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23 April 2002 (Day 220)

I go to work, foolishly, to finish a book ready for print. By the evening I'm in incredible pain.

22 April 2002 (Day 219)

My foot found the ball truly and then the ground awkwardly. My weight came to bear on the side of that one balancing blade and forced flesh, tendons, ligaments and muscles to wrench unforgivingly in one swift and painful wrick. I screamed three or four times.

In the hospital, in pain, waiting. Waiting noiselessly, though in company. Two police officers seat a handcuffed man into one of the moulded red forms opposite. Two manacled arms reach to do the jobs of one: take polystyrene cup to lips and down into lap; push fingers into scalp and push the scent of scalp under nostrils. The two hands mirror each other with fingers that fidget and clasp asymmetrically in frustration. A man sits to the right with bandaging obscuring the majority of the top of his head. Blood soaks into the ecru bands that swaddle him and cuts and bruises indent his face with red and black.

An American Werewolf In London plays on the TV screen in the corner and three children watch avidly, as do their parents. Nearly everyone has got food or drink from the vending machine, despite the large white sign above, 'Do Not Eat Or Drink Until You Have Been Seen By The Staff Nurse'.

Later, I lie down on a warm but stiff leather bed and rest my foot against a lead plate. It's the most comfortable I've been all night, but it lasts only for the duration of two x-rays, after which I hop to the third different waiting area of my stay here. By about 0100, I'm shown my x-rays, which reveal no break. I've sprained my right ankle.

21 April 2002 (Day 218)

A square in the city centre. The council removed the old public seating and replaced it with benches where the back rolls into the seat area in one smooth, undulating, metallic sweep. They are no more comfortable to sit on. Their form is no more aesthectically pleasing to the eye. They are a change and councils often fix things which aren't broken. More than that though, these benches are impossible to lie down on: because they have no 'nook' into which the body can wedge itself they force the horizontal form away from the seat back and roll it towards the pavement. Several thousand pounds' of taxpayers' money has been invested to reclaim street furniture from those without a place to sleep. Ineluctable, metallic waves steer these homeless shapes towards the ground. Away from view.

20 April 2002 (Day 217)

Alone and unable.

19 April 2002 (Day 216)

In the drawer, about five cards, folded, perforated down the middle, bundled together by a blue elastic band.

18 April 2002 (Day 215)

Three phone-boxes. A man. Into one of them. Fingers push against the coin-release drawer of the pay-phone. Two fingers slip inside the metal cubby, find nothing and the other hand is already flat against the phone-box door. Out and into the next box. Fingers push against the coin-release drawer of the pay-phone. Two fingers slip inside the metal cubby, find nothing and the other hand is already flat against the phone-box door. Out again and into the next phone box. He looks up, sees me looking at him. He looks down to where his fingers push against the coin-release drawer of the pay-phone. His two fingers slip inside the metal cubby. His two fingers find nothing. He withdraws the fingers, rests the hand against the receiver, hanging from its cradle. He turns, opens the door, slides one hand into his coat pocket. I pass him, with my stare averted to where a lady in a white coat crosses the road. There is a blue vein pushing against pellucid skin on one of her knees.

17 April 2002 (Day 214)

Desuetude The cessation of use; discontinuance of practice or custom; disuse.

16 April 2002 (Day 213)

Three adjacent houses with front doors painted green.

15 April 2002 (Day 212)

A creased, imperfect square of white paper stuck to a lamppost.

14 April 2002 (Day 211)

A shoe, flat to the pavement, then angled acute, then swung forward, then flat to the pavement again. White blossom being tossed on the wind. Gum, grey, stuck to the bottom of one of the shoes, disappearing and reappearing. Blossom darting in and out of view, mocking the rhythm of the gum.

13 April 2002 (Day 210)

A hundred bubbles of watery mucus stipple the newspaper that I'm reading. Half of the paper sits in a triangle of light – the window replaying outside events onto one of several interior forms. The smell of singed newsprint comes as the last of the bubbles dries to a pale stain, near the number at the top of the page.

