Stopping on Mulholland Dr.

Me: Speak up.


Matthew: I think I said: "I think every woman I've shared a bed with stars in Mulholland Dr. I mean, in their faces, you know? At first, each is laughing and dancing brilliantly without having ever been taught. Then she is pitying or disgusted, with nothing to give at dinner parties."


John: Yes. The new girl, her open chest driving you into the wilderness. The last, a dissatisfied, misremembered porn star.


Luke: I think she said: "Do you want to sleep with me?" I should have passed at the question; instead I rise to the stage for another Act, the baptised pinnacle of my head resurrected through a trapdoor. Reality is desire. It is a sequence shot of jouissance drowning, the eyes open. There are bubbles and boring fish.


Me: What do you want?


Mark: It has been decided for men that a mutilation of genitals is an impossible scenario. So I want to be tied to a mast, moored to a fantasy, with no more failure at sea. If I could devolve, green and amphibian as a flip-book of family cartoons - a text one can make perfect sense of, and smile through, on the bus -
I would live under their gazes. Under the sea, little hands crinkle like the glue and paint of a star, guided by a push of wind onto the surface of an outdoor swimming pool. A child learning to ride a bicycle. A child on holiday. A child, painting and sticking. Under the sea, you do not hear the intones: hesitation or frustration. Seeing, even through goggles, is a constrictive and dissatisfying experience. From now on, my partners are conceding the seductive sibilance and clear music of their siren songs, all to water. Don't give me that look. To be a fantasist is not to regress; in a dream I am another child, recording adult, middle-of-night embraces on a disc, the shame absent as a disonaur from a holy book.


Me: What the fuck are you talking about? Who are you having a pop at? Women? Religion?


Luke: In the movie, do you remember the single blue key on the table? How it reappeared?


Me: No, I didn't notice it. Where are you going with this? I'm going to give Dr. What's-His-Face?-I-Can't-Remember a call.


Matthew: On waking from fantasy: mistakes, sirens and slow monsters. After dying, a silence.


Mark: The languages of the world went static once your lips and your fingers began moving. I have tried to act for the audience I love: the solitary specatator in the Odeon space. Whether or not there is a holding of hands, loved is how I yearn to disappear.


Luke: There was an accident. I came here.


John: This is the girl.


Me: I wonder where you were going.

Erocracy

Not even Eric Blair, a teenager anxiously on the brandy, buttoning up a shirt for a date, squeezing the rubber on his perfume, could have defended against intimacy:

Always cutesy or brutal,
This totality.

We are making gods of ourselves.

We hurry to edit the past and future,
Spectacles our computers will celebrate.

Sometimes, I watch you making stir-fry as if we are doing the gardening in Eden. We use one another's eyes as reflective water. The echo and the fall are unoverthrowable

Solipsisms,


Shuffling back to childishness, and lunging our hopes forward to a coupled death amid the narrative panic of the world.

We have our heads in a hole, our skins on a silver screen: You, Film, Strip, me.

I have to repeat to myself: I am just something in a mirror, and to keep my eyes peeled for the both of us. I have to make sure the hunt is as appealing as the haunt. Overall I must both love and fear this power. Otherwise these fantasies will see to it, disappearing - participle-proud - my personage. All over. Again.

Rising with the Wirelessness

On Skype
You have folded your arms
And are looking at me with books for eyes,
As if waiting for a gift.

I have nothing in the way of treasure, surprise, heat or strength.

If a new season begins its press
(The slitted blinds, enemies, plated heat,
The brush of Firefox light in my bed),

And we think about giving it a go,
There would surely be a deep end.

Or an imperceptible chaos of lips, from which

I ought to be afraid

I might not have the body to make a return journey.

The mind becomes drowned in returnity.
You must be Autumn,
Since my first two turns on the claw crane
Were analogous to Spring and Summer;
The word, ghost, loses its clean reputation so fast.
Vowels of pink oxygen are holding us by the tongue,
Letting bedtime stories into our ears like cotton.
I want you to tell me things.
I want to own you,
I want an eating.

What I need is forgetfulness - to repress into the future
A footprint.
In my sleep, footstep-crime goes unpunished.
When my head falls away from camera,
You ask what is happening.
I speak up,
Rising with the wirelessness, angel-hoarse:
We were asleep.
But now our heads are heavy with gold and concrete.

