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25 January 2002 (Day 132)

Smiled at eugenemirman.com.

24 January 2002 (Day 131)

I walk back into work, picking lint from the insides of my coat pockets. They seem to harvest an almighty store of it. To tease it out from the corners, I have to push my fingers firm against my leg for resistance. As I'm doing this, a sentence comes into my head: 'Simultaneously, things went right and things went wrong.' I repeat the sentence, still digitally active inside my pockets and my gaze surfing over the hills and houses in the distance. Simultaneously, things went right and things went wrong. I walk through the park. Cut through the gully. Into the car park and I see two Japanese girls talking to each other. They wear identical coats. Out of the car park and onto the main road, I see two kids walking side by side, shoulders crashing against each other. One of them is obese and in school uniform. Simultaneously, things went right and things went wrong. I repeat it over and over because I don't want to forget it, because it has a pleasing symmetry and contrariness. As I turn the corner, I look up to the red neon ring on the front of the building in front of me, as I always do.

These details could have been lost to the quotidian hunger of life. Today I rescued something from dying in that way. Today I was unhappy. Today I felt tired. Today I took a bath, not a shower. Today I saw my eyes, black, in the mirror. Today I listened for the ignition of the gas jets in a combi-boiler. Today, I recorded the minutiae of my day.

23 January 2002 (Day 130)

I should have retired to bed earlier. I've been sat in front of computer, typing and deleting words with frightening equality: these few lines the only consolation from an otherwise fruitless night's work.

22 January 2002 (Day 129)

There was a man in the supermarket today with a tiny head and a loud voice. He wore a dirty puffa jacket and looked disdainfully over at me as I browsed through the football reports in the tabloids. Why would someone look at me like that? He had tiny scrunched eyes that sat above his cheeks like two small spiders.

On the subject of disdainful looks: Poppy, our four-legged guest for the last two days, decided to piss in the communal entrance hall this evening, with an open door and the (similarly) wet outdoors just an outstretched paw away. I mopped up with a towel and remembered the guy with the menacing eyes and then the spider analogy.

21 January 2002 (Day 128)

Slowly. Downward. Autonomously graceful words. The website of that name – slowlydownward.com – gave me a good hour of enjoyment today. I was captivated by the simple stories, reveries and images; forgot that I had enjoyed it so much when I last visited a year or two ago.

20 January 2002 (Day 127)

It seems as though the rain is now here to last. The streets become desolate and the sky laden with the most premature grey colours early in the day. Pavements reflect these wonderfully indifferent skies. I've always liked the rain; it disengages me from the everyday things around me: my mind wanders and my heart fills with hope. I forget about the finite nature of things.

Sometimes, the most moving words, the most touching, beautiful words are those that wrap around phenomena as described above – they conjure images and thoughts: you can drift somewhere with the manifest possibilities of such words. Tonight, I pick up the phone to words of another kind, unexpected words which I am truly touched by. They work in the same, beautiful, emancipatory way as the rain.

19 January 2002 (Day 126)

Watched Amelie: a wonderful, wonderful film. Later, with my mind working far quicker than my hands, I tried to get some thoughts down for work on The Gap Between... and for the most part fumbled and failed.

18 January 2002 (Day 125)

A volcano spills a fifty-metre wide river of lava over the town of Goma. In the picture on the BBC website there's an African child, stood on what might be the town's airport runway, in a purple T-shirt, with black adorning the sky and the ground and a tear of orange fires across the middle like a decorative ribbon.

Britney Spears visits the country and there is wonderment over the brevity and secrecy of her visit and a fan bemoans the fact that bodyguards would not allow him the proximity he required to secure an autograph.

It's now an ungodly hour in the morning of this day's tomorrow and I could write and I could write and I could write.... I wouldn't reach the troubled teen idol fan with my words, nor would I enlighten or help the victim or aid worker. I will contribute nothing towards a disaster fund. Bizarrely, I am convinced that we are capable of empathy for the child who remains without his prized signature rather than for the child who clutches a solitary fluorescent-green training shoe behind the charred purple cloth on his back.

