I’d like to put up an excerpt of the play I’m currently (desperately) working on with my wife of the past ten years, but I don’t think I can. One, as you probably know, I’m very conscious about jinxing things. I don’t like drawing the Fates’ attention to things that are still a little primordial, as poking a finger in primordial soup isn’t often good for protein strands. Two, I don’t know if I can for copyright reasons - an even part published piece might prejudice our chances in the second round of the application.

But I want to! I’m loving even this painfully limited taste of living a creative life, meeting with likeminded people and discussing something I actually care about - something that genuinely draws me in. Despite doggedly, perhaps even arrogantly, referring to myself as a writer, my only recent creative experience has been me, sitting in a darknened room and feeling apathetic and hateful with myself because I can’t summon motivation to do what’s important to me. The missus and I now have a perfect working relationship - you know when you do because you can tell and be told by your partner that an idea one of you has proposed is rubbish. It’s that kind of dynamic I’ve missed ever since I went to the Fringe in 2002 with Pictish, and we’re as close now as we used to be ten years ago when she’d stay round my house, and we’d stay up till 7am watching Eddie Izzard, drinking tea and smoking and eating dip.

Our little tale is met with genuine excitement from everyone who encounters it. I even called Little One up quite randomly the other day mid-redraft because everytime I look at the script now it gives me tingles. Everyone seems to know this story (though I myself had never heard it until we started work), and it touches and fascinates people on so many levels.

There’s also the encouragement from the quite alarming progress we have already made, coming back to me still every hour or so like a kick in the head. There were only 5 or so other groups (about 12 people in total including us) at the venue viewing last week (this occurred to me in the pub afterwards - I thought it was just one night’s viewing in a week of many). Five other ideas. I have no idea how many we beat, but to get to this stage, to be that good enough is awe inspiring.

My schizotypcal temperament is also trying not to fixate on the many “signs” we’ve received. To the more closed-minded or “rational” of you, a “sign” is when the immediate space of the universe around you buckles to the extent where it throws a reflection of your life, your thoughts or your feelings back at you. This is why perfect moments, such as sitting somewhere at the height of happiness and then noticing a rainbow, are just that. Everything really does make sense because you get a glimpse of your place in the universe. It’s up to you how you read these signs, or “coincidences” as the aforementioned “rational” mind would term them. I’ve always looked upon them as an indication that your life is proceeding on track, and everything in this brief aspect of it is taking place as destined.

We may not get there, so it’s foolhardy to get excited. Even if we don’t get it, Little One and I have agreed to push ahead and find a way to put it on independently if we can. There’s no reason to get complacent at this stage and just sit back and assume we’ll be awarded funding. It’s just everyone else seems to believe that we can take this somewhere, and I can see no logical reason why I shouldn’t too.

The shark is still swimming. Still desperately swimming on.

is like being kicked in the head. It’s a little busier than being dead for the first time. There’s so many things in my head buzzing about like the living grave of a buzzing box of maniacs that there just isn’t room for extra thought - you can’t think how long to cook pasta for or even remember how to turn the stove on. My stove is electric - you just press a button. Seriously, it’s cool. It’s like something off of Star Trek. I’d just play with the stove if I thought that would help - if that’s all that eating (cooking?) involved. You’re too exhausted to eat. Eat? Eat? Eat? I know that word… I used to know how to do it. The busiest part of my brain at the moment is the nerve that runs straight to my fingers as they sluice out bits of oddly ordered suboncsious onto a blank screen. Things that make sense only after I read them hours later. Black words onto white, like scraping something dark into the infinite void.

No.

I haven’t got enough bits of primordial ink in my head to make my own mark on things. I will scratch things from the sky and take it back. I will eat bits of the void and leave a little space, little lines that look like writing, like the words I saw written across the horizon in Skye but wasn’t fast enough to take a picture of. There will be light behind the darkness as I claw crumbs back - white from behind black. Light from emptiness, like a string of LEDs on a battery-exhausted laptop. The interface sleeps, the hard disk unspinning, but the processor still buzzes. It will be my subconscious and the crazy order that lives there at the moment, the emergency power, the autopilot and the answering machine. Hello, I’m afraid Ben’s brain is too busy to process conventional thought at present. Please write yourself a message for him to remind you to sort it out yourself later.

This exhaustion, this is September. This is till the middle of October. This is the state you reach when the straw should buckle the camel and yet the camel carries on. This is what it is to be a vampire? Dead to the real world and everyday things - not remembering how to eat, dressing only through sheer sleepwalking and talking only through cunningly prerecorded pieces of previous conversations spliced together. Whilst all the time your brain devotes more and more of its processing power to working its occult calculations. It’s a jobshare for the conscious mind. My mind has gone into administration. The unseen faceless powerful ones have taken over the day to day workings - calculating and stitching through synapses and adjectives until it is done. Until it is all put together.

I should be dead. Maybe I am. Has any human ever had this little sleep? Eyes close for hours every night but the brain does not rest? The thunderstorm against the glass pounds on my skull looking for its lost little bit of itself. I have a thunderstorm in my head. Has any creature ever had so much in their head - so many different voices and places and sights and sounds like a bus load of blond Japanese tourists instructing each other in backwards German on how to cook Beef Wellington inside out.

The play’s going terribly well.

I find this madness, chaos, so terribly tame and under control.

This is automatic.

Human beings are terribly socially conscious creatures, but in a very perverse, self-orientated, and typically Freudohuman manner. They are aware of society but only in the manner of which society is aware of them.