The King's Speech

 

* * * * *

(Dir. Tom Hooper, 2010)

Somehow, the author and journalist Christopher Hitchens has found time to squeeze into his shrunken daily grind, and into the circularism of the movie reviewing business, an unexpected piece. Amid the fervour in the States (Americans just love regal, British numbers), and on contrarian service, Hitchens hones in on the various untruths in The King's Speech, particularly the transmogrifications of Hitler's pal, Edward VIII, and Winston Churchill - whose depiction comes closer to the Car Insurance, nodding-dog namesake, than the Prime Minister hero.

The role of Churchill is attempted by the normally effective, normally less significantly casted, Timothy Spall - recognisable as assistant to both Sweeney Todd and Lord Voldemort. In Orwellian ink, the tone of the article is hardly surprising. Problematic as facts are, however, The King's Speech is really nothing more (or less) than a showpiece of storymaking and storytelling. And Spall has barely a handful of script. Director Tom Hooper (Longford, The Damned United) might have broached this in his history-lesson endnote, but then what kind of auteur makes a confession moments before his name appears?

The based-on-a-true-story patter might inconvenience a biographer, and yet for those immersed in the drama, Hooper has furnished a humble and funny flickering of spectacle. His dialogue captures the ethical and historical wonder of a contemporary phenomenon: the nonsensing of guilt through revelation: psychoanalysis.

The best of this script is shared by a protagonist with a speech defect, the future George VI (Colin Firth), and his speech therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), although Helena Bonham Carter's affectionate turn as George's wife, the late Queen Mother, deserves mentioning. After failing to speak at a packed Wembley Stadium (a scene likely to fascinate any football fan with a sense of history), George is advised by Elizabeth to recruit Logue, an Australian who is secretly unqualified and has abandoned conventional hypnosis in the belief that talking is what works.

After establishing an informal routine (in the film, anyway, he calls the King by his private nickname: Bertie), Logue discovers that George's stutter is the souvenir of a nightmarish royal childhood, rather than something innate. The son without the charisma, George is bullied into an irrelevance that lasts until after he has fathered two children. Logue makes his first breakthrough by turning to something like Breuer's principle: 'a high degree of the restriction of the field of vision' (Studies on Hysteria). Having failed not to stutter, when reading anything previously handed to him, George is now headphoned with instrumental music, all presences are muted, and his task is to read the most famous lines in Hamlet: the soliloquy on self-preservation and self-execution. When he eventually hears the recording, it is a perfectly spoken Hamlet - "To be", but one who still has it all to do.

The promised, delayed action is what is so attractive about The King's Speech. A death, an abdication and a brief abandonement of Logue will have to happen before George even sits on the throne. A favourite frame of mine, when the pair fall out, is Colin Firth slowing his angry walk-away to light a cigarette in a single flash of flame. It is such a rare composed action that it fills the screen with breath and depth; the facial expression is legitimised as expression, as it stops frowning out a defence.

The war is imminent, and when brother, King Edward VIII, swiftly abdicates to continue banging his mistress overseas, the newly crowned George must prove himself, which means his voice, to England. It is not until the final preparations - for the speech that will prepare England for war - that the most important breakthrough is made. Alone with Logue and a gruesome archbishop, George's frustration pinnacles at Westminster Abbey. When his (speech) therapist asks, "Why would I waste my time listening to you?", and the King answers, crisply, "Because I have a voice!", the past has finally been addressed. Like a repaired, old vinyl, the language has had its scratches removed.

The end of the movie is the politicisation of talking cure, from the palace to the ordinary household, via the BBC World Service. The power of surveillance is dumbed and pointed elsewhere. Whatever the propaganda, George's courage seems a deliberate, superb antonym for totalitarianism. For a public that still had 'faith' in its monarchy, The King's Speech is historically principled in at least this respect. Anything modern-smooth about the cinematography - each cut is very beautifully leashed - does not detract from the fidgets and stutters, and deeper and deeper into the film, the credible shots of ceremony. Closure, meanwhile, is taken for granted. We know how this war ends and so its prologue, spoken here at the end, is already, proudly received. It is a performance, a speech, that exhales on behalf of the spectator, leaving the throat dry.

Tom Hooper's movie is the only royal event in 2011 worth tuning in for. Having dominated at the BAFTAs, the accomplices of The King's Speech will fancy their chances at the Oscars this month. I am still unsure as to what, if anything, Inception has to say about people. Neither Freud nor Lacan can be ventriloquised by me, but while their teachings are vulgarised in Christopher Nolan's first weak film, I am sure that The King's Speech and Black Swan would have more greatly impressed either pioneer as intriguing fictions and case studies. The Academy Award for Best Actor seems ineluctably headed for the speechmaker. The implied reality of a Hollywood fate remains as absurd as ever, and yet it is absolutely convincing in the case of Colin Firth - unlucky to miss out last February - that this is his time.

