Friday, 11th April 2003 - 9pm

There are many ways to begin a diary entry. I’ve tried and scrapped most of them in writing this one. There’s the technique by which one comes to the keyboard with the faintest of ideas and allows one’s fingers to run riot, the introductory paragraph closing with the words “modest-phrased though it may be, this is the language of no compromise.” But, whilst one finds oneself fond of the sentiment, one is also profoundly aware of how preposterously the slip of an idea overreaches itself. The entry is abandoned, a few lines are filed away for the pursuit of future literary profit, and one moves on.

There’s the introduction in which one reverses the standard practise of printing one’s current playlist by including instead a list of ‘Recent Releases For Which I Harbour A Jealous Passion – Jealous, Especially, Because My Relationship With Them Has Not, As Yet, Been Consumated By Their Actual Hearing’, with the explicit suggestion that readers might like to send copies of one or all of these to the diarist. The delicious arrogance of this approach is undermined only by the presumably poor probability of a crossover between readers of the diary and purveyors of Toktok Vs Soffy O records. On top of which remains the uncomfortable fact that this approach suggested itself only because one’s recent listening had seemed a little obvious and one had grown embarassed upon seeing it glowing from the screen.

And, if this brief Diarists’ Primer teaches you anything, it’s that these words don’t always come as naturally as I might like to suggest, are not without the agonisings of style. And, if my insistence upon writing this diary emphasises anything, it’s that, whilst not always easy to keep up appearances, it is always necessary. One makes one’s gestures where one can.

There is, you will begin to understand, a whole world to be won. We might christen it The World of Passant, if only this didn’t make it sound like a circus, and if only this weren’t an idea we were trying to discourage. It’s a world in which style magazines and old broken-spined novels count double, in which Pessimism and firey-eyed militancy are forever squaring up, in which world-denial is narrowly defeated by the spectre of Freud. This diary is so abstract as to be unworthy of the title, you say. All the same, I say, the arrangement of one sentence is more important than anything I may have done this morning.

I spend my journeys and my evenings in the company of The Comet Gain. I don’t know how it came to be this way, but no other band seems quite so right, so relevant to this partial world I’m speaking of. No other band captures so perfectly and so awkwardly the tear between theory and practise.

And, I don’t know, perhaps it’s not even the music. Perhaps it’s only the idea – I am quoting sleevenotes, after all - and you know how susceptible I am to ideas. But at least, in this case, it’s an idea looking outwards; it’s an idea with ideas above its station. Because the question, the oldest question in the book, is: how does one partial world engage with another? And, in engaging, how does one keep fantasies from growing cold in the open air?

This diary is a handbook of tactics, some disowned with the benefit of experience.

These past weeks, due in part to Greg's revelation that A Rebours can be downloaded in its entirety from the interweb, I have been in tactical retreat. I have accepted the existence of exhausted blood lines, of evolutionary cul-de-sacs. I have repeated those lines to myself: “They are like stirred-up dust.. The wind will blow and the dust will pass..” And, in accepting this thing, the only thing, I have found my thoughts coming to life and words coming more easily. It is productive to resign oneself, each line no longer pitting pro against contra against its sum and collapsing beneath the result. Yes, we nihilists have always struggled to write choruses.

But these things are passing fads for me, and after just a few pages of ‘Bits of Paradise’, the short story collection edited by Scottie Fitzgerald, the certainty is dissipated by a new delight, a rediscovery of pleasure. And I should sulk at the fact had the past weeks not left me just a little bored of sulking.

Still too abstract? I shall be back in London in just a month or two, and perhaps this dry theorising will then be tempered by the happenings of a modern life. In the meantime, I shall engage as best I can.