I'm blocked. Can't think of anything to write. There's nothing in there. All I do know is that I want to read more than I want to write; if you can't get out to fish, then you stay at home, mending your nets I suppose

"...The true entomologist's pleasure is much simpler, more direct: that of discovering a new type..." writes Kobe Abe as he begins to sketch out the moods and motivations of the main character in the early pages of his novel, The Woman in the Dunes.

I know that feeling, I know it very well; the near glee of finding something that has lain forgotten, or ignored, or just invisible, the almost proprietorial sense of joy "I discovered it first, ergo it's mine..."

Of course, I've never discovered anything completely new; whatever I have, has really been known about, just not to me or to many others. Putting it plainly: someone else got there first.

However, that was then, this is now, because I have. I've snuffled something out that I reckon is fresh, novel, and still has the earth clinging to it's perky roots.

I've uncovered a hitherto unknown movie sub-genre: the redemptive heavy metal film, where a struggling, washed up band, like Anvil, or a deeply addled, conflict stricken, riven apart band like Metallica, are at the crossroads, go through the wringer, get mashed, squashed, and nearly flattened, but it all comes good at the end.

Like a good taxonomist, I've then been able to pick out sub-sets hanging off my sub-genre: there's the absolute feelgood metal movie - Anvil; the metal band consumed by dark forces, in meltodwn, and in creative despair movie - Metallica.

You thought I was n't going to include the mother of all metal movies, the Ur film, the film without which there'd be no sub-genre...? The Casablanca of Spandex...the Citizen Kane of scissor kicks...the Gone with the Wind of Amps pushed to 11. Heading up my sub-genre is Spinal Tap.

That's where it all started, the source. No Tap = no sub-genre, and me without a discovery, even this trivial, to my name.

The reaction I get when I tell some people who I work for, you'd think I worked for Satan.

Mine's a tough company, and hard work, but I don't shlep for Beelezebub. My salary's earned the hard way.

Use some of his tools, though. No, not a pitchfork, and I don't sit on a pentagram shaped chair...I use Excel instead.

I might as well be using a pencil with no lead, a pen with no ink. It's that helpful.

I've spent most of the week pushing the Excel rock all the way up the boulder strewn hill, to within a few inches from the summit; I rest for a moment to steady myself for the final push, just for it to roll all the way back to where I began. Day after day of this. From dawn till dusk.

And it's painful to use; the bloody grid-lines are scorched on to my retinas. My fingers - those poor index fingers - ache and throb. I may need physio on my fingers the way this going. I lose power in these two digits, then I'm done... have to be medically retired.

Has there ever been such a piece of perverse software as this ?

Stubborn, spiteful, contradictory....only someone in league with the Devil has the instinctive malice to devise something as cantankerous as this. No reasonable person with even half an ounce of compassion or empathy could.

God spare me from Excel.

Russian Constructivists at the Tate: fractured geometrical shapes, juicy, exuberant colours, and a philosophy underpinning it all that I still don't properly understand.

What more can the art lover ask for ? Perfect.

Bird strike on the back of my jacket this morning; happened whilst I was hurrying through the park en route to the Tube this morning. Could have done without that. Hardly anything on me to clean it off with either, just a few frayed fragments of tissue I found scrunched together in a coat packet, but you work with what you have.

There's the faintest stain visible, the kind of thing you'd really only see if you held it up in raking sunlight; I'm thinking of it as scar tissue

Still an impromptu, uninvited dollop of guano is supposed to be lucky.

Luck is an interesting notion. As someone who possesses an atavistic, primitive awe of anything remotely superstitious, I used to expect the day to change in alignment with whatever hex it was, or abracadabra I'd triggered: walk under a ladder things would go one way, chance on a four leaf clover, everything would have gone swimmingly.

But the problem with superstitions, and I know this because sheer rationalism tells me this, is that all they do is promote passivity. You wait for things to happen. You wait and wait and wait... and then wait a bit more.

It is incomparably more worthwhile, to go out there and create your own luck, than to have done what I would have done in my pre-enlightenment days - submit irrationally, and I have to say obstinately, to the delusion that a string of bird shit slapping on to the back of your coat would conjure up a life change.

The only thing a bird strike changes is the complexion immediately around whatever it is, it's hit.

What a difference a good night's sleep makes.

I'm slug-a-bed most of the time: at night I'm rarely fluffing the pillows before eleven; I wake up zonked, and more often than not stay that way all day as well. So a decent night's ZZZs is never going to be sniffed at.

I feel perky, bright, clear-headed, zoomed through the in-tray, and I don't have that bone sapping tiredness to drag through London either. Good, good, good...

Sleep is a hidden treasure. Worth the struggle.

The neighbours must be thinking the world's flipped on it's temporal axis and gone back to 1973, or that they've been caught in the slipstream of an episode of Life on Mars. I'm listening to Slade, T. Rex, Status Quo, David Bowie.