12 April 2002 (Day 209)

There are moments when the absurdity of whatever simple/complex task you are occupied with becomes appallingly clear. These are not moments of distraction, but moments of lucidity. They are not abberations. This time, it is nothing more simple than turning around to pull a door shut behind me that renders me immobile. Staring into some middle distance, there beyond my face, before the sky, this vivid impression seems to crush the quotidian event that I'm engaged with for the millionth time in my life. Why is my hand reaching down for the handle of this green door? How am I upright? Why do I not topple, collapse here; why not before that car there?

Then, gone. Gone. Back to the routine, the absurd plan I had in my head prior. Back to closing the door, with this hand. There, closed. Cross this road. Upright, walking, strong, across grey tarmac. Other people. The other things that distract.

11 April 2002 (Day 208)

The brevity of existence.

10 April 2002 (Day 207)

The first day of catching up. Ten days have passed and left me behind with so many things. I'm writing this entry on 20 April and I feel like there is no hope of remembering anything of worth from the days that fell between these two dates. I allowed publishing work to obfuscate passions outside of work, to the point where returning here feels like hard and strange work. I have forgot what it is that I enjoy about this. Writing here, again, feels awkward. Since I cannot recall the events which might more accurately commemorate the next/last nine days, I have decided to convey some of the fragments that sit in my mind, garnered from this grey period where days passed all but void of vivid impressions.

9 April 2002 (Day 206)

I remembered that episode of The SImpsons when Marge succeeds in having 'Itchy and Scratchy' taken off the network. The kids are left with no reason to sit glued to their TVs and thus repair to the things that past generations would have occupied their time with, like throwing frisbee or pushing one another on swings. I've just watched Liverpool get knocked out of the Champions League quarter finals and it feels similar.

8 April 2002 (Day 205)

I mistook the end of the Bic pen on my desk for a fly today. Actually jumped when I thought I saw it move.

7 April 2002 (Day 204)

Started reading Micheal Moore's Stupid White Men. George Bush never did instil much hope in me, and, one man's slant though this may be, I'm forty pages into this book and its already a very worrying account of the world's most powerful man and his administration.

6 April 2002 (Day 203)

There are words that flit across my mind throughout the day and snatches of conversation which I hope to retain and commit here. Saturday provided me with several: I remember that there were several, but coming to address the day seventy-two hours later I cannot recall what they were.

5 April 2002 (Day 202)

Assigned to my food order: a yellow raffle ticket. I took the ticket, with a fat, black sans-serif '77' in its middle, and went to stand away from the counter, near the window, where I could avoid meeting the eyes of the six other people around me. Everything my eyes fell on before that number had screwed into a confusion of images and thoughts that I had been suffering with for days. The number – maybe its shape, its sound, its singular purpose, its very otherness – brought a calm to my mind for the first time. Violent thoughts receded: the day felt back in balance. Through the window, grafitti on the wall outside: 'Normality Is A Disease'. A ticket on the pavement, outside, like mine: '67'. Then, as my gaze lifted, I found the gaze of someone staring straight back through the window, and the peace seemed broken. A minute later I left with my food, having surrendered a ticket that I didn't want to give up.

Someone obese passed by, wearing suit trousers that didn't match his suit jacket, with scuffed leather shoes and a similarly battered attaché case, and I was overcome with an irrational sympathy for him. He looked sad too, which is perhaps why I felt sorry – I had found a mirror. It would have required only for him to trip, or to clang his case against leg or bollard and I think I would have broken into tears. Abject, I left behind his form; my reflection. Here, now, when I didn't think they would, these things repeat on the page with the same intensity that I experienced them earlier.

4 April 2002 (Day 201)

A friend and I turn up for a gig in Bristol only to be told it had been cancelled days ago. We repair to a pub, and enjoy conversation, arguably more than we would have done The Notwist. A disabled toilet and a stalled car linger in the memory.

3 April 2002 (Day 200)

Peeled paper from advertising hoarding and revealed red.

2 April 2002 (Day 199)

'Eutow', by Autechre, the only memorable part of the day.

