Well, we're here, the final day of tumultuous decade. As a planet and as a species, we could all do with a quieter, softer, next ten years. I'm an optimist, so let's hope so.

To that small, yet perfectly formed body of readers who flit across my blog from time to time, Happy New Year!

One of my friends wrote how she just simply can't stand the UK's lemming like descent into post Xmas shopping madness. With you all the way there.

Problem with shopping is that it's almost seen as a patriotic duty if you're a Brit. Shop the UK out of recession and so on. But of course that was exactly what got us into the mess we're still trying to bail ourselves out of now. That, and the carefree, reckless, spoilt child behaviour of the investment banking community.

Can't bankers be made to sign some kind of register or wear ankle tracking devices like petty criminials do? We need to know just what these self appointed geni are up to. Leave them on their own, and they'll be dumping us with another pile of the soft, brown and smelly to shovel away.

I can live with Xmas; in fact I actually find it quite tolerable....if whoever it is I'm staying with (usually a relative) understands, and they do, that this brooding, Capricorn Goat needs time to himself, or he'll start butting heads.

Time in this context translates into space, which, in it's turn, means I like to roam and to think.

Dorchester, where I stayed this Xmas, met all of my needs and more. On the town's outskirts is the aloof, dominating, yet magnificent Maiden Castle. An enormous, prehistoric hill fort, with some of the steepest ramparts I've seen anywhere, but more remarkable given their antiquity.

I was there with several relatives late on the afternoon of Xmas day, which was certainly, the best time to experience it's moody grandeur, silhouetted as it was against a lowering, cloudy, inky black sky.

Windswept and away from Dorchester, not like a cast out orphan, but almost an occult presence instead. Simply biding it's time, waiting.

Such a ruminating landscape, mysterious, full of hidden energies, with more than something of the night about it.

I was, and remain, transfixed by it.

Be thankful that we're not prickly or sniffy about the English Language. It's untidy, it's oblivious to boundaries, can take root in even the thinnest of soils, totally adaptive to any environment, and generally seems, well, inexhaustible. Simply more fertile.

Do we realise it? Probably not, or if we did, we've forgotten and it needs something to remind us. Like me after reading a dull tract on social media, but one that was fairly well stuffed with new word plums, and they made me remember how ever evolving it is.

Here are those plums. Whether they'll all survive to a healthy old age is any one's guess. All of them inspired by the relatively new discipline of knowledge management (itself, a neologism, and an indefinable one for that), and I'd be stumped if I was asked to say what any of the actually mean. But, it's their vigour and freshness I like, so here's the roll of honour:

• Wiki gardeners
• Idea engines
• Crowdsourcing
• Prediction markets
• Answer market places
• Persistent environment
• Mind share
• Thought leadership
• Sentiment analysis, and what must be a close cousin, Intent analysis

Ten years time and they're mainstream, possibly; ten years time, and they're all but forgotten, probably. I'm simply enjoying the pleasure of witnessing a rudely healthy language generate new terms, new words, new slogans without stopping.

I was among the eight million or so people who stayed at home or delayed their journey into work to listen to the last ever Terry Wogan show on Friday.

"This is it then..." he said, in the moments before he played his last ever song "... the day I've been dreading".

The end of so many things: that odd, strange loyalty that certain people engender, and Terry Wogan is the exemplar here, with a devoted listenership, (including me); of a real friendship, almost physical in it's intensity, even if it was mediated through the democracy of the airwaves; and the end of listening to some one clearly in love with words. Did n't he say on Friday that his show was one of "...badinage and persiflage"?

It was the end of something particularly personal for me. His career spanned my parent's radio life and through mine. They are no longer here. Both dead. In this sense he was the continuum, the overlap. That went on Friday, and that's another reason, I'll miss him.

It's not often I go to the pub, but I was in one today. Five of us threading the conversation with different stories, curious anecdotes, odd facts, and bold rhetorical sweeps. Pub talk.

Female pub talk, I've been told, gets to heart of the matter more or less straight away: " Your boyfriend, how good ?...big ...?"

What did we five men spend thirty minutes chewing over ? Films that have us in tears. And don't expect there to be someone saying it's when it's the final Top Gear show the season cuts to the credits. No, we were listing serious handkerchief movies, like the Incredible Journey, Marley and Me, or Up, and in my case, the film that always has me sniffling, Rabbit Proof Fence.

I'm sat in Jimmy's waiting to get my hair cut. He's busy, talking, and clipping away at someone's hair. Conversation turns to marriage:

"How long you been married?"

"Five years. Together for four before that"

"Ten year's time you're wife won't notice you. My wife she's says to me 'you look nice. Had you hair cut?' 'Yes... a week ago"

This morning I read an article about James Agee, the film critic; my only experience of him, and I realise now to my somewhat shame, was as the author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a classic of the Depression era. I'd no idea of his life as a critic, and certainly none of just how wonderful a writer on film he was.

Visionary, insightful, a thoughtful critic, and blessed with great images. Take this one of Buster Keaton's face, so impassive and featureless, that "when he moved his eyes. it was like seeing them move in a statue"; or this one or Orson Welles in the role of Rochester in Jane Eyre "...his eyes glinting in the Rembrandt like gloom...."

I love that image, it's everything you could imagine of Rochester, dark, shadowy, furtive, hidden secrets, off stage mysteries. Great writing, certainly memorable writing depends on people like Agee and the images they mine from their creative depths.

Someone sent me a link to site that specialises in publishing 90 word stories. No more, no less, just 90 words on the button. That's it.

I like the idea: you pluck something out of the air, trap it between your hands, and ultimately mould into a recognisable shape, using the tiniest amount of material. Concision, precision, and a swift conclusion.

The person who forwarded the link on is a gifted writer, a published writer in fact, and one who is more than capable of turning his hand to any one of the numerous literary forms there are. So rustling up a light lunch of no more than 90 words was pretty straightforward for him. In this respect I'm still stuck at the beans on toast stage, whereas he's a Jamie Oliver, whatever is to hand in the fridge, slice it, dice it, whizz it around, and hey presto, filling fare.

His 90 word story is a good one; to be frank, knowing him as I do, I'd be disappointed if it was n't.

Quite unexpectedly, though, I did get a chuckle out of it, (and by the way, here are those 90 words). I saw, elsewhere, a thread of conversation develop around the electric blanket that's mentioned in the story, which could only be American.

Was anyone sued ?

Three weeks since I came back, and I can still smell those corn tortillas cooking even now sat on a sofa in my small West London flat, and see those gorgeous, overflowing heaps of plump red tomatoes and succulent green beans, the mounds of fleshy fruit, ripe, tiny yellow bananas, golden carambolas, generously sized carrots, the juiciest pineapples, carpets of coffee beans drying in the sun.

The chutzpah of the Tory party and their excitable press claque... I can't think of anything to match it in Europe...well, there's Silvio, but he's really in a league of his own, somewhere between denial and disdain. Still, il Cavaliere must be hearing them panting behind him, constantly self-referencing themselves as the Government already. Did I miss an election somewhere ? Did it happen whilst I was asleep ?

Conservative Central Office must be busier than Heathrow, every day there's a new edict or pronouncement cleared for take-off, their busy army of worker ant newspaper columnists sweat like galley slaves frothing everything up.

I understand why they do this: they want their team to win, so it's get in there early and impress the waverers, the floaters, with just how businesslike the boys and girls in blue are, tell them about the preparations they've made, how they'll hit the ground running and straight into action.

All understood, I'd do the same, but there be monsters here; the constant repetition, the never ending implication that they'll win (sad, but likely), might actually back fire: there's so much froth to step through - more than you'd find on a cappuccino - that there's all the likelihood that some people will give up trying to understand them, or actually believe they are the government, and not vote. Please let it be the latter.

Of course, there is the minor matter of the Tories winning the next election, but that does n't seem to bother their thinking.

I agree: it is almost Beckettian, if it's late, and you're still in the office, and the only other company is a fly trapped in the fluorescent light fitting. Not me, I'm sat on the sofa, idly surfing, it's someone I've just heard asking for a request on the radio. Late night working....many unhappy memories...

A few weeks ago, I picked up a slim book of poetry by Gioconda Belli, which I'd spotted, hidden in the shelves of a tiny news stand, whilst I was roaming the small shopping area of Managua airport's departure lounge.

