And on. The hardness of the transfer, the darkness, and the utter hopelessness of everything. How is it that some people create a fantasy existence that gets them through each day? Or How is it possible to get through the day without the fantasy?

Let’s go on here. I can only look out. A dunnock on the Victoria plum tree. This story is my story and I am sitting in my bedroom in the earlyish morning writing it. This is the only way I can write at the moment. I can’t write about Ol or Bro or Jed, or the future things that might happen to them. I have to write about now. Yesterday I did not write very much because I was unprepared to allow myself to write about now, but this morning I realise that if I don’t write about now, I will write nothing. So I give thanks to the dunnock and the plum tree, and I will sit here and write until I need to go down and eat my breakfast.

I woke this morning after a reasonably good night’s sleep and turned to my phone for some sort of wake-me-up. I read some news, general stuff, nothing in particular, and then I put the phone down and said to myself  ‘I don’t like this time of day’ which is true. I like the next bit, breakfast, and then it goes on being good and I get things done, until about three in the afternoon, when I’m likely to be tired. The day can then fade away into the evening, when I have a beer and some supper, and watch a bit of TV before going to bed at about ten.

Repeat.

Today, from that place of ‘I don’t like this time’ I got out of bed and stepped to the screen, to my laptop, which was here in the bedroom, and began to write. This was a good move.

Sparrows fly past the window. I can see my new chicken shed. No chickens yet, it’s not quite ready, but progress is being made.

The date is 22^nd February 2018.

I’m thinking. Looking out and thinking. I was sitting here last night talking to Louise on the phone. We are both examining who we are and how we be at the moment. We’re on the same page, which makes me happy.

There are two collared doves on the hawthorn tree.

They’ve gone.

I am thinking about all these words I have written over the years, and in particular here, in this house. They are many. I always think about making them into something – a blog, a poem, a novel, but maybe they are just words that have flowed from me.

The sun is rising behind me somewhere, and shining on the houses out there in Bridge Road. The houses that look like the defending castles in the Space Invaders game, their chimneys guns pointing into the sky. A starling swallows the distance between them and me in a moment, and moves directly over my head, itself like a bullet with wings for stability.

I think I was cutting hazel somewhere in a dream. I want to make my garden beautiful, in my own particular way. There are things to do. I need to cut hazel to support the yellow plum tree, and help the arch of it to rise over the path.

There is a house sparrow where the dunnock was. He – it is a male – is looking about and cheeping.

Maybe this is a blog, or could be blogged. I’m writing a novel – did I say that – and today (and yesterday) I have been unable to write any novel, but I have set myself the task of writing five hundred words every day and yesterday I only wrote a handful, and I fear that if I miss another day I will lose the novel completely. So I am writing this. It’s like breathing.

It is like breathing.

I’m thinking I will add back to the beginning of the novel the part I wrote before the novel seemed to start. I began to write on January 3^rd, and a week or two later the novel began – Ol arrived, and Bro, and they met Jed. Ol is a bit like Daniel without the drugs and the lack of … Ol is a wonderful musician, a magician, like Elvis, or someone who has not yet existed. Bro is his friend and he looks after him in every way, always saying Yes.

Jed is a busker who they meet. Although I haven’t asked him, I think Jed probably believes the world is flat.

There are two blackbirds on the Cox’s apple tree. It is nice when birds sit in a tree which I have planted.

I’m getting the greenhouse ready for tomatoes. I wonder if I will actually produce masses of tomatoes this year. I am full of enthusiasm and action in the garden at this time of year, and then somewhere further on it all falls apart. Each year is like each day. They start well, and then something happens. Luckily there is always another one.

Louise was talking last night about a psychoanalyst who uses every stray thought that occurs to him in his analyses. It is for him a question of ‘Why did I think that at this moment?’ I think that what I write is what I need to write at the given moment. So today I must write this, even though Ol and Bro are in a fishing boat on the west coast of Thailand trying to get home without flying, and Jed is lying in an overgrown garden trying to work out why it is so dark.

And it’s OK.

I must write this.

On the table beside me is my father’s copy of the I Ching, two volumes of divination translated first to German then to English. That seems circuitous.

The sun is brighter on the defending castles, the day has begun, and writing this has saved it.

Writing this has saved the day!

OK to go. I will publish this on my blog. It is, as I said, like breathing. I’m taking a deep breath. It makes me happy.