Time for me to come out of the wings and wish everyone a Happy New Year !

Eat the frog. That's what I was told to do this morning; start the day on the hardest and most indigestible piece of work, and get it over and done with.

Out of the in-box and into the out-box. It's tough. I'm a man whose motto has always been: why do it today if it can be put off for another day.

I've made a career on the bones of procrastination and deadlines so close they've left grid-lines on my face.

And it's stressful, I panic, scurry around frantically, come up with rash, often ill-thought through conclusions, and deliver something that usually ends up on the slab under the mortician's gloomy eye, and not the bright, perky baby that others seem to deliver.

Enough.

A change is a -comin... Archimedes will eat that frog. I'll get it down somehow.

If I do exit 2009 without a job, and let's face it, nothing looks safe right now, and it does n't matter whatever industry it is that one toils in - anyone and everyone is vulnerable - then I need a plan. Always need a plan. Everyone does.

So if it does all go gurgling down the pan and money is too tight to mention, then I shall become a bespectacled, overly literate, polysyllabic spouting, well-fed, and certainly well read, male gigolo. There must be a market. Surely. Has to be. It's untapped. I like the idea of pioneering this kind of gig.

Is there anyone who enjoys this tail end time of year? This gloomy wilderness period between Xmas and New Year.

It's the restless misery that you only get at 3 am but stretched like bubble gum into hours and days. There's a buried alive feel to London right now. Where is everyone?

Lolling in the street outside my flat is a modern fossil; a relic from a time before credit crunch; something as remote in time as Genghis Khan's hordes sweeping through Central Asia. It's a stretch Hummer. A long, multi-wheeled, snub-nosed sauropod of a car yawning and snorting. Squatting like a toad. Waiting to gorge itself on a horde of young women out for the night.

Only where I live can they still be thought of as edgy and redolent of mean and cool, when all they actually represent now is the busted flush of a casino economy.

I clawed my way to the top of a chilly York Minster this morning. It was like being a chimney sweep, squirming up the narrow spiralling pipe that passes for the stirway. My heart straining the way a pump might do at a flooded camp-site, gurgling, wheezing - and I count myself as fit as well. But I got there, tumbling out of the door-way and on to the walkway of the tower, and an exhilarating view.

Thirteen or so hours later, my legs feel like plasticine or two pipe cleaners.

It's like being slowly interred; the steady, regular spadefuls of earth shutting out the light grain by grain. It's deathly in the City. Lifeless.

God knows what it'll be like during the wilderness week between Xmas and New Year. Quieter than a John Cage composition?

I'm adding my two pennyworth to the ever growing mountain of "wow, I'm getting old!" and this is what if feels like, outbursts.

It came to me yesterday as one of my oldest friends and I slogged it through a heaving, churning London; twenty years ago, we were young guns, tireless, and able to get by on what passed for the Late 20th century version of a jug of wine and a loaf of bread: burgers and a kebab bought from the back of a van outside Brixton Academy after seeing Run DMC.

Days of wine and roses then, days of whine and woes, now. Both of us have slid in to the pose which two decades ago we certainly mocked, of truculent observers of everyone else's short-comings.

I've noticed something else: moans change, or at least their origin. The breathless, lust-ridden "oh yes" walked away in the night and never told me they were going, and left me their step-mother instead - the "Oh God, that drives me mad....I can't believe they did that..that really gets my goat, etc, etc.

Oh Yes...come back...I miss you

Tempus fugit.

"...Put me back. Liked it in there...warm. Don't cut the cord...! It's a burp, don't panic. No pacifier....gimme the real thing...can't have it ? Why ! ...Too old ?

School ? What's that ? Take me back home now...hate it. Look at me....look at me....I'm in the team !

You're not my parents ! I did n't slam it !

University ? Me ? Gap year first....I'll get a part-time job. Borrow the car ?

University ? Great. Parties, girls....

...Course I love you.., want us to be together forever....Dumped her...always on at me...Career....keeping my options open.

Conference calls, spreadsheets...in the City...financial planning, that sort of stuff ...all the team....legless Friday evening...

The photo...? Girlfriend.... together two years now...flat in Hackney. Maybe..not sure...still young. Live a bit

Will you...?

Stag night, Prague...wrecked...not a word to her...not a word...!

I do

Shopping...it's my football night ! Alright, alright...I will then...what for ?..You are ! Love you, Babe !

Out the way...my wife... I'm a Dad ! Got your eyes.... Changed her last night...work in the morning...exhausted....

My little princess walking ...Want me to read you a story ? Buy you a pony ? Let's see...

You're growing...seems like only yesterday, you were...don't talk to your mother like that ! No daughter of mine is wearing that...

Where's he from ? Working ? Thought not. Can't you find someone normal ? Engaged? Why am I always the last to....

Actually he's not a bad lad...

Married....my little princess...can't believe it...

Grandchildren...two...boy and a girl...love 'em to bits....Retired a year ago...this and that. Golf, fishing...

Bit tight round the chest, apart from that ok...well, we're all getting older...no spring chicken...

Nurse....!

The end.

You could never say night-time is quiet.

It's not the quantity, there's less noise, can't argue there. It's the clarity of what there is that matters: couples arguing, cars passing, night buses drifting by, subterranean rumble of a stereo, the aches and groans of buildings settling, sounds of love-making curling through the night-time air, neighbours closing doors, the stamp of feet on stair cases, mice scuttling through false ceilings. The last I loathe beyond measure.

