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5 June 2002 (Day 264)

My ankle is feeling stronger and I am exercising again. I came out of physio the other day with a reassuring prognosis, and as upbeat as I have been in weeks. Despite the rain; despite having no coat nor umbrella, I decided not to catch the bus from the hospital back to work. Instead, I walked. I tried jogging, but my feet still hit the floor with a resounding flatness, and I quickly settled back into a brisk walking pace. I got to work soaked through and smelling of damp wool, but very happy.

4 June 2002 (Day 263)

'Desolate': From Latin. desolat-desolare 'abandon', from de- 'thoroughly' + solus 'alone'. (After Martin Amis.)

3 June 2002 (Day 262)

Among friends. We hired yachts and sailed around the marina. We wanted to get to the sea, but the sea was being lashed by wind and boats came back into the marina with figures vomiting over their sides.

2 June 2002 (Day 261)

I slept for most of the car journey. I remember waking up and reading a few road signs and heard conversation around me that slowly tugged my attention away from mileage and safety information. Late evening sunshine promised a warm night.

1 June 2002 (Day 260)

In today's Independent, Feargal Keane tells the story of his visit to a quarry outside Islamabad, where uneducated men and boys work together crushing and carrying stones, amidst suffocating clouds of dust. They make little money – hardly enough to feed their families, and there is little that they can hope for in the future, with their country so economically stricken. Despite this, each of these workers felt that the government was right to 'safeguard' the country's future by investing billions into nuclear arms. Both countries believe that they can withstand attack. Suffer casualties – maybe millions of them – but emerge strong, victorious.

31 May 2002 (Day 259)

Football teaches man more about himself and brings him closer to his neighbour than anything else I can think of. No other sport, no policy, no literature, no language is embraced by so many. I know of nothing so universal.

30 May 2002 (Day 258)

'Any incursion by the Indian forces across the line of control even by an inch will unleash a storm.'

General Pervez Musharraf

29 May 2002 (Day 257)

The threat of nuclear war spills from news bulletins and sits in ten-point Times Roman in the papers. Nuclear war. These are the two words that have helped bring the intensifying conflict between Pakistan and India into the wider public realm. The debate over Kashmir looks likely to result in war of some form, of some ferocity. Allies, the likes of the USA and China, could well become involved and ever-increasing circles could set in opposition the governments of so many millions of people, in stark and less stark fashion. Those two words, though, have been responsible for repackaging a debate that has loomed large between the two countries for the last fifty years. It has now become a dispute that extends to the rest of the world, because the ramifications of the choice of nuclear war flood this world with unease; reach out to us all.

28 May 2002 (Day 256)

I looked for the meaning of a word. Not to discover its meaning, but to recover its meaning. An effort to defeat my fading memory more than to restore knowledge.

27 May 2002 (Day 254)

Sometimes there's a desire to do nothing. Nothing slows down the passing of time like nothing. With nothing, one becomes aware of how very slowly time passes. Seconds drag into minutes and, like this, the inevitable hour approaches at the most aggravating and feeble pace. Time seems almost controllable; longevity possible.

26 May 2002 (Day 253)

I observe people from behind. From there I can stare; in front I cannot. Today, I see four cans of Tennants Super stamped vertically onto the counter, like a machine punching discs out of sheet metal. The arm returns to its side and awaits its next action. A hem of dirt circles around the wrist end of the green sleeve and stray threads spill from splits and tears that climb up towards the shoulder. Matted, rough-cut hair parts awkwardly on the man's head, like a black-and-white image of raging fire. Dirty fingers hand over a heap of coins to the cashier and, without counting their value, she drops them into the drawer of her till. As I hand over a loaf of bread to the cashier, the man in the green coat pulls open the door and stares back to the cashier, and then to his friend, with a smile, and then to me. His eyes stay on me for a while. I direct my stare elsewhere, though he remains in view. Expression evaporates slowly from his face.

25 May 2002 (Day 252)

Collections of words will always be broken down, condensed, summarised. Paragraphs, essays, even books can be reduced to one single extract, one sentence. So many hundreds of discarded words.

24 May 2002 (Day 251)

What must have been a dozen separate showers fell throughout the day. Rain water sits lambent on roofs below.

23 May 2002 (Day 250)

I'm getting used to my own company at gigs these days. Nevertheless, Múm were beautiful. So much more forlorn and dynamic than their studio sound. The joy of tonight's two hours was as much down to a chance finding out about the gig a few hours before they were due on stage as it was the wonderful, ethereal sound. The venue was an old men's working club, complete with polystyrene roof tiles where one spark would ignite the lot. To see the industry that goes into the sound is rewarding: melodicas, accordions, guitars, double bass and plastic My First Electric Pianos; wind blown into tubes connected to keyboards; sonic echoes bouncing off flicked microphone heads; beaters tapping glockenspiels; and above it all, that incredible Icelandic interpretation of English. The support, rlf, were good too, like a less-frenetic Autechre. The best thing about travelling back home alone is holding onto the most entact memory for that much longer. Re-running the night once more in your head.

