Think I need to row back a little on the amount of Frasier episodes I'm watching on Youtube; a few nights ago, I was dreaming I was a psychiatrist.

If I was asked what I'd actually like to be right now, at this very second in fact, then it'd be that worthy profession of epigramist. I saw this diamond in The Guardian's Education supplement today, and I can't stop thinking of how irreducibly precise it is a description of today's webbed up and wireless world: "To the digital native, the analogue becomes wondrous".

Hole in one. Those words sum it up.

Playing in the background as I'm writing is "The Bottle", Gil Scott-Heron's incantatory prose poem and his warning to Black America, to the wider America in fact, of the easy danger of drinking.

Without hypno-therapy, or whatever it is that allegedly resurfaces memories, I'll never be able to say how I first heard of him. Perhaps, it was Charlie Gillett's world music show on Capital that opened the door. I don't know, I can't remember,

But that loping jazz, that piercing flute, those soft, delicate, perfectly weighted keyboards, that honeyed voice, every beat balanced, stories half sung, half spoken, took me by the shoulders, swept into my soul, into deep places, into thinking.

This is night-time music of intelligence and caught me a scant few years after I'd graduated in American Literature, and every note, every line, every mood chimed.

I saw Gil twice, and on consecutive days, in mid 1986. First occasion was at Hammersmith Odeon, where I was so obviously smitten that the next day when I should have been working, I pleaded a bad back - a back spasm I think - and skived off to see him again at a free concert in Clapham Common, where yet again, his magic threaded through me. Still there twenty five years on as well. The bonds are like steel hawsers.

A syllogism based on a news article doing all the rounds today: Denmark does n't like Marmite, I love Marmite, therefore I no longer like Denmark. Something's rotten there.

Here's the article in question for any completists

"I'm interested in everything and nothing else". Umberto Eco, that's me as well. Absolutely everything.

The desire to want to write will only ever be that if the hard work of actually sitting down and doing it remains a luxuriant thought - the do tomorrow syndrome, the manana school of writing in other words. The thought, not the deed is top dog, instead of the other way round, or as my comprehensive school motto more classically put it - Res non verba.

As I've done in several recent articles I'm taking yet another cue from El Hitch; you have to put the hours in, pay the necessary dues. On average he produces 1,000 words of serviceable copy per day.

Writing at such a velocity and of such clarity as Hitchen's generates does n't just occur; the furnace requires more than simple input of raw materials, nothing's going to spontaneously combust into life, without the careful hand of the creator writer stirring the pot, and the culmination of what I've been building up to is: exercise that writing muscle, every day a little ink has to hit the page. Or writing remains an idle dream. Keep supple, stay toned.

In a strange, albeit pleasant way, and for anyone who knows me, you'll realise this is something I would never normally say, but I'm pleased...oh go on...even a little proud of the way the Queen's visit to Ireland has gone.

It's the smokes and cocktails that have done for him, says Christopher Hitchens, whose memoirs I'm settling into whenever there's a moment free.

Like Dylan's never ending tour, I get the sense that the Hitch has been on an extended run of long days, late nights, (later nights in all likelihood) snatched sleep, rumbustious conversation melded with the volcanic need to know more, question more, and learn more than your mainstream homo sapien either wants to, or can handle. He drinks heady, deep unfiltered draughts straight from the intellectual fire hose.

The Hitch, whom I saw once at the Hay Festival, hurrying along the town's main street, with a focused look that I could only imagine a Zen Grand Master capable of, but sans the ineffable sweetness and serenity of the former, and replaced instead with a shimmering, crackling area of concentration that could probably cut through steel, is up there in my pantheon of socio-cultural greats.

Combative yet principled; confrontational but in the same breath, gracious; the most forensic pen with delicious, scrupulous prose; a living, breathing wikipaedia before the notion was even thought of; slayer of intellectual mis-truth merchants, purveyors of single truth nonsense and charlatans in general. The Hitch rings all my bells. Our modern times Thomas Paine.

Furthermore, he's that rara avis: the public intellectual.

Exotic bird indeed, so alien to the British cultural / intellectual body politic in fact that he had to skip that nest or risk being pushed out, and made the long migration to the US. A warmer, more intellectually stimulating environment, bursting like an over-ripe melon with possibilities. So now he nests round the clock there and we Brits for our pleasure are left with a cultural landscape that regards Jeremy Clarkson as a savant.

The smokes and the cocktails? Hitch is gravely ill; it's his partiality for these temptations, freely and openly acknowledged by him, that he wryly said are what have done for him.

