sleeping mind gives equality to all things - a raindrop is as moving as a poem, and a triangle as frightening as hell raised.

Me: I do not care for the ghosts! Make them stop!

Doctor: Unfortunately they will persist, for there is no medicine.

Me: You mean to say that you can't silence them, or pull them out through my ear? I don't think you're much of a doctor.

Doctor: You are the sum of your past. If I kill the ghosts, I kill you, too. The truth is you must sleep with your ghosts, and make room in the bed for them.

Me: Not even a little sleeping-pill?

Doctor: Medicine is not the answer. Indeed, you are still to formulate the question. Perhaps the ghosts might tell you tonight. Now go - you are wasting my time.

With that, I left the surgery, and the blank ghosts waited just under your author's surface, trapped for now in their prison of natural light.

Court.

Two stories in the news today which show that the society in which I live is as serious as a bubble, floating away into insignificance as more advanced civilisations look upon us and laugh.

Firstly, the foreign secretary in the coalition government, the former Conservative leader William Hague, has been obliged to make a statement denying he is a homosexual, after a Labour Party blogger stated Hague had spent the night in the same hotel room as one of his male special aides.

As if spending the night in the same room as another male were not confirmation enough of Hague's gay tendencies, a photograph of he and the special advisor Christopher Myers appeared in the Press last weekend, showing the pair of them laughing, and Hague wearing a pair of wrap-around sunglasses. In 21st-century England, then, sleeping in the same room as another man, and being seen publicly laughing in your sunglasses with him is proof of homosexuality, at least as far as some sections of the media are concerned.

The default reaction of anyone who has been libelled is to go to the civil court, assuming they can actually afford to do so. The difficulty is in demonstrating (on the balance of probabilities) that what has been written is sufficient to cause the reasonable man to feel hatred, ridicule or contempt for the libelled individual.

Fifty years ago, perhaps, when being gay was more of a social taboo than it is now, it might have been possible to sue for libel and win. Today, perhaps not, leaving Hague to either do nothing and let the rumours continue to circulate, or release a statement in which he said his wife had suffered a number of miscarriages, and that there had been no improper relationship with Myers. Myers, incidentally, resigned.

The next story which caught your author's eye involves The Stig, an unnamed professional racing driver on the television programme 'Top Gear.' The Stig's job is to set lap times for cars tested on the programme, and Wikipedia tells me the character plays on the running joke of it being difficult to identify exactly who or what is inside a racing suit which covers the whole body.

It turns out that now the unidentified racing driver wishes to publish his autobiography, The Man In The White Suit, much to the disappointment of the BBC, who tried to take out an injunction to prevent the book being released.

The BBC said that the release of the book, and the unmasking of The Stig, would spoil the fun of Top Gear viewers, hence the reason for attempting to take out the injunction, which was refused.

So, in modern England, a man who is unfairly called homosexual doesn't have any legal redress against the blogger who made the allegation, and must resort to releasing difficult statements about the nature of the relationship he has with his wife, a statement which will presumably do little to make the rumours go away.

Yet it's perfectly acceptable to go to court to avoid spoiling television viewers' fun, and to spend public money doing so (even if the BBC failed, they made the effort). We are gradually being infantilised, and the likes of the BBC are complicit in this - we must be allowed to have our fun watching television programmes which keep us in suspense, so that there is something to talk about at work the next morning. Let me have my fun: this is worthy of the court's time.

We have our priorities wrong. Say what you like about another person, even if it compromises his career and damages his marriage and causes people to nudge each other for as long as William Hague lives. Dare to reveal yourself as The Stig, a prop in a television programme, and the full might of an injunction will narrowly miss you.

Ashes.

It was Wednesday night, and my grandmother's ashes were running through my hand like the sand in an egg-timer.

In this case, though, when they are gone, there is no inverting the egg-timer to watch them dribble away anew: it is over.

