Sorry to report that not much more progress has been made on my essays. I'm afraid there's just not enough pressure yet, though there's been too much stress. I'm sure it will have been more productive to have relaxed over the last few days than it would have been to try and force work out while feeling distinctly ill. After all, it's not like these are finals. The last couple of days I've remembered that there is a real world out there, and that its joys are far greater than those any degree might hold.

Things are looking a little brighter at the moment.

No thanks to the rest of the world, one of my essays is finished. When I've done the next two, I will go out and relax by wielding a sub-machine gun against unsuspecting subhumans.

For some reason for the last two days I've felt perpetually on the verge of tears. I just can't do anything at the moment. There's so much going on that I can't concentrate, I feel sick, and just want it all to go away.

Brown silhouette...

Brown silhouette traces my love for you.

The horizon is magic, the window clear.

Fire licks warmth. I feel it in the setting sun.

I have seen it every day of our last year.

I've remembered it in all I've said and done.

I lie awake in the cold of the night

And the warmth I feel is you.

I return to my chaos, my place.

Walls reverberate truth from my pen.

But it gets me nowhere, it will echo

For a moment. But dissipate and madden.

It hides here, This book its cage. These words do not know

Life or love or beauty. I build with them

But I build a place which caves in.

Tomorrow I will lose myself in the crowd.

Again, it will help. It must, for why else do it.

Lunch will stop me thinking. But I will start

Over. Back here I will come. I will pursue it.

I wonder what to say, where to go. My heart

Is full with a year of pain. I throbs eighty a minute.

Each pulse asks. Each pulse echoes a little more loud.

[1.1.2001]

Labels: poetry

The Alan Clark Diaries finished on BBC2 tonight. The whole series was one of the best and most intriguing pieces of television I've watched for a long time. As I'm sure something does for everyone at some time or another, I was often distinctly aware throughout the series that he could have been speaking for me. That his observations were my observations. Of course, much of this is down to the quality of acting. I was too young to remember Alan Clark's political career — but nevertheless, I knew that John Hurt must have been giving a very good rendition of it. His acting did actually allow me to get in touch with the character, such that, at the end of the last episode, I really felt like I was there in the room with Alan and Jane. I understood their relationship, and I felt their loss. It sounds like a strange thing to say, but there are very few actors, in my view, who actually manage to generate that kind of intimacy with the viewer. Anthony Hopkins is one who can do it, and John Thaw was another. They are actors who can actually allow you to imagine, with conviction, exactly what their characters are thinking.

All these reminders of our own mortality make me think of higher things, of the bigger picture, of love, and of others. And tonight, nothing is clearer to me than that I am totally in love, and want nothing more — nothing at all — than to spend the rest of my life with Stuart, to grow old with him, no matter what may befall us.

Of course there's no need for it. If only we all prepared a bit better, left some more time for all the things we had to do, then there'd be no reason not to be relaxed all the time. Unfortunately, I'm not very good at preparing a bit better.

Therefore, I am stressed. I've got 9,000 words to write in the next ten days. All three essays are in on consecutive days. I've got a lot of work to do. On top of that, there's a house party I'm forced to go to tomorrow night, I've got to go shopping for Stuart's birthday, go to the MFL ball, do my driving test, have copious driving lessons before that, do organ practice, sort out choir stuff, and pay gas and electricity bills. Oh, and then there's the small matter of finding a house to live in next year, so that we're not on the streets. It wouldn't be so bad if anyone else seemed to show a glimmer of life or any inclination to do anything with their lives, but it looks like, once again, superseding Nietzsche, I am THE FIRST DECENT HUMAN BEING EVER TO HAVE LIVED.

