Starve yourself. Eat words.
Chasing cattle invites just
faith to be misplaced.

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.

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.

The big plans for la vita nuova had to go on hold, briefly. After I left work I had to fast for three days. I don’t remember ever having been so hungry. I get very tetchy when I’m hungry, very tetchy indeed. I’ve never eaten at set times, just when I’m hungry - always have done. So ignoring the screaming in every cell for nutrition was almost as bad as having to ignore the obligatory screaming child on any Great Western train journey. The result of this preoccupation meant that instead of focusing my new found freedom on spinning out masterpieces or pestering agents, I was unable to do anything other than sit around the house working my way through an entire season of Battlestar Galactica whilst drinking water and more soup than I ever want to see again.

This fasting was not self enforced, though it was a choice, of sorts. I had a hospital appointment on Thursday that I’d been stressing over since late last year, quietly lingering in the background, permeating the anxiety behind every little catastrophe and crisis as all insidious coups to order begin. I found out only after the appointment that the sedation they gave me is from the same family as rohypnol. It’s a weird experience knowing that I was conscious and responsive for half an hour, but have absolutely zero recollection of it. There’s this gap between the doctor telling me he was now administering the sedative, and suddenly ‘waking up’ back on the ward, all hazy like a hangover without the headache. I’ve never had amnesia before, unless you count that time I saw The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy at the cinema of course, but that was self-induced.

But, I’m not dead yet. I don’t have cancer (this is a Good Thing™), despite the recent alarming symptoms and its growing momentum as a fashionable way of bowing out in my family as of late. The news wasn’t a great surprise as I didn’t really expect to have it, but what with so many of my family recently, well, sort of dying, my doctor agreed that it was best to get it checked out. As is always the case with my medical melodramas, I was naturally absolutely fine, and they could provide no explanation for my earlier malady. Typical, always happens. Power of the Slayer an’ all that. I’m a medical freak, and I’m not talking about the two hearts and respiratory bypass system (though that did briefly baffle the nurse who was measuring my pulse rate). Just in case however, I had already (and finally) decided on what my last words would be: “Patrick Wolf doesn’t wear any pants.” Ha, I knew it.

But look at these! Look at my little babies:

I feel like a mother blackbird, gently nudging her offspring towards the edge of the nest, anxiously waiting to see if they’ll sink or soar; or a wartime factory owner, surveying his new arsenal of bombs ready to be dropped over some unsuspecting country. I think I prefer the blackbird metaphor, but there’s a quiet potency in the latter about the sheer psychological weight of what I’m about to release into the world.

2007 is The Year. This Is A War, and though I hate ever having to be dependent on anyone, the last few days are just another in a long line of few days that I couldn’t have got through without the tireless love and support of my friends. The Battle Of The Ninety Pages will surely turn the tide one way or another.

was not playing. Nor Bittersweet Symphony or any other other happy-clappy ditty I’d always imagined hearing on walking out of the office for the last time.

If anything, the only song I heard was Land’s End, imagined all tube journey home, with the clatter of the northern line making a clumsy percussion to the unheard plucking of strings. Life’s now all about having nothing but a green tent and a violin at the moment, or whatever metaphor you want to use.

And don’t it seem like too long a time
Since you were sweating in the streetlight?

The office raised a glass to the disappearing administrator, and he made a brief but grateful speech. It may surprise most people to hear that I actually hate being the centre of attention. It makes me overwhelmingly self-conscious and I spout utter rubbish in a whiny sort of voice that sounds not only incredibly gay, but also a little like Willow in Buffy as she delivers an insufferably cute line. There was wine but I can’t drink. I was offered piza, but I couldn’t have eaten it - nothing but delicious scraps of boiled chicken and luxurious cups of Bovril for me. Mmn mmmmn. In the end I cracked and grabbed a glass of red wine and asked Con to join me in my Ready Room (the car park) for a cigarette. Doctors, what do they know? Towards the end of the day I was wandering around the office clutching my wine whilst everyone sat hunched over their screens still tapping away. I felt like a cross between a Bourgeois millowner and a lost party guest they didn’t quite know what to do with. I quite like the latter, I might make that my new personality.

As I said in response to a very lukewarm and arbitrary goodbye via email from someone who I’ve worked with for the past two and a half years, “second star to the right, and straight on till morning…”

Everything you’re sure of is up for change

… because tomorrow I once again wake up as just a boy called Ben who’s chasing adventures and living on chance.

And dry toast and Tesco value beans.

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.

Things you don’t imagine yourself saying to the mother of all bees, that’s trapped itself in your bedroom:

“Hello. I have no intention of hurting you. Please don’t sting me when I put this large plastic cup over you. And please don’t do any sudden buzzing or fly at me because that really scares me.”

“Oh no, oh goodness no, please don’t do that.”

“You’re doing that throbby thing with your abdomen, aren’t you? I’m annoying you aren’t I? Please don’t sting me.”

“[Frantic buzzing] I can see you’re becoming agitated. [Even more frantic buzzing] Let’s just calm down and talk about this..?”

This thing was enormous. I’ve only seen bigger closer to the equator. It had droned on in through the smallest of gaps in the open window and was contentedly strolling around my kamidana, until it ultimately decided that my oil burner was a nice spot for a picnic. The significance of where it landed (and where it proceeded to stay for the next three nail-biting hours until my fear grew strong enough that I could ferment it into resolve) made me wonder if it was a sort of scary black and yellow omen of sorts, so I had a quick flick through my books. The only conclusion I could come to was that I wish I hadn’t taken issue with my namby-pamby wicca books and gotten rid of them to begin collecting the more hardcore occult stuff, so a quick google yielded this.

So it seems I’m in for either a visitor or some luck. I could use some of the latter, but it doesn’t state how long you can leave the bee there for before you can start claiming points. This isn’t a B&B (haha, bee and bee… sorry), and getting rid of my fear at the time seemed preferable to gaining luck.

And anyway, why is it that insects can always find the smallest of access points into a house, but can’t find so much as a huge gaping open window to get back out again. I think they just like turning up, making a lot of noise and unsettling everyone.

Maybe Margarita Pracatan is a bee.

I get intensely irritated by people who just dismiss something out of hand, before they’ve even given it a chance. I’m infuriated in particular by fussy eaters, but particularly ones who decide they don’t like something without having ever even tried it -

“Ooh, sushi! Yuk! Don’t like the idea of that! Horrible stuff!”
“The idea? So you haven’t tried it? Then how do you know it’s horrible?”
“Well, it’s raw fish isn’t it?”

That said however, this looks like the biggest pile of shit since Nellie the Elephant went out on the town with the girls and ended up at the Light of Raj curry house on vindaloo night.

Please leave this poorly beloved and tired corpse to rest in peace. Stop digging it up and screwing every last gold tooth out of it. The idea is about as original as anything with Matt Le Blanc in it and, if certain rumours prove true, won’t even be as well “acted”.