1 April 2002 (Day 198)

Farewell sadness
Good-day sadness
You are inscribed in the lines of the ceiling

Paul Éluard, 'À Peine défigurée'

31 March 2002 (Day 197)

Little things: retrieving a white plastic fork from where it had fell, behind the desk; a group of six children gathered around a phonebox, staring at me; rain that came quickly; the word 'homophobia' in big letters across the page of a newspaper; a fly, landing on the plate, here.

30 March 2002 (Day 196)

Ten or so answerphone blanks from my mother. No words. Blank, except for the fuzz of a television in the background and patient and expectant breaths and scrapes across the mouthpiece.

29 March 2002 (Day 195)

A third consecutive summer day. Everything looks so markedly different when the weather changes. I worked hard, writing, designing and redesigning. The night's industry encroached on the morning hours of the following day. I finished it all at 3.30, listening to 'Blue and Grey Shirt' by American Music Club.

28 March 2002 (Day 194)

Today I recognised a man who used to come into the shop where I worked through college. He was elderly: sixty or more. Back then, he came in looking for a certain type of crystal glass, always the same glass, and when we couldn't locate that glass for him he started to mumble and redden. Odd words fell out – always 'mother' – amidst his tears. When he didn't leave the store crying he would sometimes hang around to purchase a substitute glass. Today, I walked past him, dressed immaculately in suit and overcoat, as he always was. He was holding the hand of a woman who must have been some twenty or so years his senior – possibly his mother. He looked sad and I felt sad for him.

27 March 2002 (Day 193)

Walking back from work. At one end of the street the moon, pale, but fully circular and high; at the other, the sun, deep orange and fused with the clouds, low over the rooftops.

26 March 2002 (Day 192)

Sunshine raked over a thousand details of pavement and grass and gave the pansies in the window box this morning a unique intensity of yellow. I remembered a summer spent in Sitges before setting off for work. After the toilet at work I peer into the mirror and pull a film of sleep from the corner of my eye that stretches right across the eyeball.

25 March 2002 (Day 191)

From the Stephen Fry interview in The Independent today:

There was one [psychiatrist] I spoke to once. I said something about having gone off the rails, and he said, 'Do you want to be on the rails? Isn't a rail just an inverted rut?' That's a damned good point, isn't it? When someone is in a rut, that is what they want to get out of. And a rail is just the inverse of a rut. Who would want to be on rails? We are not supposed to be on rails.

24 March 2002 (Day 190)

Before sleep tonight I read through the papers in bed. The Independent on Sunday magazine carries the story questioning the authenticity of Anthoy Godby Johnson. The story intrigues but disturbs me.

23 March 2002 (Day 189)

Took out the folded Jonathan Franzen piece that I'd cut from The Guardian supplement yesterday and read it, perched on the stairs at the top of the hall landing, occasionally looking over to where two-year old Henri had fallen asleep on the floor. I later draped a duvet over him. Kristoff was asleep in his cot and Charlotte asleep in the master bedroom, trying to leave behind a migraine. It was a magical quiet. We are looking after her nephews for the weekend and I'm starting to love them very much.

22 March 2002 (Day 188)

A smell in the air that I associated with a smell from the past. Behind the centre of the city there is an abbatoir. I used to live out that way and I remember passing underneath the bridge with the abbatoir to my left, when I used to go jogging of an evening. The smell was not of meat, but of slaughter: of the terror, confusion, struggle of imminent slaughter, and it always scared me for the few seconds that it lingered in the air.

21 March 2002 (Day 187)

I remembered my mother, lost in confusion and panic, the day we were evicted from our house, when I was eleven. Thoughts like this crippled me throughout the day. I remembered chewing multi-coloured gobstopper sweets when I was young, and expectorating pools of garish spit onto car windscreens, and then taking off at speed with my brother and a friend.

20 March 2002 (Day 186)

The day passed that marked six moths of submitting words to this journal. I noticed it only after going back through the old pages, cutting images and cleaning up links. The sustained effort pleases me. I re-read that first entry as I thought about preparing this one. There are two things, clear in my mind, responsible for the beginnings of this journal.