Well what can I say, I was forced. Why else would one carry a briefcase into a seventies' disco? It is almost too close to the events in question to suggest that this reflection can be anything but a traumatised one. But go to the Love Train I did, and I had the joys of watching "The Italian Stallion" Tony Martini lead the dancing all night. One of the things I found most interesting about this particular seventies' night was undoubtedly that there were no fewer than five people willing to assist in the searching and locking away of my precious briefcase, which contained only innocuous copies of the Brahms Requiem, but when I tried to get a drink, the three bar staff who were available for the thousand plus party-goers proved woefully inadequate in doing anything at all. In fact, their blank faces, no doubt betraying two-digit IQs, are the sort I would usually expect to see, erm, well - in Hell. Having waited ten minutes, been pushed in front of by one of the hundreds of Dick Heads present, argued with said Dick Head, I did finally get some service. However, Stupid Bar Cow #1 had the brilliant idea of serving me a double vodka Red Bull in a shot glass. How intelligent. Unsurprisingly, I spilt most of it, since the most drink-spilling song possible was being rendered. I filed through a mixture of Dick Heads and Drunk Stupid Cows doing their best to get into the bodily position required for "Y. M. C. A." I was not impressed.

Earlier a Dick Head had been a Dick Head in the cloakroom queue as I was trying to find a minder for my briefcase. "Uh huh uh huh huh huh," was his initial greeting, of sorts. "Yes?" I said. "What's in your briefcase?" After looking him squarely in the eye for five seconds, I replied, "Music." "Uh huh uh huh huh huh." I despaired. "Are you a terrorist then?" was his next, logical question. Looking him in the eye for a further five seconds, "Yes." I took my ticket and walked off. I reckoned myself to have won that particular exchange, though now doubt he thought the same. The best part was that my cloakroom ticket described my item as a handbag.

And thus ended the Love Train.

It always happens. You go away for a few days, have at least a relatively relaxing time, and put all the things you have to do to one side. But then when you get back, everything seems to have taken on a new urgency and intensity, and you begin to think it might be better if you didn't take breaks, because they only seem to exacerbate the gravity of things.

I'm tired. I spent three hours this morning staring into a tube in a pitch-black room as part of some research into colourblindness that I've volunteered for. Four hours of lectures certainly didn't fly by, and then I realised, after standing at the side of the road for thirty minutes, that the driving lesson I arranged yesterday must have been for next Tuesday. This in itself is stressful, since that means I will have only one week between my next driving lesson and my test. Having done no parallel parking, no emergency stop, and not much else, for that matter. I don't really mind getting into trouble for saying that the way BSM run their franchised-private-lesson-do is not very effective. I am fond of my driving instructor, and he is a nice guy, but through no fault of his own his health is not wonderful, which means he is often tired, he's been moving house because of a mad divorcee, he works far too many hours because he needs the money, and in general, I am forced to conclude that my easy-going attitude means, naturally, that he regards my lessons as a time to relax and not do much work. Long gone are the days when I believed that anything could or should be perfect, but in light of the many favours I've done my instructor over the last five months, in terms of running errands for him and giving people lifts, I do not feel any great pangs of conscience when I say that I would have appreciated a little more professionalism in the weeks coming up to my test. I'm sure I could do much worse, and perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that he's not going out of his way to do me favours, particularly in a world where commitment to anything but oneself seems to be dissolving away.

Just now and then, I seem to lose track of what point in time I am existing in. I have always been dubious of the material existence of a concept of time, and, like tonight, sometimes I think I'm living in the future, or the past, or whatever. It's probably all conditioned by films I've watched and things, but from time to time I'll realise something has changed, and feel and remember something from, say, six years ago as if it happened only a few days ago. I suppose it's a strange thing to say. But I imagine that, despite the apparent material proof of time passing in our own bodily ageing, the only thing which actually alerts us to a logical and rational understanding of the passing of time, the only thing which brings it into our intellectual realm, is memory, and the capability of the mind to order memory. Of course, I am no biologist, and even less any kind of neurologist, but this is the kind of abstract assumption I make about the way our minds work. Even if time is actually, physically, passing, what marks its passage except milestones and selective memories harboured unconsciously in our minds? This is why I can quite often happily convince myself I am in a totally different moment in time than my rational mind would dictate.