Address

Apparently, really,
Your essays are immature,
Not in their writing,
But in their underexplored content

(Which is, surely, writing.)

There really is no exit from this little madness.

So it has to be enjoyed, 
Watered and relished,
As publicly as is possible,
As unshoutingly as has to happen.

All The Visitors Had Gone Home

I

    In a small room on Ward C, a student began to excavate and staple together his storytelling. Beryl is the best thing I’ve ever written, he said. Ready for the post: for friends, professors and publishers. It was half past eight in the evening. All the visitors had gone home. To his judgement, they had arrived too early and left too late. He preferred isolation and a dead quiet. He confined the word ‘solidarity’ to the dictionary, and kept its synonyms vibrating in the thesaurus. He wasn’t lonely. In private, he knew how to fulfil all his wildest dreams. Food would pile up in his hands, masturbation on a plate. There would be no such thing as cliché. No matter who was first to see the final draft, he wanted it polished. He folded his work so scrupulously that any leftover creases echoed the faint musculature of a child.
   
    Sharing his eyes with those in the mirror, he could see that his fingertips were impatiently slow. He rolled up his sleeves and noticed an increase in the fierceness of veins up his forearm - a reward for his efforts in the work-out room earlier. He began at the paperwork. He guided it into an envelope as though he was arranging the first birthday card in the world. Immediately he cringed at the realisation: I want to apologise. He wanted to apologise for over-analogy and for braking hard at every full stop, the way each sentence tried to be an event. So he moved over to the wardrobe as if to inventory his clothes but he knew that there was another mirror in the bedroom, on the inside of the wardrobe door - a mirror where a family photograph or calendar might have hung instead. He opened the door and looked himself in the eye: I’m really, truly sorry. But this will have to do.



II
    Nobody could say he wasn’t a sincere person.

(From the sky, a million copies of the now uneditable, now public, manuscript snow lightly down. His hands and feet are cuffed. His legs, his superficial fibulae, snare in mid-air: he can not loosen the noose, go down and reread his work. The rope is a monstrosity offering a love-bite. There are spectators at the gallows, but the wind is dead. The wind in whom two people hold onto one another as one, the wind in whom two people argue as two, is dead. The twitch goes on, objectively. 'How the Howl Became a Fossil', they said he should have titled it. A children’s story. An earthly addition to Tartarus in every illustrated book of Greek mythology. Know thyself! But he wasn’t having any of it. Instead he suspended himself in a fantasy of punishment.)

The stapled storytelling now out of sight, he felt-tipped the same address on every envelope. He could have been an office clerk repeating the process of writing for a minimum wage, willing the passing of time. In the hospital everything is matter-of-course. There are beds, meals and books. There are old boxes of Top Trumps and Scrabble sets missing the rare tiles. The visitors would ask: How are you finding it here? They would say: Your room is homely, the staff are lovely. Rarely would he answer. And when he did, he would neither agree nor disagree.



III
    The following morning, the visitors happened to see whose address was handwritten on every envelope.

Why did you send it to yourself?

He would fidget, bow his brain and say:

I didn’t mean to.



IV

    It’s Beryl, a name, a handwriting manufacturer. She is sitting opposite me. Her skin is an orange, plastic felt tip - a broad boringness. She picks her nose and I hold my gaze in the reflection as passengers make way for passengers at Doncaster. I carry on comforting myself through a jean pocket. Yesterday I slept for fourteen hours. Some kooky cunt of a song like ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ blares from her white headphones and I think I might foam up and yell FRAUD but it doesn’t happen today. She’s writing something down in blocks that look like stanzas. I imagine pointing her hand - as men do to women in the movies at constellations - at the ad below the luggage shelf which reads Blog Here: It Matters To Us What You Have To Say. I sneer and rub my palms into a mad sweat because on the table separating us Beryl has a Mac Book and a protective case for her iPhone, also by Apple. I continue to sneer and swell until I’m short of breath and conjunctives.

    "Unoriginal? Don’t you have anything more to say? I haven’t edited it yet, that’s your job.”
Further up the carriage, a writer and his critic bicker. The critic points at a pair of double-spaced lines: mirrors that transport ghosts. I study my-selves, winning at each reflection.

