Completion.

I think often of the departed Danny, and I sometimes write about him, too.

Both the thoughts and the writing lack an element of finality, though - they are incomplete.

I see Danny on the run as the wind plumps up his fur, trying to retreat from the force of nature which is inescapable, as was his own death. I hear Danny push my bedroom door, and think about the feeling of him impacting on the middle of the bed, like a brick launched into a pond. Yet there is nevertheless something missing, and it applies to everything I might wish to think about.

Danny was one cat, singular, in a world full of cats, and he succeeded innumerable other members of his species. Yet when I write about him, the conditions of his existence fade into the background, and his feline lineage is of no consequence.

To do Danny full justice, and to appreciate him entirely, it is important to respect the continuum from which he emerged, and which flows on inexorably even in his absence.

It is the job of the writer to (in this case) understand and acknowledge the cat in the cat, and separate out the uniqueness from the traits without which there would be no individual feline. In each individual cat, there are the traces of every cat that has ever existed, and every cat that ever will exist - the cat in the cat.

Somehow, the author must pull together all these cats in their collective, sum-over-history, and re-present them in words, in the form of a singularity.

This is the true task of anyone who tries to sculpt words - progressing from the particular to the general, without ever straying too far from the single example we begin with.

God.

If the atheists are ever to rid themselves of God once and for all, they must first realise that there is no single crushing blow which can be delivered.

Instead, they must be prepared to behave as a swarm of fleas, draining a single drop of blood at a time, until the idea of a petty, interventionist god is fatally weakened.

Then and only then can we push the deity out of its tower and watch it spiral towards a Nietzscheian death. Until religion is sufficiently worn out, though, be content with nibbling away an infinitesimal at a time, and know that you will get there eventually.

Yesterday, another gobbet of flesh was ripped away from Christianity in England when Bristol County Court ordered two religious hoteliers to pay £3600 in damages after they refused to admit a homosexual couple (who are civil partners) to a double room (ie one with a double bed) on the grounds that sex before marriage runs contrary to their beliefs.

If we were unsure before, we are now certain that England is a secular nation - the laws which are passed here are derivations of the minds and pens of lawyers, judges and politicians, instead of emanating from the mouth of god, and we are by now grown-up enough not to pretend otherwise.

Furthermore, we now know that my own private beliefs are superceded by legislation designed with the public in mind. Your god is yours, and if he exists at all, it is only in your own mind, and you cannot invoke him when you intend to act outside the law.

Perhaps this event is the one which will in the long-term be the catalyst for secularism to overwhelm all aspects of our society, swamping all religions, no matter what their basis. In order for the public perception of something to change, first the message has to be internalised that whatever we wish to overturn is in some way unacceptable.

Quite how the pressure to create a negative impression of something is generated and applied is for a different day - what concerns me here is that it happens, and that it (maybe) happened yesterday. Before the smoking ban in public places was implemented here, I remember the refuseniks who said they'd continue with their habit - in my experience, they are very few and far between, and now they (generally) smoke only in the designated places.

Partly, no doubt, this is because it's illegal; but I think of the considerable social pressure which compels smokers not to light up where they shouldn't - this is perhaps as compelling as the threat of being fined for your actions.

As soon as something becomes unacceptable, the memetic propagation across human synapses occurs very quickly indeed, and a kind of self-policing is evident. It's your authors suspicion that we have - or soon will - reach a similar tipping point where religion is concerned, and Bristol County Court on January 18 this year represents the birth pains of a great, broad, sweep.

Pentameter.

Here is my own amateruism displayed:
A hundred thousand words without structure,
And thus no human voice beating below;
No English cadence we can recognise.
Hence the new challenge: to cookie-cut ideas;
So as to make them fit someone else's mould.
How could it ever be otherwise, though?
For nature's laws are immutable, too.
The calibration of the proton's weight,
And the metre of writing alike commute.
Now I suffer the dead, constraining hand,
Applying its brakes to creative thought.
Subjugated by the pentameter
Iambic is too much for the present.

Home.

I was back in Yorkshire over the course of the last weekend for a fleeting visit, knowing that soon I shall set down roots there once again.

