"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.