22 May 2002 (Day 249)

A break from work led me to find solace at the window. I pushed my head out and immersed myself in the outside. I've looked through this window over a thousand times and yet today, for the first time, it occurred to me what I was looking at. I orientated words around what I saw. I followed planes of rusted, corrugated iron to where they concluded at gutters. I stared at gaps and fissures in the black of tar-painted roofs and watched water moat around stranded objects that had plummeted and sailed from trees overhead.

21 May 2002 (Day 248)

On the answer phone, not a message but the scraping of surface against surface. The fabric of a pocket against the mouthpiece of mobile phone. Some pre-set button triggered through clothing. Someone walking quickly. A perfectly rhythmic minute later, the mistake seems discovered and, rather uncharitably, the noise comes to an end.

20 May 2002 (Day 247)

Tiredness and ill mood tracked me overnight and woke with me this morning.

19 May 2002 (Day 246)

A strange malaise that I can't put down to anything. Smiling surely requires more muscles than this something which is neither frown nor muscles in repose. I have already tried smiling twice today and both efforts left me tired and embarrassed. Words come through thinly parted lips. Nothing in me really wants to resist. Whatever the cause, whatever the prognosis, the day has slowed down. I will take one task, small perhaps, and complete it and then set about finishing another and gradually endure the day.

18 May 2002 (Day 245)

A friend related a story to me. He works for one of the world's largest cosmetics companies, based in Paris. He told me about a tramp who walked into their company building, exchanged words with embarrassed staff, then ambled over to the reception sofa, hitched up her skirt and shat onto polished leather, after which she exited the building. Other friends, and other threads of conversation that floated and tangled, but nothing that left as vivid an impression as this scatological tale. A drive home, through a black AM hour, with the whir of heaters and the tack of tyres over road turning thoughts numb.

17 May 2002 (Day 244)

Coming down into the city, I watched a seagull flying off the flat roof of an estate agent's office with what appeared to be a rodent clasped in its beak.

Today's 'Review' section in the Guardian contained a favourable review of the wonderful new Band Of Holy Joy album and had a feature about the forthcoming film adaption of Alexander Trocchi's Young Adam. Both made me happy.

16 May 2002 (Day 243)

In the shop today, I counted the money in my hand that I had pulled from both trouser pockets to determine what I could afford for lunch. I had only a small amount of cash and so considered the cheapest available sandwiches. For a moment I felt sorry for myself, humbled by my meagre budget. I quickly realised it was melancholy not pity that had taken hold though, and I smiled at the thought of having enough to exchange for an egg and tomato sandwich. When I was younger, my brother and I had the choice of catching a bus the three or four miles to school or, alternatively, walking to school and saving the money so that we could afford lunch. There were times when there wasn't enough for either and I remember many instances of making a pack of bourbon-cream biscuits stretch the lunch hour between the two of us. We made it through the day on a six- or seven-biscuit hit of sugar. We watched other children rush to the chip shop enviously and we shared biscuits with those that requested them because we were proud.

15 May 2002 (Day 242)

More than ever, I feel that it is misery and suffering and restlessness that give rise to creativity. Happiness is not what I am after, at best it can be a short-lived consolation. To create though, one also needs energy, and at present I have little of that. One needs to see things clearly too. Above all, one needs to be truthful, must always be truthful.

14 May 2002 (Day 241)

The yearly average for corpses pulled from the canals of Amsterdam is 52. I'm halfway through editing a travel guide to the city and facts like that which have nowhere else to lock into are escaping from my head. Camus compared the city's concentric canal system to the circles of hell: 'When one comes from the outside, as one gradually goes through those circles, life – and hence its crimes – becomes denser, darker. Here, we are in the last circle.'

13 May 2002 (Day 240)

Notes from the journal of Gerhard Richter.

24 October 1990

It does not seem useful that we become fewer and fewer and come to an end when we have learned so much. Over and over again, later generations have to strive for decades to regain a standard of experience long since reached before.

17 October 1992

All this exaggerated humaneness and helpfulness – this compassion with every murderer in a death cell, every fish that perishes in an oil slick and every dying tree – all this stands in contrast to the unprecedented vastness of the misery currently caused by war, starvation and disease; it stands in contrast to the predictably catastrophic future of an overpopulated earth whose inhabitants are going to slaughter each other and starve to death in unprecedentedly chaotic circumstances – it contrasts with the inevitable emergence of a conscious contempt for humanity and an extreme incapacity for love or mercy. It springs from the fear of all this.

12 May 2002 (Day 239)

A retrospective of the work of Gerhard Richter is currently on show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It's been a while since Richter was in my thoughts. A related internet search for articles concerning his Baader-Meinhof suite of paintings – 18 October, 1977 – took me away to a site containing a letter from a Cesar DeLeon of Pipeline Safety Operations to a Mr Bob Pourchot of the Central Plastics Company, Shawnee, Oklahoma. The letter was dated 18 October 1977 and complained about faulty component parts. Via an alternative link, the 18 October 1977 Iowa City Council audit results which provide the names of the four nominees electable for the 8 November city elections appear in dour red, blue and black HTML. I went back and tracked some of the Richter articles that I wanted to research, but remained long-mesmerised by the idea of a multiplicity of events, ephemera and life-changing incident. Amazed by the idea of things simultaneously occuring.