17 January 2002 (Day 124)

Once more, I listened to Solomon Hayes' 'Jeffrye Street'. Then I listened to it again, and then again, and if no one else should ever get to hear that song (certainly, very few people have already) I wish merely to mention that it is one of the most wonderful pieces of music that I know.

16 January 2002 (Day 123)

There are many beautiful things throughout the day. Too many to mention, though too few that stay with me for more than a fleeting moment. Here I have an outlet for them and possibly someone to share them with. There are as many of these beautiful things that escape me as come rushing towards me. I can point to the screen, find the tiniest little green or red or blue square and name it so. I can fold the corner of this page over to obscure the number of the folio before me and declare it so. I can dwell for twenty minutes over a final two-letter word to finish a sentence and know it, too, to be so.

15 January 2002 (Day 122)

About to leave the supermarket today, I looked up to the cashier to thank her for her service and my brain told my mouth to shape both 'thank you' and 'thanks then'. The noise that followed was 'thanks you'. A simple messed-up phrase. I think it passed unnoticed, but I pondered my error walking back to the office and thought that maybe the brain becomes lazy and sure of itself when we ask it to repeat the all-too-familiar. Maybe, I thought, it's indicative of the half-hearted effort we put into so many things.

The paint on the door to the house wherein lies the office in which I work is peeling. Though only a couple of years old and sheltered – set back from the road behind a tall wall – from the lashings of cruel weathers, it is in poor health. Soft to the touch, grey, rotten wood sits underneath these curlicues and splinters of forest green. Finding my keys at the door, I concluded that if we fail with objectives that are so simple, how much harder must we try to combat the real difficulties in life?

14 January 2002 (Day 121)

This morning I awoke feeling as good as I have done for a long time. There was a strangeness to it, not least that it came on the back of three days of feeling so bad. For so long – and I use that 'so' very knowingly – there's been something that feels as though it has been with me, left over from some past malady or malaise. This residuum seemed gone today. I had glandular fever three years ago that hospitalised me and left me fragile. Physically, over time, I became stonger. What resided though was vulnerability: fearing the next setback; the next bout of exhaustion or apathetic shadow. That stays with me. Today felt good though.

Watched The Office on BBC2. The humour comes from so many uncomfortable silences and fumbled words. It's painful in places, but so funny.

The work that I carried out on the site yesterday pleases me, on scanning through the new pages and features earlier this evening. I also went back to several old notebooks and felt inspired to write more towards my other project.

13 January 2002 (Day 120)

It was good to get out today. My gaze found a sign in the window of the post office that proclaimed FAX FACILITIES HERE. Spare the abbreviation, I thought, and the sign would read with pleasing alliteration as FACSIMILE FACILITIES HERE. Little things like this charmed me: there was a dog wearing a neckerchief that I also recall fondly.

Made many small changes to the site. Added reviews of music by Sigur Rós, Radiohead, The Warehouse and Godspeed You Black Emperor! and replaced a poor, disused section with the new 'Loci', which I hope to keep updated regularly.

12 January 2002 (Day 119)

Still not feeling too good but smiling at the oxymoronic qualities of yesterday's solitary sentence.

11 January 2002 (Day 118)

Well and truly ill.

10 January 2002 (Day 117)

Finally, the headcold that has been flirting with me for weeks takes full hold. Nearly every inch of my face feels tender: I can push a finger into my cheek and feel the squish of liquid and seconds later can only breathe by opening my mouth for an airway. I dread sleep at times of illness.

9 January 2002 (Day 116)

The words of others can be sincerely touching. To receive praise from someone, not least someone you respect is a particular, and, it occurs to me, rare grace of life. Such words came today and on Monday also and I am thankful for and charged by them.

8 January 2002 (Day 115)

Reporter: 'Mr Gandhi, what do you think of Western civilisation?'
Mahatma Gandhi: 'I think it would be a very good idea.'

