This is a long entry - the kind you need to take the morning off to get through. I’m sorry. There’s a lot going on in my head right now. Most of it’s pieced together from conversations I’ve been having with people over the past few days, because other people can occasionally be invaluable in order to see yourself through another person’s eyes. If you haven’t got the time - and I really wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t - scroll down. There’s a picture of me and Patrick Wolf and some funny movies from YouTube below that make me laugh as an alternative.

For those of you who don’t know Ben, Ben’s decided to do something.

And it’s crunch time.

A few days ago, when I decided to do what I’m about to do, I felt free. It was like nothing I’ve felt before. I suddenly felt so explosively happy. A million ideas came alive in my head. So many things I suddenly wanted to do. I think the first one was wanting to take a night train to the Devon coast and walk along the cliff tops. Then I wanted to skip around Highgate Woods with Danse Macabre screaming into my ears from my iPod. As the prospect took further root I suddenly wanted to start a new literary movement - one for intelligent and creatively articulate young men who refuse point blank to disappear between the cracks of meaningless, ephemeral 9 to 5 trudgery. A beat movement revival maybe - in the spirit of humanity, vomiting up anything original that’s already been eaten up because the purity of thought is too rich to properly digest the first time around. Indigestion. Such a movement would have to wear a slightly more parochial, slightly more self-deprecating name to be born out of North London, rather than 1950s America.

The Beetroot Movement perhaps.

In short, I felt, for the first time in a long time, like I could do anything.

Because I can.

I can do anything.

All of us can. We just forget this. We trap ourselves. We need to pay the mortage, or get the kids into a good school. There’s a Voice Of Reason that tells us not to go chasing rainbows, pipedreams or any other fuzzy-shaped metaphor because we’re adults now, and we have responsibilities. We should start behaving like an adult should. We should start to live like a grown up.

Now I have never been, and cannot conceive of myself as ever being, a “grown up.” I’ve chased silly dreams and reached for The Stars Unreachable ever since I could stretch an arm. I don’t believe in limits other than the limits we set ourselves. And having been an appallingly unreformed smoker for the past ten years, I know of no greater ingenuity than that demonstrated by a man who has no money and needs nicotine.

You (yes you) can do anything you want.

So, as you might have guessed by now, tomorrow morning I will hand in my one month’s notice and take my chances, for just a few weeks at first, as a full time writer. A novelist. A poet. A desperate, frustrated beans-on-toast eating unemployed person whoring himself out to agents and magazines. An ex-rat, retired from the race.

My only concerns at first, still riding high on the crest of self-expression, was how I would survive one last final month of servitude. Having turned on the light at the end of the tunnel, I want nothing more than to run full steam ahead towards it.

I. Do. Know. That. The. Next. Month. Is. Undoubtedly. Going. To. Be. The. Most. Agonising. Wait. That. I. Have. Certainly. Ever. Endured.

But tonight I’ve left a door open somewhere, clearly. Whilst the defence mechanisms of my persona were celebrating - dancing and drinking, patting themselves on the back for both their resolve and having finished editing a paragraph or two in Chapter Five of my long suffering novel that I’ve picked up again, amidst the blaring bad karaoke - the demons broke out, and now they’re quietly creeping about the party in disguise, picking on one guard after another - telling them that they’re fat, or that their flies are undone, or that the cute blond standing across the room isn’t into guards like them. Every so often a voice can be heard above the brawl of the party:

“What the fuck am I doing?”

I’m halfway between enthusiasm to press on into the unknown towards pure ambition, and terror to leave security behind and drink it safe and steady, but dilute.

I’ve tried to juggle Ben the Administrator and Ben the writer for two and a half years now. It doesn’t fit. It’s incompatible. In fact, Bruce Wayne and Peter Parker know nothing about living the double life. I’ve dillied and dallied about quitting for months now, waiting for another job to come up that’s sympathetic to what I want to do with my life. None have. So now I’m just cutting away the bane and taking my chances with a pocket full of skimpy savings and a few good contacts. I’ll do temping after a month or so when things get desperate, and I’ve got some good friends in good places who are keeping their eyes open for me should I need another job.

I could fail, sure, but I could also fail in the long run by spending the rest of my life being nothing more than a PA/Administrator who used to have dreams once. And the way I feel at the moment, I’d in all honesty rather become a Buddhist monk than go back to being one of Dolly’s footsoldiers.

There’s just this doubt. This constant, unrelenting, unsilenceable doubt, over and over again like the painful melody of one hundred dripping taps:

“Whatttt The Fuckkkk Are You Doinggg?…”

As a footnote, because life often really needs them, as I write this, Louis Armstrong has started singing ‘We Have All The Time In The World’.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Tomorrow belongs to me. Tomorrow will tell all. Only love. The answer has got to be love.

The only thing I’m scared of at the moment, far more than making a go of this and failing, is chickening out tomorrow morning.