Now that felt good. Cleaning my kitchen, washing crockery, bleaching surfaces, getting the vacuum behind the fridge for once. I had to do this; there's a lot at stake. I've begun to feel cowed by the stuff that has to be done - the walls are grubby, the bathroom suite's a shocker, the kitchen filthy, my living room overflowing with books, papers, clothes. In the right hands, the right writer's hands that is then this tiny flat could be as epic as Quentin Crisp's legendary New York apartment. My hands are n't those and I don't want that.

It's the last thing; no, what I want is somewhere clean, quiet, pleasant, that I can gladly invite people to see, drop-in if they do wish. I don't want to have the cortisol jolt of wondering was that mice scampering along the roof space, or the indignity of having to bear someone else stamping across their floor (my ceiling) in the wee small hours.

Tonight I think I've stopped myself going into a state of near domestic suspended animation where nothing would have happened. All sounds quite melodramatic, does n't it, but understand this: I've turned something like a corner here. I've taken a stand against that other me - the idle, the worrier, the sometimes despondent, the procrastinator, the talker but not the doer.

The other me, incidentally, is a reflection of only an aspect of my personality, not the fullness of me; after all we are complex, often contradictory beasts, perplexing to our own self as well as others, resilient, introverted and extroverted according to circumstance, active and passive.

Caution items may have shifted during flight. They have. My back's killing me since I got off the train from Birmingham. I'm having to do the old man shuffle - two hands massaging an unforgiving back muscle and all of it bent double - just to get around my flat.

This is definitely muscular. Wonder if toting that damn laptop across Birmingham is the culprit? I need everything to shift back the way it was status quo ante. Looking to you, Sleep, to do what you need to. In your hands right now. No pressure.

In London you trip over other people's conversations from the moment you close your front door and step into the public domain. It's like the city was designed for it: waiting to pay at Tesco, anywhere on the tube, even walking home through the park, the one sure thing is that you're going to inadvertently wander in, through, and then out of the smoke and fog of someone else's conversation. It's a given. A certainty.

No reason either why it should n't be either; there's nine, possibly ten, maybe eleven, or even twelve, depending who you believe, million people squeezed in to London. So why should n't we be dipping in and out of a smog of small talk?

As I ploughed through Holland Park on my way home earlier this evening, I fleetingly drifted into range of a kind of Q&A going on between a family of three, and snagged a line that resonated instantly. The father was agog about a bird of prey they'd once seen. I don't  think it was recent - something in his tone suggested that - nevertheless it carried epic connotations. It had taken his breath. It had awed him.

I know all about that despite never seeing whatever he saw; something similar happened to me at the Barnes Wetland Centre one late winter's evening last year. I'd just followed a friend into the quiet gloom of  a bird hide. He turned towards the larger front window and I made for one of the smaller side panels. In front of me, perhaps no more than six or seven feet, sat an impassive sparrow hawk, tawny brown and steel-eyed, the lean face of death, the master of the urban skies. I felt like a veil had been pulled aside and I had been given a glimpse of another reality, where I was the intruder and the sparrow hawk was master.

I've had very few moments where nature has allowed me this snatched view of a master hunter's almost imperial disdain. Quite unforgettable. For me then and just as much for the anonymous father I overheard a few hours ago talking about his own moment of wonder.

I was in a cafe this morning listening to a friend go over her holiday plans. She's been a roamer like me - the more offbeat a destination the better. It's a chronic sign of wanderlust; I know, it's printed into my DNA.

 However, she's a quieter gal these days with a partner in tow, who like her seems to exist under siege like conditions at work. So she's looking at somewhere to let the work bruises heal, the sun to carry out it's magic, and generally get the office life wrinkles ironed out. But there has to be a little culture in there alongside the beach and the sea as well. Prose and poetry.

Malta? What did I know ? Had I been there ? Thoughts? Been there and, yes, it'll probably press all the right buttons: picturesque, warm, good food, generously natured people, layers of history; in general, a place to let the imagination wander. Her kind of place in other words.

