9th March 2003 - 11:30pm

It’s a Sunday morning. Whilst the wind still has a cruel bite to it, the garden is delighting in the glow of springtime. The cat from next door keeps me company during my occasional cigarette breaks, and would happily spend the whole of the day turning on her back and wrestling with my hand, but my thoughts are elsewhere, brooding on the issue of the day.

The issue of the day is, of course, that I shall have to go back to work tomorrow morning. As issues go, it’s a minor one but, nevertheless, one that troubles me and seldom relents. Perhaps it speaks of one who has spent too much time in ease and plenty, perhaps it suggests a simple childishness of outlook on my part, but I still look upon work with a very real combination of horror and fear.

This, written in order to keep myself from falling asleep…

As here illustrated, work tends to sway me towards both self-pity and sullen misanthropy, and I resent that. Because I do care. I do.

I have often thought that I should very soon inherit a large sum of money from an unknown relative, or win the lottery, or get a cash reward for handling poverty gracefully, because it surely can’t be proper for someone like me, someone who spends the nights in the gilded drawing rooms of European aristocrats, someone with ideas so far above his station, to languish in the sorry world of toil and moderation.

And then, rebuking myself, I reason that it is both right and proper for this state of affairs to continue indefinitely, if only to teach me that there is no such thing as natural justice and that, even if there were, I should probably be undeserving of it.

Distaste for work is one thing, but it is leisure time that gives me the most cause for alarm. The time spent counting the hours until the beginning of the next working day, the freedom squandered in despair at the thought of how short-lived freedom is: these are an ugly reality, leading me to dread my leisure time, because I know that I shall spend it in dreading work.

And so I spend today tinkering with ideas of time, wondering how on earth to tame it and train it to work in my favour. A lifetime can pass in five minutes, a single kiss can be timeless: these things I know, but how to take time into my own hands so that it no longer ebbs and flows over me?

There’s a character in Borderliners, Katarina’s mother, to whom my thoughts keep coming back. Having been told that she has only three months to live, she comes to the conclusion that time steals forwards in jerks when one is looking elsewhere. That one can make time stop entirely if one only concentrates properly.

And I’m afraid that this idea haunts me during dark nights of intoxication and youthful communion, Sunday afternoon walks into the sunshine, and I ask myself: am I just wasting time? I let my steady gaze falter, and work arrives without me even noticing its approach.

And yet, no moment is so dead, so still-born, as one spent with an eye on the clock and a pencil marking off the hours.

So runs the caption to an image in Days of War, Nights of Love, and I have sympathy for this, too, this re-statement of the desire to live without dead time. And in those brief periods when I forget work, forget time, forget fear - when I give myself over to a passion and catch myself smiling suddenly - I understand all of this, and I recognise that my free time has only now become truly liberated.

And, seeing that I’ve led myself to the subject, I shall say that the aforementioned is a fascinating book: both infuriating and seductive. On one page, a deliciously emotive critique of the relationship between language and ideology; on the next, an indictment of cleanliness and appearance - which may be politically defensible but which I resist with every bone of my fragrant body. Nevertheless, I recommend it for the pictures and the pilfered quotes..