Regardless of what you think of the current media circus (and let’s face it, it’s akin to social suicide to be seen as even slightly critical of its dominance in the news), it’s really quite baffling to see how ‘tributes’ such as the one linked to below actually help.

Frankly, I think there’s something increasingly disturbing happening in Western society. More and more, this is no longer about a missing girl or a desire to see her returned safely to her parents. The very image of Madeleine McCann is slowly becoming the latest must-have fashion accessory; her very name is being used as a sort of emotional blackmail to tolerate anyone’s desire for five minutes of fame in a stolen spotlight. Am I heartless? I don’t think so. I’m capable of empathising to some degree with what those who actually know her are most likely feeling (limited as I am by not having had a child myself, let alone one go missing). Her picture is everywhere, but that’s the point; people are donating money in the thousands and it’s not really that hard to understand why. But when does well meaning exercise become gushing hysteria? Surely it’s when you make things like the following.

Watch this and you’ll see what I mean. You’ll want her to be found soon too. Very very soon. Please God, make it soon.

Things I think when an attractive man smiles at me:

(apart from oh my God, an attractive man just smiled at me)

Just because I look away, quickly, doesn’t mean I’m not interested.
Just because I seem arrogant doesn’t mean I don’t have zero self-confidence.
Just because I manage to look back at you doesn’t mean I’m capable of making the first move.
Just because I don’t say anything doesn’t mean I don’t want to.
Just because I’m holding her hand doesn’t mean she’s my girlfriend.
Just because I haven’t shaved this morning doesn’t mean I don’t suddenly wish I had.
Just because I know I’m never going to properly fall in love doesn’t mean I don’t want to.
Just because you’re smiling at me and I’m smiling back at you doesn’t mean we’re ever going to see each other again, does it?

And then there’s the one I never think at the time:

Just because a stranger smiles at you doesn’t mean they’re attracted to you.

I will not be flesh.
I will carry my iPod with me more, and listen to Bach’s Cantatas, stodgy Italian opera, Klaus Nomi and The Lion King soundtrack while I wait for a bus or walk down Archway Road.
I will stop going vampire hunting in the wood at night. I will stop looking for trouble.
I will think of sunsets, and the glow they give you over silhouetted rooftops like an embrace, like being in love. Again.
I will smile more in slow motion when something moves me to joy.
I will not pretend I don’t cry at things that make you cry in films.
I will eat more chocolate and pretend the spots I get mean that I’m 17 once more and have the chance to do it all again, right this time.
I will buy a jasmine plant. And I will probably talk to it when it’s midnight, and a full moon draws out its best blossoms in pale silent flirtation.
I will sip good wine more, and not glug it to get drunk.
I will appreciate my friends more, for however long the universe permits me to have them.
I will plan the songs I want played at my funeral in case I don’t get the chance.
I will fall in love again and not pretend I don’t want it. I will fall in love again. Spectacularly, sharing chocolate on a balcony in a foreign city by an orange glow that makes the buildings about us black, and sip the world and wine alike in jasmine-scented sighs, waiting for the night’s first cool sip of the moon.
I will come alive again.

Tree-filtered sunlight casts shadows across my floor. From the corner of my eye all things come to life – a coat raises its arm and waves to the window, rabbits that don’t exist hop across the pools of light, ballroom dancers whirl polkas in tiny circles upon the rug from IKEA. The entire carpet glimmers like an ocean floor, and I imagine fish and crustaceans scuttling over its unsandy surface. But this is only the perception of life. There is nothing here that truly exists beyond the light, between the shadows of simpler lifeforms reflected. Yet still I watch the movement, from the corner of my eye. I watch the light and the shadows and in their ballet I choose to be by the sea.

You have to think in a tunnel, in any kind of tunnel. Your legs are moving, blood is pumping through your body, through your brain. You have to think.

I took the long route home from Little One’s via my first flat and Crouch End. I passed the road He used to live down, three years ago now, and duly kept my eyes to the ground. Then I bought some hair dye from Boots, waiting patiently in the queue and smiling serenely as an irate mother with a bad perm screamed at her loose change next to her screaming child.

Through Parkland Walk my mind began to hop from one thought to another – half considered couplets and memories. I thought of Toby, my beloved little black miaowing monster who broke my heart at 17 when he died. I thought of little three legged Hector who broke my sister’s heart when he died several years later. I remembered the voices and dimples of old flames and considered how congenitally incapable I am of maintaining a normal relationship with someone. I wondered which I disliked more – emos or rabidly single-minded feminists. Then I thought about Larkin, wondering if he originally titled This Be The Verse as Original Sin. What ifs and never weres were dangling in front of me like caterpillars from silky threads by the time I snuck across the road into Queen’s Wood.