7 January 2002 (Day 114)

On the way to London I read through more of The Story of American Freedom and learnt that the term 'freedom of speech' originated in Britain to 'protect unrestrained discussion in Parliament'. It was a way of safeguarding legislators from prosecution as they engaged in debate. It did not extend to the citizen's right to criticise the government. The concept of freedom has evolved and been reinvented and seems to mean so many dipsparate things to so many different people. With so many different definitions, indeed, so many different freedoms, I am sure that it is easier to believe the artists of this world who resort to words and images than it is the politicians who clamber onto soapboxes. By way of conclusion then, I like the words of Polish film-maker Krzystof Kieslowski:

'Our mouths are full of such words as freedom, but what does it really mean? Does it not perhaps mean being totally alone, living in a total vacuum?'

I met with a friend after work, a new but already good friend, and many threads of conversation later boarded the midnight train that would drop me at Bath Spa and terminate at Cardiff. During the short walk home from the station I glanced across the road into the doorway of George Bayntun's Book Bindery and saw someone sleeping there, wrenching a filthy duvet over his shaking form. I decided that if he were to ask me for money I would give him all the change that I had in my pockets. He didn't and it's sometimes as simple a mechanism as that – as not being dragged into the misery of other people's misfortunes – that prevents and, contrarily, keeps us despairing of life too much.

6 January 2002 (Day 113)

A long day spent transcribing the notes for these pages that had till now resided in exercise books, on strips of paper and the backs of train tickets.

5 January 2002 (Day 112)

I cut twenty or so strips from a single piece of paper. By the end of the evening I had slipped seven or eight of them between the pages of books that I'm reading: The Story of American Freedom by Eric Foner and Bodies in Motion and at Rest by Thomas Lynch. I scribble a few random thoughts onto another of the strips. I insert one in between the pages of a classical music guide which illuminates on the third symphony of Henryk Górecki.

4 January 2002 (Day 111)

'Certain brief sentences are peerless in their ability to give one the feeling that nothing remains to be said.' Jean Rostand

'It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and of freedom. The beauty of disappointment and of never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.' Benjamin Britten

3 January 2002 (Day 110)

Today I gave change to someone who told me that his car had broken down and he was in need of money to get to the nearest station and fill his petrol can. I gave him 70p, though I could have afforded the £1.50 that he was asking for. A few months ago this same guy stopped me, with petrol can in hand and asked me for money, since he was without any, and was stranded a few miles down the road; his car out of petrol. Then, despite feeling that his cause might have been genuine, I had decided to give him nothing. Today, this repeat occurrence, despite now believing his cause to be false, led me to part with money. Maybe it was a vain attempt to make up for a past act of meanness, regardless of the probable dishonesty of these carbon-copy requests.

2 January 2002 (Day 109)

Back to work, which I'd not been looking forward to, but after a few hours it began to feel comfortable and I realised that I had actually been missing the order that it lends to my days.

1 January 2002 (Day 108)

Little more than the first day of the year, met with only the slightest semblance of a hangover.

31 December 2001 (Day 107)

The eve of a new year; an article which is built up to be much more than just the end of one 365-day cycle and the beginning of another. The juncture that heralds new beginnings and the curtain that sweeps, often prematurely, falsely and resolutely, to signal closure. Optimism and hope spring from this moment as from no other moment throughout the year, yet the first day of this new year will play similar to the thirtieth day. The eleventh day of September may yet become just one more unremarkable day. It amounts to little more than an uninteresting lie that signposts what little time we have left to do something original or courageous.

I mailed a friend on the subject of Sartre's Nausea and mentioned that it had been a stumbling block for my own writing. The first passage of that book – the questions of what we do, how we do and why we do – is one of those passages that simply seemed to defy improvement. Why bother? Trocchi, in Cain's Book, reiterates 'What the hell am I doing here?' It seemed like a fitting conundrum for this last day of the year.

30 December 2001 (Day 106)

What is it that other people's eyes wander to when they are talking? That middle-distance stare or that gaze to beyond your own head. Do they look at those things as closely as they consider their words? When my eyes drift in similar fashion, my concentration slips and starts to dwell over the severe otherness of my interlocutor.

