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28 December 2002 (Day 396)

The other day there was snow. The first fall of the year. The first fall of this three-month winter. White sky and on the ground its granulated reflection.

27 December 2002 (Day 395)

On the day that Charlotte and I drop Mum back to the coach station, so content, so completely back in love with life, there's a phone call to inform me of the death of a friend's father. Amidst the happiness it seems so entirely natural to learn of someone else's pain.

9 December 2002 (Day 394)

I read a few pages of my book, and this is all that feels like progress today.

8 December 2002 (Day 393)

Listening to the beautiful voice of Mimi Parker of Low ('Point of Disgust').

7 December 2002 (Day 392)

'A work is never beautiful unless it in some way escapes its author. If he paints himself without planning to, if his characters escape his control and impose their whims upon him, if the words maintain a certain independence under his pen, then he does his best work.'

What is Literature? Jean Paul Sartre

6 December 2002 (Day 391)

I purchased a new dictionary for the office; a meaty Oxford edition with a thumb index picked out in black and gold down the edges of the leaves. Among the huge reference works on the shelves of the lower ground floor of the book shop, I couldn't resist buying Roget's Thesaurus for myself. I kept it on the desk next to me whilst I worked through the afternoon, carefully sliding it into my shoulder bag at the the end of the day, excited by the prospect of taking it home.

5 December 2002 (Day 390)

'Art is the highest form of hope.' Gerhard Richter

4 December 2002 (Day 389)

My head is rested back against the pillows and my gaze shifts around the uppermost part of the wall where it joins with the ceiling, looking at the tiny fissures, the threadlike cracks which lace across the surface and then diffuse back into the surrounding white. I wonder if this is the first time that I have seen them, or whether I have noticed them before now, only forgotten them, because they are so unremarkable. When I look over at Charlotte, I see that her face too is angled towards the ceiling, but she is asleep. I imagine where she might be looking, were her eyes not closed, and I imagine it to be the very same area that I have just been studying. Her lips are sealed shut also; as I look at them my mind still holds a mental picture of the white wall. Her hair is spread across the pillow and one of her shoulders is bare and the other is hidden by a shirt that is buttoned just above her breasts. I follow her form down to the bottom of the bed – stomach and legs and feet translated through the fat of the duvet. The duvet is white, with creases that mirror the rifts of painted plaster on the walls.

3 December 2002 (Day 388)

Started reading What is Literature? by Jean Paul Sartre. I'd got through three of four pages of the book when I overheard someone a few seats away from me making fun of either me or my taste in books. I didn't lift my eyes from the page, but nor did I finish the sentence that I had started when I heard the words 'Sartre book' and then laughter.

2 December 2002 (Day 387)

My mistake was to acknowledge his strangeness with a smile as I walked into the room. From then on he was troubled by an urge to reciprocate. He returned my smile with one of his own. Then, again, when next our peripheral lines of vision crossed, another feint, diffident smile. To disturb the awkward silence which had incarcerated us both, I asked him a question, the answer to which I already knew. I hoped that this might trigger a conversation which would pull us out of this messy ellipse of optical etiquette. When the succinct answer that I recognised already finally came, though, my prior knowledge left me unable to respond properly, unable to go anywhere with this information. And so we plummeted back into silence and the over-compensatory facial jerks of mild embarrassment; our silence now an impotence.

1 December 2002 (Day 386)

For the last few mornings I have been walking past the same man. He sits in the same place performing the same routine each day that I pass him. There is a picnic bench at the top of the enbankment which overlooks a stretch of the canal. There is a small leather bag on the table in front of him, and next to that a silver goblet. And he sits there, peacefully, meditatively; simply sits there. Yesterday, when he was behind me, I peered back over my shoulder and saw him with the goblet raised to his lips, then watched his grey-haired orbicular head tip back, crushing the flat of russet scarf into a rope of dark red around his neck as he emptied the contents down the gully of his mouth and into his throat.