Nicaragua relishes poetry; as much as it can be said to be the Land of Volcanoes - pockmarked with flooded extinct craters, and those that still froth and smoke, and occasionally vomit - it is a nation that celebrates the sensuous imagery and the exquisite concision of meaning that only poetry is capable of.

The nation's politics are complicated (and never free from interference); it's landscape apt to writhe and wriggle; but poets are it's life force, able to sketch the struggles, the joys, the complex human comedy we find ourselves in, with the passion and intensity that Life in all it's ragged glory requires.

There is a line from one Gioconda Belli's poems (the anthology, incidentally is called From Eve's Rib) that stops me in my tracks, nine simple words: "God carved into me a workshop for human beings".

I love that image of a womb as a workshop for new humans. And I see a sadness in there too; there are women I know who have dreamed of forging new lifes in the crucible of their bodies, except that circumstance has not allowed the work to start.

As a man, I thank poetry for this insight wrapped in a metaphor that is unforgettable.

The longest, arrow straight, bend free road I've ever been on was one I travelled a few days ago between Managua and Leon, in Nicaragua. A highway without the hint of a kink or a curve, just perfectly straight, with a heat haze forever shimmering in the distance.

It is a numbing experience to be sat on a bus that seems to make no distance on a never ending line of a road, nonetheless, it is a strangely enchanting one, simply sitting for hours taking it in as Nicaragua's plays it's rhythms before you.

Solitary labourers, carrying small backpacks, and a machete in one hand, walking in the dust of the road's margins; the occasional, riotously liveried, 'Chicken bus', steaming past; then the convoys of second hand American Mack trucks rolling by with unknown cargoes' and always a joyous invocation to Jesus slapped on the windscreen; along with Central America's other workhorse, the Toyota 4 x 4 pick-up, weaving between the trucks and the buses. Nicaragua at work.

Off-stage, but never completely out of sight, were the countless spirals of soaring, patrolling vultures, tasting the air with the extraordinary sense of smell. Below them, small, scattered groups of thin cattle, nosing through the fields. And, always, a single dog trotting somewhere.

I never thought a simple journey on a bus could be so fascinating.

At the heart of Boris's mayoral campaign was the pledge to clear London's streets of the Bendibus, an articulated public transport juggernaut, but something I've always enjoyed seeing, winding and bending from the hips as it clunkers through London. I'm sure it will be replaced (I know it will - it's one of the very few BoJo pledges that might actually happen) by something sanitised and clean.

Clean, schmeen; I think our streets need pepper, they need spicing up, buses ought to have character, so I say to TFL: be bold, take a leap of faith and add a real dash of strap hanging exuberance and near psychedelia - order a fleet of 'Chicken Buses', those second hand US school buses that smoke through Central America at speeds that are obviously out of kilter to the condition of the bus and definitely unsurvivable in the event of a burst tyre or collision.

God, they are an experience. I've been on several this month, and watched in awe, hundreds more hammer around the tiniest bends with the doors flapping open, or shave past one another, at the same distance a man applies a razor to his stubble, and always in the manner of Formula one drivers duking it out round the toughest Grand Prix course.

These are buttock busting contraptions. Six hours or more bouncing on a ruined chassis along rutted, pot-holed roads, overtaking on the inside and outside, around blind corners, and the crests of every hill turned my rump into two sandbags.

Somehow I always had a seat, and for that I'm grateful, I saw two women sitting on two up-turned buckets once, their faces pressed against the spokes of someone else's bike. That was the journey where I was squeezed like a near empty toothpaste tube might be in the hands of a fervent recycler against the window by a truly enormous woman. Gargantuan does not meet the grade, this was something beyond.

Often I would wake up, to the sound of chicken buses shudder along the nearby streets, belching and wheezing, audibly clanking up and down the gears, or if they had a few yards free space in front, roar like a squadron of tanks crossing the invasion line.

There's nothing they can't accommodate or carry; the squawking chicken, obviously, after all that's why they are called what they're called, or a couple of squealing pigs darting between the seats, sometimes the bedstead strapped on the roof along with several sheets of glass, and always my rucksack lashed to the top.

Nor is there anything mute about the colour scheme; it's brash, eye-poppingly raucous, and more often than not there's a reference to Jesus spray-painted in screaming hues. There's some modesty, however; not every chicken bus is near dayglo, many remain in their original deep yellow US School bus tan with their old school district name still visible. The irony could n't be starker; probably being sat on a bus marked Topeka School District or Clark County Education Board will be the nearest most Central Americans will ever get to the US.

You can buy models of these buses, but where's the all action version, the one that spews out a cloud of black smoke the way the real ones do. The air is chewy when they pass. I've taken in lungfuls of burning diesel and smoking brake fumes as the Chicken buses have rolled past me.

By God, I miss them. There's a romance and a frisson they have that dear old London Transport will never have. Just think though if TFL did take that leap of faith and a fleet of madly painted, horn blasting chicken buses starts to stream through London's streets.

Sixteen hours of solid travelling including a hair-raising mini bus gallop through Guatemala City and then two planes. Can I get a seat other than the middle of a row of three ? My eyes are cinders. That's it. To bed.

Break in service. I'm off for a few weeks traveling in other parts, so posts are going to be fewer and thinner than usual. Transmission resumes at the end of November.

I like the unexpected joy of coming across a place in a novel and knowing it really exists, and in a few cases, the even deeper joy of actually having been there. It happened this evening. Browsing in Waterstones on Oxford Street this evening, I picked up a copy of Norman Collins's "London belongs to me"; a tale of ordinary, unexceptional Londoners living humdrum lives but in the trembling, nervous days before the outbreak of World War two.

Funny, how your eyes can riffle through a page of text and spot treasure. Thumbing through the novel's early pages, I saw Cannon Street mentioned, a road I've walked across or along for nearly ten years, then further on, the name of a pub appeared like a sunbeam splitting a cloudy sky in half - the Bunch of Grapes.

I walk past this small, rectangle of a pub virtually every day; glimpsing the opaque shadows of city workers through the mullioned windows; catching stray fragments of conversations from the small groups smoking outside, clustered around the beer barrels that double as tables.

I've always suspected, if only by it's age, that this pub had history, that there must be stories soaked into the floorboards and a bar aching with gossip. Now I know.

"...schmoozy e-mails full of philosophy..." What an accusation that was. Not thrown at me, though it did have me inwardly cringing; I've an over achieving portentousness gland that likes to have a run out from time to time, so I know there's a lot of my own mails out there laden to the waterline with bombast and nonsense.

Still, it was n't me that these two young women on the top deck of the 27 bus were dissecting. Someone else's erstwhile boyfriend was getting the hatchet treatment and his mail sentiments were their fodder. Brutal.

I met my namesake yesterday. We're not lookalikes, no evil twin thing going on, but in the right light, well, there's a resemblance alright. Weirder by the moment.

I don't know whether I've slipped into the pages of something gothic by Edgar Allen Poe, or dropped between the words of a Paul Auster novel, where he's celebrating the strangeness of coincidence, but I've had an uncanny couple of days.

Yesterday, I flicked over to watch the BBC news and saw myself in the backdrop of a piece to camera. Unexpected - although I do remember seeing a TV camera perched on the side of the road - so not that unexpected in hindsight, but also unsettling. Do I really look like that ? All that yoga, healthy food, walking everywhere, striding up thirteen floors to the office, to still end up looking lost and nerdy ?

Then today, I find myself leading the charge to keep the Security Guard where I work and the person I'm charging against has exactly the same name as me, and even more bizarrely, we even look like each other, according to those who've met hm. Weird.

I read once that the early Portuguese and Spanish explorers knew when they were nearing new worlds when they saw vegetation drift past their ships, or picked up the scent of mysterious places still over the horizon.

This is very much how it is for me now. The tiller on my job has been turned and I'm steering into uncharted territory, and it is n't remnants of exotic flora that's sweeping by, no it's strange terms like "folksonomy", "tag clouds", "hive minds", and "peer to peer social networks".

These words are like catnip to me. I know that the world of social media which is where these concepts live is n't flat and there's no edge to sail over, but that's it. That's all I know. An unknown world out there, be fascinating to find out what it's shape and size is

Someone on the radio proposed a moment ago that Amy Winehouse is a cipher for our times, given her rehab, chaotic lifestyle, and recent pop-up appearance on Strictly Come Dancing. Celebritas rather than gravitas seemingly being the state we all aspire to as a nation. In effect, she represents our collective state of mind.

