26th-28th December 2001 - 8:01 p.m.

We pay a Christmas visit to my Gran in Oxford and sit around, supping tea and catching up on the details of the various lives on show. Polite conversation, always. And then the world turns imperceptibly quicker than usual and throws us out of synch, and we're moving onto death, socialism, depression.. I'm offered a slice of cake and asked whether I consider myself to be an anarchist or Marxist. Gran begins to talk about her own funeral. "And I don't know what flowers I would like, because I love them all. How could I choose..?" And I'm struggling to hold myself together, because we're being Civilised Adults, for whom everything is a Commonplace, for whom nothing carries any more weight than the angelcake which is now doing another tour of the room.

My uncle launches into a gentle critique of the Post-Industrial system, and suddenly I'm the bourgeois fraud..

- "And what is a predatory takeover but an objective sign of capitalist decay?"

- "Yes. More tea?"

Death, socialism, depression.. My Fates! My Furies! My Dark Knights of the Soul! These bittersweet tales of my young heart, glimpsed through torrid dreams of Communards, corpses, capitulation. A future seen through the eyes of tragic heroines and sorrowful Silent Stars. Stumbling through Hours where Each equals Each equals Each, and the horizon nothing but cloud and distance. An involuntary shudder. The unexpected movement brings my eyes back onto the sleeping world outside my window. Awaken now! Awaken, sweet duty, desire, destiny!

My politics? My life? I shall talk with the tears travelling my cheeks or I shall not talk at all.