30 November 2002 (Day 385)

We swarm from the train to the platform to the station subway. From here we form three or four contiguous channels that make for the station's exit. There we split and become one, or maybe two, and push towards our offices and the opportunity of another union. Today, though, before we exit the station, 'we' all become our singular selves prematurely, as each of us acknowledges the disabled man stood awkwardly in front of our exit, bent into the alimony of two metal walking sticks with arms clasped by two plastic girdles just above the elbow. Suddenly we are halted, cracked apart and forced into unilateral action.

29 November 2002 (Day 384)

This morning the sky is a watered black. The town casts no shadows, but is merely submerged in one. The green hills look trampled, the withered bare trees look like wretched skeletons and the canal looks like a trough of petrol. Yesterday, the sky was pink – if not the sky, then the day, the day that for a few minutes glowed in a magical shade of rose – and we went to the window, on the brink of touching it and saw the fantastic deep hues of red on the cars, posts and railings vibrating before our eyes.

28 November 2002 (Day 383)

A coat hanger lies on the floor. It lay there yesterday also. I dwell on the passage of time that has contained this object and its hours of residence upon this floor and consider that it is the same passage that has contained this blind with its slats fanned open, laying horizontal to let in the light of day and the artificial glare of night. I ask myself if there is any reason why the hanger shouldn't stay there for another day, undisturbed like the blind has been. Left alone like one leaves a door ajar. I cannot think of a reason to pick the hanger up so I leave it where it is, and the pattern on the floor and order within the room remains the same. This triangular object has become a small, intricate part of the balance of this fragile day.

27 November 2002 (Day 382)

I'm losing. I'm delayed getting into work because of a late-running train. The day has started its defeat of me. I'm here at 8.34 and there is no train for me to board. I cannot claim these minutes back. I am slowly being raped. Time is being stolen from me. Everything is against my will, but my will is of no consequence.

If I am to be late, then, I now wish to be thoroughly late. I wish for disorder, beacuse I cannot restore perfect order. I pray that the delay will turn to cancellation. I pray that the next train will not arrive in thirty minutes time, simply that it will not arrive at all. I wish to be stranded here for hours, cold and helpless, the hours – my life – slowly, ineluctably, being fucked out of me. A freezing wait in sloping grey rain. I want to be utterly fucked and defeated.

26 November 2002 (Day 381)

A grey building with a stubby cylindrical tower at its summit. There are scaffold poles erected around this fat, round column and a ladder propped against the middle of the front-facing side. Creeping along a platform supported by the scaffold poles, like some slow exotic spider, there is a man in a fluorescent orange coat and helmet. He is far away and his movements blur into one long easy glide.

25 November 2002 (Day 380)

Finished reading Jim Crace's The Devil's Larder.

24 November 2002 (Day 379)

The tedious, the dull, the concrete, the shadowed and the wasted forget or forsake themselves often. Within them one finds the most stunning moments of accidental beauty. I immerse myself in this world whenever I can.

23 November 2002 (Day 378)

This sky seems omniscient. It has influenced my mood. It has distracted me. It has brought about these reveries. The sky is the uncertainty into which we stare. The sky is the lid on this world.

22 November 2002 (Day 377)

When I ready myself to depart the train, I am happy to be the last to rise from my seat and head for the exit door. It gives me pleasure to overtake all the people who hurried to the doors ahead of me. Curiously, some of them bustle to be first to leave the train, only to dally once they have emerged ahead of the pack.

21 November 2002 (Day 376)

It occurred to me tonight that I have stopped taking so much notice of the outward part of myself. I have chosen to spend far more time on the inside. Therein, my vanity knows no bounds. I'm content to study me for hours.

20 November 2002 (Day 375)

I note that I didn't mark Sunday's entry with a mention for Pessoa. After a lengthy read-through, I finished The Book of Disquiet. No words have ever branded themselves upon my mind with such vigour. Time and again, they force my eyes up from the page to some insignificant middle-distance object where I can meditate upon the thoughts that coruscate in my head. No book has ever moved me so much and it now feels as though I am without one of the few friends who understood me.