Such a suggestive word, cipher. Slithers like a snake through the undergrowth. Not a door stopper of word like it's near cognate, emblem, cipher goes under and around. Stealthy, but...

It's a raised eyebrow of a word too; prim, arch, certainly Victorian. I'm sure many Nineteenth century novels and tracts have a fine dusting of cipher.

To matters at hand, however. It's not that I disagree with the term nor who the radio presenter has as it's object; it's that I think there's an uber-cypher walking amongst us. It's Boris Johnson. His gurning mug, that wall-eyed, mock wodehouse whimsical face leering from every newspaper page. He's the cipher of our times.

Two apologies due. The first to the two young Americans outside Holland Park station this evening. I gave you the wrong directions - completely wrong - to Beach Blanket Babylon. I got confused with another lookalike bar and thought that was it. Could n't have picked somewhere further away if I'd tried.

And it's not like I don't know the area I live in. After twenty five years, come on, you'd expect I could pick out where the local hot spots are? Hope you found your way to BBB in the end. Really embarrassed about that.

Second apology to me: spooning soup from the saucepan....hey, what's that about?

He's up there with that small band of people who deserve it to win it, but to be given the Nobel Prize so early on in his career, and for promise of future success rather than actual, in your hands achievement, is, I think, going to give Barack Obama, a lot of unwanted problems. The Republicans must be baying at the moon about this.

Where we are now, that is my friends and I, is that fifth decade of life; the season of mists, of ruefulness; uneasy about the future, but treasuring past glories; flitting in and out of quiet self accusation - why did we do this, but not that, turn right, instead of left ?

It's a slow motion slap across the face being in your fifth decade: the gradual, ultimately worrying realisation that this really is the midpoint, and that the inevitable descent looks tough, uncertain, probably treacherous.

Everyone faces this, and it's nothing new either to wrap it in the handy image of a slow journey into Autumn. It's another stage in our personal evolution.

Embrace it, or be crushed by it. It has to be the former however strange this new land seems.

And I've resurrected it. Though I'm still apprehensive about the new power pack I've bought; the connector I'm using is n't for a Toshiba, but none of those are marked as Toshiba compatible will fit. So here's to hope and a safe electricity supply.

When I'm confident, meaning the battery's brimming with charge then I'll settle down and blog something in more depth

Could be some time before I'm blogging in strength: my laptop is dying on me.

A great referendum vote. Well done to the boys and girls in green. It's pole-axed the Tories. Still disappointing to hear that Cameron - assuming he becomes PM - says he'll recommend a No vote. I support the EU and why should I feel like an endangered species ?

It's the patriotic duty of every one in Ireland to vote Yes in tomorrow's EU treaty referendum. That'll stuff the Brits.

Another great line that I could have sat for aeons pounding away at the keyboard and never come up with.

Honore De Balzac, please come on stage, and take a bow, for these are your fine words: " A great writer is just simply a martyr the stake cannot kill".

I'm neither, but to have thought this up is a prize in itself, and it does n't end there. Further on in Lost Illusions, which is where I was electrified by this line is another fragment of clear sighted genius "....the tremor of self-consciousness...".

I do n't think I've read such an apposite line that so succinctly sums up the utter gawkiness and stomach churning angst, the meek, the bashful, and the timid undergo in all manner of areas.

Not my words. The best ones never usually are, nor to my chagrin, are original thoughts. But if I can't mine them out of virgin soil, I can certainly put them on the shelves for others to look at. So here's a novel look at paranoia: "People are out to get you, but fortunately they're out to get us too, so the amount of time they have for you is diminished" End result: don't worry.

Wise words, Answer Girl, hope you don't mind me sharing them.

Coming home this evening on the bus, I overheard, and then saw, a young mother cajoling her toddler to eat his dinner; there was love, there was affection in her tone, her words were dripping with it, but where was her thought? The kid's dinner was chicken nuggets and a handful of fries scattered in to the tray of his pushchair. Looking at the way he ate and the set of his face, this was n't the first, second, or probably third time, he had a fast food dinner.

I'm guessing at how old he was, two, three, maybe four, and already he had an uncomfortable pudginess that probably is going to dog him all of his life: concomitant poor health, body image issues, self-esteem battles. Except that fatness, right now, is virtually the norm. It's everywhere.

There's a handful of books that I've enjoyed so much that I've felt I ought never to re-read as to do so might expose frailties and weaknesses that I missed the first (and only) time I read them.

Strange vow, perhaps, to seal away an impression in the manner of Miss Havisham's dress, but these books have had that effect, and I've kept the memories preserved in amber. Obviously, the edges blur and the skin starts to sag; nevertheless, I've kept temptation at bay, for decades in some case, and not re-read them.

Until this week.

Amongst the swirling, icy mists where these glorious few books are cryogenically stored is Zola's Therese Raquin. I read it, or to be precise, swallowed it whole in one day, nearly thirty years ago; it was a recommended text of a course on literary naturalism I was taking at University.

Started it in the morning, took it through lunch, on into the afternoon, and reached the end sometime in the evening, and then interred it. Too precious, too good, to ever re-read.

I've seen it in countless bookshops since, looked at it resting on the shelves of several libraries, and held back from a reacquaintance. This week I did n't. There's been a copy gazing at me more or less every time I've been browsing the fiction stock in the Camomile Street library.

Gauntlet dropped. Gauntlet picked up. I took it out, opened it up and read it breathlessly, albeit it over a slightly longer period, two days unlike the first time.

As powerful and as passionate as the first time, and no flaws found.

Knight's move thinking. It's psychiatric meaning is quite strict from what I've gathered from searching on line, and as so, it's literal meaning does stand at odds to how I see it, but when a new phrase hoves into sight, grab it is what I say, and I have.

What it encapsulates are those abrupt ruptures in a smoothly running conversation, those completely unexpected notions or ideas that appear without any warning, often illogical as compared that is to the direction the conversation or dialogue was taking previously. A completely fresh, novel association. And often the breakthrough moment is just a few seconds away.

The image is obvious if you have even the most casual brush with chess; the Knight and it's peculiar leapfrogging, oblique gait.

I can't think of a better, more exhilarating tool in the thinker's tool-kit than this: permission to jump around, think past and beyond a roadblock, and free-associate to your heart's content.

Anything that can unlock creativity, especially if it's something as simple an image as this, but one jam-packed with possibility and indulgence, has to be celebrated.

I like things that don't make me feel as if I'm trapped in a corner, that I have options even in the tightest situations, which is why I'm so taken with this concept.

Walking through Westfield this afternoon, I thought of someone I know who was there earlier this month shopping for a Wedding Ring.

Quite why this came into my mind, I don't know, just that it did, and it's been hovering in my mind ever since; I've finally picked up on the manifold symbolism of the ring, above and beyond signalling that a person is married and in a state of union. It's this: as women generally outlive their men, then for so many widows that ring finger will be a permanent reminder of their partner's touch.

Now I understand why so many elderly women stroke their ring fingers - they're bringing back a memory, almost Aladdin like, conjuring up the genie of times past.

Ever pondered this question. I have. Millions of us have, but, what does Art do for us ? Just what indeed. I know now, and it's a most beautiful summation: Art "...gives shape to our emotions, makes them visible, and in so doing places a seal of eternity upon them".

The seal of eternity. I love that sense of consecration, of things being handed on from hand to hand to be appraised and discussed, critiqued and enjoyed, argued and fought over, loved, and it's antithesis, hated. Never static, always moving on.

I found these passionate words in a novel of Muriel Barbery's - The Elegance of Hedgehogs - which I devoured in one afternoon sat on a park seat in Vichy last week.

Vichy was a breakthrough trip: I did as I promised myself I would - read until the muscles in my eyeballs twitched and when I was n't doing that, I simply sat marvelling at the huge flocks of starlings flashing over the river to their roosts every sunset and the crackling, cawing rooks spiralling in their hundreds over the poplar trees before they headed towards to their night time home in the Esplanade.

Oh God....England just qualified for the World Cup. We'll never hear the last of this. The triumphalist press will be in overdrive tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that...

This time last night I was bracing my unconscious for one hell of a ride after snacking on an absinthe spiced bar of dark chocolate. I was hoping. I really was hoping. Nothing happened. Probably predictable given that there was no more than a breath of absinthe in there. But I did wonder whether the doors to some sort of perception might have cracked ajar; they did n't. Nothing did. Just a headache in the morning as the fallout from eating chocolate late at night. That, and an aniseed flavoured tongue.

