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.

I've found an upside to sarcasm. Did n't set out to find it, it walked out of the undergrowth on it's two legs. But as it's lumbering around in the open air now then might as well say what it is.

Sarcasm gets you noticed.

My professional profile is so much more heightened, my contours sharper than they were before I went on that conference call with my new boss, but did n't recognise his voice, and sent a sarcastic zinger (well, deep sigh, plus a few words) zipping towards someone else on the call.

My boss commented, I wilted like a dying rose, flushed briefly, then paler, paler, until very pale; still, he knows who I am. Upside to most things if you look.

Motto for back to the office tomorrow: keep calm and carry on. Going to need it. Big backlog of e-mails curdling over the long weekend and some not good news about jobs in this morning's papers.

I was at a Rugby match this afternoon that was neither hot, nor cold, just colourless and earthbound.

There were flashes of drama, and the occasional touchline tussle where you could almost see the shock waves radiating after a bruising tackle; but for long periods the match lacked any hook. I sat there, watched, and took nothing in.

I prayed for action, even controversy, a questionable decision, anything to make it memorable, so there would be at least something to dissect - and probably dispute in the car on the way home - but really more for a friend's young son. This was his first time at a match.

With the noise of drums and ragged terrace chanting, booming around the ground, and men shouting or whistling, the place was a cauldron.

I wanted him to go home with the foundations of a memory - the time he went with his dad and his dad's friends to a rugby match.

I was hoping he would experience, and never forget, the camaraderie, that following your side into battle fosters. Where you become part of something bigger and sense the mutual complicity that goes with it. Being amidst the hubbub of excited, roaring crowds. And how to work through the all too often heartache of the ball just not bouncing the way you hoped.

Instead, the game delivered flat nothing.

If I'm honest, then I know why I wanted it to be a gotterdammerung of a game, it's this: in remembering the game, he would remember us, his dad's friends as well. We would live on even when we're no longer here.

I had a profound sense of my own mortality throughout the whole game. Unknown adventures and excitements await this young man's generation which none of us will see.

No other city in Britain has anything like the capacity London has for chance encounters.

It's beyond stating the obvious; the size of the place, the hubbub of simply being the capital, the centrifugal force it exerts on all aspects of life, could n't allow it to be anything else but the place for bumping into someone who has an interesting, often unusual, occasionally quirky story to tell.

Many of these seemingly serendipitous meetings really are n't if you think about it.

My theory is that people of similar sensibilities seek each other out for one thing and cluster around similar nodal points for another. Take today as an example. At the gallery where I volunteer, I met a fascinating London based, Rosanna Arquette look-a-like Russian Film director, who had just finished making what seems to be an acutely poetic film of Sicily, and was wandering around the gallery late this afternoon seeking inspiration for her next film.

This would never have happened to me in my hometown. Never. Thank God for London.

To temper the joy (near joy, after all it's probably been done by some robotic device) of having a celebrity follower on my Twitter feed, I've gone through the wearisome exercise of writing a complaint to the company who manage the block of flats I live.

It's small, it's about poorly fitted hall carpets, nothing at all in the scheme of things; it's the fact I have to do it that makes me vexed. I hand these guys a sizeable chunk of money every month. Where's my return on investment?

Everything is a battle with them. Nothing is easy. It's attrition. I'd just like things to go smoothly, quietly and transparently.

Jeez, I've got a celebrity follower ! Anvil are following me on Twitter. Go, boys, go. Seeing the film again tomorrow night.

Most of the books that lie on my shelves have been read all the way from the opening sentence all the way to the closing. Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly; nevertheless, however long it's taken, I've always made it to the finish line.

Usually.

The clue is most because that means not all, and that's important.

There's a growing number that I've started in hope, eager to be stirred, and taken away from the mundane, only to lay them down unfinished, disappointed, wondering what I'm missing or not getting; and on occasion even mystified as to just why a particular book has the fan base it has, when, bluntly, it's unreadable.

Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot" joined that group yesterday. However hard I persevered, the story never opened up for me. I saw words, lot's of them, scurrying everywhere, but they were n't like little parties of ants forming up into tiny platoons of words, and marching the narrative along.

So I gave up

A number of things are bothering me right now: my new credit card has n't arrived - it was supposed to be sent to where I work yesterday; then the carpet fitters have n't finished laying the carpet in the common areas where I live, and it looks a mess, particularly around my front door, where there's a tongue of carpet curling upwards that has to be trimmed, or I'll keep falling over it.

But the big one, the elephant that I can see in the room - is my utter lack of decent clothes. Any clothes really. Not got a thing, a shirt, a button, a jacket, pair of trousers, shoes. Nothing. I could n't even wrap a towel around myself; they're as frayed and threadbare as everything else.

Christ, I'm must be a sight boarding the Tube, or heading to the shops, I should ring a handbell...but redemption, I do smell nice. L'Occitan en Provence, thou art my saviour here. Untold prayers.

Still, I did get a heartlifting moment walking back to the office from Liverpool Street this afternoon. I ran into one of the G20 protests (to be honest I did want to see them - there are other ways of reaching the office), a mass sit down cum cook-out cum mini tent city just up the road from the growing Heron Tower.

In that great heaving, impromptu mass of people and passions, and ideas that will eventually become mainstream, was the nucleus of the next generation of new leaders, opinion-formers, thinkers, writers, film-makers, bubbling away growing by the moment. Democracy in motion, haphazard, raw, sometimes angry, always engaged, sincere and thoughtful. Wonderful.