The whole flat is freezing, gripped tight in a chill that surpasses skin and goes straight to the bone. I feel white and brittle. Why do I still find it so hard to make a decent start on this – my new life? Why do I insist that I cannot writer, cannot even pick an address out of the book and send them a prebound manuscript – a simple synopsis, CV or letter?

Instead I spend money I do not have on food I do not want, watch TV I’ve already seen, and not respond to texts and phone calls from a man I gave my number to but already don’t want to meet.

It’s my second day in my new diary – still on the first page, and I’ve already noticed I started the book, this new life, back to front.

I’m doing everything the wrong way round.

One day out of Paris and it keeps snowing in fits and starts. Sometimes it is only a few tumbling flecks falling from the sky – others it’s a torrent of tiny white snowflakes. They fall but do not settle.

The light outside is muted – pale yet sharp, somehow like a television where the contrast is set all wrong. It reminds me of the way the world looks after an eclipse, or a thunderstorm somewhere by the sea, as the sunlight first begins to peep back out through the soggy clouds as it indeed is doing now. The world is bright, raw and anaemic.

I have started a new diary, and I choose to write in it at a time of newness in my own life. I put next to no thought into its selection. It was simply the first book that came to hand.

Why does this fill me with inspiration, and not my usual surge of deep envy?

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.

I have just decided that words are an inefficient medium to properly convey the rapidity of concepts and images that flit around in my brain.

I am henceforth going to communicate through animal noises, rapid hand gestures and intent facial expressions. I might even use a paintbrush or drumstick too.

At the moment I feel WHEEEEE! stam stam STAM. Brrog brrog. brrog. brrogggggg. tittletacktoe totum nee nee pang pang vwOWWwwm. vvvrrrrrRRRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. [ruffles hair maniacally with fingertips, scrunching up face] Doggie cakeus. [Makes noise like a melancholy dolphin] Fhanstnap.

Yeah, that was rubbish. See? Words just don’t work anymore. They should be upgraded or given a sabbatical or something. Or be made redundant. Everyone else I know is being made redundant at the moment. “Thank you for your tireless contribution to civilisation. I’m sorry but you’re just not up to the job anymore – we need something that can keep up with the big important thoughts of the highly mobile lifestyles of the twenty first century. Here’s a gold watch and a book about Dolly Parton. Please now leave my idiom.”
“Idiom!”, Words sobs on his way out, clutching his gold watch and book about Dolly Parton. “I gave you that!”
“Henceforth ‘Idiom’ shall be known as “kHAA! Bram ZWAH! [puts cake on head].”

We should all instead talk to each other through haircuts and smiles, big coats, stripey purple tights and loud shrieks and humming noises.

I wish I had a job that would let me dye my hair every day or week or paint my face. And let me dress in long coats with shirts that have big sleeves meant for cufflinks.

I find it so hard to properly express myself at the moment.

This morning I was on Eversholt Street, having just bought my now regular sandwich in Mark’s and Spencer’s line in Manic Depressive foodstuffs (“Smoked Mackerel and Egg Omega Boost” – delicious. Closest I can get to kedgeree in Euston at this hour) and this thought popped in my head – it sounded a bit like my voice, so I paid more attention to it than I usually would.

“Be like the shoes,” the thought said.
“Eh?” I grunted by way of reply, narrowly avoiding ending up a series of clashing colours on the 263′s front right wheel.
“Be like the shoes,” it repeated. “Just do it.”

I think it’s taken me a while to rum up my exhausted rescue squads into making another daring salvage attempt, but as usual, the bleedin’ obvious has hit me months later. Just do it. You have to try. Don’t fret about people thinking it’s rubbish. Don’t fret about you thinking it’s rubbish – you can’t possess an arrogant blustering confidence in your abilities all the time.

Don’t delay doing it any longer, and don’t pretend it’s not because you’re scared. Just do it, and keep on doing it. Rome wasn’t built in a day but Triangle was written in two hours. Success is not a mark of ability but an occasionally happy bonus.

So why are you still here?

Go and write books.

Way back in the midst of the swinging sixties, lived a funky wee gal called Gail. Gail was a dress designer, and had her own shop on Carnaby Street. She organised fashion shows, briefly dated the drummer from The Moody Blues, and was once wolf whistled at whilst leaving her shop by all of The Monkees (I image them all walking down Carnaby Street in their customary hands-on-each-other’s-shoulders, one-step-at-a-time walk – didn’t Carnaby Street sound like the place to be then?). She even had to pull out of the last round of auditions for the James Bond movie Thunderball when she found out she was pregnant.

Eventually, she fell out of dress design, or ‘the rag trade’ as it was known then, and settled down in West London to raise a family as the wife of an HR Director. She’d potter with her former skills as a part time job, switching over to interior design, stitching curtains and settee covers for the both the pretentious and affable of Chiswick. Much of her time was devoted to raising her two children, and she would on occasion lend her talents to making them costumes for fancy dress parties or school competitions. In later years she made the bride and bridesmaid’s dresses for her eldest son’s wedding.