I predict a riot going on in my unconscious tonight. I've been tucking into a bar of the darkest, dark chocolate one of my friends brought back from Italy; and it has a character all of it's own - it's been generously spiced with absinthe.

And Baudelaire used to go to the trouble of drinking it...if only someone had told him to try it in chocolate.

There's a woman who I have carried a torch through all weathers for, and for years as well. She is - I'm certain of this - very aware that I bear this burden. Delicious and frustrating in the same instance. She once told a crowd of people that I liked her, but more importantly (in my case) that she also liked me: I nearly fainted out of joy.

At least three people I know have had Swine flu, or if not that, then something virtually indistinguishable. Sweating, prone for days, barking, hacking coughs, streaming noses, aching bones, and so on.

I'm not entirely certain if I've had it or not. Something recognisably flu-like did knock me out in May though. So maybe I did...

Whatever it was did n't hang about. No slow, creeping barrage, this was the missile out of the blue.

I was having a meal with a friend in Canta Napoli, and we'd reached the dessert stage - so far, so healthy - then blitzkrieg: I broke out coughing and did n't stop for a week, plus got all the other nasties that tag along with flu. But not, surprisingly, the soaring temperature which seems to be swine flu's signature.

So maybe I did n't...

Except for the hard-shelled things like crabs, I enjoy fish.

Breaking something open with a hammer or tongs, or whatever it is, that's used to prise open shellfish does n't count as eating in my mind. It's demolition work. There's a place for that and it's not wherever it is you're eating.

What marks our generation, and certainly the one breathing over our shoulder, is it's endemic and infuriating inarticulacy. Straightforward conversation no longer happens. Once an anecdote might have unfolded in a reasonable narrative flow, A then B on to C, and so on, with an occasional space for an interjection or pause, it's changed now, the sequence has blown, every thing's jumbled. The interjection IS the conversation.

Those evil filler words - 'like' as in "she said...like...", " know what I mean" (I don't, so why are you insisting that I might?), and the cockroach of them all, innit - all of these pass as vocabulary for millions now.

Frightening enough just on their own; but when a conversation contains nothing but these, and everyone who's jabbering away knows precisely what everyone else is on about despite the utter paucity of expression, it's terrifying.

I've no idea how people understand each other. Perhaps it's all body language, or intonation that counts. I'm as mystified as I am saddened that we're in this state.

How we found our self peering down this linguistic dead-end is something I've yet to fathom. Someone I know has a theory which does hold water though; for him: "It's a symptom of being a stranger to prose narrative. It's an entire generation weaned on comic books, TV, and movies. Dialogue is all they know."

Not too far off the mark there. I'd also throw in the mesmerising effect of e-mail, text messaging, social media, the 140 character straitjacket that you know what makes people wear. The compulsion to talk when there's probably nothing to really talk about, and as nature abhors a vacuum then what else can we expect than filler words slithering in to take their place.

Thoreau got it right; people, he believed, behaved, "...as if the main object were to talk fast and not sensibly" This from a man who lived in mid nineteenth century America. That, in it's own way, throws up this puzzle: if he said that then and it's still true today, then what exactly is a good conversation? Does it need to follow my prescription, and only that, or can the two coexist without one asphyxiating the other?

The ease that some people have with words has to be celebrated.

The ability to conjure a prose poem out of the simplest of language is something I yearn for. Where every word has the correct ballast and the phrase sits in the water beautifully like the swan in a fairy tale.

Someone I know wrote the most sensual of words I've come across in months, maybe years, and I have to share it.

"The pasta is just there to hold the tomatoes, the Basil is just there to powerfully accent it, the olive oil cloaks it in loveliness, and the salt and pepper just give it the little kick in the pants the tomatoes love to reach their full glory"

There's a joy in this sentence that actually makes me want to eat it and as it's from a recipe then I probably will. There's no head strutting, no competition between any of the words - they all marvellously 'fit'.

I love that image of tomatoes being cloaked in their loveliness by olive oil; it's so unexpected, so memorable, and so apt. I can see the sheen of oil on the skin of the tomato even with my eyes tightly closed. I ran into this delightful sentence catching up on some of the recent items posted on Lazywoman.

I struggle with words, I know I do, I recognise it just as I recognise when I'm in the presence of someone who has the gift and can make them whisper and dance. And that's Lazywoman to a tee. A great writer.

Twelve days to go before I have a break abroad. I have one aim when I get there: to read until my eyeballs pop out on their cartoon stalks. I'm hungry for books and if no other appetite of mine (other than for food) is ever sated these days, then I'll be damn sure that it is for books.

Twitter is something I dabble in, a comment here, a comment there, see what other's are up to, that's about the nub of it.

What can't be ignored is the discernible frenzy to actually go on. Join or feel left out. The music finishes and you're the last person standing not on twitter. Not easy to resist in this peer pressurised world.

I'm a fence-sitter. Never made any bones about this. Therefore I sense there's a purpose, perhaps multiple, but I can't see the shape of any of them forming out of the fog just yet.

So I understand why a lot of people don't see any reason either: they never join in the first place; tweet for a short time then don't return (Twitter must be full of orphan tweets); or simply pull the shutters down on the whole thing and close their account.

Someone I know did that recently, deleted their three day old twitter feed and fell back into the arms of their long time social network beloved - facebook, saying on - where else- that "I felt like I was cheating on a wonderful woman with a deranged little slut".

I've never thought of it like that, but it's as good as simile as you going to get it, assuming your twittering days are coming to a close.

There must be psychic forces at work tonight; two different people just asked me if I wanted to go the Whitechapel gallery.

With their innate genius for understatement and avowed loathing for sensationalist, attention grabbing headlines, the Tories have today modestly announced that the UK is as broken down a society as that shown on The Wire.

Premature in my mind, but I admire their honesty in letting us know what to expect when they're in power.

Interesting too that the Tories are now merrily 'dissing those they claim to love: the NHS (thanks Dan Hannan), and implicitly, with today's barrage of froth, the Police.

Tonight is THE night I go to bed before midnight. I really mean it. Procrastinated enough with endless late nights roaming the internet. Now, I'm too close to Nosferatu in appearance...yeah, that haggard, that wan, that dark circled under my eyes.

I've been glued to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's memoir, 'Living to Tell the Tale' since I plucked it off the library shelves earlier this week.

In amongst the anecdotes and memories, there's indisputably fine writing, crackling and lightening up the pages.

Some of it, though, is n't always from whom you might suspect. As with this assertion, which sweeps up in both hands what the shocking, seductive, and sacramental power of poetry actually is: 'If poetry does not make my blood run faster, open sudden windows for me on to the mysterious, help me discover the world, accompany this desolate heart in solitude and in love, in joy and enmity, what good is poetry to me'.

This was written by Eduardo Carranza, the beacon of Colombian poetry during the twentieth century.

I simply can't think of a more intoxicating statement, a more passionate and defiant manifesto for poetry than this.

Time to big up a friend's novel - UNDISCOVERED GRYL

"I read this in one sitting and then had to mop my brow; this is an extraordinary book. The writing sizzles.

Either the author is writing from experience and has collected their tattered medal ribbons as their kids have torn and yelled their way through adolescence, or they have the uncanny ability to channel, but the characterisation is perfect. If you've ever sat on the top deck of a London Bus, transfixed as I have, listening to a cabal of very excited, late teenage girls declaim to all and sundry their thoughts and adventures, real, (or more likely, imagined), then Katie's apparent narcissism, self-absorption, her shrieks and stage whispers, and that door-slamming, finger flipping flippancy she revels in and that seems exclusively reserved for this period of growing up, rings absolutely true.

Don't think of her as a wilful, saucy Fanny Hill, or indeed self-destructive, she's no shoe gazing goth; far from it. Underneath that sarcastic, vinegary tongue, and carpet bombing approach to seeking parental approval, Katie's heart is probably that of most young women; one who is disappointed, who feels misunderstood and unappreciated, and who dejectedly knows there's not that much she can do about it. Katie's real world therefore is her blog; everything there is on her terms - that's where she can change things.

If there is a parental alert required, it's this: wherever you are, sit up straight,and pay attention - learn from Katie's woefully inattentive and odiously self-obsessed parental figures, who I'm convinced are more than representative of too many parents world wide. How do you expect them to grow up if you don't make the requisite emotional investments. Not going to happen through wishful thinking.

