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.