The air beyond the glass reeks of Samhain. The charge of gunpowder peppers the air as the season’s fireworks creep from hibernation. I imagine them crawling out of the rich chocolate mud from beneath a sea, tealike, of rotting leaves and crunching twigs, their snouts sniffing at the unburnt air before they shriek like banshees towards the stars, scorching the earth with sparks and smoke as they fly. I sit, hear, and smell the air, listen to the distant thud of reds, whites and blues creeping in from the cold between the gaps in the window. I sit here and my head is spinning in a mad, oxygen-high dance. And I’m going nowhere fast, the lyrics say, but it’s okay. It’s okay now. This is Samhain, Halloween, the eve of ghosts and spirits. This is the night of the dead, the end. This is the thirteenth card, poised inevitable between the magician and his trinity of cups, almost spilling their mulled wine in their eagerness for celebration. Nothing is eternal. Full moons now burn brighter than new ones ever did before, and magpies have taken the place of ginger cats. I see them everywhere, everyday. I see them watching me. Tonight is the eye of the storm, the last dance before the big push. This is the day I know things will begin to change. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I know that this is when it begins. I can feel it, as strongly as if the planet had shifted its poles. Again I smell fresh gunpowder in the air, like the last shot of a musket. Now there is only the silence. This is a war. This was a war. This will be war. Everything in our universe is in conflict, save for this one peaceful moment, breathing in the sway of a slow Autumn candle, glowing like a thousand suns before me in the dark confines of my manmade room as I stare, and stare, and stare, until the world beyond - its weather and their war - melts into one glorious nothingness, enveloping me in a breath.

Today you are ten thousand sunrises and ten thousand sunsets, ten thousand pirouettes around the Milky Way. I hope you never stop dancing.

This is really quite impressive as a piece of forward thinking. Unfortunately for me, it’s from an author I am particularly jealous of/frustrated with, but she’s clearly the only person in literature with the gravitas to pull it off. And indeed the balls.

Dumbledore doesn’t like girls.

A generation of children will now be growing up seeing just a few more things as normal, which means the usual psycho-loonies in the far right Christian Faculty Against Witchcraft and Buggeration will be denied many future acolytes to keep their vile pestilent philosophy of hate going.

Must… resist…. urge to praise…

This is the book where the precious things go. This is where I put love to grow mouldy, where I put lies told to loved ones to be forgotten about - to fade with time, blanched to inedible like asparagus left in dark cupboards for the rest of lives. This is where I put my dreams and fears, stapling their excitement and power to bored pages like hunting trophies, waiting for their blood to seep out and soak until they become just words on a page. This is where I put myself, where I tried to paint the childhood portrait that would age instead of me. This is where I lost myself, in a half finished game of hide-and-seek. This will be the only place left where anyone who looked could find me. Sometimes I hear their footsteps. Sometimes I hear their breath as they pause, hand reached out, taut with intent, pink with pulsing blood. But I, being only words upon a page, cannot call them in, cannot call for help. Cannot call. I listen instead to their footsteps as they turn and walk away, each sounding so like one another’s but peppered with the hint of something new. The scent lingers stronger than any portrait, long after they have gone. You can smell newness like an aphrodisiac in here, because this is the place where the trophies are stored - the lost pennies, the shed ungreyed hairs, the priceless precious dust. This is what happens to the things we call precious.

13:00 Wake up
v bad. should have been up earlier than this.

13:01 Get up. Try and remember if I’ve had any nightmares but can’t remember any.
v good.

13.03 Run bath. Have not washed in days since I went home to see my mum.
v good. Attempt small activities throughout the day that you can accomplish.

13:09 Stare at own reflection, trying to see a soul behind the eyes looking back at me. Cannot. Notice how my features just hang off my face when feeling empty inside. Feel like laughing. Do not.
v bad. You have not taken your pills yet.