Wherever condensation is I need to finger B-E-R-Y-L at all costs.

The critic does a grin, mocks the writer. He holds an iPhone. He thumbs the iPhone to pause a heard song. Now he will turn away, look into my eyes and think: there cannot really be such a thing as pause. I am bored by this noise. And by the noisy thoughts of the passengers. As the train pushed on, I heard the writer say: I have no choice, I have to write about writing.

    The timing is perfect when a star, a spheroid of been-and-gone light, becomes, and Matt Berninger of The National has the courage to sing through my headphones: I'm frightened I'll overdo it. I stand up and look to the luggage shelf. I unzip my rucksack and unlatch a blade from a Stanley. This is how it is supposed to happen. I tell myself I'm in arms-reach so, straight-faced, I jab and slit Beryl's throat and I believe (but don't understand) what I've just done. A pensioner repeats "What the fuck is happening?".

I sneer, sated.
    I am a sneering satiate.
        I am a sun swallowing sunlight.

I do some slow breathing. My forearm is flecked with a vividly red metaphor, endowed with a tongue: Society is a wall of glass I can see through, punch through. This might have been spoken previously and the exhilaration is too much to bear. This is how I dreamt it would happen. The film director in my head is mouthing at me.

        Motherlessly: I accept the new word.
    Motherlessly: I accept its meaning.
Motherlessly: I do what he says and surrender.

Limbs and nails padlock my beautiful body:

    He lay like a marble statue staring down.

On the carpet where my neck is bent there are Whopper Meal wrappers and balls of Wrigleys, torn-off clothes and more. What I begin to see is the nude who in every passenger: they have not so much undressed as a planet of shopping malls and street vendors and Old Testament leaves has disintegrated

in a sentence that could only begin, Suddenly!, there are flat continents of skin, curves I forgot could be interesting, and without even details of the body I can feel the muck of intimacy. It might filter in, fill in, for the anonymous fuck and become a named thing - loving, loved, laughing, bed-lingering, bud-linking - once more:

    Would I might leave my body!

Someone upturns my bag and onto the table roll a Lucozade flask, a Guardian, a print out of my ticket, a bracelet of duck tape the size of a bony woman’s wrist, and a shiny Samsung with the most erasable phonebook in England. And when the bystander moves to Beryl’s side of the table and finds a purse in her handbag and opens it, and out of breath says, “When you get through to 999 tell them her name is Jo, tell them her name is Jo…” I sound a groan. Because from the floor I have to twist in my new personage if I'm going to look the hate of the train in the face when I let it into my secret, breathing easy as pie, I let it out thus: “No, her name is Beryl. B-E-R-Y-L.”



V

Speed is a means of defending oneself against dishonesty, especially in writing

about the clock. Or the beach. Or the train. Or the stars. They are so slow.

The evening is a certainty now. He stands at the window, looking out. The garden is an enclosure. He can see that there are other patients, standing at windows, looking out. The lights from the hospital bounce off his Nike wristwatch; the iconic tick, or ‘victory’ in higgledy piggledy Greek, is strange. Its look-alike symbol is the square root: a demented signpost issuing the last of the past of the self. Light continues to bounce, back and forth, bark and froth. In the garden the light finds a flower, if not an answer. The centrefold is yellow, closed-in-on by white petals. There is reason to ask: Is a description of the flower lovelier than an answer? Yeah any day. Slowly

the flower will wither and fail. After a while, the colours and smells will be replaced. The narcissus doesn’t know about this, of course. The centrefold is yellow, closed-in-on by white petals. Sometimes the patients too are enlightened. Always they are relocated or replaced, or both.

Sublurbia

It afflicts; the plasmic silence when the Spotify playlist has run, the thumbnail recommendations replacing song, and you can see with what face I am looking back at the laptop on the bed, here at the windowsill, thinking whereabouts on the soil I should buck my cigarette butt, having bloomed an arm through a hingeful of air, put out the flame on the house wall, a blow of ash, a reaction to flash photography, now calling that moon a bluff and that rascal star a buttress, now the light of the laptop failing to persuade wings out of the cold, no wings in so new a year:

yesterday a seagull tottered to a standstill, eyed food, decided not to drive on, interrogated old vomit.

There were two professors, or conversationalists, in the first chapter of the novel I am in. I always double check blurbs when I queue at Smiths; the publisher promised three professors. This story is about three people. Okay.