The events of 11 September embarrassed me; they showed me how lazy and apathetic I had become. I simply wanted to resist, and so started thinking about, and then writing, Per Diem. That day the world was a smaller place. Thousands of deaths scared me initially. That tragedy will never be anything less than a tragedy; the terror, though, the terror simmered and cooled: real for only a few days. In the 180-odd days since, I've felt sad at seeing a leaden shopping carrier split and have been lost watching the wind throw and circle litter. Those things struck me with a fervour equal to that which overcame me the day when planes exploded into the towers of the World Trade Center. That day we watched the news – from the first of the live broadcasts – from the hotel room we were occupying for the last day of our vacation in Sitges and Barcelona. I was reciting first sentences, still nervous, later that night. I was reading Bulgakov at the airport, the following night, catching the horror in other travellers' faces as they heard of the attacks for the first time. That day simultaneously eclipsed and uncovered everything else.

Then there was www.almostcool.org – someone else: someone else's creation; someone else's fervour. In the art and ingenuity of a stranger I found objective versions of my own confusions, my own ardency and contentedness. A mirror of sorts. A model that I could adapt. It is still the only site that I visit daily. I read about music there, and a journal, very different, though probably not so very much unlike this one. Other content and that author's prolificacy contrast with this site, but I think we have much in common. This is a small note of homage, I guess.

19 March 2002 (Day 185)

Staring out of the office window today when into view came a boy picking his nose with great application. Other things which filled the minutes and hours: prepared and packed thirty-eight kits ready to send to American sales representatives; made a phone call to Birmingham Social Services; listened to the DNTEL album, repetitively; played football in the rain, dodging puddles; watched Liverpool progress to the last eight of the Champions' League. And finished the day happy.

18 March 2002 (Day 184)

Not wanting to wake Charlotte, but cold, and wanting to stay at this keyboard, I decided not to fetch a jumper from the bedroom, but, instead, to try on one of her zip-up tops that was hanging on the door behind me. I took it off a few minutes ago though, because I think that the blood was no longer getting past my wrists. I'm cold again. And have no more to write.

17 March 2002 (Day 183)

There were a few things that stuck from Montaigne and Seneca, from the book I've been picking at today. But little else. On the train there was a door, the sensors to which were retarded, which delayed its opening. People stood and waved and stamped and cursed. It takes five seconds for that door to open, I thought, and you're almost in a desperate panic.

16 March 2002 (Day 182)

Reading back through Camus's Nobel speech (14 March):

[A writer] cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it. Otherwise, he will be alone and deprived of his art.

In 1969, Sartre refused the prize on the grounds that it would be wrong to accept and associate his personal commitments with the awarding institution. Further, he felt that a writer, 'should not allow himself to be turned into an institution'. Sartre had always declined official honours.

15 March 2002 (Day 181)

The mornings supply the most vivid thoughts and impressions of my day. I cut through a car park to get to work and pass one or two hundred different cars in the same grid formation every day. Amidst the change and the order come thoughts, more pure and affecting than at any other time during the day.

14 March 2002 (Day 180)

From Camus's 1957 Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

For myself, I cannot live without my art. But I have never placed it above everything. If, on the other hand, I need it, it is because it cannot be separated from my fellow men, and it allows me to live, such as I am, on one level with them. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings. It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and the most universal truth. And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge. And if they have to take sides in this world, they can perhaps side only with that society in which, according to Nietzsche's great words, not the judge but the creator will rule, whether he be a worker or an intellectual.

13 March 2002 (Day 179)

Wednesday. I can only think to name the day.

12 March 2002 (Day 178)

Tired. Weeks segue one into the next. Episodic TV programmes; the emptying of metal wastebins into bags for the refuse collectors on Thursdays – such things pass like knife-scores in tree bark, marking the passing of all these days; aware that time is against me. Tonight I sat upstairs at the office in the last half-hour of daylight and just enjoyed the quiet and the dark. Shut out everything, bar the glow of street lamps and the blue-red sky through the window.

11 March 2002 (Day 177)

The day offered moments of beauty; metaphors, probably all too obvious. Wind and noise. A polythene bag flapping, spiked and trapped by the branches of a tree. Wind. Later, rain. Fond of these simple things, of seeing them, of being around them, of feeling them.