484 days
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88 days
44 days

29 October 2001 (Day 44)

Walked through the car park today, on my way to work, after buying a make-do breakfast from the supermarket, and passed a car, parked between the two white painted lines that demarcate an individual parking space for such vehicles. The car had not a scratch on it. Not a single crack or dent, and it sat equidistant between the two lines. I marvelled over all of this only because the car had been clean-tipped over, its roof flat against the tarmac, its wheels level with my shoulder blades. Surrealism at 8:45 in the morning.

28 October 2001 (Day 43)

Putting the clocks back an hour is a disorientating business. Wristwatch reset; wall clock reset; ovoid novelty clock in the bathroom that keeps me from going wrinkly whilst I read and soak in the morning, reset. Three clocks left: the one in the bedroom – the alarm clock – which has a mind of its own half the time and I rarely bother to set these days; the clock display on the stereo, which I have no idea of how to change, despite having done it before; and the clock display on the video, which is supposed to 'right' itself automatically, and hasn't, which is annoying, because it cannot be changed manually. My computer, however, knew exactly what needed to be done.

Dislike how dramatically different the evenings now are. Walked into town at 5.00 and was not prepared for the false and harsh lighting of the street lamps so early.

27 October 2001 (Day 42)

Stayed up, into the early hours of Sunday morning, writing. That's something I haven't really been able to focus on for a long time – less what I write here, that is – and it gave me great pleasure.

26 October 2001 (Day 41)

The end of a week and one of which I am glad to see the end. I feel, finally, happy in myself. Tired, but happy. I've been surrounded by the sobering details of other people's lives for what feels like a long time now. Not that I've had these details dumped upon me. I've simply been profoundly moved by these people's misfortunes. I feel confident that happiness, at least of some fleeting nature, is close by now.

25 October 2001 (Day 40)

The exposition of one's thoughts is not an easy process. Here, they appear not in code, but, occasionally, under shelter. Similarly, things sometimes need time to come out. The entry for 21 October expands upon the entry for 15 October.

24 October 2001 (Day 39)

Skim-reading the papers and only half-digesting the odd piece of news. This, by Plato, resurfaced later on:

'What we grasp with our reason is more real than what we grasp with our senses.'

23 October 2001 (Day 38)

Got into the habit today of referring to myself using the plural 'we' rather than the singular 'I'. Became all too aware of my own words after that. Everything from that point sounded processed and disingenuous. Late as it was though, tiredness soon took over from paranoia.

22 October 2001 (Day 37)

Monday has disappeared! It would seem that I worked for the most part – enjoying not the least part – of this day. A little portion of this day, though, I remember, was my introduction to Caleb, who finishes a week's work experience with us on Friday. He was refreshing, in the way, it seems, that only youth can be.

21 October 2001 (Day 36)

Reasons for a previous discontent:

A wrong decision has consequences.

On Friday night, you miss the last mail collection by no more than a few seconds. This now means that the card you're sending, by way of explanation and an apology, will not reach your mother on Saturday. It will arrive, two days later, on Monday instead. Saturday is the day that she is expecting you to arrive. But Saturday will bring her not you, nor your card. Not even a phone call. Not a phone call because this service was terminated months ago. (Bills, reminders and letters forewarning of action to come sit in drawers, in cupboards, in boxes. Afraid to confront them, afraid to throw them away, afraid to show them to her sons. Do you clear another of her debts? Do you then clear a fourth or fifth debt? Perhaps you do, because you can afford to more than she can. Perhaps you don't.) She has no phone service so you cannot call her to let her know that you will not be returning home on Saturday.

Saturday comes for you both. You work, but you are distracted because you are having to think about her, because she is starting to wait and, unbeknown to her, it will be a fruitless wait. She is standing at the kitchen window. At times she will open the window, lean out, take in more of the street outside and hope to catch you in her sight sooner. Then, later, she will be leaning onto the sill with her chin resting on half-clasped, half-clenched hands. She'll punctuate her waiting with a cup of tea; with lunch, with a trip to the toilet. She will return to the window more confident of seeing you walking down the road.