And this is where I ran into problems. Straightforward enough to emphasise that it's the ideal sanctuary cum holiday destination she needs, got no doubt on that. But harder, much harder to actually express all this in words. You should go here...pause...then here...had a great time there....pause...easy to get around...pause...people friendly, not get ripped off, and so on in that staccato style. It's something I've noticed not just me, but others falling into: the power of expression takes a swan dive right out of the window when we're trying to say what somewhere is really like.

How difficult it is to articulate the sense and effect of a physical place. It ends up coming down in my case: to gestures; 'it just is' repetitions; and salvos of go and you'll see what I mean exhortations. I might have better luck describing the the nature of the soul than this.

Still it looks like she's going to go to Malta. So something seems to have worked. Let's call it the alchemy of inarticulacy or the enchantment of the tongue-tied.

Just woken up and read that James Gandolfini died last night. This is not right. Such a fine actor. Mesmerising in the Sopranos. I'm shocked. My age too. Underlines if it ever it needs to be that every day is singularly precious.

I got a clearer view of a coastline that I've only dimly glimpsed and then only through the eyes of various conflicted characters who populate a number of Saul Bellow's novels - the unknown land being that of Wilhelm Reich. His analytic style, and particularly, the orgone accumulator he developed, mattered to Bellow for a time, cropping up in his fiction and in his real life; an article I read sometime ago had Bellow sitting in one of these wooden, metal lined boxes for hours at a time, trying to get elusive "orgone energy" before being told to run out into the woods and scream like a banshee.

Reich earlier in his career, this time in Austria, simultaneously shocked and wowed with his advocacy of something that today we take for granted because we talk about it like we do the weather - the orgasm. 

My Reichian insights owe their origins to a film I've just seen at the Austrian Cultural Forum earlier this evening. Shown in a tiny, first floor room with a disproportionately large chandelier in front of maybe thirty people. All with some interest, professional or personal, in Reich. 

The Q & A that followed was as enjoyable as the film. It felt like being in a very large Hampstead sitting room surrounded by engaging, educated, articulate Mittel Europeans, who each had some personal stake in Reich. One elderly woman, wearing a red sweater, in particular stood out: she bounced with questions, in fact it was more like a conversation she was having with the film director, which he equally enjoyed. I caught the pride in her voice when, as I expected her to do all along she said she was Viennese by birth. 

I love events like this. My intellect needs stretching every day. Evenings like this are like going to the brain gym for me.

Another four to go then it's me in front of David Sedaris. He's going to ask me what I want him to put as a dedication when he signs the new book of his I've just bought. Ask me about the weather, David, or why cats have four feet, anything but what dedication I want. I can't think of thing. Nada. Not a sausage. I'm blank, and, bizarrely, starting to feel something not unlike the tremors of a mild panic attack. C'mon Archimedes, pull it together, take a deep breath or something, he's a writer, a generous, funny, spirited man, not Torquemada...

 Sounds like the Brummies he's talking with now are having a hoot. Down specially for the reading, they're saying. That's love. Reciprocated; he's just given them some free tickets to another event he's booked in for. They're walking away in a collective swoon. 

Wonder if he thinks I'm Italian because my friend in front of me whose book he's just signing actually is. Oh, he's asked the question. I am Italian, she's saying, and now they're rapping about the UK citizenship test and a book festival near Torino. 

And it's me up, my turn, and I'm doing it already...mouth flopped open like a middle aged guppy...here we go...My name?...Archimedes. Do I speak Italian? I can, but I dare n't say so since you might be fluent in raw Tuscan or earthy Roman and ask me something or fling an Italian Bon mot at me, and I'll clam up even more.

 He's doing a doodle, I'm not that boring am I? No, not a doodle, it's a signature owl...that's different...not had that before. Most authors are scrawl and pass; scrawl something illegible then pass on to the next person. 

It's come to me! I know what I can speak to him about. Did n't he mention swimming at Kensington Leisure centre? Near enough to where I live for me to smell the chlorine and the bleach...we have a common point...finally.