The ashes came in an olive-green cardboard box, heavy and impersonal, and I was handed them by my father with the words: there's your gran, and a gesture which suggested we should go ahead and do what was inevitable.

My father is full of very difficult love: I suspect it is unique to the north of England, or to men of his generation, or to men of his generation from the north of England. It is a love which speaks of anything other than what it is. 'There's your gran' is not designed to wound the recipient, and is more than a mere statement of fact. It is in actuality a tribute, and a paean to loss.

'There's your gran' are the words of a man who is frozen with grief; who can't dislodge the bullet of having had to watch his mother die in a hospital bed. To my father, love is expressed with a mock aggression which overlays a river of tenderness. I am told that as my grandmother opened her eyes for the last time, my dad said: you've decided to have a bloody look at me, have you? and moments later, she had ceased to be.

Sometimes, in the madness of a kiss, the rage of the moment causes us to utter: I love you, as soon as the kiss is broken, and then immediately regret it. In those instances, word gets the better of deed, and we admonish ourselves. In the case of my father, there is no case of tongue outflanking censorship - it is just difficult love, consisting of five going on six decades of reinforcement of the idea that emotion is tantamount to a sin for a man, an unwelcome refinement.

Yet, inadvertently, my wonderful father, despite his best efforts, unthinkingly made the gesture that absolves him of any historical grievances. That is, dad's emotions rushed upwards to speak to me, and in doing so made the once-in-a-lifetime offer which signified the enduring love a father has for his (frustrating and under-achieving) offspring.

We were each taking some ash, and sprinkling it on the land behind my grandmother's house. The other side of the neighbour's chicken run, over the grass, beneath the apple tree; the blowback was covering our faces and hair; my hands were grey.

When the plastic container was down to a handful, he asked: does tha want the last bit? and I refused, watching the last remnants dwindle away, pressing my head into his back in tears and knowing that his question had changed the nature of our relationship forever.

Distance.

To sympathise with someone whose long-distance (initiated-online) relationship has just ended, it takes someone who has experienced the same thing.

I've seen the reaction of others for myself - trying their hardest but failing to understand how losing someone who lives an ocean away is more painful than splitting with a partner who lives on the next street.

It is more painful because people in long-distance relationships eventually exhaust themselves in the name of the beloved. Conventionally, it is sufficient to say: this is what I am, and I hope it's acceptable to you. If not, we can cut our losses without too much trauma.

When the beloved is thousands of miles away, however, everything is acceptable and everything is permissible. I always warned Bluefish not to expect a god, but just a man. Not an infallible, but someone who has to go to work, and has suffered with depression, and struggles to complete basic tasks. Without such frequent warnings, I feared that Bluefish's most cherished wishes would come to be projected upon me, and of course I should fail to live up to them.

The difference is, then: when in a conventional relationship, it is normal to demonstrate your best qualities in order to become more desirable. When in a long-distance relationship, these qualities have to be suppressed, and their suppression leads to exhaustion due to the mental exertion required to keep them in check.

The energies which sustain the two types of relationship differ, too. Conventionally, we exist in the moment, like Buddhists. I feel love, and so I express it. I feel sadness, until your eyes solve the misery. You can't sleep until my voice delivers rest. We exist, here and now, and nothing is more important than the present.

Long-distance, however, only the future is of any consequence. Just three more months, darling. What I live for is the moment we are brought together; you exiled from your hot, dusty land and flung into this cold, impersonal one. The present is insignificant, because you are not physically in my present, with your appearance of an angel, and so I turn my back on the present, and hibernate until such time as you arrive. Only another month now. Keep holding on for me, for us, against the odds.

Yes, only someone who's experienced those dynamics can truly sympathise when someone else's long-distance relationship ends. It's the difference between an uncertain future and no future at all; the difference between a subliminal flicker of beauty across the eyeball and no beauty at all.