The vast, frozen spine of the Pennines, its ribs splayed out to the sides, x-ray bright with snow against the darkness; a leviathan unconscious but breathing underneath the inclement weather.

Up at the apex where as I child, I swore, I had reached the highest point on the planet, with Barnsley and Manchester both glowing thousands of feet below, and the ashes of Sylvia Plath interned beneath the earth, I apprehended the surrounding bleakness and called it home.

This Yorkshire, this excess of memories where Danny would make balistically for the door when the wind caused his fur to stand up the wrong way; where I smashed my mouth open on a concrete post we were using as a cricket stump; where I met the wet-eyed, wet-lipped muse who doubled as my first serious girlfriend, for all of seven weeks.

This Yorkshire into which I leaked last year, suspicious-looking under the umbra at three o'clock in the morning, seeking out the woman who deserved so much better, and whose motif is the gently admonishing: does this look like a girl's house? when I failed to put down the toilet seat; where I restricted you to three or four hours of sleep and promised you far more than I ever delivered. For as long as I live, I'll think of: does this look like a girl's house? on a regular basis.

This Yorkshire, a spaghetti of events experienced, and events half-imagined, and infused with a history which a Lamarckian would stain us all: Arthur Scargill, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Harold Wilson, Peter Sutcliffe, and I go back no more than 25 years in selecting those names.

Austere, spare Yorkshire, I see your stripped trees and sinewy dogs and hear your pebble-smooth vowels in my dreams, yet I wake up separated from you, the beat of a heart with no organ present, a river without flow.

Pleasure.

When recovering from an illness, I recognise the beauty of crossing the apex of the complaint's parabola, and the gradual descent back towards normality.

After a bout of sickness, for instance, the flexing and unflexing of the convalescing stomach muscles is practically orgasmic, and the first mouthfuls of scrambled egg more delicious than a Michelin-starred menu.

At such a point, when I declare that I'm feeling better, what I mean is that I'm feeling better than at any other time in my life. In the little window of time marked by the overlapping of illness and complete wellness, as long as I am careful, I outlast my normal self.

Being careful means to do everything in moderation: to eat only a few mouthfuls of egg; to listen more carefully to my body than I normally would - when it demands sleep, I don't this time ignore it, and the fuzzy, kaleidoscopic dreams I have are anyway more enjoyable than the normal ones.

Not, though, that I have been ill, at least not as far as the body is concerned. Since March last year, though, the head has suffered more than it should have done, and it's only now that I feel I'm sliding down the other side of the curve.

The 'illness' in the mind has manifested itself in a lack of interest in the things I love the most - too sad to lie in bed and read, craving sleep too much to get out of bed and catch the three trains needed to travel to Barnsley for the football, visits to the gym slackening off to a total stop, to the extent that I'd feel an utter stranger in there these days.

Yet, suddenly, and inexplicably, I am stronger, and more willing. With the same attention to detail I'd give to my poor, inflamed stomach, though, I tread carefully, allowing things of beauty and pleasure to leak back into my existence only gradually, lest I overdo it and end up feeling worse than ever.

The strains of Soul-Limbo on the radio which mean another night of Ashes cricket is starting takes me back to my teenage years, huddled up in bed with an earphone (scared to death that I'd shout out when a wicket went down and blow my cover), awake all night listening to the commentary from Australia, and aware that I was pissing away any chance of success in the (apparently) crucial O-levels which were only five or six months in front of me.

Nowadays I stay up until four in the morning and turn in to work at 1pm, in no fit state to do my job but enlivened by the few hours I spent listening to the Test Match Special commentary. More tired than is good for me I may be, but I seem to float through the eight hours, the long-gone ghost of something approaching joy fluttering within.

I recognise the flutter: it is passion, it is enjoyment, it is pleasure - I want more of it, but repeat that I don't wish to push my luck. Tentatively, I'll pick up the book on the fall of the Ottomans lent to me by a colleague, and scan its pages for a few minutes; my fingers brush over the porcelain cat which resembles Danny, and I feel neither sadness nor emptiness, but a connection with him which remains unbroken.