• Seven people were arrested under the Terrorism Act today just round the corner from us.

Three properties close to Manchester city centre remained cordoned off on Monday afternoon and forensic officers were inspecting them. The cordon included AK Computers, Dolphins takeaway and Funky Fones on Upper Brook Street. ACC Whatton said searches would probably continue into Tuesday.

The properties are three storeys high, with the top two storeys of each converted into flats. Officers in protective clothing had entered the takeaway, while two police officers stood guard at the rear of an upstairs flat.

The most significant thing about this story is that "officers in protective clothing entered the take-away." And this is understandable, since it is from Dolphin's chicken that Stuart managed to get food poisoning. Also, as MG perceptively pointed out, is "AK" a good name for a shop covering for terrorists? Ah, what a beautiful world.

If you think about it, the persistence of the Iraq story has been quite unprecedented. Even though I did not want it to at the time, I imagined throughout last year that it was only a matter of time before questions of weapons, war justification, democracy and so forth would eventually just dissolve away without debate, recriminations, or proper appraisal. For once, I think we can say that it is a victory of the quality Western press for persisting in taking U. S. and U. K. governments to task about their behaviour.

Nevertheless, the effects have not been that great. There is little more the press could do to highlight the probable lies that have been told about the war, and it is a victory also of modern government that it has been able to talk its way out of what has, at times, been an exceptionally dangerous situation. Even if there has been genuine legal impropriety in government, who, if not the press, can highlight this? As much as I wish the mess Bush and Blair have created could cost them their political careers, the chances are that it won't. There is no way Labour will lose the next election, and although the American election has its entire course to run, I would not be surprised if Bush stayed. Even if he doesn't, I don't think that his replacement would foster a foreign policy schedule that anyone would find that much more palatable. The difference in policy, particularly foreign and economic, has rarely been that marked between parties in America.

There is so much to say about Iraq today. It is no doubt a place where hundreds of conflicts are being played out - not just the big ones with guns on our T. V. screens, but conflicts political, ethical, personal, social, and so on and so forth. Reluctant as I am so to do, to put the war to one side and look at the present situation and the problems it presents is little more cheery. Newspapers which generally supported the war seem either to be presenting the goings-on as the fault of Iraqis and their primitive religion, or recognising the gravity of the situation but suggesting that it can still improve. As much as I would like to go along with the optimism of the latter, it does not quite pass the instinctive Bullshit Filter that takes effect in my mind when reading the papers. Although there are surely some things that the anti-war movement has to answer for in terms of the "Well what would you do?" kinds of questions, I think the predictions of many of us that war would simply unleash more bloody conflict and a more anarchical state of affairs than ever existed under Saddam have been vindicated thus far. And furthermore, as I suggested last year, the risk of terror attacks has at best remained the same, and probably increased. If the war is justified in the name of reducing and eliminating the force of terror, yet also feeds and perpetuates that very thing, that is a very dangerous precedent. And so, in line with my previous predictions, all I can see in Iraq is a major fudge by the U. S. government, which would probably be worsened by a change in administration, the continuing of violence and mob rule whether or not allied forces are in or running the country, and ultimately levels of conflict which would destroy any democratic system imposed from outside. I am sure democracy is possible in Iraq, but I have never seen how that end can be fulfilled without huge human cost over a number of years as the country essentially fights a civil war. I believe that democracy is a good thing in the world, but it is not the only good thing in the world. I do not believe that it is the only way to live a worthwhile life. One thing I do know for sure is that it is not such a good thing that hundreds of thousands people die fighting along its path.

Iraq is a different place from Germany, from Japan, from Britain. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein was one thing, but forcing equally unwanted governance upon Iraq is unequivocally achieving nothing.