I know the sickness, and the misery, and the lack of closure, and the sense that it's all been for nothing anyway. Like everything, though - even love itself - I know those feelings don't last forever, and once you've begun to make a recovery, then you can hoard the memories and sentiments that are inviolable, and speak to you of a truth which no-one else can share.

An unbreakable truth? Surely, then, there is nowhere else to go, and you might as well give up on men - both local and online - forever, because the most pious symbols of love have already been written and arranged? Not so.

Human beings are creatures of the present. Ask them for their best 100 songs or books of all time, and close to the top you'll inevitably find music and literature released within the last few months, because the zeitgeist is so overwhelming. This bias towards the very recent is understandable, but if it can be overcome, then the future is not so bleak, and we can face it with the lessons of the past - most of them positive - as ballast for the unknown, exciting future.

Evidence.

If anyone wanted circumstantial evidence for the non-existence of God, it is there in their own synapses.

Buddhists apart, all Gods that have ever been created are covered in the fingerprints of human creativity - there's the one who was given birth to by a mere mortal, there are the ones with the human qualities of vengeance and jealousy, and there are the ones who take an unhealthy interest in our comings and goings.

No, there is nothing there worth worshipping in such a creature, who stands over us like an imposing, admonishing colossus, but a colossus with the same seeds of downfall as the scurrying ants he surveys.

Are we, in the 21st century, supposed to suspend our disbelief to the extent that petitioning a deity could ever have real, measurable results?

Oh, Lord, I am suffering, for someone dear to me has departed and now rests eternally in your kingdom. I throw myself upon your wisdom as I seek not only explanation, but comfort - and, in return, I pledge absolutely nothing. Not only an omniscient God, but a benevolent one, a foolish God providing the ultimate free lunch.

The funeral, and the beautiful words of the charming Reverend Sue; the poetry readings and the committal of the body to Christ; the singing of Abide With Me and the journey to the crematorium on a day when it seemed the whole of nature had come out to say goodbye - crows circling the hearse in respect, and fields of corn bowing in the wind - what greater tribute to the glory of religion could one ever wish for?

And yet, I suspect it's nothing more than a sham, akin to the veneer of civilisation, the result of penetrating which is to fall helplessly out of one's species, to become an outsider. We are not condemned as outsiders when we prick the bubble of religion, but we instead must steel ourselves to look at a universe which is indifferent to the plight of humanity, a plight which is summed up by Reverend Sue: we know and understand 'life's little day.'

A true god should be incomprehensible to us, and be far too un-human to care who dies, and who's in anguish. This sort of entity would be no less than the mechanistic universe itself, creating and destroying stars and galaxies and planets, and meanwhile the inhabitants of thisplanet proselytise and beg for comfort, like children.

Emergence.

The last thing in the world I want to do at the moment is to write, and yet I know I must do it if I'm to avoid descending into illness.

All week, those who care about my well-being have been asking how I am. There's only so many ways to say you're fucking awful before boredom sets in. Grief is tedious, orbiting unendingly around the same small flame, so that nothing new is gained.

It's odd that I mention repetition and tedium in the same sentence. Normally, we say that practising something over and over is the road to perfection, and is seen as a virtue. Yet in this case it's nothing more than a tiresome mental tic which it is best to put a stop to.

I recall stating before that it's possible to listen to a significant piece of music so many times that it eventually loses all its emotional power, and I'm now beginning to think that grief is just an extension of this process.

Grief is about draining the attachment to the past, and its network of associations, until we can think of that which has departed without collapsing in tears. And, for your author, charting the progress as the attachment diminishes is important.

At 03:37, the last thing in the world I want to do is write, and yet I am left with no choice because each word promises a return to normality - somehow, eventually, inevitably.

I am not yet able to write properly, with conviction and the whole gamut of emotions condensed into a sentence - but it is better than nothing. Words make me feel sick, and yet despite the nausea I can still shape them, even though the tiredness and lack of confidence is there for all to see.