You know it will happen this way because you have arrived home to this before. You have seen her waiting like this for other people. You have seen the way she spends her days. You have endeavoured to help her change the way she spends her time and you have found it difficult. What saddens you most then, is that each hour she spends at that window, sure that the moment of your arrival is more and more imminent, she has no idea that you are no nearer to her and that you will be no nearer to her that day. Saturday will end in disappointment for her. Sunday may begin with renewed hope, but will end like the previous day. Only Monday will bring her the news that she already knows.

You know that you have been the cause of upset in her life and that sadness stays with you. That sadness is not easily removed.

20 October 2001 (Day 35)

To London, to see friends. I've little inclination to write about my time there; about being with them, except that too often and for too long I forget how much I miss them both.

19 October 2001 (Day 34)

Two weeks ago, after getting back from football, I pulled the bag off my back from over my left shoulder. As I did so, something dropped to the ground. On leaning down to inspect this something I found it to be a snail, and not a shy one at that. Still wriggling, I threw him from the open bedroom window, aiming towards where I assumed the landing would be soft, but no doubt consequently smashing his shell to bits. On removing my shirt I found he'd travelled quite some distance across my shoulder blades for the half-hour or so that he'd been piggy-backing. I enjoyed telling the story to Charlotte. Last night, I found myself repeating the story to a friend, so it is obviously one which I'm still quite attached to. So now I'm depositing it here, as a memorial to the snail that I probably murdered a fortnight ago.

My desk light does not actually sit on the desk at all. It leans off it, with slightly too large a base to fall through the gap between desk and wall.

Rain is pelting down, seemingly aware that after an absence of three months or so, we once more have window boxes and flowers on the ledge outside.

18 October 2001 (Day 33)

Mom was blind for a while. Couldn't watch telly, but sat there all the same and rarely missed an episode of Coronation Street. Couldn't see what she was putting between slices of bread, but trusted that it was butter, in the container that felt like it was butter last; hoped that the bread was good. When I think of the things she's endured, and then, the things that she's refused, the life that she's had put upon her, and then, the life that she's sat back and watched die, I feel helpless for everything else in life. This connection to one or two or few people makes so many of us weak. Again, occasionally, I feel helpless for everything else in life, and fragile enough to wither with those that I love.

17 October 2001 (Day 32)

The guy who came to fix our photocopier today was a talkative sort: very good value for his cup of tea. He told me how to overcome car sickness, being so kind as to demonstrate the particular piece of apparatus that prevents the onset of nausea. In return I gave him some useful information on how to get around the local parking restrictions. He also fixed the photocopier, of course, showing me the problem part, explaining its redundancy and, as a bonus of sorts, alerting me to the dangers of putting too much toner onto the page. I can't remember anything of what he said regarding the operation of the machine, but I suspect that my feigned enthusiasm was almost palpable at the time.

Problems shared are sometimes halved in their gravity. Sadness shared though, seems to remain a sadness, shared, whole. Problems are negotiable. Sadness reaches further; isn't divisible. Sadness just takes time.

16 October 2001 (Day 31)

Enjoyed very little of today. Mind was elsewhere. Not on work; not on football. Felt out of place.

At the moment this place feels like a morgue. I keep on fueling it with more sombre or dead memory and conjecture. I guess expulsion is healthier than concealment.

15 October 2001 (Day 30)

Apologies. I am in debt: so many apologies. I made the wrong decision this weekend. I'm not even sure that I made it for the right reasons. Strange: the logic that got me to this point. Have spent much of the day frustrated but feel calmest now, as the day is ending, and I'm listening to two voices overlap on A Silver Mt. Zion's new album.

14 October 2001 (Day 28)

Words and their power. Interesting to sift through the rhetoric, the propoganda and the reportage of the last few weeks' broadcasts and broadsheets. There's a sense that these crafted words are, more than before, intended for an audience and intended to have effect on that audience.

The most efficacious words are being spoken by the figures at the centre of this conflict. I particularly like the chiaroscuro of '...all of this was brought upon us in a single day, and night fell upon a different world.' And I also liked reading the words that a young Winston Churchill had written: 'Before the orator can inspire audiences with any emotion he must be swayed by it himself.'

