2001-12-03 - 4:40 p.m.

�Twenty nine pearls in your kiss, a singing smile, Coffee and lilac skin, your flame in me�I�m only here for this moment�I know everybody here wants you, I know everybody here thinks he needs you��

This morning I booked my train ticket to my parents� for Christmas. Well, I say �train� � it seems to be more of a train-bus-horse drawn vegetable cart kind of combination, as every part of the rail network bar its pricing structure seems to have regressed to a commercial point just after the Neolithic period. I half expected to have to barter manual labour for my ticket, or pay in groats or wildfowl. I haven�t been home in, for me, a long time � last spring, in fact. It�s been a fairly conscious resistance, given that every time I�m there, I have to vociferously defend my continued insistence on living at the other end of the country with no visible means of support. And last time, people were still actually buying my writing, so now the stakes are well and truly raised.

People from my town aren�t really supposed to leave and live the life of a jobless chancer in the capital. We�re really meant to settle down with Nicola or Sandra (or, for those with olfactory ambivalence, Annette) from school and work in middle management on the rubber tubing production line or the fucking munitions factory (I kid you not) or if you have an unexplained urge to �help� people, maybe the state sponsored ambition reduction unit that goes under the collective moniker of secondary school teaching. Yeah, sign me up for 40 years of those suckers.

And I don�t feel superior when I go back, just defensive because everyone else has their lives sorted out and it�s kind of hard to explain why you don�t, especially to other people.

And let�s not even get started on �relationships�.

OK, let�s.

My married friends (which is all of them � they cull the unmarried people over 27 every year and hang them from lamp-posts as a warning) all think I�m some kind of sociopathic eunuch because I haven�t even had a date in 3 years, let alone courted and snagged someone deranged enough to have my mewling cabbages. To them I�m a late-20�s lost cause. At the other end of the scale, my mum, who I love, but who is insane, is bafflingly hanging onto the belief that I will get back together with the one girlfriend I have had, even though a) we broke up several millennia ago and b) she�s into a long-term thing with someone else and c) neither of us remotely want to get back together, if I can just get myself invited round for dinner often enough. Great tactic, mother � you should write a self-help book for the Bridget Jones generation.

Anyway, I have 3 weeks to work myself up into an unreasonably neurotic state about all this.

�How our love will blow it all away, Such a thing of wonder in this crowd�I�m a stranger in this town, you�re free with me. And our eyes locked in downcast love, I sit here proud��

I should be at work, but I woke up feeling too Monday, so I put on my best �night spent battling symptoms of debilitating flu� voice and phoned in sick � considering I�m out of practice, it went like a dream. I�ve been incredibly productive and secured two rejections for features, so it�s been well worth sacrificing my meagre pay packet. I�m sort of resigned to not pushing myself to do much before New Year now, which is the traditional time for self-made promises of life-improving philosophies and dynamism � all of which lasts just under a fortnight until the same time the following year.

I sometimes think I�m never going to change myself. Because I never really know what my self wants.

Sometimes I think my relationship with myself is purely sexual.

�And I know they all look so good from a distance, But I tell you I�m the one��

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