Keeping it simple this time.

For sale: One burnt out type 3 novelist: Leto model. No longer remotely top of the range but these models are proving increasingly popular with collectors, and is still just about functional at benchmark level. Details below.

HARDWARE:

FIRMWARE AND ADDITIONAL DETAILS:

KNOWN DESIGN FLAWS:

All offers considered. Buyer accepts Paypal, cash and lager.

A bittersweet moment in any writer’s life.

I do wish I’d got my postcard back though. If any one happens to be passing through Granville Island Market in Vancouver any time soon, please go and see the mad postcard woman in the mall for me. It’s the black and white photo of the little girl, clutching a pig and laughing. You’d make it into my will (assuming you’re the sort of person who feels they could benefit from a collection of broken watches and a few fuzzy videos of Star Trek: The Next Generation taped off the TV. Still, it’s possibly still a fair exchange for a postcard.)

I keep looking at the letter and feeling perhaps inappropriately excited. I feel like I should be ticking something off a list, or running a line through the agent’s name with a big fat black marker pen. As Adrian Mole said on receiving the response to his first submission, “it’s a very nice rejection letter.”

Here I am, approaching thirty, with only hayfever, a second edition De Profundis and the perpetual elusion of Du Temps Perdu to my name. Now I have lost even my former self’s guilt over my newfound indolence, I spend most of my time sleeping, avoiding the outside world and its pollens, lamenting self-denied cigarettes and alcohol with a face buried in duvets and pillows, too new to be home to fussy old fashioned dust mites.

So what did I do tonight? How did I struggle to escape stagnancy today? I tried to turn back the clock. It was surely an urge from my subconscious itself.

I opened the drawer, the top left of four each labelled in a language few would understand. This is the Drawer of Time. This is the drawer where my collection of watches lives - pockets, fobs, wrists and clocks.

I took each box out, one by one, and inspected its contents. The battery powered masonic watch no longer ticks. The battery has died. I saw no point in winding the demi-hunter brass number I bought in Camden - the crown does not release properly once you’ve pushed it and you can’t set the time. The battery in my backwards watch is dead, as is that in the silver Alpine watch bought in Vancouver. The first watch I ever bought - the one that regulated the synchronicity of the universe, remains broken, overwound. There are others, absent, but I forget their locations. ‘They’ll be around here somewhere’. ‘They’ll turn up in the end’. I wound my great grandfather’s gold watch, and several others, and put them back in their boxes.

I should have stopped there.

I should have stopped because I had forgotten about one of the most precious watches I own. It was given to me, years ago. The two of us had been standing looking in an antiques shop window in a market in Angel, and a pretty little pocketwatch had caught my eye. That Christmas, I opened my presents it had been bought for me. I remember instantly crying with happiness when I saw it, overcome in one of those rare moments where the certainty of being important to someone hits you, unexpected, and almost winds you with the purity and strength of its sincerity. I had an urge to wind it up, to bring its arms to life again, and did.

I really, really should have just left it there.

After I took a brief joy in listening to its steady, tiny heartbeat, I then set the time. Of course, because I’m stupid, I had forgotten that this was a proper watch, an antique for Christ’s sake. For Christ’s sake. I had forgotten that this watch, bought for me by someone who wanted me to know how much they loved me, was not like the cheap junk I buy in Camden on those very rare occasions when I have more ten pound notes than sense. You set the time in a very different way. Failing to notice, or indeed remember, the quiet evident button set into the seam of the watch’s face, I pulled at the crown, gently at first, and then firmly. For reasons known only to my stupidity, and perhaps my self hatred, I pulled harder.

The crown then spat out across the floor, and the stem, ripped from the watch’s innards, catapulted over the carpet with it.

All time stopped moving as I realised what I’d done.

Like a gesture of ignorance to complement the idiocy, I replaced the stem, and the crown, and set the watch, properly this time, to the correct time. When I checked on the watch an hour or so later, I was relieved to find that I could still wind it by the way I’d replaced the stem. My heart sank however when I realised that the hands had not moved since I set them. Through thoughtlessness and coincidence, I had created another carcass of myself - an object once of love and importance that now merely ticks without fulfilling its purpose.

I’d broken it.

Not content with destroying my most valuable timepiece (in both monetary and sentimental terms), my subconscious evidently decided to have a pop at the universe. Almost two years to the day since I fatefully scarred fate onto its outer face - the gold watch from Vancouver - I had an ill advised attempt to replace its inner one with that on the left.

I succeeded only in snapping the arms from the mechanism.

Having destroyed not only one of my most prized possessions but also one of my crafted avatars for the universe in only a few minutes, the universe got its own back by striking me down with crippling stomach pains - either that or my stomach just got tired of all the hayfevery goo I’m no doubt swallowing in my sleep.