A powerful, passionate novel, that Jane Austen, the expert in the misunderstood, passionate, and spirited woman, might have come up with had she lived in the today of blogs, tweets, and mobile phones.

I expect Undiscovered Gryl, deservedly, to be the talk of the town."

One man's mess is another's beautiful minimalism was the convoluted, and let's admit it, furtive, description I gave someone of my flat.

Messy, though, is as you can see from my opening statement, all relative, and there are many gradations. But, I'm, worryingly, at the extreme end. Every day, my poor, old flat inches nearer and nearer to eyesore.

I'm privately terrified that those I have the courage to invite round, will see my flat, leave quickly, their hasty goodbye floating down the corridor, to make an urgent phone call to the social services "...single man living on his own....obviously can't cope...hurry..."

It could only be a Tory - Daniel Hannan - who would have the presumption to stick the boot in to the NHS on US TV. The only sense of Self any Tory understands is aggrandisement.

I had an e-mail from a friend who's holidaying in Japan. The country, and Tokyo in particular, has utterly bewitched him. His mail is studded with all of the adjectives this charming, exciting, Alice in Wonderland like country - so jaw-droppingly modern and at the same time so deeply traditional - can inspire: there's an open-mouthed 'amazing', a wide-eyed 'fascinating'. a rapt 'outstanding', a breathless 'incredible'.

I know all about this - it happened to me when I went there last year. Dazed and excited, and wondering why I'd never been before and desperate to return.

It is EXACTLY how I'm feeling now reading Amos Oz's memoir - A Tale of Love and Darkness.

The prose is diamond sharp and the images as memorable as shooting stars; it's the sound of a lonely cello playing, and yet as sociable as an Irish Pub. It's left me with more impressions than a kaleidoscope could ever produce. And this question: why have I waited so long to start reading this writer. Why?

First John Updike left us, and now John Hughes. Both in their own, magisterial ways, chroniclers of certain slices of Americana: Updike, his characters freighted with gloom, secrets, mysteries often to themselves, let alone others, scurrying through the quiet and shade of anonymous suburban America streets in and out of worrisome relationships; whilst, for Hughes, his province was a territory of exuberant, gently rebellious young High Schoolers cocking an affectionate snook to their elders.

Neither artists will ever fade away. In the decades to come, (I'm sure of this, by the way), people will settle on Sunday afternoons to watch a John Hughes with the reverence and anticipation the way millions have already with Ealing Comedies.

It'll be the same with Updike; his canon is too large to be spiked. I'm sure in a century's time there'll be people on tubes, in buses, in their privacy of their living rooms, cracking opne something by Updike. Too good not to.

This cannot have been what he was hoping for, surely? All those days cross-legged under the Bodhi tree seeking enlightenment, and this is happens - he's cited in a divorce case?

London is a cheek by jowl place, packed tighter than a sardine can; almost inevitably then, this means that at some point of the day, you will be forced into accidental companionship with folk you've never met, simply by the sheer pressure of people.

Moreover, whether you want it or not, it's a near certainty you'll be caught in the slipstream of whatever conversations are going on in the sardine can. Dull, or eye-poppingly sensational, it's impossible not to listen. Like tonight.

I'm fond of Holland Park. Living in a flat with no balcony and no worthwhile garden, Holland Park has by default become my green lung - the place where I breath easier, where I think, and where I read. Or try to.

On the next bench along from where I was sat this evening, was a woman, who for the benefit of her friend, had taken on the busy work of dissecting someone else's recent and, clearly, very bitter divorce.

The nadir of their divorce battle, the Stalingrad of their break-up, was the angry tussle for just which one of them would get full custody of a huge stone Buddha they'd bought holidaying in Thailand. An argument over Buddha?

You have to stop and think about this one, though. Is n't Buddha supposed to bring people together, embodiment of reconcilation, and so on, and not be, instead, under siege from competing parties in a divorce court ? Something cannot have been right from the get-go in that marriage if it met it's end in a catty squabble over a stone Buddha.

Apparently, it finished with them having joint custody rights stitched into the divorce; six months here six months there.

Graffiti is "...a pathetic attempt to emerge, to be visible..." said one of the talking heads during a short video clip on the problem of urban doodling and scribbling in Rome.

I'm fifty-fifty here. Part of me enjoys seeing splashes of exuberant hieroglyphics lighting up odd nooks and crannies, those niches of city places that lay forgotten, until the street artist turns up and then they shimmer brightly in to life. Tropical colours in a wan, mid-Atlantic setting in that respect.

At the same time, you would be able to hear my teeth gnashing on another planet if I went outside and found a giant, randomly shaped tag, zig-zagging across the sides of the building I live in. Remember I'm a Brit, and all of us carries a strain of nimbyism. Mine might be detectable only at trace levels, nevertheless it's still there.

Where I do stand back and wonder is just what do some slogans mean. Is there a meaning even?

Let's get the common ones out of the way first. Applying the first law of Rumsfeld, then we know what we know, which is: political are easily understood; same goes for territorial boundary marking - W10 posse rulz this 'hood, for instance; love and heartbreak, straightforward enough, maybe too much in cases; and finally, the public address to the football team is as direct and explicable as the rest.

But it's the other category, the head-scratching, the arcane, the mysterious. What for instance, just what, did this graffiti artist in Doncaster, have in mind when they were spraying " Albert, the kid is ghosting" ?

Who's Albert and should his kid be ghosting, whatever that is? Answers, please, on a postcard. I've tried already back in May, when I first spotted it. I've no idea

Ignorance is n't something to be proud of. Certainly not a state to celebrate, nor to revel in. "There's nothing in here...nothing" as I once heard some one say as he pointed defiantly towards his head.

Well, it all depends.

These days, I'm beginning to think the benighted state of ignorance might just have some value, (parts of it anyway), providing you look at it counter-intuitively and with a touch of self-awareness.

You're getting lost already, I can sense so it, so let me explain. As there many different shades of a particular colour - say red, which goes from the palest rose to the most brazen scarlet - so it goes with ignorance. Consider the etymological distance between: unaware, dumb, vulgar, obtuse, indifferent, all the way to plain old crude, and these are just a handful of the synonyms for ignorance.

It's like an extended family tree; many of them are n't anything more than second, third, or even fourth cousins. The root stock is that diluted.

So if I've established there's diversity in ignorance, where's the usefulness that I implied at the top of this post?

It's how you view some of the family members, the feebler ones, the less potent relatives. Unsuspecting, for instance, is ignorance, albeit an innocent version, as is simply saying I don't know.

It's what comes next; do you leave the room, or stay and try to find out what it was you did n't suspect, or did n't know?

Should I stay or should I go? Teach someone the value of the former, to stay and ask the questions - why don't I know and what am I going to do about it - and you've detoxified ignorance.

I know these pairings make no literal sense whatever, so blame it all on Shepherds Bush because that's where they surfaced out of the murk of my subconsciousness and made their way to my temporal lobes.

There I am, hunkered down in the Tube ticket hall, sheltering from a biblical style downpour, watching the rain drops explode on the road and endless umbrellas bend inwards from squalling winds, when this brace of similes came to me - it was n't simply rain falling, it was gobbets of rain, gouts of rain

It's that barking, hard, abrasive G, I'm sure of it. It sounds like things being chopped up, or spat out, or the noise a road drill makes cutting the pavement up. That was the rain earlier this evening - all week in fact. Not a soft patter, or the shush of ballet pumps across the stage; no, it's been hellish, the tramp of endless jackboots, crash of shells. A mire of endless damp.

The Sun. Turn it on, tune it in, and light it up please.

"We're all of us..." Tennessee Williams remarked "...sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins for life"

True, but a little harsh in my eyes; there's many a person with a rich and textured interior life who actively enjoy solitude. I do.

It's when solitude becomes desolation - the absence of anything even faintly intimate or hinting at companionship - that hurts. And this is, inevitably, an emotional hurt that pierces deeper than anything physical ever can. I've had my share (who has n't).

It can generate monumental imagery. I've never forgotten what someone once said to me after their very long term relationship had quietly sundered; their bed, once as cosy as a sofa was now a Siberian steppe of emptiness, with an orphan pillow on it with no head for it to rest on any more.

For various reasons, I'm having to use a laundrette these days. Their service wash facility to be exact.

Since there are hardly any left in the part of West London I live in, it's a long, dispiriting schlep to the nearest, which is perched at the top of Holland Park road.

