Back only five minutes, I kick over another mound without realising, trampling the crazy paving of the undone. The Road to Hell. The half-finished, half-started journal entries and half-read books. Unfinished chapters and half eaten plates of food; plates and chapters staling together in the gardenshed air. This is London, where I could just as easily have kicked over an old woman. I stare at thy which has not been done, and my bed like a whore on tap perched despotically above it all. Slow sad breath.

This is a war.

It all looks exactly like the peoplechaos I encountered when I stepped off the train. An Asti bubble bursting into the bigger bubble of the surface. The world. Broken bubbles puffing air at the universe. London is more anonymous than ever.

People scream across its paving with silent heavy footsteps. Not Tom, Dick, Harry or Harriet. Just people. Just Tomdickandharry. A sea where everyone is sludged together. A boiling pot of coffee, custard, beef, liquorice, bean sprouts and honey; a sickly adrenaline goo of loneliness, alcohol, money, terror and frustration. Is this really my home? This great hungry mouth, this vomit, this violence? Away for only a week I can now see its teeth, hidden behind the shale, the rain and the neon - all decayed, uncleaned and stained with indulgence and neglect alike in another unhappy marriage of convenience.

Are you happy?

Exiled from saltwater all over again, I pretend I’m back on the train, pulling a coat I no longer own over me and staring out at vistas through Mona Lisa glass. Reflected over the sea like an oil slick and beneath hair clipped in a receding pique I see my face - my baggy eyes, two day stubble and chapped bitten lips. I watch the sea. I see my face. I look at the clouds. I see my face. I try and read the names of stations, shops and sidestreets as they whizz past like bad decisions, again and again and again. I see only my eyes trying to take it all in, desperate, clumsy, failing.

By London I see nothing. Saltwater, seabreeze and sunsets become McDonalds, pavement and traffic lights. My face bobs in the Tesco Value soup of other faces, all dilated pupils and trackmark smiles. This neon drug doesn’t work anymore. There is clarity only after that inevitable next hit. London. London London London. We can’t go on like this, London. We just don’t talk anymore, London. You know I’ll always love you, London. I think one of us should move out, London.

Our absence was my language.

Concrete. Concrete after the rain, or just before it. It’s hard, and damp, and coarse, and cold, and pale. Colour is sluiced out of everything. Your vision throbs and spins from the lack of summer. The whole world has gone World War II documentary. No vaseline-lensed laughter here. No thunder overhead, but thunder isn’t the scary part. It’s the anticipation of it. Just concrete. Walking, or at a bus stop - every limb in your body aching, and your mind tries to make sense of the world through the grey, through the fatigue. Your heart pounds because it knows there will be thunder. At any moment. You try to think of something calming - seaside, ocean. Your brain crumbles and fails. Too big. Smaller. You think of a lake - serene, calm, peaceful, quiet. But you can’t. The lake is grey and freezing and shale cuts the sky overhead. Suddenly you’re in a boat and unseen boots kick it from the shore. Big heavy brutal and black - the kind that crack bones or kick boats. You’re adrift in the lake, shivering in a cold and lonely abeyance. No oars. There’s nothing you can do. Just sit it out. Sit it out and hope some benevolent current brings you back. Sit it out and hope it doesn’t thunder. Breathe. Breathe. Close your eyes and breathe.

Or so they say. I remember Roger Mellie inventing one of these years ago on Tomorrow’s World. If you’re a bit perplexed as to what this is, then it does become more obvious the further down you scroll.

My only question is, as usual, why? Why? Is this for the congenitally lazy or the impossibly busy? Either way I’ll add it to my list of reasons for why I remain eternally perplexed by self-loving rich wankers.

I’m clearly a proper writer now.

Having so far totted up two whole rejection letters in as many months (with another six no doubt on the way after tomorrow’s trip to the post office) I am now receiving what appears to be personally targeted spam. Twice in fact.

Aside from the tiny oversight that I don’t actually live in the US (though I did once enjoy a very pleasant breakfast there), my Wotalotov Detector started sounding when I looked up the sender’s domain and found only a parking page. In Spanish. I then looked up the link that was subtly suggested throughout the email (actually it was about as subtle as a BNP Party Political Broadcast) and was naturally astounded to discover there was no contact address, phone number or even email offered. Anywhere. Just a lot of very encouraging suggestions to part with $125 for their excellent service.

A quick Google revealed this from an apparently similarly minded cynic. But scroll down and you receive a post singing its praises. More carefully placed false advertising? Much of what I find on Google is pretty much dismissive as a standard.

It’s not that I’m remotely considering parting with $125 (like I can even afford to). I’m just a bit uncertain what to think of the email. I’m only used to hearing from very reputable Nigerian business men who want me to help them transfer funds. If this is indeed a legal, albeit slightly insincere self-publishing veneer, then why use so many different and reputable domains to forward the email?

Junk mail gets more intelligent all the time. I miss the good old days when all I got was credit card offers at (insert ludicrous %) APR.

When I first read the following it profoundly affected me.

There are times, such as now, when I still pick it up and read it, over and over. It’s surely one of the most bleak and horrific letters ever written. But why do the words bring a sort of comfort, albeit damp and gnawing? Maybe comfort is the wrong word.

Perhaps it’s simply the frustration, the hopelessness, and yet the indefatigable effort to do something about it, even if it is ominously final and fatal. Perhaps it’s the familiarity of each line, bleak and plain though they may be, and their struggle to give form and expression to a mind that has become incapable of it. Perhaps it’s simply because in her attempt to explain her hopelessness, the very act of writing it is a sort of manifestation of hope.

Putting order to chaos is, fundamentally, a very human endeavour. Yet all human endeavour can only come to one thing. That’s the tragedy of it all, and the brilliance at the same time, because every day is a stance against the inevitable. Even the smallest act - even our final words - is about making our mark against fate.

This is a war.

I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.

I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.