29 December 2001 (Day 105)

Attended my first game of Premiership football: a rather stale affair – Southampton v Leeds – and not much to admire or that excited in the football itself, but the atmosphere was amazing. My feet were extremely cold and my friends and I seemed to be seated next to the only hooligan contingent of the Southampton support, but the day is one that I'll remember fondly.

28 December 2001 (Day 104)

I visited my mom in Birmingham and whilst there met with my elder brother and afterwards spent an hour or so with my twin brother. I still struggle not to think of Birmingham as home. In fact it is simply a place of origin, but nearly ten years on I find it difficult to extricate myself. Each returning visit I find it broken and busy; as intriguing and frightening as I last left it; as I will always remember it.

It feels like things change, move forward, yet so little seems fresh or extraordinary. These feel like middle years, like a middle level has been reached. Life is sequential, like the dark of night drawing in on the light of day. That's the tired, descending rhythm that I seem to be plodding through at times. The odd burst of joy or despair occasionally comes like a star shooting across the black of this mundane inbetween.

After yesterday's miserable train journey; today, another. The 'replacement train' is in actual fact a train replacement. Not a train at all, but a bus. Road travel makes me nauseous and thus these new travel circumstances deprive me of the chance to read, so these two hours are spent idle, which already saddens me. I arrive into Birmingham and catch the bus to mom's flat. The first hours are a mosaic of dirt and despondency. Urine-soaked sheets; cat excrement; broken washing machine and boiler and things that simply need tidying or replenishing or attending to. A dish with bran flakes petrified to its sides proves one of the smaller yet more stubborn tasks. I have notes that expand on these matters. I wanted to write it all down, but now I want to leave it as is. I gave her the presents that I was unable to get to her before Christmas Day. Talcum powder, bath oils, chocolates and a humorous book about cats. There's a profanity to it all that I'm extremely uneasy with.

At 23.10, on a train back from Birmingham, I pause whilst writing out these notes. I can smell disinfectant on my hands and some words of Samuel Beckett's are on my mind. I look out of the window and the orange squares there lead me towards the right words, as does the reflection of the woman sat opposite.

A dirty tapestry that no-one wants to clean or mend. I'm stuck.

27 December 2001 (Day 103)

It's unfortunate when details that should be the background or ancillary parts of your day erupt and obscure and become the foci. A train journey that should have allowed for several pleasurable hours of reading is instead one that requires us to stand for two hours; myself tired and ill and hot and trying to maintain the thin purchase that I have on the seat upright for stability.

Tired because of the journey, I put off going back to Birmingham until tomorrow. I watch Magnolia in the evening for the second time and it's more wonderful than I remember it first time round. My chest pounds because the film is so uncommonly beautiful and intelligent and sleep comes with some difficulty later because my mind is stirring and I want to get up and do something.

26 December 2001 (Day 102)

Cold sets in further; not enough to depress me but ample to make me weak and I fraily fall asleep from the position that I've slumped to on the floor during the day. Sleep is one of the few things that I want from today.

25 December 2001 (Day 101)

What feels like the last day of the year. Everything after feels like the slow formings of something new or changed. It's the first 25/12 that I've enjoyed whole for a long time. Happiness and affection fuel the shared glances of the day. Later, we walk along the beach with Poppy, and I feel slightly giddy from the sea air and a developing head cold.

24 December 2001 (Day 100)

Watched a documentary on the Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar. He was being interviewed in front of a giant model of spread legs and vagina.

23 December 2001 (Day 99)

Samuel Johnson, paraphrased in the book Tunnel Visions, that I've just started reading:

'No mind is much employed upon the present; recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.'

22 December 2001 (Day 98)

Nothing that cohesive about the day, just a myriad of tiny unrelated events: bought the Her Space Holiday album, read some pages in a book about Iceland and watched flames lick and snarl and then turn molten-white the discarded string bag that had contained a dozen satsuma oranges.

21 December 2001 (Day 97)

Charlotte and I spend the day with Henry and Kristof – Charlotte's nephews – and the simple trust and affection that is reciprocal between these children and myself is touching indeed. It's dazzling that you can carry out a search for truth and meaning in the words that you read and write and then, in holding the simple clasped hand of a child, a moment can be so manifest with love and understanding.