My head then began to swim with quite human concepts - silly tellurian preoccupations of comfort, pain, pleasure and contact. The other watches still litter the top of my chest of drawers, nameless and without portfolio now that both fate and sentimentality have been broken. Severed. And yet, unseen in the drawer, I can still hear something ticking. I imagine its arms slowly arcing in blissfully ordered movement.

Boxes, watches, drawers and dark places. And even now as I’ve been writing this, it is already tomorrow. All of this is already in the past now.

I’ve only just read that Michael Rosen has been chosen as the Children’s Poet Laureate.

I’m surprised it hadn’t happened sooner. The man has a quite Dahl-like quality to him in capturing eloquently the sort of world that children love to live in, namely a world that largely involves things like bogies, puke, dog poo and making a mess at dinner time. I was lucky enough to meet him when I was no more than about 7, and he visited my primary school in Chiswick to give us a brief talk on what poetry was. I still remember this very tall, floppy haired man with big feet arriving late, much to the relief and then delight of the assembled female teachers, and plod gleefully to the front of the gym hall where we were all sitting crossed-legged and patient. There he performed what I can only describe as ’stand up for kids’ - a mix of poems and stories that I can still remember a few of to this day. It is one of perhaps three happy memories I have from my first primary school.

Those of you who missed out on this charmingly anarchic man as part of a staple childhood diet should really try and get hold of a copy of his recent collection Carrying The Elephant, which recounts, amongst other things, the sudden death of his eighteen year old son. Having grown up reading his silly titles such as Hairy Tales and Nursery Crimes, I wasn’t quite prepared for how moving this recent collection would prove to be, and it made me fall in love with his work again in a very different way, about fifteen years after I discovered it for the first time.

I am a drug addict. At night I lie in bed, too hot to sleep. My head pounds, my clammy skin itches and burns. I can’t breathe. If I sleep my first thought when I wake is of nothing else but reaching for my drugs - the idea of going another minute without them too terrifying to consider. One pill popped and I know it will make me better. I think it will make me better. I hope it will make me better.

I know, deep down, that it makes no difference at all.

So my eyes go a little less red. So my mind clears long enough for me to remember where the bathroom is or that human society requires people to answer their front door clothed. The symptoms always come back in an hour or so, just when you think they’ve gone away. Just when you think you’ve had your last sneeze. This is the curse of the summer, and I am finally becoming a vampire. I am allergic to the outside world.

There are two types of people in this world - people who get hayfever, and people who wonder what people with hayfever make such a fuss about. I’ve been both. I never used to get this contemptible little affliction until two years ago, when it suddenly appeared from nowhere, like a visit from an unwanted relative. I remember walking through Tavistock Square, where huge clumps of pollen, seeds and other such vile treebits were in quite visible swarm. They said that year many people spontaneously developed hayfever who had no such allergy before. This is a war, and many fell that summer in nature’s devastating attack on day to day life; days that live on in infamy. It is intolerable, and like vampirism and unemployment, is insidious in its conspiracy to stop you living any sort of normal life during daylight. Oh, how I press my snotty nose against the window and watch the normal children at play! How I long to enjoy a glass of wine and a cigarette; how I crave being able to taste my food!

Having since tried what feels like every drug on the market in the space of only two summers, from the budget to the not so Tesco Value, I have found only two things that make any real difference (remembered from my days as a budding teenage hedgewitch). I here share these with anyone else so similarly suffering. First, honey. Ideally locally made, but a spoonful of honey works wonders for a tickly throat. Honey is an excellent natural antihistamine, and local honey is of course made from the very little bastards who are doing this to you in the first place. Of course, not all of us live in a Miss Marple novel so finding something made locally isn’t always a possibility. For those of you not accustomed to weekly village fetes (thank you, oh, thank you twee and middle class Highgate), any sort of honey should still work very well, but the thickly set stuff is the best. Secondly, sage. Ideally fresh, but even dried sage will do. Chew it with gum or put it in tea. Sage is a brilliant decongestant. I don’t know about anyone else, but in large amounts it also gives me a slightly Zennish feeling, so there is the added bonus of being able to alarm your family and friends with your unnerving aura of calm. I often just combine the two and make tea out of dried sage, stirring in plenty of honey.

This is a really horrible condition. I just want to stamp my feet a lot of the time and have a petulant little sulk at how unfair this all is. I’ve waited months for summer, and now I can’t go outside because the flowers are flocking, Hitchcock-style. I can’t even stay inside because my hayfever is now branching out into the dust mite market, and I need fresh air more and more. I suppose the only alternative is to not breathe at all, or wait until I evolve into some genus of aquatic bathbound homosexual. Or move to Alaska.