There is no denying I’m in a manic patch.

The amount I’ve written recently - here, there and elsewhere - both inane and sublime is evidence enough of that. Right right write. This flurry of thought currently comes so easily, and all so very quickly in one moment. Perhaps even too quickly. I was lucky perhaps that my time of the month coincided with my “audition” at the Soho Theatre. I don’t know how that went - I won’t know for some time. The exercises and some of the tools I learnt on Saturday were very insightful and time well spent, but I didn’t like what I ended up writing. I thought my protagonist was an insufferably dull man, and his antagonist intolerably juvenile for an old woman. The Canadian said that not liking what you’ve done at an audition is usually a good thing. Given my credit history with the Bank of Hubris, I’d like to agree.

I’m also doing very stupid things. I’ve started crossing the road intentionally without looking because at the time I think it’s “funny”, or spontaneously trying to kiss people I really, really really shouldn’t (prompting a long phone call to a no doubt quite bewildered friend yesterday that consisted of me saying nothing but “fuck fuck fuck. FUCK! Fhhhhhuck. Oh, oh fuck. FUCK.”) I’ve also barely slept in the past three days, despite feeling physically exhausted.

As ever, my entire mentality at present can be neatly packed into a pretty little nutshell of something that happened on Friday. Whenever I’m reading something (and I often am) and I come to a paragraph or perhaps even a sentence that touches me somehow, I’ll bookmark the page with whatever comes to hand (never, ever, dog-ear a page. There’s just no excuse for it). Usually this is a scrap of one of the many Marks and Spencers or off-license receipts that seem to breed in my pocket. This behaviour is not particularly unusual, I grant you. As I’ve been mostly reading my current choice in Tavistock Square recently (definitively and possessively MY square, along with Soho Square which we will come to later), I’ve on two occasions continued to use whatever came to hand - a leaf. One was, appropriately for the passage I marked, a maple leaf. Another I noticed only as I reached for it and, appropriately for the book I am reading, was deep red in colour. As you’ll see, it looks strikingly suggestive of a geisha - deep red lips on pale white skin.

Justly I had used it to mark a particularly beautiful passage (though anyone who’s read this book would probably agree that these are in no short supply - it is probably one of the most ornately written novels I’ve ever read. Though over 300 pages, I started it barely a week ago and am already close to finishing it - testament to either its quality or my present mental state). However, I was on a break at work on Friday and took it out on the balcony with a cup of foolishly strong black coffee and a cigarette. As I opened the book the leaf fluttered out, twirling towards the ground and lying in the dirt with the dried and crushed husks of its oakier cousins. I’d completely lost the passage I’d marked, with no idea what it might have been. I looked for an age, trying to jog my memory, but I couldn’t find anything that so profoundly spoke to me as it had when I’d been sitting in the square. I guess this says a lot about moments. In the end I just stuck it back in the book at random.

It occurred to me only this morning that mania is losing your place in the book. Flick through to try and find where you were and words will only whiz past your eyes faster than you can read them. In the end you just stick the bookmark back in anywhere, on impulse, because you know there’s no way you can find the order you were looking for.

The desire to put things into order is of course a human conceit. The universe is perfectly well ordered as it is. At present it seems to be using the songs of the dearly missed Kirsty as a reminder of what’s important and what isn’t, though this is perhaps simply because I’ve found myself in Soho Square a great deal recently, and always for entirely different reasons. Her song by the same title has also become my current favourite of hers, and I’ve suddenly started hearing it in the most unlikely of places.

An artist would call this charming. A bland person would consider it a coincidence, and perhaps invent an unnecessarily long word so they can better compartmentalise the artist into a box for filing with the other schizotypal or cyclothymic syndromes, temperaments and disorders. Everyone has different names for divinity. Being in love is an aspect of divinity - this raw incredible surge of ability that is often all too powerful for us to contain. You feel capable of anything when you are in love - you feel euphoric, inspired, alive and at one with everything; but you can also feel jealous, hateful, insecure and alone, half-dead from the heavy weight of the emotions you still carry round from you, long after they have served their purpose and their appropriateness and freshness have passed.

This aspect of my imagination - of the very neurology of my personality - is little different. In fact, it’s all too similar. I am not sick. I do not need your pills. I am madly, as ever, in love with my brain, and the two of us are at present very happy together. Human beings do like to dictate how people should live - what is normal and what is healthy - how they should love one another and what form that love should take. They seem to have trouble comprehending that what may be sauce for their goose is not for another’s gander.

All I ask is that you hold my hand when I’m crossing the road, and hold me back when I next lunge for someone I shouldn’t. A hand to hold and someone to lunge for generally would even be nice at times, but it’s important to accept our disabilities in life - the syndromes, temperaments and disorders that stop us from being normal and make us unique.