There are compensations; it's near to Holland Park, which I'm a near semi-resident of, (at some point, I shall probably just pull a carpet of leaves over me and start sleeping there); and they fold things, shirts, tee-shirts, match socks and ball them up. It goes in there, a huge knot of tired, creased, dirt and distress, and it comes back to me, near pristine. I'm not used to such transformations.

The place where I'll leave my mark may be here, in the form of this blog where I've chipped away entry after entry; or it could be Holland Park, in the form of a bench.

I love Holland Park. Acres of restorative gardens, lawns and woodland; it's a sanctuary, a place of well-being, an escape from the madhouse London inferno. I literally bathe myself in the wonderful splashes of greens and yellows, the fiery hearted flowers, the bird-song; and the air is always cool - hedgerow cool.

I've been there this evening for a few hours, idly reading, occasionally listening to fragments of opera floating away from the pavilion, and just taking in quiet lungfuls of healing air.

Then a slow walk to the Kyoto gardens, a manicured and intensely symbolic Japanese style garden. There's a small pond there, where I once saw a stately and inscrutable Heron standing one-legged oblivious to the melee of people passing by. Today there was hardly anyone there, just a solitary moorhen, a handful of tourists and the shoal of carp patrolling the pond.

Perfect relaxation after you guessed it - a hard day on the phone.

Strange things seem to happen in pairs. Outside Liverpool Street Station this evening was a Brass Band ensemble burning through a cover of Motorhead's Ace of Spades. It took me some time, I admit, to finally pin the tune down - the swinging trombones and hooting trumpets hid it - but eventually I picked it out.

I had to hurry on to a westbound train, so I've no idea whether their set continued in the same vein. I'm sure they must have. There's an affectionate irony in this kind of tribute, which the funkily dressed musicians and their delighted commuter audience seemed to be revelling in.

So that's the right shoe, here's the left to make the pair up.

I had a drink with a friend shortly after leaving Liverpool Street, and what made it an odd, yet for the day, apt occasion, was what he said about his kid's pet rabbit; it loves rock music. Like a moshpit veteran, his rabbit steadies itself in the centre of the action, equidistant between the speakers, luxuriating in the maelstrom of throbbing lead guitars, rumbling basses, and herculean drumming.

And it seems bizarrely to know what pose to adopt according to whatever rock music sub-genre my friend has playing. He put on Dark Star, a particularly trippy Grateful Dead song, left the room, then came back to see the rabbit on it's back, flaked out on a cushion, eyes closed. Some kinda rabbit.

Once in a while, I go to the well and there's nothing there to draw from. No inspiration; or if there is, it's subterranean or even a shadow of a shadow. Like today. I've not been able to water any plants, or tease something into flower.

Don't force it, I guess. Go with the moment.

I was listening to an Italian friend of mine talk about a very heated conversation she had had with her boss early last week.

Everyone shades a conversation gesturally. Even on the phone, it's impossible not to sketch in the air. So don't be lazy and pin a stereotype to my forehead at this point, or throw that Latin passion gibe at me, but as my friend got to describing an especially fierce and storm-ridden region their argument had reached, she instinctively sat bolt upright, swept both hands up from her stomach, and said that at that point, she could feel the fire within begin to burn, then erupt.

But, it was n't only the action, the rising up, that defiant intake of new energy, and how she described it, that bewitched me, it was the Italian phrase she used as well.

This was, she said, the moment of flusso di coscienza; the point for her, when the free association door popped open, and the emotions and feelings, the strength of argument flew out like worker bees leaving the hive.

It's a great phrase: the flusso has the sibilance of passion and the rude vigour of something elemently natural in the way it's pronounced; coscienza, for it's part evokes logic, stern argument, dialectics, reason, ethics. Both words yoked together by the sturdy preposition, di.

I can't stop thinking of this Italian expression. It's perfect.

Spot on. I was right. My poor, old flat is royally 'spent'. So am I now after this past week.

It seems I'm never more than a moment from some domestic drama: dying fridges, pattering mice, leaking washing machines.

Ca suffit ! Basta ! Bastante ! Genug ! Enough and no more please !

My introduction to the world of ex-con burlesque singers, strippers and Tom Waits lookalikes still has to happen. It was on the cards for Friday. Then a fire broke out on Dean Street, not in the vicinity of the club I was supposed to be going to, but still close enough, nevertheless, to find itself within the exclusion zone the Fire Brigade set up.

So we made up for it with a great meal at my Italian artist's friend's flat in the East End.

In today's Observer magazine there's an article about extreme tiredness and debilitating weariness which looking at what's been described, really ought to be called uber-fatigue, but since I'm always just a little too late to the christening party, has already been named and classified by a South African doctor, Frank Lipman, as the condition, 'spent'.

Too tired to go on ? Legs like jelly ? Used up your sleep overdraft months ago ? Spiritually and emotionally depleted ? Feverishly insomniac ? Busted, weak, batteries drained ? You're all used up ? Then you're probably spent.

Actually, I'm not. I feel fine. Plenty of sleep. Eat well. Exercise. In transatlantic English, I feel good. Really, I do. No shell-shock stare here.

It's my flat - it's 'spent'. It's shagged, it's health is ruined, I'm convinced of it. Feeble, frail; if it was human, it'd be walking round on sticks. It just does n't seem to be able to go a day without panting for breath, or being brought down by some new viral infection.

Like today, I wander into the kitchen and it squelches underfoot like I'm treading through a peat bog. Another leak. A bigger one than the first I had in May. Bubbling linoleum. Aqueous films of damp everywhere.

Before you start, I don't neglect this place, it gets cared for, it's just 'spent'. It needs a rest, I need rest.

Thank God, this place I'm going to tomorrow night has no dress code. My chic is tugboat captain, my look, stricken.

The moment of truth, though, is going be that bouncer's hand hovering over the velvet rope. Un-clip it, I'm in; he leaves it alone, and looks over my shoulder in to the distance...well...

Most of my recent evenings have centred around gentle excursions to Holland Park, and long, leisurely hours there, reading and catching drifts coming over from the local Opera festival.

Totally bourgeois, completely serene; the raucous, emerald coloured parakeets and strolling peacocks, being the only real distractions.

However, an artist friend of mine has invited me out on the town with them this Friday, and I think this could well be an After Hours experience.

Do you know the movie? A mid-eighties piece about a humdrum, drudge office worker who takes a metaphorical turn left when he should have stuck to his usual right, and ends up forsaking his normal TV dinner lifestyle for one hell of a strange night.

The place, my artist friend has in their sights, and this is taking the best bits, is a "...vaguely burlesque...(and)....extremely unclean (club)...where the club owner...sings, and is always dressed like a Chicago mafia boss...but he is not a phoney; and probably his criminal records are not that clean, too..."

The main act sings in a Tom Waits style and interleaved amongst it all is a girl or two, who decides she's socially inhibited wearing clothes and therefore better off without them on.

As long as the latter entertainer does n't bounce on my knee, or shake whatever it is she can shake in my face, or brushes my head with a feather, then I'm good to go.

Then Sunday, back to the healing balm of the park.

I had the strange, and dispiriting, experience of leaving Blackburn station yesterday and walking straight into a small scale British Fascist rally.

This was the first time, and I hope the last, that I have been close enough to see the podgy exemplars of the erstwhile master race in all their cheese and onion crisp, complexioned glory.

Heroic specimens.

A small, nervous, band of frumpy haus-fraus; a sprinkling of feral faced, lager swollen young men; and a timidity (there has to be some collective noun, so why not this one) of middle-aged men, in beige anoraks and mis-matched suits - bingo-caller chic really -who in a more innocent setting would not be out of place standing on the fringes of a real-ale festival or on a railway station platform ticking the passing trains off.

All of them probably friendless through school, through life, and only now, finding a weird unity in companionable inarticulacy.

They have the monopoly on boots and fists, but wit and acumen ?

An easy gibe, I know, to say I'm convinced I'm more likely to get a reasoned response from a cabbage than I would by asking anyone of them a question deeper than their flag-waving rhetoric can safely take. But really I saw no lights flashing. Did n't even glimpse a bulb. The scrutiny of even a reasonable, let alone semi tough, question, would be like putting them through the bends.

Their's is a bovine, albeit malign, dumbness, that is attempting to traduce the sense of society, tolerance and democracy that glues us together, and replace it with vicious sloganeering, fingerpointing, victimisation, deliberate misunderstanding, and mutual contempt.