13:15 Lie in bath. Listen to rain outside window. It’s like Grimsby outside. Grey. Oppressive. Relentless. Cold. Isolating. But fresh, cleansing. Consider the phrase ‘pathetic fallacy’. Feel warm water irradiating my dirty skin, fragmenting dirt and grime with near-intolerable laser blasts of heat. Think about oblivion. Imagine every cell in my body fragmenting like the dirt - dissolving, crumbling, melting. Feel calm as I listen to the rain.
v bad. If you had taken your pills you would be feeling better by now.

13:46 Towel self dry. Do not like this towel. It is of pour/poor? quality and leaves little bits of itself all over me like fragments of shedded wormskin. Brush teeth. Put on freshly washed white dressing gown and feel clean.
good. Pills?

14:04 Self-awareness: Sit down to finish Housing Benefit Form. Realise instead that I am 9978 days old today. Feel the necessity to do my washing up soon. Realise I have missed Deal or No Deal. Realise I had to think about what my name was. Think about my mum instead and hope she’s okay.

14:14 Sniff the rain. It has no smell.
You still have not taken your pills.

14:16 Play Midnight Radio from Hedwig and the Angry Inch. No lights on and the storm makes it dark. Just the music and the rain.
What do you mean you don’t have any pills?

14:20 Have a cigarette and listen to the rain. Realise don’t want to dirty white dressing grown or make it smell of smoke, so pull on a pair of jeans and a t shirt. The jeans are still damp from the washing machine. I wear them anyway. Continue smoking. Listen to Wicked Little Town. The door’s open and it’s cold but I’m used to it.
What do you mean you don’t take them?

14:38 Acceptance: Feel sick of feeling like this, all the time, just when I start to feel better. Do not know of any other way to feel. Feel nothing. Listen to the rain.
You wouldn’t feel like this if you went to the doctor and got some pills.

14:42 Attempt to do housing benefit form.

15:22 Finish form and collect necessary papers. Speak to a very nice woman at Haringey Council who talks to me like I’m a human being, and not a phone call she needs to make before she can go home. She says I can take it into the housing office rather than risk the postal strike.
You really should consider taking them, you know.

15:28 Leave house. Dress like a person and take my umbrella. I do not open it. I let the rain wash my hair and trickle down my face as I walk to Crouch End through sedate suburban terraces. I still do not feel cold.

17:17 Resolve: Home. Feel better for having gone out. Do not think about tomorrow. I am getting better. I will get better.
I give up.

“Is this going to go on much longer?”
“Less than I knew, more than I expected.”
“I can’t believe he chose this.”
“Why?”
“It’s a tragedy. A tragedy.”
“Such a waste.”
“Blimey, I haven’t seen him in years. Hasn’t he got fat?”
“Do you think he’s watching us? Do you think he’s laughing his arse off?”
*silence*
“I can’t imagine what it must be like.”
“Are you okay?”
“Angry. I feel angry. It’s so stupid and senseless and so typically like him.”
“I need a drink.”
“Milking it, much?”
“Makes you think I guess.”
“No.”
“Yeah, thanks a bunch.”
“He just wanted to be loved for fuck’s sake, why was that so fucking scary to him?”
“I didn’t really know him.”
“Someone’s going to have to sort it all out.”

As a result of my belligerent disinterest in the world of fashion, I’ve been entirely ignorant of the fact that Little Wolfie has now been moonlighting as the new Kate Moss for the past four months.

As part of Burberry’s new campaign to demonstrate their clothes aren’t entirely for Victoria Beckham and people who want a weekend alternative to manmade fibre, Patrick Wolf, Edward Larrikin (then fresh from the sadly late Larrikin Love), Agyness Deyn and a handful of other people that to be honest I haven’t heard of have been appearing in magazines and on billboards all over the capital since June. Shows you how much I get out these days. I’d imagine that using famous musicians is the industry’s way of bringing the label “back to the people”. Oh Fashion, you cunning thing.

Beth found the above in a magazine left on the tube. I do like his coat, though am sad to see that retro military clothing has now, inevitably, hit the high street stores.

Fashion: n. The art of raiding the bins of yesterday, scraping the vomit off its discarded items, and charging ten times as much on account of your having added an extra button.