clinging to the wreckage

  In life I have chosen not to have children and I have spent all of my life being extremely careful to avoid having them. I have also never wanted to marry (although I did for a few years due to love with geographical complications). I never felt a desire, or pull, to buy a house. I see a progressive city as one in which there is public transport, bicycle paths, and places to walk. It is incredible to me that people claim: ‘you must find someone and settle down, get married, have kids, buy a house.’ If that is what you sincerely want, great. However, if you don’t feel any desire for these things, there is nothing wrong with that choice. I have devoted my life to travelling, music, literature, study, and work. My incessant travelling, and moving to different countries, means that buying a house always seemed like too much of a commitment to me. The more I read about renting versus buying, the more I believe that the house market is bordering on a scam and that buying is equal to op...

  At 3am I am drifting around the apartment like Banquo’s ghost, awake and not so much alive. I stand at the balcony door and look across at the apartments on the other side of the swimming pool… some have bright lights on. Why do they have bright lights on at 3am? I watch for a while, but nothing moves, no one moves. The tenants clearly thought it a good idea to leave a light on while they went away, but instead of leaving a dim lamp or a low-lit light on, they left the main dazzlingly bright light on, the one that I never use because it makes me feel sad and empty due to an association with final goodbyes. Getting back into bed, I finally fall asleep just as I start thinking of giving up and making a cup of coffee. The dreams that came were not comforting. I was trying to get to the 11 th  floor of a building… I do not know if it was a hotel, an office, or my apartment building, but all of the elevators were out of order, there were no stairs, and some strange form of taxi k...

  Is it a new beginning… or the beginning of the end? It’s a New Year and yet, on some level, it feels like I am suffocating. On the one hand, I am starting to deeply love literature once again, as I have all of my life, but it is renewed, and I am reading and writing more. On the other hand, I feel as if I am not bringing much value or receiving much love in other areas of life. Therefore, I focus on quiet… and the beauty of the written word. It never fails to fascinate me that people feel a sensitivity that is deep enough to want to capture the daily moments of life. Not in the way most films do… in films it seems there always has to be a terrible tragedy to work around, I rarely see films that are just about life and the day to day and people trying to find meaning in the banal. This can be found everywhere in literature, because the writing style, the words, the thoughts… they make it beautiful even if it is just describing a brief walk through the city or next to a river. Ther...

I recall the way that she would lean to fill up the kettle for us to make tea in the office. It was unusual… awkward. And it was loveable, like everything that she did. I’d walk to the kitchen behind her and feel amused, and enamoured, by the way she walked. It was like a catwalk model, but slower… and she was funky (in the true sense of the word, not the modern American distortion). She had balance and elegance and style and grace. And yet she was clumsy. It was hilarious and beautiful. Being French, she didn’t put milk into tea or coffee, but as I told her how we drank it in England, she started to try it… and she liked it. Thus, I would make two cups of tea with a little milk and quarter a spoon of sugar. The connection was magical and inexplicable. It was something at a biological level… possibly based on smell or something else. Alas, it was not to be. She was engaged and had a son… and another would soon be on the way. The friendship remains to this day, but it is fragile and int...

            There’s not enough time… there’s not enough time to read and write everything that one wants to. When the Covid pandemic came along at the end of 2019 and caused a lockdown in 2020, it gave us something of a warning… a lesson and a warning and an opportunity. A lesson in how to slow down and stop being so stupid. A warning that things could be much worse. An opportunity to change and to make things so much better. We were offered the opportunity to carve out a work/life balance, to stop filling the roads with traffic, to avoid complicated social situations that filling offices with people forced together brings. An opportunity to be more productive and more creative, freeing time to read and write whilst also working effectively. I used to spend the time I had previously spent commuting reading books (I commuted on a bus and couldn’t read due to severe motion sickness). I would spend my lunch break reading or walking whereas, before, in the offi...

  The first day of the year was inevitably littered with a hangover. Nevertheless, at midday, after a walk around the lake in the freezing air, I went out to have lunch with a couple of ice-cold beers at a Mexican restaurant. I went home and lay on the couch to read and watch some English football, but the feelings of despair started to arrive as I did so. A friend of mine had asked if I wanted to have dinner with her and, after initially saying that I wasn’t sure due to my hangover, I agreed to meet her. It helped to spend time with someone who has had more than their fair share of tragedies and sorrows, and it was fascinating to listen to her talk about some of her dark moments. Fascinating and sad. It made me wonder how many people out there are in that dark place… suffering due to loss or, in many cases, something even worse than loss such as being in an abusive and hateful relationship in which one feels like a prisoner living in terror and fear and hopelessness. During the pa...