19 November 2002 (Day 374)

Whilst the internal remains the same, the external moves and pushes us along with it. The external (this world of otherness) doesn't recognise our comfort, our stoicism, our laziness, our contentedness. It doesn't appreciate our will to stay as we are. It plods on or it accelarates; either way it forces us to move with it and we are pushed into choosing something new.

18 November 2002 (Day 373)

A man and woman alight from the train and, upon request, hand their tickets over to the guard that stands between them and the stairs that lead down from the platform. The man and woman are unhappy, and they vent their frustration on the smiling ticket-inspecting guard. They exchange words that are too quick and quiet and tempered by emotion to overhear them with any clarity. Their communication comes to an end and the distance between them grows, as the pair exit the platform and station and the guard remains stationary at the top of the stairs.

I look back to the guard as I follow the pair out and his appearance has changed. He looks bruised. I overtake the man and woman and turn round to look back at them, and they are both coloured by a flush of wicked joy. These two people have stolen that man's happiness, I thought.

17 November 2002 (Day 372)

Sentimentality and sadness course through me. A cat, fifteen years old, with missing teeth and a scrawny coat of discoloured fur. A cupboard door with a broken hinge. A crudely-cut square of carpet, wet and dirty, sitting puzzlingly alone on the linoleum floor. These observations are mine: my problems, my sadness, my things that I don't understand. These things are my mother's: this dying cat; this wasted door, this odd shape of carpet. This home is my mother's, is mine, is sadness, is life, is death.

16 November 2002 (Day 371)

Is there truth in everything I write? Yes, in as much as I recognise myself in each of these words. Beyond these words, in the things that I say, the decisions that I make and the actions that I take, I don't recognise or understand myself nearly so well. Here, alone, I find truth. Here lies consolation. Here lies hope.

15 November 2002 (Day 370)

I was walking past the area of the converted old train station that houses about a dozen small market stalls, when I heard the most beautiful music. I had already been there earlier today – at lunch time – working my way around three paste-tables full of books, and had picked up a 1967 paperback edition of Genet's The Thief's Journal, and paid the small price that had been scribbled in pencil onto the title page of the book. It was a few hours later and I found myself being lured back by this music that layered the books and the second-hand CDs, and the balls of garden twine, and the hand-carved incense stick holders. I browsed over the books once more and picked up a yellowed edition of Bellow's Seize the Day, and without checking the price I walked over to the stall owner once more. I handed him the book and told him that I had never heard anyone play this music in public before.
'What? Sorry?'
'This music, this album: I've never heard anyone play it before.'
'It's Sigur Rós.' he replied.
'Yes.' And I nodded and told him that I thought it was a wonderful album. He shrugged his shoulders and told me that someone had just brought it to him – offloaded it along with several other albums he had no desire to keep. He'd picked it off the top of the pile and decided to put it on the stereo.
'And do you like the album, then?'
'What, Sigur Rós?'
'Yes.'
'Yeah, it's alright, I suppose.'
He opened the book and recognised '£1' in his own grey handwriting at the top of the page.
'A pound then, please.'
I gave him his money and walked slowly away with my copy of Bellow and the quietening sound of the music that had prompted my purchase.

14 November 2002 (Day 369)

How accustomed and yet upset I am each time I return to the note that was scribbled down in a fever yesterday – when I was then so sure of its force and elegance – only to regard it as a crude draft version of a few ugly and insignificant thoughts. They hatched on the page so beautifully, but now I find them transformed into something weak and insubstantial.

13 November 2002 (Day 368)

A piece of ash on the wind or a little grey butterfly that has lost its direction?

12 November 2002 (Day 367)

The night has been drawn onto black paper. The moon is a smudged white thumb-print.

11 November 2002 (Day 366)

An exhibition of work by Victor Burgin at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol. I visit with a friend and we spend half an hour walking around, which is not enough time to savour properly what we're looking at, but it is late in the day and we both have things to get back to. Burgin is an artist whose work I enjoy – foremost I find him an engaging writer. When he writes simple sentences, playing with narrative structures and the way they relate and juxtapose with images and systems of understanding, I read them as beautiful sparse poems before I consider the way that they relate to the imagery in his work.