This is something I never expected to see amongst the foliage of cab company stickers, flyers for gigs and missing pet posters that cover most bits of street furniture on the Goldhawk road: missing wand, sentimental value. Wand? Is there a coven in West London, or someone just a little too deep into Hogwarts and Harry Potter?

I've said it before and it's likely I'll never stop saying it or thinking it: without fiction, I'd have no sense of empathy. None at all. Well, perhaps an operating function, a sense, but nothing any deeper. Able to observe, but not able to connect. Get in there and understand, see through another's eyes, feel someone else's emotions. All of that immeasurably valuable. Humanity plus.

Since finishing "A long, long way" a few days ago, I've been wondering if any of these modestly sized turn of the century houses were handed a telegram during the first world war which spun them from one life into another. And now barely a few pages into Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant" I've been gifted an insight I never expected; I can't think of describing it as anything other than 'will this be place"? Wistful hopes, if that makes sense, might be another.

The insight is this: a freshly married couple spend their early years moving from town to town as her ambitious salesman husband steps up the career ladder. She gazes at: ...each new town with hopeful eyes and think (s): this may be where I'll have my son..."

I read that and almost instantly thought of several women I know; have they felt like this, were this character's inner hopes, theirs? In the house I'm in now, did the couple who live here, imagine, mud, strewn toys, sleepovers, parties, ferrying kids to after school events? There's another woman, one who I have felt the most I've ever felt for any living person other than my parents; did she look at London and have this hope deep in her heart?

God bless fiction. Without it, I'd probably be an emotional still-born.

Holidays are a problem. The people you're with sometimes, where you go can be another, whilst my perennial is sheer reluctance to come back.  I can never over come that. No home sickness in the classically accepted view; mine is much more idiosyncratic, I'm simply sick I have to go home. That's it. No more, no less.

Half a dozen of us spent the tail end of last week in Northumberland: beautiful scenery, the most accommodating, friendly people, and a generous dollop of fine weather spread across the whole time. Blissful. And littered like a first world war battlefield with all the snares, traps, encumbrances and petty grievances of a problem holiday. A real, real pity. I think I was probably the only one not nursing some sort of injury or vexation.  

Observation is the historian's mode; perception and evocation are the writer's. Whether I read this or whether it's a home grown thought of my own raised in the sunlight of something I did actually read is moot, I just don't know. But it's a thought I've been carrying with me since I turned the last page over Sebastian Barry's WW1 novel, A long, long way, a few hours ago in the dining space at Wholefoods.

The stale has become fresh, fresher than I ever might have imagined; the tired, rejuvenated. I've seen the miserable madness of that war refracted in the most unexpected ways, which I'm struggling to articulate to myself, let alone consider putting into words.

One thing that does is the realisation that war's echoes reverberated across decades and probably never fully left people. Something, oddly picked out in Barry's most recent novel, On Canaan's Side, where elderly Lily Bere, looks back over a long life that began as the sister of Willie Dunne, the protagonist of the novel I've just finished, and takes in the decades spent as an Irish immigrant in America. She talks briefly, yet almost poetically in it's pureness and simplicity about Willie. And I get the sense of deep loss, sadness, that what might have been had it not been for the life shortening cold horrors of the trenches.

Perhaps I was already affected, thinking this way before realising it fully today;  I have after all been steadily reading " A long, long way", for several days now, snatching time to do so whenever I could. I remember looking at the roll call of names on the war memorials in Amble and Warkworth when I was up there earlier this week, thinking of the enormous, irreparable tears made in the fabric of these small Northumberland towns. Neither would have been the same again. Melancholic ghosts, broken hearts, bereft families. Sadness that might dim over time, but would never lose it's visible edge.

Something that you don't come across too often and, in it's own way, a modest rebuke to all those who think men don't emote: a man quietly discussing his relationship, it's ups, it's down, with someone who was either a friend or workmate. I'd settled down for a quiet read after finishing a meal in Wholefoods when I picked up snippets of the conversation happening over the next table.

I must have something akin to dog whistle hearing; a word or a random sentence pops out of the ether, and that's it, I'm reeled in to ear wigging.