Christopher Hitchens, whose memoirs I'm steadily working through, gently chastises his friend, the poet James Fenton, for " awakening (Hitchen's)...buried and dangerous lust for alcohol and nicotine". I like neither stimulant, never have, never will; but chocolate serves the purpose as strongly as either of Hitchen's companion vices, maybe as strong as the two combined.

I'm in thrall to Theobroma. The cocoa bean, that stubby, green pod, leads me by the nose, the prod in the back; it leads, I follow. I always have been, and it looks like I always will.

And in the times when the sullen, stickiness of work pressure has it's baleful shadow over me as is the case right now where I don't know whether I'm coming or going, my appetite for chocolate is gargantuan. Truly massive.

As is usual after any outburst, I've calmed down since Sunday's chest-baring jeremiad; the molten metal cooled in the water of several days reflection, steam, froth, then tempering. Nevertheless, I still don't want to see the heart and guts of this nation torn in different directions. Let's stay together.

A fine mess is what we're in since the Lib-Dems slept with the enemy. That one night stand has left the UK in a perilous state constitutionally.

Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Scottish voters voted en masse for the SNP, to such a degree that they can now hold a referendum on Independence and ace it. As an ardent believer in the Union (in itself, somewhat of a curious, paradoxical statement, since I don't hold any particular love for the English; the paradox is that I was born and still live in England), this saddens me immeasurably, so much that I've been finding it difficult to sleep. I love the idea that we are a United Island, that we can live equitably and satisfactorily; that we are an exception to the rule, and yet it could all founder, this glorious, wonderful idea. I write here as someone who is a true Brit: English, Irish, Scotch and Welsh blood powers this heart.

The outcome should this happen frightens me in exactly the same way as it saddens me: the nation collapses, Scotland ends up a peripheral North Atlantic state, whilst England slips into the default state I've always felt exists at dangerously shallow depth: sullenness, grievance, inwardness, begrudgery, tribalism, and xenophobia.

To flame this miserable bonfire, not only will the nation crumble, the shared values incinerated, the English will end up being under the almost perpetual yoke of the Tories due to the absence of Scottish Labour MPs and the boundary changes the Tories are pushing through.

Tory dominance in perpetuity of a rump Serbia like England, the UK broken into bits, Scotland a minor player. This is the most disillusioned I've ever felt. I can't believe we could be but a few years away from this.

If only Clegg had n't been such a patsy, a wimp, a Trojan Horse for the Tories and fought the tories tooth and nail, and Ed Milliband too, why did n't he carry the cudgel into the Tories ? We would n't be left like this. A nation about to split apart.

What never fails to impress about the US President is that he is a natural statesman and modern day Cicero, who to my British eyes never fails to display anything other than grace under pressure. Almost a Hemingway hero made flesh.

The US is blessed to have him; whereas we for our sins have a Tory reactionary aristocrat as PM. Are we absolutely certain that Obama is n't British? Is there no genetic pull towards bacon and eggs or fish and chips? Nothing ? What about the weather, does he talk about the weather? Now that would make him a Brit.

If only he was, I'd vote for him in a heartbeat.

Some headlines you wonder if you'll ever see, and this was one: the death of Bin Laden. Well, I have, and I can only express my complete appreciation of the extraordinary heroism and courage of the US Special Forces personnel who entered his compound deep in the heart of Pakistan.

I have equal admiration for the steadiness, the eloquence, and care in which Barack Obama announced the news; no triumphalism, no fanfares, no crowing, just the Presidential, timeless, Cicero like prose he's so blessed with.

If only we had an Obama figure in the UK.

I like the idea of the Royal Wedding so much I'm going to celebrate by going to another country.

The crowds, the nonsense, the tabloids in frothy nuptial overdrive, the fear of the street being taken over by a street party (there's already a flag pole with the English flag in a back garden a few doors away from where I'm staying). The lachrymosity, the dreary sentimentalism, the spurious nostalgia. All of it makes my heart sink like a stone. I could n't, I can't face any of it.

Hello Dublin, see you on Thursday...

What makes a translated classic shine even more than the plot or the themes is the quality of the translation itself. That, I'm convinced, strips away the intimidating sense that we have about any classic, and especially any foreign classic. Remember, authors' in the main write because they want to be read, it's about accessibility, and not deterrence; your name is on the list, and you can come in.

I've bailed out of innumerable classics simply because the translation was opaque or fussy; impenetrable, even impossible to understand; or just dry, bone dry, starved of any love, the writer's intent sucked off the bone, indigestible.