I suppose it's been a mildly depressing day, with a death at church. It was not unexpected, and I'd only met him once, at his last Christmas lunch, as time would have it. Grief is an amazing thing. If you think about how little is really universal, its universality is quite remarkable. No matter who you are, you will always cry.

It doesn't really feel like a Saturday at all. If you asked me to say exactly which day it does feel like, I would be fairly at a loss. Monday? No, I don't feel crap enough. Tuesday? Fairly unremarkable, I suppose. Maybe. Wednesday? No. Thursday? Friday? Etc. Really, of all Saturdays, I should recognise this Saturday particularly, since it is the most important Saturday in the year. That's to say, it is the Saturday upon which the World Snooker Championship begins. I hear your groans and they pierce my heart.

So I'm back on the train, which is not as full as it was last Monday, though it is nearly as full. It was early and left on time, which is quite refreshing. That's two train journeys in a row which have run to schedule now. Soon I will be back at my den of iniquity in Manchester, and all will be right with the world.

Sorry that I've been away for the last week, people. I've been in Leicester for the last few days having a rest, but not really getting much sleep due to excessive indulgence in the pleasures of Food and Drink. I've also been playing with the design of the site, and, while still failing to deliver the promised improvements in content management, I hope it's at least looking a bit better.

I'm heading back on the train to Manchester tomorrow. Over the next two weeks I've got a lot on. I'm back to lectures, which I'd better go to, since I'm not really sure what's going on in my courses at the moment. I've three essays to write which I really need to do well in to boost the prospects of my being predicted a first and therefore the prospects of my winning M. A. funding for next year. However, as with all things where one needs to do well, it is even harder to get motivated to do anything. Perhaps this is because the stakes are higher, or perceived to be, and therefore the challenge greater, and the risk of failure more palpable. I know I am perennially afraid of failure. Then I've got my driving test on May 5th, university exams soon after that, and then my Grade 8 organ exam. You see, I am a busy bee. All you doubters sit there thinking, "Ah, that impersonal Newfred, he's nothing to do with all his student-type time." Wrong. Shame be upon you. And don't forget my twenty-hour-a-week bar job and the fact that I spend at least eight hours a week doing choir work!

So I've mainly spent the week playing with some Leicester organs and seeing some friends. I didn't see any of the terrible three, probably due to mutual lack of organisation. It doesn't mean I don't love you all. I love you all. Really I do. Quack.

Yesterday I went to Stamford, which happens to have a hotel called "The George", just as Wallingford does. Incidentally, Wallingford is where Stuart went to school. Stamford is beautiful, and so was the day. The sun shone on the stone buildings and the town seemed to radiate light. Except for the bit around the shops. That seemed to radiate opportunities for getting run over by stray taxis. We went into four churches (or was it three?), and, judging from the maps, the town still has six in operation. Stamford is not big enough to justify six churches, in my view. Also, a further church was demolished in the seventeenth century as a result of an amalgamation with another parish and yet another church building, though still standing, has been converted into retail units and accommodation.

I've always been aware that when one walks into an empty building, one immediately gets an almost intuitive sense of what the place is used for, how close the community is, how well it is regarded, etc. There's nothing really supernatural or spiritual in this; the chances are it's just qualified reactions to all kinds of minor details in the building, for instance, the freshness of the flowers, the cleanliness of the place, the amount of light, the number of service sheets, etc. S. E. commented when he came to my church in Blackley that it was "full of warmth". I know exactly what he means; the building reflects perfectly the character of the community it serves, and this is, of course, no accident. And naturally, it's not just true for churches. They're just a good example to illustrate the idea, because churches, it seems to me, provide as accurate a cross-section of social groupings and modes of operation as is available anywhere. This reaches right from the dysfunctional, failing, elderly parishes, often but not always in the south, through to the well-attended, noisy, young and clapping evangelical churches. Anglicanism somehow pulls off the impossible act of reconciliation in encompassing these and everything in between.