Her youngest son however became particularly influenced by the mountains of cloth, buttons and fabrics all around him as he was growing up. The scent of cotton, the soft catlike feel of velvet between his fingers, or the sound of the electric sewing machine juddering away late into the night both sharpened and cushioned his developing senses. Though he never developed any skill of his own in clothes making, and indeed maintained an extreme dislike of “fashion” as a trend or concept, the almost often theatre-costume environment he was raised in shaped his imagination in ways he could never fully realise until much later in his life. If he had a hero or idol, he would ask his mother to make him the clothes of that idol, and they became part of his playthings. This boy became used to seeing the concept of himself as he imagined actually there when he looked in the mirror. This was a boy who never knew anything of a divide between fantasy and reality.

And these are the origins of the style in his creative work in his adult life that he has realised only now. This is where the view of the everyday as a solipsis comes from – a fantasy or hallucination that isn’t quite real. This is the birthpool of that “arrogant” certainty that life should be just as you want it, just as you imagine it to be. This, on a more superficial level, explains a little perhaps why he so detests wearing suits and ties.

My so-called “eccentric” style, limited only by availability or money, is never limited or contained in my imagination – never restrained or toned down by what is expected in the “real” world. The realisation of the self as seen in the mirror of my mind is limited only what is around me and the cost of it, as I said above, and my own inability to emulate the creations I grew up watching come to life in my mother’s workroom. I don’t know where my style comes from – my love of the mock formal, the overly gentlemanly, the almost vampyric or Byronic coats, waistcoats, velvet, pinstripe, silvers, blacks and reds. Doctor Who maybe, the era of the New Romantics I grew up in perhaps. Whenever I try to think where it comes from, I become certain only that life is a game – a party, a play or a make-pretend adventure in the playground. Everything is make-believe. And you need costumes for that.

The purpose, the fundamental act of any artist in creating something is to bring its imagined components – the sights, sounds, scents and sensations they are able to clasp so brightly in their mind – out into the real world. To give solid form or representation to their thoughts and thus share them with others.

An artist’s first canvas is themselves. By the tools of my trade, I can put myself down on paper, but I can never wear that conception as crafted by my own hand. Everything always seems to stay that little bit insubstantial, like a meal you can smell so strongly that your mouth starts watering, yet inhaling its scent is as far as you go in tasting it.

I’m not sure what I’m trying to say – that I’m disatisfied using only words to create? That I wish I’d learnt more skills in music, sculpture or dress-design as I grew up? That, no matter how hard I try, I can never sufficiently drag out of my mind the things I see so clearly there, and translate them into three dimensions to exist in the “real” world?

If I could dress in my own my clothes – surround myself in my own creation for only an hour or so, would that really make a difference? Would that be all that’s needed to completely give birth to all these lose conceptions floating uselessly in my head?

Sharks.

“Sometimes I almost wish…” “Don’t smoke, Ben, it has a 50% fatality rate.” “That’s why Coupland’s a poet for the dispossessed generation.” “Fine thank you, but please don’t call me Midget.” "No, no. It's just I've suddenly realised I haven't eaten in three days. I knew there was something I'd forgotten." “I’d forgotten how lonely it was being a vampire.” “Hey Ben, can you do me another favour?…” “Don’t diss the Hoff.” “I’m sorry, that property’s gone.” “in the swirling midst of everything” "Dear Mr Jones, thank you for... [SCRUNCH]" “Do ring your grandmother, Benjy. She keeps asking about you.” "How am I? It's August and I'm wearing a scarf to work. That's how I am. How are you?" “I want fondue.” “At times it feels like we’ve got nothing in common.” “I’m sorry, that property’s gone.” “for one moment” “not likely.” “Please don’t move away.” “sit on the beach watching sunset for at least one evening… a nice cooked breakfast outside for at least one morning.” “But I fear that if you do that again it may make our friendship untenable.” “I’m sorry, that property’s gone.” “a minute, a second, a breath” “Oh, you fucked him too? Great. Brilliant. I do love the queer life.” "Good morning. Who's calling please? One moment please." “Thanks. If I wasn’t in financial difficulty before, I certainly am now.” “Basil misses you.” "It's a different sort of day to deciding what you want for breakfast and growing a beard." “Beasts of The Field or The Boy Who Killed God. What do you think?” “I think I want a boy, it’s been a long time so I can’t be sure. Either way I think I’m coughing too much to keep one.” “Let’s do something creative this afternoon. Please. Before it’s too late.” “Haven’t heard from you in a while, but wondered if you were okay. You were sounding stressed in your last e-mail.” “Yes, that one’s still… oh no, wait… no, sorry, that property’s gone.”

“my life could just stand still.”