11 May 2002 (Day 238)

A paperback book lying in the middle of the road, sodden from some recent rain or spill, spine bitten and held by the tarmac and dirty pages flailing with the wind of passing traffic.

10 May 2002 (Day 237)

Optimistic for the first time since turning my ankle that I might be back fit soon. Yesterday's probing, stretching and ultrasound seem to have reaped dividends, and today the ankle is taking weight when I walk upstairs.

9 May 2002 (Day 236)

After miraculously fast-tracking my way up the NHS waiting lists, I today attended my first physio session at the hospital for treatment on my ankle. I was flooded with compassion for the physio who began tweaking every bone, ligament and tendon in my foot.

8 May 2002 (Day 235)

Grey.

7 May 2002 (Day 234)

The sun has fallen down
And the billboards are all leering
And the flags are all dead at the top of their poles

From the monologue that opens 'Dead Flag Blues', from the album f#a#infinity by Godspeed You Black Emperor!

6 May 2002 (Day 233)

So long as there is a consistency in the words people communicate, regardless of their truth or falsity, their subtlety or rhetoric, do they not all aim in the same direction, towards the same conclusion? Perhaps truth is almost indistinguishable from lies. But there are layers to truthhood, and, essentially, one cannot lie. One reveals what he is as soon as he commits to communicating.

5 May 2002 (Day 232)

Discussed the film Magnolia with a new-found friend, both objecting to each other's opposite criticisms.

4 May 2002 (Day 231)

'The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.' Sisyphus.

3 May 2002 (Day 230)

The first e-mail in a long time to make me laugh hard.

When Mark Shuttleworth (very rich space tourist) returns from space, everybody dress in ape suits.

Pass it on.

2 May 2002 (Day 229)

Grey, dark grey.

1 May 2002 (Day 228)

When I walk now, one hand swings Neolithically by my side and the opposite shoulder hunches into the air as my good foot forcefully finds the ground and, with hip as fulcrum, lends momentum to the poor parody of the adjacent stiff leg.

30 April 2002 (Day 227)

My penknife is on the table. I open it. Why not? In any case it would be a change. I put my left hand into the pad and I jab the knife into my palm. The movement was too sudden; the blade slipped, the wound is superficial. It is bleeding. And what of it? What has changed? All the same, I look with a feeling of satisfaction at the white paper, where, across the lines I wrote a little while ago, there is this little pool of blood that has at last stopped being me. Four lines on a white paper, a splash of blood, together that makes a beautiful memory.

Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre

29 April 2002 (Day 226)

My ankle is still extremely swollen. This is better than two or three days ago, when the whole foot had ballooned. There's a lot of bruising: an iodine stain that leaks above and across the ankle and creeps up towards the shin. Around the instep there's a green pallor and around the base there's a bright purple lining, which lends that area a particularly 'guilty' sort of glow. It's very painful (a sharp stabbing pain whenever the foot bears weight) and I'm still wincing at having to limp just a few steps around the flat.

28 April 2002 (Day 225)

Finished reading Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. Having found time to read seems to be the only blessing this injury has brought me.

27 April 2002 (Day 224)

Look back and the minutes of a wasted day blur into a whole: an hour of a day wasted; a part of a day wasted; or, simply, a day wasted. Within each minute is the chance for something new, to create, to move, to use time, not waste time. Look back again, later, much later, and edges blur once more: wasted days become days that belong to weeks during which little was done; weeks during which nothing was done. Later, weeks fuse and become months and little or nothing has been done. Suddenly (as though this should occur to us suddenly!), we are struck with the fear of how little we have accomplished. Looking back, everything recalled is sensational event or unshakeable trivia or nagging truth or worrying fact, but the rest has blurred, the rest has been forgotten, has died.

The same model can be applied to humanity. The depth of our vision blurs at the edges, bodies become plural when we survey many individuals together. These many become one group, these groups become one people, these peoples, these generations, these many years, these many hundreds of years' worth of humanity. Time which we once counted (once reduced to minutes!), which we wasted, eventually becomes massive – all-encompassing – and swallows and forgets all but a few of us.

26 April 2002 (Day 223)

Limited as I am, predominantly confined to the flat until I'm able to walk again, I dwell on what I do with my time and fret over counting whole minutes pass by. This sort of anxiety is at the back of my mind as I read, as I watch television, as I place ice onto my ankle. Worrying about wasting time wastes my time, yet I can't help myself. I hate having the stereo display opposite me flipping digital numbers over and over. I hate being transfixed by the flashing LED of Charlotte's charging mobile phone on the table. I need to forget time before I can stop abusing it.

25 April 2002 (Day 222)

Fragments.

24 April 2002 (Day 221)

A door: metal exposed to the air corrodes around a few lingering blisters of dirt and yellow paint. On closer inspection, the paint holds firm in tiny swatches of age-old layers of pigment that refuse the rust of the naked metal.