13 October 2001 (Day 27)

Had a feeling in my stomach today, akin to butterflies. It came as I was having lunch. I've had it before. It lasts for a few minutes and it puts me into an extremely nervous state. It stops me dead. It comes when I'm busy, when I've too little time to get things done and it is clear in my mind each time it comes that life is so very short.

12 October 2001 (Day 26)

There are good reasons for updating this journal every night; not least that when it comes to filling in details a few days later my memory rarely ceases to fail me.

11 October 2001 (Day 25)

Tonight is just tiredness. Too much going on and too little time to accommodate it all.

10 October 2001 (Day 24)

You can come to depend on bad news, bad luck, bad days. There comes a low, but there is always a turnaround; a point at which things get better. It certainly cements things into place, into proportion. It also helps shed light on things peripheral. It enhances our appreciation of what is good.

Went over to Bristol this evening to see The Beta Band. Expected it to be either fantastic or awful and it was neither. It was good, possibly very good, but it wasn't the extreme that I had expected. Left somewhat underwhelmed and tired, with a long walk back to the train station and a further long wait once there. The last train had been replaced by a bus service and the journey time was doubled.

9 October 2001 (Day 23)

Today was a bad day. There: expressed at last. Never have been very good at getting things off my chest. At least, those things that are likely to cause others anguish. Today, this unselfishness – to give this trait a general name – I put down to cowardness. At other times it feels like martyrdom. Sometimes, I stay silent because I wish other people's happiness above my own. Today, problems surface, but they are simple to resolve. There are easy answers... but then, something external comes along and obscures everything in the manner of a large, dirty filter. Suddenly, boundaries blur, the mind muddles and the problem becomes a plural of things pent up that need to be let out. And for some reason, I have this facility that refuses to do so.

It's possible that the above makes no coherent sense whatsoever. If so, then I have probably rather faithfully transcribed the whole process as it manifested itself a few hours ago in my head. I'm recording this for myself; that this is a weakness of mine and one which I dislike very much.

Last two minutes:

Pouring water into a hot-water bottle (a device I'm bringing out more often as Autumn drags on, regretting that I'm picking up another of my mother's fond habits). A blue hot-water bottle. Unscrewing the cap and pouring boiling water into the rusty mouth of a blue rubber bottle which will sit beneath my feet as I type at my desk. Water that spits back at me and then glugs down. Spits and glugs. Like a belching sink with plug pulled. Enough hot water left over to make coffee. Stare at computer screen.

Re-read. Uncomfortable with everything, bar the hot-water bottle description.

8 October 2001 (Day 22)

My mind is not tuned into thinking something onto this page tonight. Feels like too much of an effort. Have been reading through last week's news for the past couple of hours and it would be easy to use someone else's words as kindling for a few of my own. I've no inclination though, so will end before this becomes stale. Will write tomorrow.

7 October 2001 (Day 21)

It was inspiration that I chose to start writing of when recapping Friday and then yesterday's entry. Today, friends visited. I spotted my T-shirt with grease from dinner. I felt weak – enough to start shaking – as I routinely did the washing-up. As I sat down to write I sought inspiration for tonight's entry and tried to bring Friday and Saturday's events back into my mind. In looking round, hoping to spark something to write about, I came across an old theatre programme: Krapp's Last Tape. This is the sequence, verbatim from Beckett's script, where Krapp describes the moments of his mother dying:

I was there when – [KRAPP switches off, broods, switches on again.] – the blind went down, one of those dirty brown roller affairs, throwing a ball for a little white dog as chance would have it. I happened to look up and there it was. All over and done with, at last. I sat on for a few moments with the ball in my hand and the dog yelping and pawing at me. [Pause.] Moments. Her moments, my moments. [Pause.] The dog's moments. [Pause.] In the end I held it out to him and he took it in his mouth, gently, gently. A small, old, black, hard, solid rubber ball. [Pause.] I shall feel it, in my hand, until my dying day. [Pause.] I might have kept it. [Pause.] But I gave it to the dog.

