I raised my prices today – for my lessons. That’s not particularly interesting for you, probably, but it’s a milestone for me we’ve got to start somewhere. Actually we’ll start here: I’m two months sober. I don’t really like the phrasing of that, makes me sound like a crackhead, but well, maybe I was a bit, back in the day. Not crack but – plenty of other stuff. I stopped drinking after New Year’s Eve with the intention of going three months without. Since I was 14 I don’t think I’ve ever gone anywhere near that long – and I started to worry that my life was not as glorious as it might be and more tragic that it need be. I find myself underwhelmed by years of drinking and the knock-on effects it has on every little thing: that being discipline, money, body fat, anxiety, skin, hair, teeth, motivation and the great sapping-away of TIME.
Continue readingengland
Rich Girl
You’re a rich girl, and you’ve gone too far
‘Cause you know it don’t matter anyway
You can rely on the old man’s money
You can rely on the old man’s money
It’s a bitch, girl, but it’s gone too far
‘Cause you know it don’t matter anyway
Say money, money won’t get you too far
Get you too far
Continue readingI Intended This One To Be A ‘Year In Review’ Type Thing, But I Immediately Got Carried Away Talking About How Much I Love Teaching
Because I don’t have any better ideas, I’ll begin by describing the room I am in. It is a bedroom. It is a bedroom in my mum and stepdad’s house, in Bardsey, in Leeds, in Yorkshire, in England. It wasn’t always mine, this room: it used to be Charlie’s, back when he was finishing Sixth Form and I was away gallivanting. For many years, I had no permanent room in this house. That’s changed now: this room is largely considered to be “Dan’s’ room”, because for the last year or so I’ve been living in it. Nice to have a room.
Continue readingAK ’23 | Surprisingly Chipper, All Things Considered
Wheeeew –- had a week off from writing. Went to Berlin. Will write about that later. Got to catch up on my Annie diaries first. Much to get on with. Where was I?
Continue reading
AK ’23 | Liminal Chillin’
Annie and I arrived at my mum’s house in the same state we did in September of 2021: poorly, dishevelled and underslept. My mum likes Annie; she finds her funny and interesting and refreshing. I think Annie was a bit nervous to meet my mum again – as they stood chatting in the kitchen I noticed she was babbling a little, talking faster and louder than she had been with me on the bus. It makes me smile when Annie is nervous, worrying about being liked. Ironically enough it’s what made me like her so much in the first place.
Continue readingAK ’23 | What’s The Collective Noun For A Load Of Morons
It’s hard not to view Manchester’s EasyHotel as a sign of the times. Only a few years ago – what, ten? Five? – fifty pounds a night would have gotten you a large room with breakfast included. You’d have probably been given a trouser press, a television, and a mini fridge with one of those choded Pringle tubes and two tiny little bottles of wine you daredn’t drink for fear of the check-out bill. You might even have gotten a little bit of patio, and almost certainly a complimentary breakfast.
Well – not anymore, because in the United Kingdom we love to watch ourselves spiral ever inward and downward, grumbling and grunting but not actually doing anything to prevent it, nation of wet lettuces that we are. It’s almost schadenfreude, except instead of taking joy in the downfall of others, we bask in the tragedy of our own downfall – we get our kicks from it, we get our rocks off, like the people in that film who crash cars and then knob in the debris.
Continue readingAK ’23 | She Is The Walrus
Annie sleeps like a walrus. That’s not to say she’s an inelegant sleeper — she isn’t, she sleeps in this weirdly prim manner like Dracula, on her back, face up, mouth closed. It’s just that she sleeps forever. Whenever we hang out we always go to bed at the same time, of course, but my body clock simply refuses to allow me through the morning. Annie, if undisturbed, will sleep for 16 hours. It was for this reason that, on our second day in Manchester, I spent around four hours lying awake in my bed, looking at memes on my phone, awaiting the moment my friend would rise from her crypt.
Continue readingAt Home | More Scheming, Less Steaming
You wouldn’t know it – I mean, how could you know it – but I write these diaries all the time. I just never publish them. What usually happens is that I begin doing some other thing, like working or reading a book, and at that instant I am struck by inspiration, and I throw everything aside and sit down and hammer out 2000 words in an insane blur that I barely even remember. Then I sit back and crack my knuckles and read what I’ve written, and while I read my jaw gently slackens, until finally I think ‘nobody must ever discover how shit a writer I am, how inane, how poundingly mediocre my thoughts are’ and I delete them all in an orgasm of self-loathing.
Continue readingAt Home | Beard-Growth as a Form of Self Discipline
I’m in the library. I’m in the coffee shop. I’m in the combination library and coffee shop (and also art gallery).
Continue readingAt Home | All A-Glow
I finished my book!
I finished my book this morning, the Australia one – rewrote the end, finally found the right words after weeks, months of sitting at my laptop and writing things and then deleting them over and over until I finally go ‘PRICK!’ at myself and slam it shut. But now it’s done.
Continue reading