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.

I always knew my humanity would get in the way.

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.

Today on an ultimately insignificant little black-red website, far out in the uncharted backwaters of an unfashionable corner of the internet, the ugly face of humanity again puffed up its lungs to speak. The self-appointed literati once again opened their mouths, and by doing so only strengthened the case for the defense.

On the pertinent thread of conversation, this wasn’t about whether a musician decides to keep performing or not. On the fatuous, this wasn’t even about whether Mika is worth listening to, though, perhaps much to the surprise of my usual tastes, I think he is. I even, much more to my surprise, really like a recent Take That song. When I first went to university, I was amazed by how everyone there just listened to whatever they wanted without being judged for it. There was suddenly no longer any schoolyard notion of what was cool and what was sad. There was no pack mentality for once. It was crazy being an individual for four years.

No. This wasn’t about any of that. The hot air belching about the virtual cyber-never room only highlighted a really horrible aspect of the society we live in and reminded me of something only increasingly evident. We don’t celebrate success in this country, if not the world. We just take vulture-like glee in its failure. We don’t try to empathise or understand the motives for anything when it happens. We just judge whatever the cause may have been by its ultimate and immediately visible effect. It’s so much easier to get a quick witty remark in when you don’t have to think about whether it’s true or not.

Everyone’s got an opinion these days.

And I’m not completely ignorant of several hypocrises I seem to be demonstrating here myself, such as making a blog into a soapbox, or that all too familiar line “everytime a friend succeeds I die a little”. Nor am I ignorant of my own recent ignorance regarding an erroneous report in the papers involving a man, a camcorder, a garden fence and a nude woman that I wasted no time in turning into a snide little teatime anecdote of my own without properly checking the motives, circumstances or indeed facts.

Like I said, everyone’s got an opinion these days.

But university is not the real world, anyone will tell you that. It’s less real than a forum on the internet. It’s probably naive to think you can just do your own thing and people will love you for it, so it must be foolhardy to expect people to understand when someone gets frustrated with it all. We live in a society where creativity is judged on one thing alone - how it can be sold. The reason why criticism is so important to an artist is because it’s so powerful. It’s dangerous. It has the ability to create or destroy an artist as an artist would himself create or destroy ideas. A moth can’t resist a flame. Society tells us that any artist must know how to market themselves now, or what more often happens is that an artist must become what they’re marketed to be, in order to be considered successful. Apparently. It’s not good enough to create a masterpiece if you haven’t got a marketing strategy or publicity plan to take it somewhere. You’re only as good as They say you are. If you can’t live in the market, then you’re not an artist.

Evidently.

So good luck, Patrick (and good luck Mika too). Keep the music for yourself or sing the tunes they want you to. This is the choice all artists must ultimately, then continually make.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I must return to my synopsis. They say it’s impossible to market a story to anyone without it.

I should know. Aeschylus told me.

Someone downstairs is drilling into the wall. I lie back on the mattress and try not to imagine it’s my head being bored into, the shrill scream of metal on plaster resonating through bone and wood alike. This is a Tuesday. Who am I today? I have a become Tuesday. Remember, not all calls will be successful but every call will be charged. Uncertainty flares again upon my belly and I tear off another few layers of skin without a second thought. Suddenly, with the call of an unseen bird commander from the other side of the window, the drill ceases, and the burning stops. The world inside the prison falls entirely silent, and even the leaves beyond the glass cease their slow bobbing dance out of respect for everything that remains trapped within - clawed at, bored at, but never breaking the thinnest of barriers.

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.

Nice touch.

Go to the above and scroll down until you can see the comments from one of my latest MySpace buddies.

Looks like a trustworthy sort of bloke, don’t you think? Certainly no pratt, and his career looks like it’s worth traken.

Sorry.

As usual, I rarely take the time to appreciate what’s on my doorstep.

At university, I walked to and from my first year lectures down a quiet little country path flanking a sprawling rapeseed field of swaying yellows and greens, barely pausing to even look and think “oh, that’s nice.” In second year I lived right beside the links of the spectacularly bleak West Sands beyond the famous R&A golf course. I can count on one hand the amount of times I went there. In my last two years I lived in the perfectly decrepit Gatty next to East Sands. At the end of every year this became the most popular place in St Andrews for families with their screaming kids, barking dogs, and not very clever but painfully pretty young students who liked to take their tops off a lot. I visited this place more often, mostly in Summer. Late at night I would stand on the end of the old pier and stare into nothingness just listening to the sound of the sea. Sometimes at around 4am I would walk out amongst the rock pools, and sit with just the purple sea and pink sky for company, watching the sunrise. But on each of the few occasions I took the time to do it, I scolded myself for not doing it enough.

But today I am happy. After finally knuckling down to the much loathed synopsis of the deeply protracted (and quite loquacious) novel, I treated myself to a lunch time stroll in Highgate Wood, armed with only some tobacco, a Cherry Coke and a dark chocolate Bounty. It occurred to me that I’ve never really seen the colour green before. Not really. The leaves in the wood are so brilliant, so vibrant. When I realised from the local parents’ looks that I’d been staring at a tree long enough to apparently alarm them into thinking I was simply waiting for an opportunity to snatch their gremlin children from them, I quickly left the human path and found a clearing with long logs for benches. It was a nice little patch, not far from the bare bones of a makeshift teepee someone had apparently lost interesting in completing. The clearing looked like the sort of place King Arthur would sit to rub his bunions after a battle, or a where a modest Wiccan ritual had taken place days before. There I sat. I rolled a cigarette, drank my Cherry Coke and ate my dark chocolate Bounty bar, and watched the squirrels, the flies and a tiny green caterpillar that was crawling across my knee. I even took my hat off.

Afterwards I found an impromptu pet cemetery, or memorial park. There were two ‘graves’ there. One for Toby, whose name had been craved into an oak stump with photos of the red haired chap, noted only with a date in October last year, and ‘7 weeks and five days before Toby died.” The other, a terrier, had only two photos - one of the dog, and one of him with his owner by the fountain in snow, and a quote above them both:

The one absolutely unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him, the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous, is his dog. A man’s dog stands by him in prosperity and in poverty, in health and in sickness. He will sleep on the cold ground,where the wintry winds blow and the snow drives fiercely, if only he may be near his master’s side. He will kiss the hand that has no food to offer, he will lick the wounds and sores that come in encounter with the roughness of the world. He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince. When all other friends desert, he remains…

I thought it was time to go home, so I did. Fortunately the families and their screaming children had had the same idea several minutes before. As I left I passed a lady with her labrador. We exchanged smiles. I even gave her dog a smile too.

I like Highgate Wood. I had a good day.