I bumped into the Welshman as I entered the building. The skin was flaking from his cheeks as usual and he grinned widely. With a hint of embarrassment he held out the black bin liner he was carrying: „You’ve caught me out. I am going to smother myself,” he announced.
„On such a beautiful morning? Go to your office and write out a list of five reasons to stay alive!”
It was for spring cleaning. My parting shot: „Take care in disposing of the evidence!”

Time is fickle. What I found hardest to adjust to was being in charge of my own time. Not politely visiting some eco-friendly model housing estate without so much as glimpsing the concrete cows, not touring a particle accelerator facility or a sardine-canning factory, not travelling up the gantry in a lift with a hard hat to stop my locks straying across my face, not constantly at someone else’s beck and call, barely tolerated, presence begrudged, but permitted my own voice and ideas, just for a brief few months. Not that my problem was being distracted by the luxuriant abundance of minutes, hours, days and weeks at my sole disposal. Instead I tried to force too much into the waking moments and have never suffered so many migraines in so few months. Even now not a day passes when I do not work, for it is a privilege beyond compare to be paid to think and write. I have already lost music (extraneous noise has become unbearable to me), soon I will dissolve, reproducing streams of consciousness pouring forth from others. Soon my livelihood will be considered a wasteful extravagance by those who have no inkling of the creativity of the process, which once was such a joy to me, a challenge. Soon I will melt back into the ranks of souless and despised bureaucrats. What was frightening was to wake up aware of the extent to which I had been conditioned by my occupation, by the need to fit around, to accommodate, to stifle myself in the interests of accurately conveying the original content.
I tried acting, but could never play a weak character, so it wasn’t for me.
My friend Rob, short, slender and sallow-skinned played Henry Higgins and I Mrs. Pierce when we toured with our production. His stage presence is fierce, liquid talent. With a doctorate in phonetics (he studied Norwegian dialects) and a natural streak of cruelty whetted by his razor wit the part could have been written for him. I used to watch his performances from the wings never tiring of them. When I moved to Waffleland he put me up for a few days whilst I looked for a flat. It took me two hours to reach his front door on arrival, a distance that can normally be covered in ten minutes. I had three suitcases holding my clutter of belongings and was eight months gone. There are no lifts or escalators in the station. Several hundred steps. Nobody offered to help, not even part of the way. This continues to be my abiding impression of that small country. Indifference, at best, towards outsiders, a dart of hostility and resentment, an inability to accept assimilation beyond boosting the statistics of one language community to the perceived detriment of the others.
I had to take a shower after my exertions. At my house-warming, Rob confided in me that he had contemplated walking into the bathroom (I had not locked the door) and embracing me. The wall separating us was thin and the idea of taking me in my ripe state strangely appealing. He did not, the awareness that he could sufficed for him. Rob is completely confident in a manner I have only ever encountered in men. He once told me I would make the perfect escort girl, attractive, fluent in several languages, pleasant company, able to converse on almost any subject. That I would retain the power of whether matters proceeded any further. He meant it as a compliment and as such it was apprehended. I suppose the thought was inspired by my chronic state of being unattached. He also (quite justifiably) criticized a piece I had written, based on an experience of my father’s. Whilst I agree entirely concerning the style (I never reread what I have once comitted to paper) his objection that the reaction to the events would have been rage rather than resignation is, sadly, not true. We are doomed to unprotesting surrender in the face of sullen greed and the scoop of the bulldozer.

Cigarettes killed my mother. I asked my father once whether she had any cravings when she was carrying me. Only for more of the wretched weeds. She would dispatch him into the night to seek out vending machines. They devoured her lungs, reducing her to an agonising hobble, then struck at her heart. It was eleven weeks ago to the day. My father hates Tuesdays now.

Cocooned in my office a smile spreads across my features. Aurora is not here for the second day running. The space is not too cramped for us both, but her duties mean that she constantly jabbers on the telephone. It clamours for her attention every ten minutes or so and she makes no effort to lower her voice. This is not conducive to serious production. Now the room is silent as I sit surrounded by my volumes of Hegel, Bourdieu, Zygmunt Bauman, Giddens, Locke, Hume, Elias, Lash, Megill, Berlin, Foucault, Collingwood, Oakeshott, Merleau-Ponty, Barthes, Parfit and Durkheim in no particular order on my shelves. The song of a blackbird pierces the glass of the door.