If you don’t read anything substantial, you can’t expect to write much either. I haven’t read anything in ages, which probably explains why recent entries have been little more than schoolgirl gushings over rising electrofolkers gone pop and random uninteresting images lifted from the internet or what’s lying about my bedroom, rather than the world around me.

These things are low cost microwave meals - rich in E numbers and MSG, but providing nowhere near the recommended daily dose of 5 portions of good ideas and lyrical sentences a day. The last book I read was months ago. I stopped halfway through because I was getting distracted by other things in my life, but also because I was losing interest. I was becoming frustrated with the stories - I could see where he was going and what he was trying to say after the first few paragraphs. It didn’t excite me anymore - I was just following the dots. A friend of mine congratulated me when I had a brief whine to him about this. A little puzzled, I asked what he meant. He said it was a reassuring sign I had, at least in my own Benverse of ability and recognition, surpassed those of one of my literary heroes. It meant that I was improving evermore as a writer.

And yet now look at me. I’ve dilapidated into a state where writing this alone has taken, so far, over half an hour.

To continue the food metaphor, I’ve gone from a self-important epicurean to an anorexic recluse who can barely peel back the foil of a Pot Noodle. My skull feels so thick and muggy all the time - fresh ideas come nowhere near as quickly as they used to, if at all. My interest to write is only a gnat’s wing above my interest to read - fueled only by my habitual guilt over wasting time, and a light-headed distant certainty that this tiresome plodding existence I suffer could be better if I just put in the effort for once. It’s a telling thing that, even now, I’m hungry, but I can’t be bothered to go down to the shops for ingredients.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just can’t do it. I find it near impossible to pick up a book now, and just as impossible to sit down for an evening and work on so much as a short paragraph. In a way it’s ominously similar to my short lived career as a ‘Kia magus’ - one day I just couldn’t do it anymore. I could barely maintain the interest or focus to so much as light a candle. It was as if someone realised I was just going to make a huge mess of things and switched off my ability to make even the simplest thing happen.

It’s horrible feeling like this. You sit there, watching the hours drip by into days, weeks and months, and yet seem unable to do anything about it. Everytime you make the effort to do something - to make the most of the time you have left - you fail. I looked at my novel earlier. Rubbish. I didn’t understand what on earth it was I was trying to say with it, other than “look at me and how pompous I am. Aren’t I clever?” The whole thing’s saved from the stillborn stage but now well and truly on the critical list in intensive care.

I just have nothing to say, and thus no interest in saying nothing.

I’m really, really hungry - you know that gnawing hollow feeling when there’s just nothing inside of you, and you feel like you’re body’s digesting itself? I should go and get something for dinner, but I just can’t be bothered to leave my nice warm tiny room where I’m not doing a bloody thing beyond cultivating a headache from looking too long at this computer screen, and there just isn’t anything I already have here that I want to eat.