And yet the first block of writing, put above the debutant asterisk, is not so. The first words are an aloof conversation between two people only. Two professors.

I thought: One person must be late, or dead. Apparently it is a woman, and her absence is worth an excavation. I am reading the end of the novel on its first page. I am certain I am reading the book as though it were a manga, or a tempting fortune tale, counting down pages, sirening green bottles into accidental free fall. But all the pages are numbered, in tact, white, ready for a quick turn. Was this a father or brother's holiday-read from years ago? I start to speak at myself, speaking words out of the windowsill. Stop thinking about loose ends.


The Three Professors

'No, you read too far into what happens later.'
'Later? So are you saying it is her childhood? That something happened early on and might have been brushed under the carpet?'
'I am. She did not like the idea of a mother or a father. She essayed at length on supervision and sex. And in her eight hundred poems, mothers and fathers are never mentioned. The closest she comes is: I lived under an extraordinary roof.'


I forgot to say earlier, that there are other blocks of writing in the pages before; before the story begins moving forwards, and after the end has trespassed there.

These other blocks of writing were for 

Praise, Publishing Houses and For.

My For dedication is to Those Women Who Said: No: Condescending To My Mouth: Terrified Of My Ears.

I will leave the window dehiscent, bent out, to freshen my bedroom, and I have to go and soap my fingers, cut their nails, turn more pages.

Don't steal anything, please. I will be in the bathroom.

Kenny Dalglish? Whatever.

Hillsbrough is not going to have any impact on Liverpool climbing the Barclays Premier League table in 2011. It needs to be put this bluntly. It takes incredible patience or stupidity to watch and read about Dalglish and how he understands Liverpool, everyday. For instance, do the fans really believe that Rafa Benitez, who had never played or lived in England, understood Liverpool better than Roy Hodgson in his first four months at the club? I have become so sceptical that I'm sure if Liverpool do finish in the bottom half of the table, it will be Hodgson or the former owners who take the blame.

Imagine if Arsenal had demanded this ingredient: a sense of club history. For stylistic reasons alone, Wenger would never have come to England and pushed football forwards. Or, more importantly, consider Barcelona. In 1973, had a certain Dutchman decided Catalonia wasn't for him, we would not see Fabregas, Xavi, Iniesta or Messi in the same todaylight.

I would like to think Liverpool's genuine supporters (including many of my friends) are those who, despite being proud to sing on the Kop, recognise how boring and embarrassing the club's obsession with itself is. I love the flags, I love Xabi Alonso, I love Marcus Babbel. And I find it hard to watch documentaries about, and footage of, the tragedy without red eyes. But is there really any need for this reeking shit of media current? Am I really being harsh or am I even allowed to be harsh, in bringing up Hillsbrough? Or does the quality of the squad and its dumb tactical deployment over the past sixteen months have more to do with their league position than Lucas Leiva not being told what it means to wear the shirt?

When Spurs were in the relegation zone not so long ago, it was for footballing reasons. Pascal Chimbonda was standing at centre back while the porous pairing of Didier Zokora and Jermain Jenas couldn't distribute the ball in midfield. Our most talented players were either injured or off-form. Gareth Bale's career was being stultified since it was fashionable to describe him as a 'wing back' - dependable neither at left back nor left midfied. It is my opinion, and the opinion of many fans afraid to speak it, that stories about Walter Tull or John White, or even visits to terminally ill children in hospital, would not have addressed Zokora and Jenas's discipline or helped Gomes to settle. Nor would said emo strategy have eased the demands on Darren Bent, busily adapting to playing in a pair instead of as a lone striker. If our results had picked up after some kind of emotinal spa, this wouldn't mean anything anyway. The truth is always on the pitch, and the English Press, rather like Liverpool Football Club, has an unhealthy fascination with what happens away from it. Look no further than videos of David Beckham training at Spurs Lodge - a potential loan signing to inspire younger players, coming off the bench to improve Peter Crouch's statistics and Spurs' attacking set pieces. This almost-story should be worth a couple of hundred words in the Sport. Dalglish's, a little more.

There is no southern writer's bias going on here. I remember being surrounded by and joining in with Liverpool fans, jumping up and down, wearing a Carragher shirt and singing when they won the Champions League on the most powerful night in my football-life to date. (Admittedly, I probably went too far.) Liverpool are a club struggling to uphold a world famous legacy. They are carrying the burden of an inadequate stadium, an overrall dismal record this century with sponsors, and much disastrous business in the transfer market. What Kenny Dalglish has inherited, this time around, is a mid-table team. One that last season's most successful mid-table-team manager could do nothing to improve. Albeit in four months.