10 November 2002 (Day 365)

Sadness again. How can I write so much of sadness? Why does it seem to thread so many of my thoughts together, to cluster around the innocent objects onto which my gaze falls?

To start, maybe I can define this sadness more clearly. It's a sadness bound up in the poverty of other people. There is a gap between them and myself, and no bridge across which some small act of charity, not even a smile, can seem to pass. An example: I'm waiting in a queue today to pay for sandwiches; there are three people before me. The man in front of me has a blue blazer with gold sovereign buttons at the cuff, green-grey trousers and a hat of awkward shape and design. At his shoulders lie tiny piles of white dust. I can now see the dirtied collar of a cream-coloured shirt, with horizontal stripes, the colour of damp garden soil. I can see wrinkles that have eaten great shadows into the flesh of his brown neck. As he turns I see his old face in profile. He has huge bushes of white hair that grow out like dead, dry grass from the side of his face. More wrinkles gauge into his forehead and blue vitreous eyes dance crazily underneath the white nimbus of a single eyebrow. How incredibly beautiful an object for description he is. Already I want him to catch my gaze, but he will not. I want to smile at him, yet want to give nothing of my pity for him away. He is old and alone in life. This I do not know, but I surmise it all the same, with a surety that feels as weighty as any certifiable truth. I can't look at his face any more, so my eyes come to rest on the three items that he has placed onto the cashier's desk: an economy-buy loaf of bread, a foil-wrapped pack of butter, and a tin of catfood. It is the tin that makes my eyes want to weep and my legs to fold under me. This old man has a companion: a cat. This old man has company in life – not someone he can talk to, not someone whose hand he can hold, not someone who cares for his dirtied shirt... but he has some comfort. He is alone, but not without solace. This cat must depend on him for food. He will go back home and prepare a lunch for them both: he will sit down at his table to eat, but before attending to his own hunger he will fork half the contents of this tin of catfood into a dish for his cat. My heart swells; my lungs expand and push my chest out like a billowed sail, conveying the efforts of my mind to find comfort in this story of sated appetites in hope of surmounting a sadness which feels like it is ripping me open. I pity this man without knowing him and I'm unable to tell him so. This man who returns home to only a cat. This man without love in his life? Are these vague notions regarding the life of a stranger what sadden me? Yes. Yes, and so much more. But much more I cannot expand upon. Much more eludes me. My confusion shadows and confounds. There are times when I can't bear to have other people's lives touching upon my own. Today, I am sad to have gazed upon this old man and his life. Two days ago, my sadness lay within the metal hollow of a cat's dish.

9 November 2002 (Day 364)

Mirrors push my physical image back at me. Into these I gaze and catch a figure that I recognise and dislike; I see eyes that move in symmetry with my own; each pair trying to follow the other, as if one of us knows the way out from this four-walled reflective cell. I see and distrust everything that I recognise as myself. My own eyes seem to mock. My lips do not move but ask awkward questions of my reflection and me. This gaze is another of the day's quiet disturbing enquiries that goes without answer.

8 November 2002 (Day 363)

The day's sad poetry inscribed itself into whatever I was careless enough to let my gaze wander over. Looking at a sky, which didn't know whether to open or close, I felt sadness. Passing a tree, its singular clothed branch holding stubbornly onto the last of the leaves that autumn painted so beautifully, and then raped so savagely, again, I felt sadness. This was but a small part of the incredibly forlorn scenery that made up today. The myriad reflective surfaces of this dull, dull day have worn me down. The most extreme sadness, though – so obvious it was almost hidden – lay in the metallic bowl resting on the kitchen floor, where the kitten comes to feed each day. It nearly moved me to tears. Its emptiness screamed at me. I thought of his small head dipping into the bowl and couldn't bear to stare there any longer, and so left the kitchen and found some other distraction. Some unstable element in me is inflating the lonely beauty of isolated objects in a way that keeps threatening tears.

7 November 2002 (Day 362)

I watch a friend board the train. As I'm watching him step onto the train I'm smiling at him, though he has his back to me and can't see this. I'm smiling because I'm remembering him as kind and the kindness of other people is tonight making me feel happy.

