A scent of dust - a burning taste of fluff as an old heater’s turned on too quickly after being left off for far too long. that is the first thing i smell when i imagine being in your house. it’s winter, trees outside cut faces and nitrogen alike with cold wind-whipping scratches, but it’s warm inside your home. your mother is in the kitchen, humming, slicing pumpkins and listening to an opera - to a debate on radio 4. your father is in his office, dark and flanked in a tiny labyrinth of strange books and doing something i don’t understand that doesn’t grab me. your cheeks are cold, frostbitten when you come in, heavy woolen coat but no scarf. i want to have bought you a scarf, something snug about your warm constant pulse as it pounds a steady rythmn into the world, something to snag the scent of your living body as it moves through the nitrogen, through the scent of cooking, through the world. something to smell when you’re not looking, to bury my face in and inhale a hundred memories, and thousands more unborn. memories stitching together to form a life - events that didn’t happen in the past, could happen in the future, thoughts that knit into images in the present. i bury my face in the scarf i never bought you like an infant cub in the ruff of its mother’s warmth and pulse, a mother cradling the warm pulse of her animal infant. everything intertwined like woolen threads. i want to be a part of your world. i want to have been in your home from when i was a boy, scratched knees and muddy shins, to the age we are now, cuts healed into unseen scars. i want to come from a background, rather than a nowhere. i want to be part of the world. i hate people. i love people. i want to be a person because i am a nothing. i must be a nothing. i came from nothing - somewhere barren and breathless out there in the cold. i defined myself - patched together like a ragged scarf or patchwork coat, stitched with favourite snapshots of other people’s lives as i passed through them like cold unscented nitrogen. today i have painted myself with your sound of your mother’s colours. i feel the killer in me, restrained. there is that urge to taste, pounding at my molars, making me lick the bare bone of bared canines, involuntarily. i want to taste your life, your childhood, your mind. i want to taste you. i want to devour you, consume you, fill myself up with you and become a person through your genius, fat on kindred ideas that keep me lithe and young, constantly running.

And also the most creative I’ve been in this job.

I wonder if they all thought I was furiously taking notes.

I only just found out about the Patrick Wolf gig at the Union Chapel on the 19th December. After missing his appearance at Koko on the 3rd October whilst I was in Florence (a further holiday disaster which I will relate another time when I have the strength), I was naturally quite buzzy that all is not lost, and I finally get to go to one of those “intimate venues” that everyone raves about as being the best way to see him.

Imagine my surprise when I found out that my recent run of total sodding sucking bad luck in the realm of missed opportunities is still alive and well and stinking, and that tickets are totally sold out. Everywhere.

It’s a little bit poofy, I know, but I feel like bursting into petulant little tears.

Why do I seem to constantly miss out on everything now by a mere few infuritating days?

Oh well, at least I still have all my teeth and legs and eyes and such. Yay. Hurray for having teeth and legs and eyes. I think I’ll go home later and thank my lucky stars that I have teeth and legs and eyes. I might even use my legs to run home to brush my teeth and stare at something for hours on end to celebrate.

Whoopee.

To say these have been a difficult past few weeks - months even - would be an understatement.

To conclude that I was cursed, or had offended a major league entity in this small corner of the universe, or simply carried the vines sprouted from seeds of my own hubris about myself like manacles would not be mere paranoia.

To be fearful for the increasing consumption of my reason and intellect, cut dead by a fateful conjunction of rotten luck and long-nested neurological demons and eliminating with them my very ability and interest in self-expression would not be hysteria.

To be wary of once again putting pen to paper, fingertips to keyboard, nose to the grindstone would not be unreasonable.

To give in to Sleep would be to give in to Sleep’s brother, Death.

To quote someone else’s words rather than forge my own with still rusted tools - a favoured passage that has been trickling through my addled synapses for several days now between those pounding moments of adrenaline-soaked blood and long evenings of atrophic alcoholic indulgence and self punishment - this seems preferable.

I have to pick myself up out of the dirt again, not quite buried but a little deeper in the ground than before. I have to clean myself off, learn how to walk once more and carry on doing it. Walk back to the beach and down to the shore. Back into the water. The shark must keep swimming, no matter how old, tired, intoxicated or cut it has become.

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.