Not in my country please. Not in any country.

Where should I look to find the real you?
Amongst the pens and papers, make-up and hidden corners of your bag?
In the fridge where you hide away Green and Blacks?
Or that other deep of deeps, your mirror, where I think your secrets really lie?

Something for the weekend, sir? Yes, sleep. Lots of it, pots of it. Enough for two people...no make that family size, instead. Max it up. Supersize it. I'm falling on my feet; the heat is slowly mummifying me.

I'm swaddled at night. My flat is power source; it holds the daytime heat just as a battery might, then pumps it out during the night. Open windows make no dent in it either. The fresh air simply is n't there. I must be on at least one of the rungs towards eventual zombiedom.

Nothing exists entirely as an island bereft of entanglement with anything else. I'm not making my situation any easier either, with a raft of late nights - very late nights / early mornings in a couple of cases -that I've been on since mid-June.

Got to cap that behaviour. Bed before eleven at least once a week. And, if the weather plays ball, and listens to a litany of private pleas I've left it, then, it'll be a healthy eight hours of clean, clear, cool sleep. Bring it on.

Molten streets. Baking tubes. Broiling passengers. Sweating shops. Liquefied pavements. Fused bricks. Heavy, dripping air. Sweltering buses. London: the inferno.

When the weather is astounding like today, or just plain good, and I've decided not to walk home, I spend time sitting in Holland Park, reading, and listening to snatches of opera coming from the festival (tonight was la Boheme).

The park has been taken over by a colony of raucous, restless parakeets, and along with the imperious disdain of of the long time resident peacocks strolling between the beds of dragon red and apricot begonias, it feels like I'm swaddled between the sentences of a magical realist novel. The sweating evening time humidity just adds to it.

I was on line toggling between Facebook and Twitter late on Thursday evening when this electronic fog of hearsay and "that can't be true" gossip appeared.

It was like there had been a disturbance in the neighbourhood in the early hours of the morning and everyone had been jolted awake.

Lights flickering on in scattered houses, windows cautiously opened; uncertainty. Whispered conversations, rumours, then counter rumours. More lights coming on, more people out of their houses. The swirling rumours becoming a rumble of fact. And then the astonishment, it's really true. Really true.

Michael Jackson is dead.

It's the weather that's reduced the flow of postings. Blame it on the elements ? But how often do we get acres of wall to wall sunshine in dear old London Town. If it's there, then grab it, and I do. With both hands.

I like to luxuriate in Holland Park in the evening after work, sometimes idly reading, other times watching the birds compete for the bird-feeders, or simply gazing at the clouds drifting over, and enjoy the music of the outdoor opera.

More days like these please.

I should carry an emergency book of poems. Something I can dip into for sustenance whatever the circumstance. The joy of reading poetry - aloud if I can - is a sweet I'm finding impossible to put down.

This afternoon was a torment; three of us, strolling through Ravenscourt Park under a soft patter of early summer rain, on into a pocket sized Garden centre that hugs the side of the District Line.

Such a find as well. A quiet cafe full of deep sofas to sink into, small, peaceful fountains, weather beaten Buddhas folded between bushes and shrubs, and the full palette of green, from the lightest to the deepest olive. It cried out for a poem.

I needed to steady my nerves last night, so I turned to my new medicine - reading a poem aloud.

Thanks Anne Sexton, your verses took the tangle out my tiredness and unwrapped the day's stresses and strains. I'll need your help again tonight; today's been a bruiser.

One night this year I will go to bed before midnight. There's a glittering prize at stake: staying awake in the office, and not dropping off in the fug of the tube. Got to aim high these days.

Poetry is taking a larger role in my reading life than it ever has before, and I don't know why. If indeed I should ask myself that question and not simply accept is as fact, and enjoy exploring hitherto unknown worlds.

It's crept up on me. It did n't knock on the door. It just appeared. For some reason a casual glance at a forgotten book of poetry - Penguin's Contemporary American Poetry - and that's it. Quiet minute by quiet minute, absorbed.

Stolen and transported into lands of tightly compressed metaphors and deeply felt imagery. The delicacy, the almost orchid like elegance of poetry fascinates me more and more; handfuls of disparate words raked into patterns where the sum of the parts is far more meaningful than the parts.

It's an extraordinarily relaxing voyage I'm on. For a good part of this afternoon I sat on a stool in Chiswick's Oxfam bookshop rummaging through their poetry section: new lands sighted.

Most evenings over the past month, I've read a poem aloud just before I turn in for the night. My nightcap.

Money slips through my fingers the way sand goes through a sieve. My ex-gym stuffed me with a £118 cancellation fee and stoked it up a little with a letter from a Debt Collection agency. Exercise from here on, (and as it has been for months, really) is Yoga, walk everywhere, and never use the lifts or escalators. Let the meatheads and gym rats sweat it out over the weights; I'm in the urban, low-carbon gym frame of mind now.

Depressing to see that the North of England has revealed it's squalid side and elected two fascist MEPs, and that Doncaster has decided life is better under an English Democrat mayor, who probably shouted his way to the top on a sensationalist, but hopefully found to be hollow, manifesto.

I am convinced they've voted the way they have in great part due to the inaccurate, unsubstantiated smears, half-truths, and plain untruths, the Express, the Mail, and the Sun, incredibly, parade as fact on their frontpages.

What I'm interested in seeing is what the leaders of the master race will do now they're in charge. Cutting back on welfare seems self-defeating since, from what I've seen, many of their supporters are on it, have been for years, and don't want to leave it.

Going to have a be a quick one tonight. My laptop is on batteries and draining power quicker than an Investment Bank loses money.

If we could stick a tracking a device on those memorable slogans and lines that some films generate and then see if they'll thrive once they've been released as it were into the wild. I'm thinking here of a strip of dialogue between Steve Evets and Eric Cantona in Looking for Eric:

Steve Evets as Eric Bishop, a deeply depressed Mancunian Postman:"...Eric, you're the man....

Eric Cantona as lui-meme: "I'm not a man....I'm Cantona..."

Come on, that has to find life outside the confines of a great script and terrific film. It's imbued with a "Four score years and seven...." quality

There were squadrons of parakeets scorching across Holland Park this evening.

In the five years since I first had them pointed out to me in Hyde Park, I've watched these green enamelled birds work their noisy way across West London; they've stormed the skies over Richmond and Chiswick, brazenly infiltrated Kensington and Notting Hill, and dominate the air above Holland Park.

They make London feel tropical, especially on warm, piercing blue sky days like the run we've having now.

Cheap and lazy, but I'll never let a cliche wriggle away from me; maybe this is a foretaste of a globally warmed London.

"Albert, the kid is ghosting...." In Paris, this would be surreally hip and intelligible only to the select ; in London, it would pass muster as a Banksy slogan, and certainly as a wacky band name; in LA, I could comfortably imagine this line from a forgotten film, but I saw this on a bridge parapet in Doncaster....

Now Doncaster has a certain charm, it's own signature, but prone to gnomic statements like this ? In South Yorkshire, facts are most certainly facts, and this sounds way too avant garde for the good burghers of that town.

Donny folk specialise in bluntness, rough kindness, telling it like it is. These five words have that abrasive texture if you look at them individually and say them separately; it's the fact they're arranged, like ducks in a row, in a declaration I just could n't imagine anyone there saying, but someone did, so what's it all mean. This will be bugging me for days.

I'm reading Marilynn Robinson's latest novel - Home, and it's unbearably good. I'm rationing myself to a few pages every day just to prolong the joy.

An appeal to my vanity: the two women in their twenties who I share a Sunday afternoon's gallery duty both looked amazed - genuinely - when I said how old I was. "I thought you were thirty-seven or thirty-nine...". Feeling the love that shot through my veins even now.

An appeal to my never quite dormant sense of frustation: the block of flats I live in, mostly occupied by short-term residents who have no direct commitment to the upkeep of it, continues it's slide into becoming a slum. I feel like I'm living in one of these cities that's gradually vanishing under the sands or being slowly strangled by encroaching trees the way Angkor Wat disappeared. I don't know what to do; stay and be submerged by it all, or sell-up at a a resounding loss.

An appeal to my love of cosmopolitanism. The cafe had closed, and most of the tables were empty, but there were still a dozen or so Eastern European men absorbed, either playing or watching, several games of chess on the terrace of the cafe in Holland Park. They were there when I passed an hour or so later and still as preoccupied.