6 October 2001 (Day 20)

As I record something of Saturday it is now Sunday and news is breaking of military strikes on Afghanistan.

Yesterday was spent with a friend (and other good company) raking over some of the things that we'd missed out on in each other's lives this past month or so. I like the way that people can shore up details, meet and release them on each other without relent. Time was against us and we left with things unsaid, and that which was said under-developed. A warm few hours though.

Two moments that stay in the mind from Saturday:
1) Being hemmed in on the train as the buffet cart pulled up alongside my seat, just a minute or two from the station at which I was departing. I remember feeling anxious that I wouldn't be able to get from my seat to the door in time and bookmarked the page in the book I'd been reading, gripped ready the jacket across my lap and, as the train slowed, watched the track through the window, each piece resting before my eyes for longer and longer, in rhythm with the train's descent, and then the platform edge, and then the train stopping. By which time, the cart had moved on.
2) Reading from Edward Said's biography, in particular, the passage where he describes the passion he had as a child of imagining the make-up of other people's houses. Not having had friends who invited him into their houses, he would wonder as to whether their rooms resembled his, whether their kitchens functioned in the same ways as his did. I always used to be amazed, and then embarrassed, by how little most other friends' houses resembled mine.

5 October 2001 (Day 19)

Inspiration can be the most elusive of things. Tonight though, it is less inspiration that fails me, more recollection. Friday's entry is being written on Sunday, and I find that I recall very little of two days ago. Little, that is, that inspires me to write. So the two intertwine. Friday's entry then, had it been entered that day, would so likely have been less a snippet of the day lived, but more a thought or fleeting moment that emerges from the black: resisiting or responding to the dark, blurry, forgettable monotonoy of daily life.

4 October 2001 (Day 18)

The plane that exploded in mid-air over the Black Sea today did so as I was choosing wine-red from a colour swatch for a book due for print in a fortnight's time. Stressed over publication schedules an hour or so later. At 5.30 I rushed off to play football. Later, I went to the Co-op to get milk, without which I couldn't drink my tea as I like it. Whilst there I picked up a chocolate bar each for Charlotte and myself. An hour later I sat down and watched the report about the mid-air explosion over the Black Sea that ended the lives of seventy-eight people.

3 October 2001 (Day 17)

There's a bit of Marshall Macluhan that I vaguely recall, something like: 'to re-experience the past is an unbought grace of life'. It concerns the replaying of events from the past; the enhanced pleasure that one can gain from reliving these events in a different medium or slightly altered form. To read someone writing my own words back to me gave me great pleasure.

The above thought was divergent from the others on my mind. These thoughts weighed heavy on my mind today. Just today. They will leave, but only to resurface another day. Such weight owes much to uncertainty, but also, in equal part, to a weariness that has dogged me for years. How do you tell someone that is your own flesh and blood that you love them? How do you get this declaration to affect them? How do you effect change in that person; stimulate something: warrant love in return? How can you imbue the most abused and impotent of three-word sentences with genuine sincerity that will have some lasting effect on that person?

I think about you all the time, I write about you and I love you, more than I think I can ever convey to you.

2 October 2001 (Day 16)

Watched Requiem for a Dream tonight. Harrowing. Four people, each in pursuit of their own vision of happiness; each refusing to let go of their dreams, even though they are realising nightmares.

Tiredness limits this entry to these few words. More to write, but I just keep blinking at the screen.

1 October 2001 (Day 15)

How is it that twenty-four hours can pass and all I can muster by way of conveyance is a solitary self-referential sentence?

30 September 2001 (Day 14)

These pleasures of mine are so simple. Today it rained and I had the most vivid sensation of being alive. I laugh and watch her laugh and the sensation is the same. Today: not the resentment of waiting two hours edging forward in traffic; not irritability from too few hours of sleep. Just humble forms of happiness.