In art, to have it received and receive popular acclaim from society, you musn’t offend anyone. You can’t pen any beliefs or opinions that aren’t already known and popularly held. You have to agree with the new flavour of the month and its fashions, and you have to disagree with the old masters. Rabbits are coprophagic. Humans are cogitophagic, but are only able to comfortably digest already digested thoughts. The unknown and unseen gives humans indigestion.

Poo to popular acclaim. Sod society.

What’s it really worth in the end? What’s it like to wake up at the end of your days and know that you never created a single thing in your life, but just bought the reactions of people - comfort, reassurance, shock, anger? Art is for people to respond to. The artist cannot exist without the world and the world cannot survive for long without the artist, but art is not about catering for people.

The day the expectations of your audience affect what you are crafting in your hands, the sooner you should hang up your pen, paintbrush or plectrum. You’re old enough to walk, unaided, without having to crawl. Don’t be a baby, and judge yourself by your own standards. Challenge yourself. Think for yourself, as your audience should think and challenge themselves, but don’t expect them to. Don’t expect anything. Don’t ever write for an audience. Just do whatever it is you are compelled to, if at all. Don’t try to shock, but don’t try to please. Don’t try at all. Do, or do not, there is no try. Ridicule is nothing to be scared of.

God didn’t win any design awards for the human race, but he wasn’t looking for any either.

It was just something he had to do.

Woke up. Looked at clock. 9:37. Shit. Called in to say I’d overslept. Exhausted still. Staggered into shower. Couldn’t get the temperature right. Thought about the words people say or think when they wake up and look at the clock and find out they’ve not woken up but rather woken up late. ‘Shit,’ seems the only appropriate thing to say. Couldn’t imagine anyone waking up , looking at the clock to discover they’ve woken up late and saying ‘Oh goodness, no.’ Brushed teeth. Somehow couldn’t shake the taste of not having had enough sleep. Got dressed. Couldn’t find a pair of clean socks - put on these stupid thin nylon things I found at the bottom of the drawer that will make my feet sweat. Left house. Waited another half hour for a bus. Bus stopped at the bottom of the hill. We were all told to get off and get on the next bus. The next bus was absurdly overcrowded. Two people maintained a conversation about not being “buggered to go all over London today” several milimetres away from the back of my head. An unseen simpleton behind me let their juvenile musical ringtone ring and ring and ring. When I tried to get off at King’s Cross an old man clambered over my feet, shoving his legs between mine to try and get to my seat when I’d barely left it. The usual circus of people milling about, dawdling this way and the other, drifting into your path or coming to a sudden stop because the ability to think about anyone else in even the immediate space around them went out with Girl Power. Walked down Bidborough St and passed a removals man. Wondered what my life would have been like if I’d ended up a removals man. Fitter probably. Walked down Mabel’s Place towards the office. Instantly felt the urge to cry. Suddenly saw my life as this empty meaningless collection of missed opportunities and unfulfilled ambitions, with pathetic little veneers of assumed contentment to paste over the gaping holes - just more commendable ways of wasting time. As I opened the door and climbed the stairs, the urge to cry disappeared. The total pressing despair vanished. Suddenly I felt nothing at all. Instantly, I was flat. Numb. Empty. I apologised for being late, sat down and began to type this.

I don’t know enough vampires - unshaven bohemians, natural-blooded nocturnes I can chat away the arc of the moon with. Perhaps this is why I make friends with people on the other side of the world - someone’s company to hope for who keeps the same hours of activity as myself. It’s not as if my brain’s buzzing with much at all. A few post-traumatic tinglings from my heightened emotional state earlier in the day but no real flesh. Nothing for these vampire teeth to feast on. There are a lot of vampires in our lives. Hunger is a vampire. Vampires only come out at night, even if they just lounge around in their pants on their bed listening to Björk remixes and chewing pencil tips.

Imagine if something had happened to me after I left the square when the battery on my phone died, mid-conversation. Imagine if my last words to you - my last spoken words to anyone - were “I don’t want to see pigeons copulating.”

Imagine what an epitaph that would be for a life.

I hate my job.

I HATE it. I am so sick of being treated like this. I am fed up with breaking my back getting things finished in half the time it would take anyone else only to get more work on top of it. I’m sick of being given no time or instruction on how to get something done, and encounter only criticism for my best efforts. I have had more than enough of losing hair and neurons about things that I don’t give a flying toss about - things that don’t make the blindest bit of difference to the universe. It would also be nice if just once I could leave the office this week before 7:30pm, particularly since there’s no automatic system for overtime in my contract.

Today I feel like bursting into tears or simply walking out. Or walking out in tears.

I’ve really had it up to here. One more thing. Just one more thing is all it takes.

I’m losing the best years of my life to this piffle, I’m losing time I could spend to create. I have deadlines of my own that I’m jeopardising as a result. Lost time, again, and I can never get anything back from that loss.

I’m so unhappy here. I don’t even get paid enough to do this to myself.

Does anyone remember a show called Doctor Who? It was a BBC series on for about thirty years and featured an eccentric old chap in a great coat wandering about the galaxy in a blue police box with one, or maybe two or three companions, having adventures and righting wrongs, all wanderers in the fourth dimension without a home or ties to distract them.

It’s a bit similar to a show on at the moment, where an eccentric old chap in a great coat wanders about London in the early 21st century in a blue police box with one companion and her family.

Does anyone remember when it was just the Doctor and his companion, and their mum and dad, in-laws, pets, and postman didn’t have to tag along in every other episode as well? Does anyone remember when the show was set in outer space, or on planets that didn’t happen to have a city called London or be set in the modern age?

Does anyone remember when this show was about adventure and living a life of days like crazy paving rather than having to be dragged back every other week to more mawkish bloody family clutter?