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.