I now know that as a child I was n't alone in secretly imploring the local library to stay open so that I could wander across the shelves for just a few more minutes. Please...A few more minutes...please...

Twice a week, Monday and again on Thursday, I'd put myself through the delicious ordeal of choosing two books to luxuriate in. The magnitude of that task - which book out of so many. An old friend, or something new ?

Then home to release those caged words and be taken away from the fact of a small, hilly Yorkshire village and into the boundless world of imagination that only books offer.

I had an accomplice, or perhaps, more aptly a fellow sufferer, a few miles further north in the same county, and a few years older. And I only found that out on Tuesday when I went to see the very cheerful poet Ian McMillan at the Barbican. He confessed to the very same affliction. Not alone. A fellow traveler. Hooray !

He has buried himself in words; I see him as either a very jovial miner breaking the surface with words stuck in his hair and fluttering from his face, or poking through like a dog snuffling truffles, a gem here, a treasure there.

Another South Yorkshire bookworm too, who loves the romance of a small village library, that words are more than symbols on a page, they are portals to other lives and other worlds.

The boy done well too. No doubt that they may have maddened him as they do all of us, that they'll not stay still, or don't look right, or fall apart at a touch, but words have n't abandoned him. Letters have n't swarmed overboard. He writes very well, and in that lovely effortless style, which you know is only that way because of long hours at the keyboard, pacing up and down, waiting, hoping, for the moment when a recalcitrant sentence finally behaves itself.

God, I admire him.

Occasionally I set out fishing for inspiration, and find nothing, not a sprat, not even a sea urchin. Like today. Rattle my head, but it's empty. Still if you can't fish, you can mend your nets, which in my case, means a lot of reading is coming up.

I think my little furred friend has dipped a toe back into my flat; this morning and again this evening, I noticed something that looked like leavings. I do not under any circumstances want to this flat the sanctuary of St Archimedes, the patron saint of all things verminous. No, my saintly role model here is St Patrick, as he did with the snakes in Ireland then so should I - cast 'em out

I understand it now. It's all become clear to me. Sarah Palin's VP nomination is an example to the world of the US's meritocracy; whether you've been there centuries, or just arrived, and struggling with the language (as she seems to be), everything's still open, there are no obstacles, you can aim as high as you want.

Canny man, that McCain. He's trying to win the "...English is not my mother tongue vote...", and that's why SP is on the ticket; she's there as living evidence that wherever you hail from, or irrespective of the fact that your English is shaky... third, fourth language that kind of thing... you can still go places. So subtle. Taken me ages to spot this.

What a politician McCain is. She's there to get the immigrant vote.

They're following me ! We found a cockroach in the office kitchen this afternoon. I've become the patron saint of Vermin. Everywhere I go, I attract the damn things, why can't it be women I have this effect on!

"...of no consequence to anyone..." is how Michael Heseltine is trying to explain away George Osborne's fascination for Russian oligarchs...and yet, it would be if it was a Labour politico and the Daily Mail was circling maliciously.

It actually is of no consequence to anyone anyway; what happens when Bullingdon Club members fall out is flatly irrelevant to the country (although I do like the sound of 'when Bullingdon club members fall out', said in a certain way it does have the ring of a fairly racy 1950's novel).

Yet, and is n't there always one of these, it does appeal to my karmic sense of justice. George Osborne gleefully told tales and stoked the bile of the right wing press with tales of Peter Mandelson, and now the shoe is most definitely on the other foot. What goes around comes around.

I can only wonder if other indiscretions are waiting to break over Mr Osborne's rather smug face, indignantly wounded as he may seem right now. As the Daily Mail would proclaim in banner headlines about any other politician who was n't a Tory - "no smoke...etc..."

I've been watching Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food series since it started and I have only admiration for him.

I know Rotherham and I know it's avidity for cheap, bad food, for kebabs, chips, Pizzas, burgers. I go there monthly - it's a wonderland of obesity. People cocooned, swaddled in fat, marbled in it. Heart straining, gut busting diets handed down the generations. Children who in all likelihood could find their lives medically compromised, or even shortened, because of junk food

It is inarguable as it is inexcusable that so many of them are effectively malnourished, wholly over reliant on cheap bad food, in a world where the ping of the microwave and the takeaway container passes as cooking.

What Jamie is attempting cannot be condemned - some people may enjoy a richer, more fulfilling, hopefully longer life because of him. Provide a counter argument to that. Do we want to be in the position where we have witnessed the reversal of progress ? Youngsters dying before their parents?

Everything's inverted. The free market Republicans have more or less nationalised most of the main US banks and the Tories are caught soliciting money from the Russians ! No wonder they fought tooth and nail to get Boris elected as Mayor, with a name like that...

I'd always thought it was Labour's role to be deep in the Kremlin's pocket, at least that's what the Daily Mail has proclaimed...oh, since...the time of the Zinoviev letter. All this is doing my head in.

Tough days ahead. I'm seeing that headline or variants of it more than I see the Starbucks sign, and understand me here - there's a whole lotta latte brewed in London. It's a personal choice kind of thing: you believe, part believe or not at all. As a good fence sitter, I'll not bother saying where I am on this point.

But what does worry me is that the City has put itself on a yo-yo diet - up two hundred points one day, down three hundred the next. They gain it, they lose it. And all that bouncing between extreme emotional states as well, never high enough, never low enough, up, down. Elation, depression, yet no look-in for reason.