29 September 2001 (Day 13)

I can never quite comprehend this facility that I have to become so absorbed with thoughts that are so light. Reveries, which occupy me for many minutes at a time; divert me and relieve me of any genuine obligation to think. Quite how I can write of the levity of thoughts, I'm not sure. How to quantify a thought as 'light'? I think I am referring to moments when I feel without responsibility, when there is no onus to contribute, no effort required, no consideration for the otherness of company; just a faciliity for the mind to wander. Thoughts that flit in and out, like a dandelion clock passing on the wind.

Tonight was spent with friends, last night too. I too easily forget how much I value such friendship.

28 September 2001 (Day 12)

There was a bright orange plastic mug. It sat in a recess with a frosted window behind. Next to the green plastic soap dish. Strange, the things that stick in the memory.

So little that I remember of my father. I remember him handing a five-pound note each to my brother and me, after winning a bet he'd placed on the horses. I remember washing him in the bath once; his first bath in months; feeling sick and rubbing into his skin, watching dirt and skin and sweat form like congealing fat across his back. I remember how I took four sugars in my tea for years because, like him, I used to love sweet tea. I remember he wore a scarf in bed when he was cold. I remember watching him sign his pension book. I remember how rare it was to sit on the settee, because the settee was his bed. I remember instances of fiery temper and the ways in which his eyes could convey both sadness and kindness.

The bright orange mug was brought to him two, three, perhaps four times daily. Sometimes he would be strong enough to walk to the kitchen to get the mug himself. Most of the time, my mother, one of my brothers or I would take the mug to him; wait; and then return to empty the water that he had passed into the kitchen sink. Holding my breath, I would swill the mug twice and replace it on the shelf. Running the tap, I would use my hands to channel water onto the sides of the sink; then toil with the cake of soap for some time; return it back to the soap dish next to the mug; wash; rinse; dry my hands against tea-towel or apron or clothing.

27 September 2001 (Day 11)

Incidental things. Perhaps those moments or events that are not so significant, that are small or forgotten against the scale of international terrorism; against planes becoming bombs; against parliamentary members being massacred by someone opening arms on them as they stagger defenceless, running for the cover of tables.

Tomorrow, I will go to work and perform more than a thousand incidental acts. Most of my day will be resigned to memory or mortality and next Friday I might not even register that I am duplicating many of these acts and working my way insignificantly through Groundhog Day again.

Tonight, it weighs more heavily on my mind that my girlfriend is troubled with a migraine. I dwell on the news bulletin from three hours ago that was unveiling the points of attack that a military international coalition will strike from at Afghanistan. The thoughts rotate again; and again. Then I hear Charlotte stir in bed and then I dwell on the mediocrity of an hour and a half spent at the theatre this evening.

The tragic and the beautiful and the mundane are awash in my mind. I have no means for sharing someone else's terror. I can't understand it. I don't feel for the dead and bereaved of America any more (and yet I sense it will nearly be tangible when I allow those thoughts to return at any future moment). I understand so much alternative sadness though. I can turn my thoughts to my mother and stop writing... and I am nearly brought to tears.

We can only experience the world as individuals. We can only reflect on our experience as individuals. We cannot come together. We can converse; we can unite in our action and we can stand six inches apart from one another as we mourn and cry but we can do no more than synchronise as individuals.

I feel a shock of cold suddenly rushing over me. I'm tired and I want to lie down next to my girlfriend.

26 September 2001 (Day 10)

Buying lunch today and the man with the lazy/boss/blind eye(s) in the shop, who never fails to give me the correct change despite my irrational fear that he always will, asks 'How are you today?' 'Very well, thanks.' I reply and playback the question to him. 'Yeah, fine, thank you.' I choose a tub of vegetable pasta and cottage pie. 'Actually,' I start, whilst he's packing the first of the two polystyrene pots, 'I feel lousy.'

I did. I do still. We laughed at the exchange; at how very predictable that exchange usually is. People are too lazy to tell, listen to or challenge the truth. This is doubtless not breaking any new psychological ground.

We shared a few more frank sentences afterwards and I left in amiable mood, wondering as to whether my next visit would prompt a similar discourse or would it revert to following eyes that are consistently looking over the top of my head or the pot of hot pasta that's being stocked for my lunch.