The bastards have returned; I'm terrified they're going to gnaw through my ceiling.

I've found the angriest place in London: the livid, throbbing nexus of indignation and choler, where the mean air temperature is always boiling point, and rage baked in to the fabric of the building. It's the crossroads of umbrage where all the traffic lights are stuck on red.

And centigrade 100 plus is...the Associated Newspapers building, where every morning the latest edition of a hot under the collar, enraged, surly, resentful Daily Mail is sent scuttling into the world.

I've wondered why the security guards in the lobby all wear asbestos gloves; I know now - every surface is too hot to touch.

Hot coals instead of carpets to angrily stride on ? I'd bet my last euro that's the case.

What a place it must be to work in: mockery in the Gents, sneers in the Ladies, jeers in the corridors. Everyone, surely, must talk in italics, or emboldened UPPER CASE, or both at the same time. Talk... sorry, a typo, I meant bellow...

I've been trying to conjure up what a typical office there must look like. Everything, obviously, must be in black and white, though I fancy, things are shot through with lightening bolts of puce and crimson. Specially strengthened handsets - need to be, all that disgusted slamming down; keyboards the same, reinforced to take the pounding only irritated fingers can make.

I see people working there having just two expressions: righteous caviling, or more likely, open-mouthed incandescent fury (for some reason, the rictus like horror of Francis Bacon's "Pope" comes into my mind here).

Too enraged for courtesy either ("do you mind, got to write an article bemoaning it's apparent disappearance"), so it'll be sharp elbows and barging through to get anywhere.

I had trouble wondering what the logo on their flag might be, then it hit me. Obvious. Two crossed beta-blockers on a pulsating vermilion background.

When I'm in that part of Kensington next and it's raining, I shall check to see whether the rain does n't instantly turn to steam the second it hits the building. Spooky place.

I know what love is. I heard it this evening waiting at checkout in Waitrose; it's a soft female voice whispering adoringly to her partner: "...come home, I'll make you a bacon sandwich..."

Lust and food, and in only eight words. It's better than a haiku

Art yesterday, Politics today.

What a great advert Boris Johnson is for David Cameron's earnest but never less than bumptious, young turks. Cohort number four has had to trudge out of Boris's City Hall wreathed in disgrace: it's like Spinal Tap in there. Ray Lewis goes for a walk, Tim Parker out to grass, James McGrath forced in to exile, and today, David Ross.

Boy, can Boris choose people. Four of his inner circle gone in seven months. I'm so impressed. Bet David is too.

Art heals. I've no uncertainty here. It does. It soothes.

Saturday, I felt listless; something I was going to do with someone I like, did n't happen. That's all I'll say.

Moods, every one knows, do n't respect the calendar, they'll weave in and out of days. They run outside clock time.

So Saturday's tail-end slump woke up with me on Sunday morning. Dragged it's heels alongside mine, until I reached the gallery I volunteer at. Through that door a blazing world of colour, paint, freshness, ideas, shapes, angles, oddities of expression. Whiffs of bright, clear air. Into the light.

Once my sense of wonder is re-lit I'm good to go.

The creative spark in general is something I'm intrigued about. Can it be taught ? Is it innate ? Borne out of years of slog and graft? All of the above or a combination?

There's a large table full of books in the Tate Modern shop devoted to creativity: inspirational in the main, almost evangelical in a few cases.

Lots of lessons. Life stories. Incidents. But the key to it all, which seems to remain unmentioned, or is, but perhaps, just in the smallest font size print, is this: just do it. Stare the blank screen out, face down the empty canvass, and start with something. Anything.

Blogs were made for gloomsters, and in my particular case this evening, the "I wish I could have" middle aged male sob.

Put up with the heaving shoulders and chest, readers, it's worth it...for me that it is. Better out than in. Here it is, puking and mewling in the open air, documented for the first time: I wish I could have lived with someone.

To have been a participant in coupledom proper, where you buy a house together, you freshen it up, fret over paint schemes, bicker over furniture, worry where the throw rugs should go. The things that adults do. Things I've never done, never experienced.

There you go, one unfulfilled middle aged male sob.

Testing times at work. There was a fire in the kitchen which is next door to my office this morning. Acrid smoke and water everywhere. I can't go back into that part of the building for safety reasons, so I'm nomadic now, squatting wherever I can.

But that's just a minor thing; the nightmare is that I can't get to the kettle now, and I'm nowhere near creative or productive until I've drunk at least a gallon of green tea. Agony.

Japan is a melody of noise. The signals at pedestrian crossings merrily chirp away whenever the lights flick over; there's a steady, slow, deep ocean wave like "bing, bong" chime rolling across the platforms at main line train stations; and my favourite - two bars of Monsieur Hulot like accordion music every time trains pull into a certain station on Tokyo's Yanamote line.

So different to the unfinished symphony of noise that rolls through Hanoi and Saigon. Constant babble of discordant hoots, whistles, squeals, bells, rumbling exhausts.

Seoul is smooth, like jazz, like something Grover Washington might have written. Oiled and toned, all the notes fit tightly. It all gells. No bumps.

I love all three.

Two things have been gnawing at me today. When, and this is the first, will the Daily Mail print something vaguely responsible and without innuendo ?

Their uniquely joyless vision of life gets me down but at the same time, irritates me to high heaven. Give me a free one on the metaphor mixing there, but that's what the DM does to me.

In the spaces when I've not been pondering that, I've been turning this over: why do some women put hand cream on the back of their hands first, but others put it on their palms? Put me out of my misery on this one please.