Tuesday 24th June 2003 - 8pm

I think sometimes you know from the moment you abandon your bed. I think sometimes it’s there, clear as a thundercloud, before the curtains have even been drawn back. I think sometimes you know that it’s been on the cards, those terrible black-spotted cards, for quite long enough, that you’ve had a taste over the past few weeks, that it couldn’t be diverted any more.

Hello my friends; it’s one of those. Make do as best you can.

Some days are good for nothing but pouting in the mirror. Black evening jacket, high-collared white dress shirt (two buttons unfastened as a token of devotion to decadence), a fork of lightning flashing through the window. Fringe just prominent, just defined enough, to frame my features, dark cord trousers, deep brown loafers, a telephone ringing next door. Stopping. Ringing again.

It’s a formal ensemble, but not overbearingly so - I am, after all, attempting to comfort myself. A prettier kind of empty. It speaks of wasted elegance, of flesh and ideal meeting in the mirror, and it’s true that these moments seem too good to keep to myself. I’m thinking of this empty house, the words exchanged on Friday, the suggestions I thought it safer to ignore. And perhaps this weekend could have meant everything, perhaps it needn’t have gone this way.

But no, there was a look in her eyes that I remember from another time, a look that caused me, on my return home, to take out a certain book..

I rally: these moments are too good to share with another.

And much good may it do me. I spend several hours working on some music, seated at the computer, a pile of abandoned cds and endless cups of implausibly strong coffee at my side. It sounds like some kind of electronic NY blues, and I can’t stand it, can’t bear the graze of the guitar line, the relentlessly barren bass, the thought that this is all my own doing. But I continue: more hateful alterations, turn it up, play it again, perhaps it will erase itself entirely at a certain volume. Like a fever. These songs will eat you alive.

It continues, more unpleasant with every minute that passes, and I throw on a jacket and plan to walk to the station and take the first train that arrives, a few hours travelling away from the noise, a few hours with my thoughts soothed by the dependable weariness of the countryside, a few hours away, anywhere away.

But you don’t, do you? You take your jacket off and lock the front door and sigh to yourself.

I sit by the phone and pretend to read a magazine. The phone doesn’t ring. If it were to ring, I’m aware that it would be left unanswered, it being undignified to present oneself like this. The need to, now more than ever, elicit a warm word from somebody runs up against the need to, now more than ever, keep up appearances, and the two cannot be other than an unhappy combination.

What is to be done?

I must make some money. That idea remains, the one of writing a book in a week, something to sell in order to pay the overdue rent. The little fantasy of working feverishly at my desk, debts and demands forcing my fingers to the keys, forcing my thoughts to assert themselves on paper. What becomes of apathy when pitched against hunger?

But I know.. It’s another silly myth with which to entertain myself. In reality, the scene would be one of fruitless irritation, and let the devil take the consequences!

I stumble upon a remedy, a release: I sit at the piano, stroking the notes, playing Alfie time and time again, crooning the words..

It means everything for a few moments. Bacharach and David never wrote a better song. The original version could never be better sung, the harshness of the voice against the warmth of the arrangement, an urgency that was never repeated, the tear at the heart of it all. These songs will see you through.