My childhood..I'm touching it..where are my flares ? Gimme back my platforms....

I cyber-peeked over someone's shoulder this evening; accidentally...important I get that in. I'm just like you, a subject of the surveillance state, but I'm not, in any way, shape, or form, an instigator of it, or for it.

So there I am just wandering by (if you can in the cyber world), minding my own business...when I catch a glimpse of the best definition of a blog. The eureka moment. So simple, so visual, so apt: it's a great big ball of yarn. Yarn. Better that metaphor someone please

And by those unwritten laws that seem to informally govern so much of life, don't balls of yarn only grow larger too...?

Something growing bigger at my age. How do you expect me to feel....imagine...

Amongst the commuters this evening on the westbound District line platform at Monument Station was an onion.

A very patient onion, barely moving. Simply waiting like the rest of us.

Utterly absorbed, serene almost - imagine a small Buddha - and, like all commuters, scrupulously protective of his personal space.

I doubt if anyone else apart from me actually saw him - and he was there, believe me. It's one of the unwritten laws of commuting to never acknowledge there are other commuters. They're there, but not there, whether it's an onion or not standing alongside.

Crowds are like waves on a tube station platform: they break, they clear, and then gradually reform. People swarm off trains, swarm on to others. Tonight amidst it all was this fist-sized onion, resolutely in the same place, oblivious of the melee of legs and umbrellas rushing past.

I finally boarded the train I needed, so I can't say with any authority what happened to this indomitable Onion in the end; maybe he did roll on to a westbound train at some point, perhaps he got picked up, could be he just got fed up, turned round and however onions do it left the station. We'll never know.

Even how he got there is a mystery. Hurrying to board the Richmond train, someone bumps or trips, and out pops an onion from a shopping bag?

If it had fallen from a bag, should I have picked it up and chased after a progressively accelerating train, like a love sick swain desperate to press a favour in to the hand of his adored? Could there ever be a brief encounter at at tube station with an onion as a go-between?

Wanderlust, maybe, or a cri de couer ? "That's it...no more green dump bin... Tesco is too small for me... too humdrum... I need space...wide open space...I'm heading for Wholefoods...be a real onion...make something of myself...

I wonder what's going on in my unconsciousness at times.

I've had dreams where I've been bitten by seals; duetted with Natalie Cole, but only after a very tense stand-off with her original duet partner; that one of my friends was an actress on sixty-seven dollars an hour (why that figure? No idea, things obviously work differently in dreamland).

Another where I was in the back garden of a relative's house being hand fed carrots.

Then there was the one where I was dragged on stage by Oasis at the old Wembley Stadium to sing "cum along feel the noize". You can't...you don't...turn the Gallagher brothers down.

And then last night, an extremely vivid dream of me watching a store detective struggling with a shoplifter, who could only be pacified by a right-hander. A beautiful, sweeping right-hander, arcing perfectly from fist drawn back until the point of impact...and in slow motion as well. A slo-mo dream...that's a first for me.

It's busier in my unconscious than it is in my conscious state. Not sure if I should take comfort from that or not.

Mickey Rourke's bravura performance in The Wrestler has given me the metaphor for how I feel right now after a battering of a week in the office.

I am that wrestler who has been in too many headlocks, taken too many scissor kicks, been thrown down too many times; and each time, it takes longer for me to pick myself off the canvas than it did before.

Some people I know want to shave my head ! Not for me to do it either...but them. They want to flash the clippers over my barnet.

Not happening. No way... absolutely no way... It's a thin thatch on the roof - never deny that, but what I have, I hold.

Until the final grey wisp snaps it's anchor and floats off...then that will be the point when I'll resign my self to domedom...and that I must restate is the only time. Be it a long time-coming too.

Hair loss is, sadly and regrettably, to be expected in some way, shape, or form, for most men - other than those blessed with a hedgerow that will see them through to the end.

Mine started to go when I was young. A complicating and distressing event; there's identity, there's allure, there's the sense of wholeness about hair.

When it goes, they become questions, difficult and unhappy to answer. This is why I'm stubborn to clinging on to what I have. It's a memory of who I used to be.

An Italian Philosopher, I was told last week, once said there will be no improvement between the classes until the rich know 1000 words and the poor only 100.

I've no idea of what context this statement floats in; whether it's from a "right on" philosopher, or from a "right off" one; nor how much subtlety has been lost in translation. I don't even know the sex let alone the name of this person.

All of these considerations are dangers and I accept the inherent risks even if I don't properly know the origins of this statement, but I trust the person who mentioned it, and that's the provenance enough.

A 1,000 words for the rich, but which ones can we trust them with? Free-market maybe, or self-regulating ? Investment Banking ? Compound phrases on the " we know best....yes we do" theme?

1,000 self-selected words might be too many and too dangerous. Whilst 100 is nowhere near enough for anyone. Rebalancing needed.