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Look at that, I actually did it. Writing creatively for three days in a row! How good. How lovely. How nice.

Yes, I am aware that I said ‘writing creatively’ and then immediately used the adjectives ‘good’, ‘lovely’ and ‘nice’. Well, damn the laments of my high school teachers. They are simple, safe words, reassuring like a sturdy boot or a pair of happy ducks, and I like them.

Am I happy today?

Yes, a bit. I’ve got quite a lot of work done in a very short space of time this morning. This has left me both amazed and devastated, because it has revealed to me the enormous amount of work I could get done if only I was in this mood all the time. This is made difficult by the fact that I don’t really know what mood I’m in ever.

Yesterday I ate a lot of vegetables for dinner, which was a remarkable experience because I realised that, if your meal consists solely of vegetables, you can absolutely gorge yourself without feeling unwell. After two heaped portions of broccoli, courgette, sweet potato, onion, green pepper and red chilli, I sat at my desk and looked at my enormous belly with the usual disdain. Not forty minutes later however, the belly was gone, and my tummy was nice and almost flat. Had that been a pizza or a Chinese takeaway I’d have been groggy and rotund for days.

Last night I assembled a pretty cardboard globe that my aunt and uncle bought for me at Christmas. It took a few minutes to assemble, slotting together various pieces of cardboard, and when I first took it out of the box it smelled both fantastic and poisonous, in the same lovely way that petrol does.

Two new books have arrived in the post today: The Underground Railroad, which is about slavery in the USA and will likely make me very depressed, and Essays in Love by Alain de Botton, which I am reading because I want to learn more about love and why I’m so absolutely shit at it.

I was distressed to learn, in the ‘Introduction’ section to Essays in Love, that de Botton wrote the book at the age of twenty four years old. This is happening more and more recently. The book beside Essays in Love on my chest of drawers is Less Than Zero, written when Bret Easton Ellis was twenty one, if memory serves. Further along is Conversations with Friends, penned by a twenty five year old Sally Rooney. On the opposite side of my room is The Motorcycle Diaries, written by Che Guevara at the age of twenty three. And on my nightstand is An Artist of the Floating World, which was written by Kazuo Ishiguro at the age of twenty six. And so, if I may just say this:

FUCK

I am twenty eight years old in seven days. I am twenty eight years old in seven days and I still feel like a complete snail shell of a human being, a known-nothing pink-palmed fart of a man. I must do better. I will do better.

Today’s parting thought, then: I will get a bloody book published this year, or else I will burst trying.

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