Parachute mood disorder counselors into the City. Send boatloads of food behaviorists towards Canary Wharf. Flood Threadneedle St with Therapists. A psychiatrist on every street corner. Specialists in equity anorexia and bulimic bail-outs outside every City cafe and coffee shop. Yo-yo dieting in the City, who'd believe it. Tough times indeed.

I've been trying to come up with a recession breakfast platter. So far it's credit crunchies and sour grapes. Trying to think of other things to add in.

I wonder as well what the keys on my keyboard say to each other after I closed my laptop up. Today at work, for instance, I've literally thrashed the keyboard. Fingers pounding away like pile drivers - smash, smash, smash....Truly the unfinished keyboard symphony.

Probably in the moments after I've put the lid down, there's a pause, then a collective intake of breath, before individual keys begin calling out to each other: " how you feeling ? what a day....he never stopped...All day...I know....if he could only use more than two fingers that would be something....my springs are killing me....hey at least, you're not a vowel...imagine...exactly I'd never want to be want to be one of them....might think themselves special but who'd want to be driven in to the ground the way he hits the keys...it's bad enough just being an R...why could n't I've been another character ? Has he ever used { or ^...? Never...no wonder they're always so fresh....what a life eh...."

Two Sundays in every month I work as a volunteer at a small art gallery in North London. It is probably one of the most delightful jobs I've ever had - surrounded by sumptuous paintings and sculptures. Bathed in colour. It's like being dipped into an aesthetic, painterly spa. A blissful experience.

The visitors are fun, they're knowledgeable, curious, and many are artists themselves. And I learn which is a state of mind I can never get enough: about colour, the daring uses of a palette, the deliberation behind brush strokes, the motivations that fired the artist's sensibility.

You know that thinking is a promiscuous activity, you hop around, one thought leads to another then another, then one more, and so on.

I spent a very pleasant afternoon yesterday idly wondering what all the artworks do when the curator and staff have turned the alarms, locked the last door, and are receding footsteps across a crunchy gravel drive. Do the images in paintings squeeze out of the canvas, give themselves a shake and pop into three dimensions, and then reflect on the day ? Are there rhomboidal shapes leaning against walls popping a beer whilst talking football with a sturdy, heavy set farmer of the Dutch School? Are there gaily dressed flighty courtesans a la Hogarth flirting with Poussin's satyrs? Anyone hissing "bitch...she gets all the attention... and why...?" at the Mona Lisa?

Or are they sat around talking about us - the visitors and the staff ? "I had that bald guy again...straight up to the canvass...his breath...Jesus..." "...did you hear that crap about colour field theory....where do they get this from...?" "You can go years stuck on these walls before you hear anything that even resembles an original thought..." "...another canoodling couple...and they think they're the first...seen it all..." "Why do they stare so much...rude, man..." "see the students were back...and do they come over to see us ? No, straight to the Hoppers and the De Chirico's every time...and people wonder why I look so glum..."

Thank God that investment bankers are n't responsible for evolution, we'd all be extinct by now.

For many months, I've only been able to look at stock prices if I've had a painkiller the size of a manhole cover.

Today, I reluctantly accept that a piece of flippancy I wrote earlier has virtually become true: there is more investment value in my supermarket loyalty card than in my bombed out equity portfolio now.

I went to the Mark Rothko retrospective at the Tate Modern on Saturday. I shall go again and again.

It is an encounter with the supernatural, but not in the sense of that word as we so often accept it, no, this is transcendental, of glimpses of things beyond. Almost like standing before reflecting pools.

Canvases, the colour of dark, arterial red blood or charcoal greys, with subtle gradations of tone and heat. Floating in the approximate centre of many of his pieces: faint, scarcely visible images of arcane symbols, almost of the type you might expect to find scratched on the surface of some long dead alien world.

Rothko could certainly work a colour field composition. I cannot wait for my next immersion.

Battling mice is wearisome, and I could stretch a riff out on the subject, except I don't want to. I'm fed up with it all. But, who said it's only ever black, or only ever white? There's always some little bit of odd joy to extract from somewhere. Mine is that I can finally see the externals, the first budding shoots of the Heron Tower appear above ground. The vertebrae of a great building is starting to take shape. Love it. London cannot have enough skyscrapers. One on every corner, or better , one for every Starbucks there is.

A break from the rodent wars.

At last the House of Representatives has passed the $700 billion bailout plan. Could this finally mean the corner has been turned and financial blood will begin to reach all the parts it withdrew from so abruptly. Right now, I have more investment worth in my Tesco club card than I do in what passes for my equity savings. I'd like to see that ratio changed.

Interesting to listen to other people's experiences with rodents. Squirrels in attics, mice in sofas, and so on. Someone I know who comes from Holland told me about the agility of the canal rats in Amsterdam. Up through the bathroom plumbing. Incredible.

That's the thing, you see. Recent circumstances have forced me - against my will - into conducting a low level counter insurgency campaign against flies and mice. That's never what I wanted to happen.

Writing pieces that subtly advanced the human condition that's what I had in mind, not exactly Montaigne or Pascal, still something that might help and guide in it's own way. But what turned up instead - me sat at my laptop churning out sit reps from the rodent front line. The Plato of Pest Control.

The rules of my flat are simple: whoever pays the bills stays. No pay, no stay, so the mouse has to go.

The Pest Control guy did his stuff yesterday. Bait boxes everywhere. They eat the poison and retire to their nests...forever.

Just that word, nests, though; I was rather hoping my...er...visitor, was a sterile bachelor.