Composed from notes written whilst drinking my second espresso, waiting for my motorcycle to be serviced…

I suppose I am only muttering to myself on paper really. Writing does calm me and does focus me, so that is a good thing. The art niggles away at artists until we create.

Mainly I want to get home and have a beer. So…

The pull of Beer illuminates an interesting challenge to the Determinism which I embrace.

If the weight and momentum of the universe – physics, chemistry, biology, history, politics, society, genes, environment, family and traumas – have brought me this far like a train with its buffers in the small of my back and I don’t have free will, what does it then mean when I am faced with a temptation I know is dangerous and/or destructive?

Has the force of the universe in my vicinity of space-time produced a human (the most sophisticated ape) who can’t say no to the bottle that is calling me with muffled cries of “drink me! It’s cold in here” from the fridge?

I’m doomed by the loss of my mother – when the world was suddenly revealed to me to be a very unsafe place – to be particularly vulnerable not only to depression but to the anxiety that I alleviate temporarily every day with the beer that exacerbates my anxiety and depression the following morning at 5am. (This is addiction. Thanks, history).

At the same time, I am doomed to have become aware of these vulnerabilities and doomed to resist them. It is not a choice, history, etc. blah blah dictates it.

It has produced a human being with a taste for beer and little willpower to resist even though it has also in the same body produced a human being that knows alcohol is a poison that is slowly killing him.

So I am a human who has no choice but to continue as well as no choice but to want to stop.

The full force of the universe, i.e. history, family, genes, environment, trauma, society, etc. gives this organism, me, no choice but to manage or resist my vulnerabilities to depression, alcohol and anxiety.

Given all the above, what will I do this lunchtime and afternoon? Maybe the correct question is not “what will I do?” but “what will happen”.

So let’s be inspired. Sometimes I win, sometimes I win….

Every second I float encumbered by my luggage like a leaf down a muddy delta of tiny streams of possibility opening into each other with the flood at my back.

When a stream is taken because the water is deep and flows fastest there all the other possibilities become irrelevant as I am washed on towards the next parting and joining of the streams with no idea of its existence or of which possibility I will find myself taking.

And all the time with no idea how far it is to the deep blue ocean or whether the tide is coming in or out.

Don’t mention the seagulls, the wading birds or the fish. Step carefully at the confluence…

So, I am starting to write in the space we have made in the day. This has become difficult. I have made it so.

My morning routine had evolved – with good reason over time as with all evolutions – into a series of slick and economic movements; a kind of bedroom, garden, kitchen and bathroom ballet – sometimes to music, breakfast television or the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme – that delivers food for tropical fish and cats as well as – for humans – emptied bladders, emptied dishwasher, breakfast, teas and coffees, supplements, medications, news reading, email filtering, French language learning through an app, a “strong senior” fitness workout guided by an app, a cold plunge in the pool, a clean body from a hot bath, audiobook, clean teeth, wood stove emptied of ash and refilled with paper and kindling, a wheelbarrow-load of firewood brought from the wood store and stacked beside the stove, yesterday’s recycling hidden in the car’s boot, last night’s laundry hung on the washing line by the fish pond, in the right order, using two pegs per item. The pegs must match: wooden with wooden, light blue plastic with light blue plastic.

This modern ballet for one aged dancer with back and other aches progresses around the property: upstairs, downstairs, outside, inside, upstairs, outside, upstairs, in and out of particular cupboards, using the appropriate, chosen tools – including particular teaspoons, particular dessert spoons, particular cereal bowls, a particular tea tray – without inelegant, sudden halts or extraneous doubling back for an overlooked detail because everything is in its place on the path through this first 90 minutes or two hours.

Then there is the drive to take the recycling to the recycling point and buy bread and beer from my friendly shops in town.

And then it is almost lunchtime.

Tickets are available now at reasonable rates for early-rising performance art enthusiasts who promise not to speak, to get in my way or draw wise conclusions about my psychological and/or physical condition. Preparation for the show begins the night before with a tidying, a loading of timed wash cycles in machines that use cheaper electricity after midnight and the cat’s evening meal. So for the full experience – including the rare but very special screaming nightmares at no extra charge – you might like to book the overnight stay.

Within these intense performance hours unexpected breakages, moved or missing utensils and people that might wander innocently across the stage with their own perfectly reasonable but – for me – unscripted interventions and destinations cause sudden irritation and frustration that is destructive if expressed.

This would appear strange and unwarranted unless a person that wasn’t simply struggling with anxiety and obsession to get everything precisely right so that everything is “done” but also – and very significantly – to get what he defends as necessary over and the space/time to write opened up even briefly. So, I must be that person.

I have never properly confronted or dealt with the pathological, chronic anxiety, the overthinking, the fear and the obsessive behaviour that has developed over the years. I have actually colluded with it and defended it as a necessary, reasonable, rational strategy to live in an insecure world ripe with the unexpected and potentially disastrous: a lesson I learned at the age of 9.

I feel a deep and frightening pain for all those children under the age of 10 in Gaza that have learnt that same lesson. Celebrate peace but thousands and thousands will never have peace.

Producing and publishing a written piece can provide a deep satisfaction. Today has been different. I am back on the journey to a personal and political confrontation. The road leads backwards and forwards. I might explore it here.