20 December 2001 (Day 96)

I journey to Cornwall, alone, since Charlotte decided to go on ahead with a friend. A fifteen minute delay prior to the train's arrival into Bath interferes with my connecting trains and I'm faced with getting in two hours later than planned. It doesn't really bother me, since I'm enjoying finishing Cain's Book and even the cold, cold hour that I spend at Westbury is invigorating. My whole body shakes in the cold and I lose two pounds to the phone in trying to replan my route and forewarn Charlotte of the changing schedule, but this alien hour has a strange, enchanting quality to it and my mind races with thoughts.

19 December 2001 (Day 95)

A night of excess followed by a night of excess, this one concluding with the rather surreal sight of my employer smoking a joint of marijuana. Enjoyed spending time with people whom I'm very fond of.

18 December 2001 (Day 94)

The last football game of the year and one that I thoroughly enjoyed. I felt as though I could have ran all night. A house party immediately after the game drags the night out and I walk home at two-thirty in the morning.

17 December 2001 (Day 93)

Cain's Book by Alexander Trocchi. Contemporary to Camus and Sartre and later friend to and instrumental in publishing Beckett, Trocchi is as likely to be remembered for the pornographic fiction that paid the bills as he is for this black autobiographical work or the equally majestic Young Adam. Trocchi is one of those writers that wrote with style and vigour, though not always with a clear subject, except that of the inner confusions, uncertainties and fears that he seemed so well equipped to document. I particulary enjoy the following, because Trocchi is almost at his best when faced with the deadlock of having nothing to say and nowhere to go.

'I am unfortunately not concerned with the events which led up to this or that. If I were my task would be simpler. Details would take their meaning from their relation to the end and could be expanded or contracted, chosen or rejected, in terms of how they contributed to it. In all this there is no it, and there is no startling fact or sensational event to which the mass of detail in which I find myself in from day to day wallowing can be related. Thus I must go on from day to day accumulating, blindly following this or that train of thought, each in itself possessed of no more implication than a flower or a spring breeze or a molehill or a falling star or the cackle of geese. No beginning, no middle, no end. This is the impasse which a serious man must enter and from which only the simple-minded can retreat.'

16 December 2001 (Day 92)

Finished the book of Sartre's essays that I started months ago. By the last essays – a somewhat Freudian analysis of Genet and a romantic portrait of Tintoretto – my interest was on the wane (I dislike his biographical work). I liked this, though, just a few pages from the end:

'...these anxious men want Beauty because it reassures them. I sympathize. I have taken a plane two hundred times, but I am still not used to it and have been too long a crawler on the earth to consider flight normal. From time to time, my fear is awakened, especially when my fellow travellers are as ugly as I am; but all it needs is for a lovely young woman to be on the flight, or a handsome youth, or a delightful couple of lovers, and my fear vanishes. Ugliness is a prophecy: there is a sort of extremism in it that tries to take negation to the point of horror. Beauty, on the other hand, is indestructible; we are protected by its sacred image: as long as it remains among us, the catastrophe will not happen.'

15 December 2001 (Day 91)

En-route to the office, to pick up a CD that I'd left behind yesterday, I passed an elderly couple. As I moved over towards the edge of the grass verge, to allow them past without having to break into single file, the old man farted, loudly, midway through conversation. He carried on talking, certainly unaware of any aberration. I carried on to the office, smiling. It had just turned 3:00 and there was a thin scrape of red in the sky above the rooftops.

14 December 2001 (Day 90)

A scrappy day at work, upset and fragmented by a long, delayed wait for books to arrive. Still sore from yesterday's efforts and upset by the lack of time available to me. Enjoyed a drink with friends whom I should probably make much more of an effort to socialise with.

13 December 2001 (Day 89)

Helped Charlotte complete her essay. To bed late. Football and staring at a computer screen for twelve or so hours have rendered me all but immobile and even bed feels uncomfortable.