The present slow rediscovery of enjoyment and purpose is the pleasure of pleasure, and I feel almost ecstatic. This is the stage prior to landing on the solid ground of wellness, and I tentatively wonder what it'll be like to no longer be travelling, but to have arrived.

Yorkshire.

I've lived away from Yorkshire for the last 20 months - dragged all of 50 miles down the A1 motorway for the purpose of stable, regular employment.

In that time, I've made no attempt to get to know anyone in this new place; I nod to my neighbour when I encounter him as I'm leaving the flat, but couldn't tell you his name.

To my regret, being here meant that I missed the sad, inevitable conclusions to the two most important days of last year - August 2, when my grandmother died, and November 10, when Danny was put to sleep.

In the former case, I got in contact with my family just as my grandmother was drawing her last breaths. I was unable to even cover the few hundred yards to the train station before my phone went off and I received the news that she was dead.

I thus travelled northwards knowing that I was too late, and trying to remove the guilt of being absent is one of the goals of this coming year.

In the latter case - with Danny - I was there on the morning of his death, aware that I'd never see him again. I had to leave him at something after 8am, as a consequence of needing to come back here to work, and he was put to sleep at 10am. Again, I regret not being present at the decisive moment.

When I posted in the early hours of New Year's Day, I spoke of the urgent need to obliterate the aggregation of past sorrow. To that can be added guilt and loneliness; all these things must be assuaged if we are to arrive at any semblance of happiness.

It'll help, then, that I received the news last week that my job is almost certain to be moving back to Yorkshire, and within the next month. It'll not alleviate loneliness, and nor will it alleviate guilt, but I'll no longer feel as though I am drifting.

Drift has been the prevailing emotion in this town; going nowhere at all in a place I don't belong, detached from family, whatever friends I managed to accrue, and from the comfortable certainty of being near familiar places.

It has felt for a long time as though I am observing my own life, watching myself fail and refuse to communicate and with personal goals reduced to one: get out of bed at some point during the day. There is no future here that I'd wish to contemplate, the perpetual re-ignition of ambition itself the infuriating start and end point of ambition.

I long to get away from here, and never return. The stock of memories around every corner is too great, and contributes to the stasis which I have become. In one more month, I hope it will be over.

2010.

The old year, then, has sailed, and with it goes the long tail of misery by which it will always be remembered.

2010 has gone, and in the senselessness which characterises human life, why not use the fact that the earth has just completed another orbit of the sun to wish for an improvement in fortunes?

The arbitrary boundary where one year bleeds into the next is a signal for hope and for change which we feel as a species; which acts as a brake on history.

Even the lonely fall in line with the convention - perhaps we'd prefer to face the future when we've consumed x cups of tea, or ignored three dozen strangers, or petted seventy-nine cats in the street, and yet the rhythmic predictability of a yearly cycle is enough to lure us into conformity.

More than an overhaul of the self - the optimistic predictions of incremental lifestyle changes which seldom endure - the barrier which is the aggregation of sorrow must be removed before any progress at all can be made.

I laughed earlier when I heard the American idea of dumping the past 12 months into a public receptacle in Times Square - much like the contents of this blog, real-world problems which are repeatedly discussed without being solved then become psychological issues which even a gifted professional cannot hope to untangle.

What begins as a serious attempt to confront an impediment quickly descends into the articulation of the same problem over and over again without resolution, and this half-heartedness serves only to re-inforce the very thing we wish to remove.

So there must be seriousness and finality when we make the decision to break with our own history, else the consequence of only partial commitment is to entrench oneself ever-deeper in the pit which has been carved out by your own hands.

Nothing is forever - so reads page 1 of the pessimist's manuscript. All that I have, I am inevitably destined to lose as age and habituation take their toll on everything around me, before eventually collecting the sad-eyed observer to complete the job. We speculate that the earth, and even the universe, are finite, physical objects, living on borrowed time.

If nothing's forever, though, then the events which have damned your author need not cause permanent damage. They are transitory, to be removed with the same automatic motions with which I take off a jacket, and not given a second thought.

In the most cherished tenet of the pessimist's manual, thus do we find the inevitable seed of its own destruction, and we can express the wish that the remnants of the events which have caused instability can be turned towards steadying the self in the arbitrary moment when we declare: enough is enough.