On Wednesday I went to a bar I'd not previously visited. Time, next to the train station, was a place that never appealed to me when I passed it. I thought it looked like another failing tacky cafe, of which there are plenty in Leicester. Perhaps the fact that it has not failed in years should have told me my preconceptions were wrong, but c'est la vie. I drank bottled Staropramen while S. E. drank halves of Boddington's. I ask you! S. E. proceeded to tell me some of his more amusing magistrates' tales. One such involved someone getting caught cycling the wrong way up a one-way street at two in the morning. It was brought to court, and S. E. made plain his objections to the case being heard. To cut a longer story shorter, they fined the bloke £2 and no costs, mainly to humiliate the Crown Prosecution Service.

You know, the civil service must be a great gas. I must apply!

Tara is my best friend, and I love her more than monkeys. :)

In reality, our bathroom leaks and is filthy. But for some reason, in this picture, it looks like some kind of expensive suburban suite. (Photographer: Stuart)

I have read in at least three separate articles in the last twenty-four hours about how the author does not 'care what other people think'. Although the very fact that they are writing those words would suggest precisely the opposite, I have to concede that I have always cared far too much, probably, what other people think. In fact, I'm nearly obsessed with it. I've always assumed that personality is a performance. This is simply my experience of how differently I've behaved, and continue to behave, in different situations. The word behaviour itself, for me, connotes a dimension of scripted performance for a social - by which I mean involving other people - occasion. How can one truly behave independently of other individuals? I am therefore wary of anyone who says they 'do not care' what others think. I suspect that more often they would like to be seen not to care, in which case they care that other people should appreciate their nonchalance. Similarly, what is a performance - dramatic, musical, or otherwise - if it is not a performance to an audience of others? And is not an individual only a performer if performing to this audience? A performer cannot give a performance if he does not care what the audience thinks, since a performance is only defined by the audience's presence and appreciation. I am musical only for the impressions, partially musical, partially egotistical, which my music invokes in other people's minds. Similarly, if I were to write a book, I would write it only with an intended audience, even if this were not until after my death. I would still be writing it in the expectation of a certain reaction from others. If there were no-one to read it, would I write it? Probably not.

End of ramble.

Feeling mildly pissed off and let down by everything tonight. I'm shocked by what the allies are doing in Iraq, my friend has been let down by people he has served totally faithfully for five years, and I've generally decided humans really aren't that reliable.

Whether or not Westernism and democracy is a good thing in Iraq or the middle east, this is certainly something that will serve the purposes of no-one but those who desire conflict in this historic country, of whom I am, incidentally, not one. It seems to me that all political, philosophical and moral debate has been subject to a crude and inaccurate homogenisation, or dichotomy, recently. Inspired by Bush/Blair's willingness to emphasise that people are either 'with us or against us', part of the 'coalition of the willing' or not, the majority of discussion has been repressed. I am neither against democracy nor do I see it as the only way to operate in the world. I am neither against capitalism, not do I see its values as universal. I understand Western desires for wealth, but I also understand that wealth, beyond material and physical need, is not always the most important thing in life. So where do I fit in to our willing coalition's master plan? To be quite honest, if the kind of thing that is happening in Iraq is the product of 'healthy' democracies such as the U. S. and U. K., then, if I was an Iraqi, I would be 'healthily' sceptical about how appropriate democracy was for my country too. I watched Selling Houses on Channel 4 last night, on which an American woman happily told a property developer that people should like her house because that was the way she liked it. It struck me that that summed up all that is wrong with America's foreign policy.