However, when the translation is light, modern, but not estuary English, and stream-lined, then a foreign classic is pure joy, as it is right now, with this superb translation of Dostoyevsky's "The House of the Dead" I'm reading, or more to the point doling myself a portion every day to prolong the joy.

It's a fabulous - so starkly illuminating it's as if someone has flipped a switch and turned on the purest strip lighting - lightly fictionalised account of the author's four years in a Siberian prison camp in the early 1850s. Contemporaneous and yet universal, I've not come across anything that depicts the existential drudgery of imprisonment better than this.

Last night's apprehensions that I'd be kept awake by the carousing kiwis next door came to naught; I slept like a top and woke up bouncing, they clearly slept, but bounced awake? No, I'd say no.

The drunker you are, the deeper the trough the following morning, so saith Doctor Archimedes.

But I know simply from experience that I'll not have been alone fretting about the hullabooloo that the first faint of breath of barbeque smoke seems to evoke. Across London, across the South-east, it'll have been the same.

This mad, crazy, complicated city state that I live in and love immeasurably has a toll to pay sometimes. I accept it. I could n't live anywhere else.

I'm at my unofficial second home, listening to the Kiwi neighbours having a barbie; they're young, they're drinking, they're right outside my window...

Is it bad if I hope there's a repeat of last night's near monsoon?

Someone I know let out a metaphorical cheer on Facebook in celebration that they were able to slide in to a dress they'd dreamed of wearing for several months.

It's obvious they're delighted; every word they've written is starburst of joy. A plan, when it comes off is an intoxicant all of it's own that defies proper articulation. It's a sense thing, an intangible asset of indefinable value.

I've been in a similar frame of mind. Something inexplicable prompted me to listen to a Roxy Music's Greatest Hits album that I'd stumbled on when I was fishing around for background music to cook lunch to.

How to tumble backwards through time. Just the faintest breath of a melody, the murmur of a line, and it's sometime in the small hours of a Winter's day in the early '80s, and I'm laying in bed with Julia, the two of us talking softly, or perhaps not at all, wrapped up in our private cocoon, Roxy humming quietly around us.

I might have forgotten I'd ever had that life if not for randomly excavating Roxy Music today.

One of my early adopter friends gave me a tour of his iPad 2. It is a design masterpiece, nothing more, nothing less; an utterly beautiful union of elegance, sophistication, simplicity, and no more weight than that of a snowflake. I am in awe. Yes, don't ask, I do want one...

My unconscious is unruly from time to time. Always been that way. I've had some extraordinary memorable dreams over the years. Nothing surprising there, we're all like that, if, of course, we remember the bizarre, baffling film strips that run through our sleep.

Mine usually have some sort of soundtrack accompaniment, and always in colour. Editing, well that's another matter, there is n't any. It's jumpcuts, time lapses, slow-mo, sometimes auteur led, sometimes I'm not featuring, but still there watching.

All of this though is another story. What's the very unexpected fallout from my nocturnal cinema is that I'm literally dreaming up new words.

Happened to me once, and I thought nothing more, other than the sheer randomness of the unconscious, after all why would a word that sounds like a French verb - Rorgner - come to me in a dream and refuse to leave?

No idea. And by the way, there is no such verb, no such word in fact.

Is twice a developing a pattern, or just coincidence? Because the new word coining machine stamped something else out last night - hyperkinaesthetics. Again. no such word exists (or not in Google at least)

I know broadly where the origins of this lie, or probably, you never can be too sure what's going on whilst you're supposedly asleep. It must be related to the talk on David Foster Wallace I went to last night at Foyles with a friend.

David Foster Wallace's was an unknown force to me until yesterday. I left the talk with the intention to read whatever I could get hold of. It's his style that rugby tackled me: fast, meticulous, highly, highly detailed, frantic, tumultuous , baroque, flamboyant, up to the minute. The style that looks as easy as it is magnetic to readers and tyro writers, but deep down, it only comes with monumental effort, discipline, and patience.

That, all of it, every vowel, consonant, verb, noun, soaked into me and the reward bizarrely: hyperkinaesthetics. My mind must have been slaving in it's workshop all night to come up with something to encompass the effect Wallace has had on me.

The unconscious. Got to love it.

It's the weather. Consecutive days of sheer sun and soft blue skies, how can anyone stay in? I can't and don't. All my non working time has been with my rear firmly parked on a seat in Holland Park, nose down in Oblomov, a fabulous nineteenth century Russian novel, which I can't get enough of.