15th August 2003 - 11:30pm

The last note lingers for a month or more. It hangs vacantly, and I turn my back on the keyboard, well aware that the rattle of the keys would signal the moment of its passing. A few seconds' silence, the groan of a tape spooling forwards, and then.. (conscious of sensitive ears, I pledged to play it on a different stage) ..harsh words about the future, about pleasure and ill-health, about the lovesongs that accompany you through difficult nights.

The songs fill the smouldering evening for a time, cooing their reassurances, whilst I sit at my desk designing Jandek-themed notepaper, wondering if it might take the edge off the silence that passes in place of punctual correspondence. A whim (a new whim) occurs to me, persuading me to pick up my phone and send a text message or two, to pack a suitcase and head for London. It scans better this way.

And those words? Oh, I forget..

A year has passed since weary irritability and a grotesque bank-balance took the upper hand and encouraged a return to the familial home. During the subsequent period of hermitude, I have employed two tactics to console myself: the first, to affect a deep-seated distaste for those who found it possible to remain in London despite my departure; the second, to maintain at all times the illusion that I am simply home for the school holidays – and, may I say, the most deliciously drawn-out holidays there ever were.

I flit between hosts. Kate has drinking games and endearing notes, Greg offers vast book collections and Grand Theft Auto. To them both, profound thanks. The city I encounter is the city I fell for in the weeks prior to leaving: a sprawl of overheated lives, a sunstroked playground, a place of leisure, languor. Kate has to work, and shouldn’t. Possibilities tumble into the open every minute – two hundred flashmobbers cram into a sofa shop, attempting simultaneously to coo and pretend the letter ‘o’ has never existed; an affable, yet shirtless, drunkard stops hurdling benches at midnight on the South Bank and explains: “I was chasing some Spanish boys through the park, and I lost sight of them. So I jumped in the lake.”..

How odd it is, to be summing up such a length of time, when prompted, in such a fashion: a moment’s gaze over my companion’s shoulder, and then, quietly, doubtfully, the words, “You see… I read some books.” There are certainly worse ways to live, more treacherous paths to follow, than walling oneself up with the companionship of words, immersing oneself in the dust of the ages in order that time will cease to weigh so heavily. And yet, dangers do exist. The ideals take flight, the boundaries of the partial world tumble, and one finds oneself declaring a sickly kind of war on flesh and chatter. During their last term, the Labour Party took to promoting the concept of ‘Learning for Life’; I don’t know that even they were proposing an exchange. In libraries, you can waste away.

In a tube carriage on the Northern Line, overcome by a moment of fragility and gloom, I imagine my copy of Steppenwolf, sitting at this moment on somebody’s coffee table, and mentally flip the pages. “Torn right down the middle, and then torn again for good luck”, I tell myself with a grin, and proceed to put some finishing touches to the myth of the Outsider, closing my eyes to the faces of my fellow-travellers. Would the myth be amenable to the creation of a hiphop album? I turn the question over in my mind as the darkness clatters away on all sides.. Destination attained, the escalators deliver us out into an afternoon of sunshine and charm. (“There are those who would never fall in love unless they had read about it first”). Fyodor D. pokes his tongue out. I finish him with a Bloody Mary.

There is much to be said for letting the structures crumble, allowing the myths and memories to run amok, and refusing to criticise them when they overwhelm attempts to carve from them a sentence. Style, the lightener of all loads, should be treated as an adjustable lens, as a play-thing. And when one finds oneself fetishizing one’s own toys and being mauled in response, one ought to think very carefully before utilising them so freely and forgivingly in future.

Days overflow, one into the next, the edges porous and irrelevant. I say too much, in dark bars, in picturesque parks, exorcising the tyranny of the written word over and over. I describe a murder to somebody, “an entertaining anecdote”, I say, but – ah, I forget, names and faces and times, it all drifts, punctuation, literary conceits, things of the past. And into the absence, the vastness, appears what I, following Mr Fowles, shall call ‘hazard’. The most tentative connections, the most fragile possibilities, the moments from which lives are fashioned, and on which cities thrive.

We typists scarcely recognise life on those moments that we find it unaccompanied by the percussive clatter of the keyboard.

Still, strangers seek me out, offering advice on cocktails, suggesting that I accompany them to Holland, hinting at personal misfortunes. The flicker of sympathy is seldom out of sight. A chance encounter leads me to attend a performance by White Rose Movement, Erica’s new band, and, taking accusations of (perjorative) nepotism in my stride, I find myself reporting that pop-rush of intoxication, that quickening of the heart, all that matters. I break the instinctive habit of refusal, spontaneously accepting the offer of a night in an unknown house, and sit out the small hours in conversation.

Didn’t Socrates state: “Only the unexamined life is worth living”?

Hannah suggests both that I should write a novel and that I should get myself a cat. I suspect that any attempt to follow up more than one fancy at a time would inspire the ill-humour of the gods, and reason that a cat would constitute the lesser commitment. The book shall be put to one side, as most books ought to be, until I feel able to write it without recognising at every turn that I haven’t a clue how most people live, or how they should.

One should cut oneself free at every turn. Paper diaries ought to stand empty, a sign that one hasn’t been home for days. Systems should be tested by contradiction (one might attend Socialist meetings to show off one’s cuff-links), and discarded when the failings prove too great. Amused as I am that my favourite witticism has, as its punchline, an apostrophe, I am forced to admit the following: that I write better when alone, resplendent with in-jokes and private asides. But that, unfortunately, I don’t live better. And my priorities have changed.

So many sultry nights spent on a balcony, angling cigarettes to the stars, while on the discman, The Foxgloves, or Momus. Or; a final evening in a Turnpike Lane back garden, leaning back into the worn chair and imagining how, somewhere beyond these walls, out in the darkness, time must be darting forward, people running late, writers attempting to draw all the threads together. I send them my best wishes, and close my eyes.