Ten

Unsleepily tired in these thousands of words,
I am not an essayist.

Would I were upbeat, hurtling from a promenade,
Waiting to leave behind me a ten-year-old's reckless footprints
In Dorset sand.
This opportunity, only and readily in dreams,
Is inspired by a strange-smelling photograph.
Any one of many relatives lifts the heaviness of the album,
Once a year
The lightness of the photograph,
In a hurry from the shelf,
And forwards what is really a poem into the hands of one who made me,
Who paid for the print.

Unsteadily, I don't remember this image.
But this is always going to happen.
I don't remember not being an image.

I'm not sure how much longer this can continue for.

If the world were globelessly flat,
Before Christ,
I would row out from an ocean-threatened city,
Pray to a mermaid,
And fall from the farthest explored salt water
Into a new nowhere.

When the tide retreats, I look and see a leather ball coming to a stop,
Spitting out gold crystals.

The Independent

After I take a shit, I think I might go out for a smoke in the light rain, so I flash my pass to security and next the revolving doors have my quieter brain clunking. A policeman, tilting a rifle, is checking for something under his car - kittens they used to tell my friend in Northern Ireland - when Peter Hitchens walks past and I remember how on my iPod, in my pocket, his name sometimes falls across the screen (if only a torch had a fragrance!) on the buses where I escape to that famous debate. And in this moment I want to take it up with him, everything, and try to defend his brother's title without whom my own words are even less firm. But I don't have the fortitude. I tell Samantha, who is on the phone and is interested in how my day is going, I have to go, I have to go, and I can't help myself. I do a shopworn performance for Mr Hitchens. 

Peter Hitchens: Hi

Intern: Hi, I just want to say I'm a big fan of your writing. (This is partially a lie.)

Peter Hitchens: Thank you, sorry I didn't catch your name?

*Intern says a name and tells Hitchens he is on a placement at The Independent.

Peter Hitchens: Well don't tell them you were talking to me then!

Intern: Well, Happy christmas and a Merry new year. And the best of luck to your brother also. (This I mean and, though I fucked up with Happy and Merry, I feel alarmingly tall just getting the words out.)

Peter Hitchens: Thank you, I appreciate that. Good luck. (This might be his turn at dishonesty: After all I'm standing there, damaging my lungs, speaking dull word after wrong word, and my name has already been forgotten.)

Peter Hitchens walks away in an important coat, and as he turns the corner of Derry Street and wrings into the invisibility of High Street Kensington, I recognise a smallness: About my hands, my ability. In spite of my excitement, a fictional writer writes me some nonfiction: You have been a third hand on a plain clock. Now fuck off and face the marble wall. 

The next afternoon, the editor of the Sport is outside, beside me, which should start a far more important dialogue. It is an opportunity as opposed to a surprise. But I always preferred surprises to opportunities.

He lights a manually rolled brown cigarette. He notices the same polieceman, and the arms that are impossible to bid farewell to. Terror is on everyone's agenda. It is a singular agenda. It wants to drown a plural intelligence. The editor of the Sport, running his fingers over his lips, then blowing over his ordinary, Arsenal mug of tea, says he will put my name in the paper. I forget about anything else for ten minutes.

Now it is January and on my last day I'm awfully hungover. I text Sean on whose squalid balcony, open to London city, I had stood in the spectacularly early morning reading the scorecard for the final Ashes Test through a window. Cricket is a childhood event, and for this reason it has to be taken very seriously.

I'm spying on Film & Music bods. I translate my stale reflection in the brilliant water cooler, into an idea. I will go home and whatever happens I have to blog about my experience at The Independent and what it means to me and how the future's mask is a fat, sweating, plastic face. What the future holds is in trouble. Then I sit back down, do a task, mull over a boringness.

Where you have to return to is the bookshelf. (As with a bathroom light, or the kitchen drawer in whose darkness the cutlery doesn't glint.) I have read many essays and works of fiction about narcissism.

How absolutely unremarkable this is - my little name, a talking centimetre, used to wrap fish and chips in. No, this is where the work is done: here. This entry is for the reader whose name is also a little unlarge; whom I don't have to love, but want to; who follows despite impatience. Thank you. Merry New Year.