This was running through my mind as I sat in the remarkably peaceful Lady Chapel of my church at Blackley tonight, with fifteen others of our congregation. Nineteen years of direct, regular and personal experience of religion has, despite years of criticising it and rejecting it, ended up in me today concluding, for the time being, that it is no illusion. I am not a Christian. I do not believe in God. Neither do I not believe in God. But these are no grounds to argue for the illusory nature of religion. I wonder, in our 'secular' society, what would happen if Muslim invaders started bombing St Paul's Cathedral? How 'secular' would we be then? I admit it, I am rambling grossly. But when I take part in religious ceremony, as I do several times a week usually, my experience is no longer of something controlling, negative, or repressive. I understand and respect those who see it in those terms. But why can some of them not also understand and respect those who do not? My experience is rather of something uniquely, innately, profoundly human, and of an awareness of an object of portent that is greater than the individual. Durkheim would assert that this is an awareness of society, and our altruistic demands upon one another, but I don't think it is important what it is. One of the areas where I don't sympathise with Western political economic democracy is when it comes to our social duties to one another. I understand the economics of personal and private enterprise increasing the general wealth of an economy, and I accept and take this seriously. But I do believe that our individual and personal excesses, of which I am guilty as much as everyone, are genuinely costly to others in our country and in our world. Not necessarily do I mean this in a limited-good way, because I also understand the importance of the service economy. But, from my point of view, my double life, my dual existence as secular outsider and religious outsider, subscribing to neither but attending both, tells me that there is something that 'secular' political-economic life has lost from its religious origins, as much as there is something that religion often lacks in understanding and benefitting the former. Though our mature social economies may be able to provide a welfare state, benefits, and the rest, if one takes five minutes to look at the histories of Muslim countries, or in fact more or less any country, one sees that religion has almost always fulfilled this social role. Indeed, if you seriously look at Islam, it can be seen that the Qur'an supports wealth creation, but for the good of one another, and not purely for the good of oneself. The Islamic Alms Tax dates from the seventh century.

I'm nattering on. All I'm trying to say is that just because a country is Islamic and does not operate on purely Western principles, means neither that it is chronically in poverty, nor that it is primitive, nor inferior. Western economists play that card that the Western political-economic system has been vindicated by Westerners' wealth, but if life was all about material wealth, why are Iraqis from all sectors of society rioting and revolting? I am sick of what our materialism is doing to the world. Oh go on, I'm such a hippy.

I am no Christian. But all this is happening in a week when many humans remember a crucified man suffering at the hands of the populist mob. I wonder where our part would be. I know I have blood on my hands.

Friday was full of surprises. I'd expected to work an 11 to 7 shift on the bar, but ended up in the kitchen cooking Scream Burgers and paninis, in the main. I enjoyed it. I'd expected to go home at 7 to do some work, but ended up staying for *cough* some *cough* drinks. By 9 I really had expected that I'd be making a move, but R went and bought Risk (The Game of World Domination) from Toys-R-Us. We went to R's flat, and I expected the game would not take seven hours, though it did indeed take seven hours. My increasingly drunken state laid the foundations for my deep-seated, letcherous, heterosexuality, to seek expression. Thankfully this resulted in not very much, since she left. Even when I left R's flat just before 2, it was not in me to go home. I went back to the pub, and finding some overworked and underpaid colleagues who were glad to see someone they could have a moan at, I was presented with three further free pints. I'd lost count long ago. We finally got to bed at 5am.

It's always strange when these largely unfamiliar feelings of attraction to the opposite sex hit me. I've grown so used to not feeling them that when they do, I don't know how to react. I can always appreciate and admire beauty, but usually in an artistic, sculptural, capacity. When art is transformed into a living object of lust, the results are naturally unpredictable. Fortunately, I think I maintain a sense of humour about it all quite well. It only took a trip to the pub last night, which sells "'Fun' Inflatable Sheep" for six pounds from a vending machine in the toilets, to remind me that if any of us forgets that a large part of the enjoyability and pleasurability of the sexual act has to be understood in a humorous way, then we have lost a lot. After all, what could be clumsier, funnier, than human penetration? It is, I suppose, only the mysterious and magical, yet very difficult, intertwining of emotional desire and sexual lust that creates this conflict.