6 November 2002 (Day 361)

Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude.

[...]

Tired, I close the shutters of my windows, I exclude the world, and I have a few moments of freedom. Tomorrow I'll go back to being a slave, but right now – alone, needing no one, and worried only that some voice or presence might disturb me – I have my little freedom, my moment of excelsis.

The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa

5 November 2002 (Day 360)

I fall asleep watching little coloured spears shooting into the sky. Minutes later, I wake with a jolt. My stop. I get off the train and start my walk home. Chandeliers of fire are dissolving into the black of the heavens. Tiny fires are starting in every part of the above and the noise is unbearable. I pass no-one. Everyone is tucked away organising guerrilla assaults on the sky. Don't they know I share the same sky; that I often look to the night for solace? Don't they know that it is the sky that gets me home? Don't they know that this sky is not just theirs?

4 November 2002 (Day 359)

I spend another day off work, another day stricken with the cold that has now dogged me for two weeks.

3 November 2002 (Day 358)

Thought can be lofty without being elegant, but to the extent it lacks elegance it will have less effect on others. Force without finesse is mere mass.

The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa

2 November 2002 (Day 357)

When I hope that my words will constitute something tough and lean towards the profound, they so very often refuse to take on this solemn and concrete state. Instead, they take off on the breeze like the airborne ash of burnt paper, and they land in places where I didn't intend for them to fall, and when I attempt to clean them away I find that I am stuck and that they have left their permanent unsatisfactory mark upon the page.

When I want to write freely, with an ease and elegance that lets thoughts take flight, my pen becomes leaden and, like Sisyphus, I'm condemned to pushing my burden uphill and towards where no reward waits. I drag my stone across the page and it rips into the paper and deposits a word that no other adjacent word could ever sit comfortably with.

1 November 2002 (Day 356)

I needed the week to end. I could not have worked another day and endured this cold and this tiredness. I need rest. As I walk home, my heart feels light at the thought of being alone for the weekend. It's raining (the sky is furiously throwing down water) and I'm unwell, but by this prospect of solitude I'm happier than I have been in a long time.

31 October 2002 (Day 355)

I'm sat in the waiting room at Bath Spa station, between a woman with a red dress who is reading the Daily Mail, and who has not progressed beyond the same spread that she was reading when I sat down fifteen minutes ago, and a young girl with brown hair styled into plaits with two plastic strawberries attached to the elastic bands that hold her hair in place; her mother is just outside wandering up and down the platform. Behind us all there are doors that lead to the male and female toilets and I can smell some awful concoction of bleach and piss. Or maybe just bleach. Just piss. The smell makes my stomach groan – just as the lady in the red dress turns the page of her newspaper – and awakens me to the fact that I am hungry.

30 October 2002 (Day 354)

The American millionaire can't believe that posterity will appreciate his poems, given that he didn't write any. The sales representative can't imagine that the future will admire his pictures, since he never painted any.

I, however, who in this transitory life am nothing, can enjoy the thought of the future reading this very page, since I do actually write it; I can take pride – like a father in his son – in the fame I will have, since at least I have something that could bring me fame. And as I think this, rising from the table, my invisible and inwardly majestic stature rises above Detroit, Michigan, and over all the commercial district of Lisbon.

The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa

29 October 2002 (Day 353)

I watched the Pinter profile that I recorded on Saturday. In it Pinter explains what he intended for the opening scene of One For The Road, a play situated within a police state in which a torturer confronts his victims. Pinter plays the torturer, and is terror and violence personified. The play begins with only a seated Pinter lit at the front of the stage, alone and silent in the dark. We don't yet know the evil of his character. This silent and empty scene, though, lasts for a couple of minutes. It endures and Pinter wants us to remember it. Pinter wants us to dwell on what thoughts might pass through the mind of this man. Pinter wants us to see him solitary, naked. What goes through the mind of such an evil man when he is alone with just his thoughts? Is this man evil if alone? I enjoyed the programme, but particularly this explanation. Pinter seems to be one of our more coherent commentators, one cruelly blessed – able to jab at the truth of the world.