"There's nothing wrong with me loving you...giving yourself to me can never be wrong...don't you know how sweet and wonderful life can be....get it on with me....I ain't gonna worry...let's get it on..."

Slow down, slow down, it's not me being heartsick and taking to the blogosphere to croon about doomed love. But I heard this epic Marvin Gaye song on music on hold before a conference call started, and damn it, I can't shift it. Lodged like a piece of food stuck between those difficult to reach back teeth.

Not complaining. I have a lot of time for Marvin, but at some point I need to lose this tune. It's all that's playing right now and I need a little bit of free time to think without distraction.

Pleasurable as it may be to have a slice of smooth Soul echoing in the often empty chambers of my mind, I do have things to attend to such as the hacking cough I've had for over a week. That has to cease and desist pretty quickly. For my sake, my neighbours, my work mates and those other innocents that I must have driven to despair sat next to on numerous tubes. Don't blame me, it's my bronchials you need to shout at.

"How (truly) sweet and wonderful life will be..." once this cough has exited stage left. My days as sounding like a mis-firing Harley Davison are done. Gimme my voice back.

So I'm getting my mojo back and not feeling so green around the gills the way I was last week, but where's my muse ? I've turned up for work. Here's me sat in front of the laptop, clacking the keyboard, and you....my ideas guru? AWOL. You can't do this to me. Report for duty. Get on the parade ground on the double...

It is n't the fact that my employer announced an eye-popping number of job losses today that's really bothering me (it will if / when I'm the target). What is, is that the little plant-in-a-cup, I bought in Wholefoods this evening as a surprise gift for someone, fell through the bottom of the carrier bag just as I was leaving Turnham Green station. 

This better not be a sign of something. 

Dead in the water today. Aching limbs, sore throat, and one very bunged up head. Any intellectual or cultural insight will have to wait until tomorrow, or whenever this damn thing shifts.

But a moan waits for no man, ill, convalescent, or brimming with health. My poor, tired flat has popped a leak, water steadily working it's way (though not gushing, thank God) across downstair's kitchen ceiling. It's like watching a watery constellation of stars take shape. 

I've done what triage I can, nevertheless, everything is going to be in the hands of the plumber tomorrow morning. I so badly want to sell up and find somewhere else. 

Tip for the day: don't read other people's Facebook updates and then compare my life unfavourably to theirs. Not healthy. 

Robert Lowell wrote to his fellow poet, Elizabeth Bishop, that he had wanted to propose to her, but had n't, and that:"... asking you is the might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had..."

It is for me too. I know it all too well, the life imagined, but held back by indecision and fear. The one person I've yearned for, since time began it seems like, such is the before and after quality of meeting you. I need the courage to move in from the edges and tell you.

House-sitting next week and I've been told to expect strict instructions on how to care for their tomatoes. What does that mean? Up every three hours through the night and feed 'em with a rubber teat ? Read 'em story ? Sit side by side and try to get a conversation going like Prince Charles is supposed to?

I had a sudden vision this morning of what my life might look like should I lose my job. Almost as if a curtain had been pulled open for just a few seconds, there it was, an image of me idling away long hours over the Guardian quick crossword in Shepherds Bush Costa Coffee. I habituate too easily to any situation and I could see myself making this a routine, but only if...

Costa Coffee should give me some sort of semi-recognition for loyalty; Shepherds Bush this morning, then their Hammersmith outlet late afternoon, where I had another unfamiliar experience. Busily scribbling away in a corner, sat a middle-aged woman, who in the pauses between writing seemed to be avidly scanning the other customers including me. For what, obviously remains a mystery. Inspiration ? Insight ? Jury's entirely open.

I took on the risk of moving to new current account. The new people did all the running, made sure all the direct debits were moved over, standing orders amended, contacted everyone who needed to know, and today was the day when it all went official. Only one company failed to do anything. Yes, you guessed it. The employer.

The company I work, in spite of being written to in March, sent my salary straight into my old account. Fun afternoon running making sure there was enough money in my new account to meet all the obligations due on it today and over the next few days.

Finally cracked how to do the balance poses in Yoga. taken years but I'm there. Plenty of deep breaths and focus, focus, focus

Nearly the end of April and I've still not properly kicked off my annual flat hunt. Do it every year. Like the first daffodils, it's a sign of Spring around here. The moment I swing their door open, the estate agents in West London know it's arrived.

Should get my buns rolling. Can't let them down.

To actually move though. If I could do that. Not to quietly dread coming back as I do where I live now (and have for years), wondering what I'll come home to: the argumentative neighbours, the frantic scuttle of mice across the false ceiling, drone of nearby TVs and stereos.

I'd like to think of my flat as a home with all the warmth and sense that imbues, not somewhere I lay down in at night hoping to sleep.

Careful for what you wish, for, as if on cue, the dull thud of music is coming through the walls.

John McGahern, what have you done to me...! All I did was read "Amongst Women".

An innocent act of pleasure on the homeward stretch of a happy few days in Paris, but don't ask me what I remember of Northern France. I was n't there. The boggy quiet of Leitrim was where McGahern took me; through it's chattering birdscape, under the cool of it's trees, across the solitude of it's fields, and into stone-flagged kitchens. Places that throbbed with quiet desperation and shared glances, sometimes of joy, sometimes of resentment, sometimes anxiety, and the uncertainties of familial intimacy a brooding constant.

Perfect. I forgot everything, and let his prose, simple, understated, yet elegant, and no doubt all the harder to conceive because of it (there are no word fireworks with McGahern, only fine writing) take me by the hand into this unknown world.

"Amongst Women" is simply so deceptive; lives lived quietly, but ones lived powerfully and unforgettably. Moran, the father and pivotal character, is a flawed man, intense, protective, brooding, yet has a buried, sly wit and I have to say, more than a little, though peculiar, charm about him. Is n't that all of us though ? Complicated, complex individuals, often emotionally inarticulate, but who nevertheless know something within them is amiss. Easy to spot, then on the other hand so difficult to give fictional life to. McGahern has, and so well too.

I almost ran to the library this evening to hunt down more of his books.

I love making a discovery. The world of luminuous writing and clear, memorable prose, has no finite borders, thank God and amen for that.

Why is it that my face freezes into a Munch-like Silent Scream the instant I re-enter the UK ? My heart actually sinks. I can really feel it miss beats. I'm back in Britain and I don't want to be, or I would if the people here could boot their incorrigible pessimism into touch and start to think of the glass as half-full. If only.

Got my equilibrium back. Eating properly, plenty of water, long, long walks by the Thames and across Highgate. The muffin in the morning, though, what am I going to do about that.

Except for a solitary glass of water, I did n't eat or drink a thing that was even remotely healthy yesterday, and I'm someone who prides himself on eating well.

My diet was so bad, it would have been classed as English - before the rise of the super chefs and good food magazines that is.

I shovelled in a smorgasbord of chips, cheese, chocolate, and a tray of profertjes - tiny fried doughnuts slathered with Nutella and then dusted with chocolate powder. All of it scarfed under a broiling sun at a Dutch festival in Traflagar Square. I felt like a pig rooting in the swill bin.

In true yo-yo style I've over compensated today: gallons of green tea (even more than the gallons I normally put away), fresh fruit, dried fruit, yoghurts, the deepest green vegetables, pin-sharp baby tomatoes, lean chicken, spindly, but zesty, life enhancing salad produce.

Got to get my equilibrium back. Got to.

Nine whole days before I pick up the 'phone and become a conference call jockey again. Time off. On holiday. Annual leave.

Such sweet words. Jam-packed with promise and spicy with anticipation. Yes, it's the thought more than the eventual reality that makes those words so damn intoxicating, but live with the thought that's what counts.

I've a couple of days in Paris to delight in, and around those I've a number of other things to look forward: a concert, an exhibition, and more than a few leisurely cappuccinos at the local coffee shop.

A trip to the estate agents as well. That's going to happen sometime next week. It's the time of the year that I usually put myself on the books of numerous West London estate agents; get driven hither and thither from property to property; work out how I'd get to work from wherever the new place it is I've semi-convinced myself I'm about to move...and then it'll all fall flat. I'll get bored and settle for where I live now for another year, vowing of course that I will move but just not this year.

Thing is I really have to. This place is too small - think of shoeboxes glued together; the area's more and more threatening; the block is dis-spiriting to come home to. I need a change. I owe myself one for emotional health as much, if not more than anything else.

Nine days to begin the process.