25 September 2001 (Day 9)

Tuesday; the second week of writing. Now, a week's worth of recording the worth of a week.

The most troubling aspect of all this is that these words that I am committing to page might be of no interest, might be of no significance to anyone else. I am not even sure what they yet mean to me. The course of the days that prompt these words do not themselves appear significant. Here, in the retention of thoughts, images, words and actions are nothing more than the remnants of days lived. An indelible proof of life. A curriculum vitae of sorts. What value memories?

'The most beautiful memory seems to me nothing but a piece of wreckage left by happiness. The least drop of water – even a tear – if it wets my hand, is a more precious reality' André Gide

You fall, You land. You pick yourself up. You fall, you land and you pick yourself up. Other times, you just keep falling. These images come back to me every now and again. It's a dream I revisit and it's me that's falling. It's as simple as that. Never the picture of what I'm falling from, nor what I'm descending towards, nor anything to suggest what it is I'm passing on the way down. A drop from, through and to nothingness. I'm falling slowly, or at least I'm watching my descent in a slowed-down fashion. There's a tranquility to it all. The dream came again last night.

24 September 2001 (Day 8)

Beauty sometimes resides in the most unlikely of places. Walking home tonight I had to step over a pool of vomit. There's no softer word for it, so the first two sentences of this entry sit in jarring discomfort with one another. To continue though:

Walking downwind from this pool I was confronted by the most toxic of smells. A few minutes earlier I had left the office and the bracing cold wind had been the most welcome element I'd come into contact with all day. For the first time today, I had been able to inhale one deep breath of air. This one cathartic breath cleared nostrils and head in one go. I'm not about to describe the lurid details of what lay around the corner from me, as I strode off home in this nasally emancipated state. Nevertheless, after stepping over and continuing my walk, I gave some thought to the fact that this was still an early hour in the evening; that this was not likely the result of some post-pub crowd drunkard. The answer was staggering ahead of me, with a half-empty two-litre plastic bottle of cider pitched down towards the ground: a man of forty or so, dressed in baggy khaki trousers and a green-leaf camouflage patterned jacket. I overtook first the repeated smell and then the man.

Enjoying my returning sense of smell was pleasurable. More than that though I was humbled by the unpredictability of life: that it can throw something new or unpleasant before me; something different that prompts reflection; something ugly that heighten's one's awareness of things contrary.

I gave an acquiescent smile as I passed him by.

Was tempted to insert this entry tomorrow because cold is spreading over me and I'm not inclined to write anything. Have been working for the most part of the day with a hot-water bottle beneath the desk. Am writing this in-between turning to face the Kenneth Williams biopic on TV.

22 September 2001 (Day 6)

A firework display was noisily ricocheting in the skies over the street. Leaning out of the window I could see nothing but the white reflection of each major explosion in the clouds.

Alone for the weekend, which I both enjoy and dislike, and fearing the onset of a severe sore throat.

21 September 2001 (Day 5)

'...lost in time, like tears in rain.'

How very beautiful I've always found those words, ever since hearing them for the first time over a decade ago. Today, I looked at the work of someone else who had paraphrased those words; melded them into her own life thesis. I read on and couldn't help but enjoy and simultaneously loathe what she had written.

A long, busy day. Eyes look punched in. Late home, late to eat and late to sleep.

20 September 2001 (Day 4)

I re-read yesterday's entry, and then the previous day's entry. How very dangerous the abuse of that possessive pronoun 'ours' can be. To write 'ours' is to talk of belonging to or being associated with a group of others. When I write about 'our country' I am talking about English people and when I talk about 'our unease' and 'our unhappiness' (all 17 September) I am writing about everyone that has been moved to feel such things. When, however, I write 'ours is a world' (19 September) I am, it seems, writing about the world and everyone that lives in it. That is not what I wished to convey, yet I write and I have the perfect tools – so many words – for crafting the meaning of what it is that I want to communicate. Think of the ugliness of the words 'us' and 'them', repulsive because of the way they have been abused; the way that they have been used as extremist markers between conflicting peoples. They conjure thoughts of apartheid or cold war.