If the anachronistic Victorian lamppost in Parkland Walk is fantastic, then the route from Priory Gardens is perfect. It really is like something out of Narnia. You turn off this pretty suburban street into A WOOD. It’s just there, a wood of all things behind the houses, so quiet and dark – all damp earth and birdsong. Swinging my little plastic Boots bag about like a kid swings his legs sitting at the end of a pier, I made a conscious effort to lose myself in the trees. Wherever there were people, I’d go in the other direction, if there was a path leading into somewhere dark and overgrown, I’d take it. I found myself walking happily through so many different clearings – little nooks where life was teaming without the clumsy footsteps of people in nylon coats, crunching twigs over toffee coloured earth and getting high off the scent of oak trees.

But I didn’t get lost. I got home quicker than I could have done, hungry to start tapping at the keyboard again. Legs tired from walking, lungs aching from the cigarettes Little One gave me, brain overdosed on the scent of nature, itself having woken up to its own cup of tea and clumsily rolled Golden Virginia.

Sometimes in life you have cause to stop and look back and wonder why your load is so much lighter, and why you never noticed it lessening. Sometimes you’re so painfully aware of having been abandoned by the sky and the grass, yet you don’t know why. It’s part of growing up perhaps, just something about getting older. Just one of those many things no one tells you about. You grow less important – to others, to the universe, to yourself. You turn from a creature possessed with imagination, insight and charisma to someone who just exists. I make a very poor human I think, but I never asked for the dubious privilege.

Regina Spektor’s on loop. The sun is shining outside and the cold is all gone. I’m facing the day. I feel confident, capable and excited about what’s to come.

Finally.

In the past few weeks I have surely felt everything there is to feel. And in its rawest state. I’ve felt the mind-numbing boredom of forcing myself through another day at work, the crushing terror of the prospect of never leaving, and then the sudden unexpected euphoria and yes!-this-is-right!-ness when I handed in my notice. I’ve felt alone, and I’ve felt lonely. I’ve had my heart bruised when it grew fond of someone but left feeling reassured that it’s still possible for me to meet someone whom I could like, even after so long. I’ve felt estranged from the people who know me best and had a night of sheer and shameless fun with a group of people I had never once met before. And I’ve tried to end my life, yet again, and was revived not only by the endless and unquestioning support and love of some much undeserved friends, but in one moment a week later experienced something that made it near impossible I will ever make such an attempt ever again.

In essence, I did what I told everyone I wanted to do after I left work, albeit metaphorically. I stood on the cliff edge and didn’t walk away until I knew why I wouldn’t let myself fall. I’ve felt everything I could feel. And I did indeed go mad, as intended.

But tonight, alone in my room in my increasingly natural nocturnal state of alert activity and yet with no one to talk to, I’m feeling something I haven’t felt in a good while. The last time I felt like this in fact was Christmas Eve last year. I feel happy. But this isn’t a cheap sort of joy. It’s a deep happiness. I feel whole, and I feel complete. And I feel ready for whatever adventure is coming. In fact, I am so happy I feel as if I could cry.

I know it won’t last, and I would grow itchy and restless with it if it did.

I’m just enjoying the company of my visitor for as long as it chooses to stay.

This was taken at approximately 6:30pm in my office on Wednesday 21st February 2007. I don’t know why I took it. At the time I found it beautiful somehow, but it’s also a sea of little metaphors for what was going on in my head at the time, perhaps even literally.

This could also have been one of the last things I saw.

It wasn’t.

Monday started with a mouse in the office. I thought I was hallucinating – that’s certainly happened before. Once I looked up to see a bird flying straight into my face, and it was only once the flapping had subsided (me, not the bird) that I realised there was nothing there.

But there was definitely a mouse in the office. I could tell it was real because I was suddenly several metres away from where I’d seen it and had shrieked “JESUS!” in an embarrassingly girly pitch (note to self – must work on exclamations: is questionable for a pagan to use the name of the son of the Christian God as an indication of incredulity).

My boss suggested we just try not to leave any crumbs anywhere, and to keep quiet about it. I agreed with one of these suggestions.

I then spent the afternoon in Superdrug trying on every different aftershave I could find and spraying it on just about every centimetre squared patch of skin on my upper body. Aside form looking a little something like a cheap bastard preparing for his first date, it was all a little pointless really, as after three or four sniffs my nasal cavities had already gone into Estate Agent Alert Mode and had swollen to prevent further inhalation of potentially poisonous gases. That said, by the time I got back to the office I smelt lovely, wearing the scent of just about every drunken attempt at seduction from my teenage years.

I ended up buying a Calvin Klein thing – Escape I think it was, and went back out to buy a Hugo Boss one – I can’t remember what it’s called but it smells all bergamotty and orangey, and I used to wear it when I was about 19. It’s quite musky though – I like heavy musky aftershaves. Most of the ones I tried on in Superdrug just smelt like a little gay citrus fruit had farted on my arm.

I then celebrated smelling nice by going out and spending more money on a new diary and the Back To The Future trilogy. This foolish expenditure (for someone facing looming unemployment) is all a down payment on guilt. I have decided to take part in the fabulous Christian festival of Lent this year, and will be giving up the fags and the booze. I managed to work some smallprint into the contract that allows me to drink wine occasionally, but this is just a reprieve. If Jesus asks to see my membership card I’ll just dress as a prostitute and ask to be saved.

Christianity will make me a healthy person.