Though we would both put each others' emotional well-being at the centre of our decisions, neither Stuart nor I could say that our relationship is monogamous either in principle or in reality. But there is such a big difference between sleeping around with gay men, where monogamy is the exception and not the rule, and sleeping around with men and women at the same time, which almost self-evidently introduces a whole set of complications. I suppose I've avoided the issue thus far largely because it has not come up, but I am always conscious at the same time how indefinite human sexuality really is, and how insubstantial straightforward adjectives are in trying to express each of our individual sexualities.

What am I trying to say? Well, for me, I suppose, anything is still possible. Each of these little episodes excites me more than I expect, not just from a sexual point of view, but from the opportunities and identities it makes possible for my future.

On a lighter, but related, note, someone got to my website last week by typing into Google the following request: "alistair cooke homosexual".

A day at work, complete. A few pints on an empty stomach, enough for drunkenness. A caffeine high, too much sweating. I've no idea what anything means at the moment. Wish all worries could dissolve away. Never mind.

Now the spring has come again, joy and warmth will follow;
Cold and wet are quite forgot, northward flies the swallow;
Over sea and land and air spring's soft touch is everywhere
And the World looks cleaner;
All our sinews feel new strung, hearts are light that once were wrung,
Youthful zests are keener.

All the woods are new in leaf, all the fruit is budding,
Bees are humming round the hive, done with winter's brooding,
Seas are calm and blue again, clouds no more foretell the rain,
Winds are soft and tender;
High above, the kingly sun laughs once more his course to run,
Shines in all his slendour.

God is in the midst of her, God commands her duty;
Earth does but reflect his light, mirrors back his beauty;
God's the fount whence all things flow, great and small, above, below,
God's their only maker:
We but poorest patterns are of that Mind beyond compare,
God our great Creator.

—tr. Steuart Wilson.

Sometimes things feel like such a bore, for the most inexcusable of reasons. I've had a very easy day. I was woken up at 10am by a dreamcatcher falling off of the wall and on to my face. How Zen. Then I pulled my shoulder out of joint trying to put my trousers on, which had me in agony for ten minutes, and then I smashed my knee into the side of the unit in the bathroom, causing swelling, brousing, and blood. I had what felt like a very productive organ lesson, went and sat in the pub, had dinner with Stuart at Pizza Express in town, and went off to choir. A most linear day. One thing after another, in a good way. I actually enjoyed playing for Stations of the Cross today, perhaps because I'd had two thirds of a bottle of wine and a couple of pints of John Smith's beforehand. I find it always helps.

As has been documented for the last few Wednesdays, I spent the evening watching the Alan Clark Diaries and Newsnight. All very civilised. I suppose I rely on the routine to keep me sane.

Easter is almost upon us again, and it brings with it the eternal feel of spring, of renewal, and of an affirmation of both the endurance and the fragility of the natural world. The sun has shone for two days now, and finally, after what has seemed like an interminable winter, I see the world emerging from its sleep, and I imagine myself waking from a dream, and rubbing my eyes, as if to clear away all the dozy pessimism that December and January bring. Skies are clear blue, and in my mind's eye, as well as in the gutter above my room, birds' eggs are hatching and amazing new lives are beginning.

All this feels like it should be inspiring some new life in me. And it is. I've a lust again to feel the mild spring air in my lungs, to watch the crisp colours of flowerbeds blurring in the wind, and to feel sharp and contented again. There is something about sunshine and summer which is always the same. There is something about them which always evoke the same memories, and bring about the same smells, and make us want to do all the childish things we associate with summer. Conversely, there is always something sinister and unpredictable about winter. There never seem to be as many memories of winter.

I long for Easter day, for the rising sun to shine above the altar at church, and affirm all those childish memories again. As rational as we are all supposed to be, I'll always feel most at home when reflecting on the mysteries that we encounter every day.