How inappropriate the phrase 'words fail me' when it is I that fail to find the words? Yesterday, I failed.

I cannot write about 'our' world, nor 'our' society nor 'our' street. I can but try and write about myself. That world which I was referring to yesterday then, is the world of anyone that has been exposed to the forms of society and culture that I too happen to find myself immersed in. One that watches the drama and film broadcasts that sandwich the news bulletins on the television networks. One that understands the references to Bruce Willis and the Die Hard films these past seven days, whilst perhaps finding them lazy and unhelpful. I was suggesting that our experiences of things fictional or far flung are our experiences of a truth embellished. Indeed, in pondering the point, I fear we would know very little of this world – that is we would not care to read or learn about the goings-on in this world – were it not for the 'dressing' of these incidents in a language that provoked some sort of emotional response.

Whilst writing about the choice and meaning of the words people use I might also mention the following:

In the statements in the news that talk about 'attacks on civilisation' in the same sentence as they talk about 'attacks on America' some have made the inference that America (more than any other country) represents civilisation and that had these acts been perpetrated against a different country that this might not be an attack against civilisation, but simply an attack against said country. If we [slipping into another comfortable personal pronoun and realising that writers have to invest a great amount of faith in their readers to understand the who of 'we', 'you' and 'they' are] are to write or to orate then we have a duty to make clear what it is that we wish to communicate.

19 September 2001 (Day 3)

Computer problems see this entry appearing later than intended. Vague memories of 19 September now. Do remember thinking over what I would write earlier during that day though. Had still been reading over newpaper reports that were four days old and was struck by the way that journalism is 'dressed' and turned into something closer to literature, that is something the value of which lies in the beauty of its language or its power to convey and evoke emotion. The effect of a plane crashing into a building is referred to as a scene of 'savage beauty'. And, of course, it was. This interpretation is something which helps to digest what we are reading. Naked facts, bare reportage is too brutal for us; too dry, and we need something to help wash down such terrible truth. Such a loaded and emotive phrase alludes almost to something of fiction and ours is a world that imbibes the fictional. It takes energy from it; becomes both educated and ignorant from it. If we choose to decorate such writing – revert to metaphor, illustration and ornamentation – then it can, if not at the expense of reporting the news, help us to understand and stir a passion for what we read.

18 September 2001 (Day 2)

Malaise again. Not specific to the American story. Nothing I can put my finger on. Just now a documentary about attacks on homosexuals in Brighton; more TV-fed discomfort. At work, a photographer talks about going out to New York to photograph '...you know'.

Out before 8 o'clock to play football. Late, so I run down. An hour later and walking back in the rain, which I like to do; like to think. Not that anything meaningful comes, but thoughts race around in this state and it feels as though something is always about to unhinge from this muddle and surface as something significant. Not tonight though.

17 September 2001 (Day 1)

It seems a strange time to begin something. Feels like the middle of something. Last week's events are still on the minds of people this week. They are too, of course, still the news of this week. I comprehend what has happened, yet find it difficult to believe that people are still so mesmerised by it all. I can't recall the last time there was something that moved people to talk and think like this. That is not to say that there is no need for such talk and meditation. It is just that no single news item – not national disaster nor war – has ever provoked such reflection and such feeling among people that I know.

This is so very substantial a part of the unease. Why feel like this now? Worse than what has happened is to know nothing of the terrorism, suffering and survival of other peoples, of other parts of this world. Worse is to see America as a mirror of our own country, and to shed tears at this reflection because at the root of our unease, at the heart of our unhappiness is the fear, the deeply rooted fear, that this could so easily be repeated. That this could so easily be us.

Yes, there is sorrow. But we cannot even remember the country affected by last year's flood or even an approximate number of the dead of last year's earthquake. We might not even be able to point to Srebrenica or Sierra Leone on the map. We cannot even fully reason a motive behind this latest atrocity. And we read five-inch-capital words like 'war', 'terrorism' and 'atrocity' and precious few of us can grasp what these words could possibly mean.

Our fear is as near to the emotional surface as our sadness. It is our fear that will stay with us over the course of the next few weeks, and let us pray no longer.