I must write something or I’ll explode. I have written articles yesterday and the day before and deleted them – rather uncinematic, I admit, if I had a typewriter I’d at least have had the satisfaction of ripping out the shite I’d typed, scrunching it up and hurling it into a little iron basket – and I’d determined to make something today, right now, even if it’s shit and meandering, whatever, whatever, fuck you, fuck me.

I think I need to start learning again. I’ve been feeling so damn stagnant recently, across all fronts. Well – I’m a bit stronger. I climb like a baboon. But intellectually I haven’t really moved the needle in – dunno. Yonks. I only realised this yesterday when, having taught a student I’d not seen for a few weeks, I found I had nothing new to report. A harrowing revelation! This is me we’re talking about! That’s not to say I haven’t been doing things – I have, I’ve been bouldering loads and I went to France and shat myself and I went to sit in Hyde Park and listen to Stevie Wonder without a ticket and I took my improv friends to The Castle climbing gym and we had a gay old time – it’s just that I haven’t really had any new ideas in a while. I’ve just sort of… gone through the motions. Go outside, have a nice time, come home, sleep.

And that’s fine! That’s got to be fine! Working a job and earning a wage and going outside and having a nice time – that’s kind of… it, no? That’s what everyone does, and they do it for a few decades, and then whack that’s your turn done. Now someone else is born and they’ll have a go. Only – I think I just want a bit more. But the ‘more’ I’ve been seeking – I always look for it in the wrong places. See, what I would like is to have lots and lots of friends and fall in love like a nutter and have sex in interesting places and twirl around the kitchen on Sundays: I think these things are missing from my life, and I ponder them a lot. However, the mistake I always make in trying to achieve this is that, rather than living my life colourfully and madly and passionately and picking people up along the way because of the natural gravity one develops when following one’s heart crazily, I only think about what these imaginary people – these shadow friends, these faceless lovers – might be interested in. I go to events at which I think these imaginary people might hang out. I never think about where I want to hang out (frightful lot of italics I’m using today – not sure how I feel about it). So – what of it? Fuck trying to meet people – fuck running around wondering when I’ll next find love – what do I actually like doing?

Last year I was teaching a student called Tania. Tetiana, her actual name was, but she went by Tania. She lives in Kyiv and she works at Preply – the teaching platform I tutor through. Tania told me a lot of things about a lot of things – she’s an active, energetic person with big ideas. She helped organise some sort of young person’s Olympic committee in Greece back in the day, and she goes to volunteer for the war effort on weekends. She’s a good person.

Tania told me about a philosophy class she attends in Kyiv. New Acropolis, it’s called – and every lesson we had, she shared her new thoughts and revelations with me. I have always been a bit shit at philosophy. I think a lot – shock – but I don’t really put names on anything. My head’s too nebulous – too swampy. I just stare over people’s shoulders when they’re talking to me about what a dick their manager is and zone out accidentally and think about, I dunno, how if you zoom very far in and very far out from the universe it sort of looks exactly the same, and what if that’s an infinite scale as well – infinite depth, as well as infinite time and distance – and maybe if you just zoomed in far enough there’d be more and more universes forever, endlessly small and endlessly vast – what the hell?! – and then I am snapped back to the room because the person talking has realised my eyes have glazed over and is angry with me.

I looked up New Acropolis yesterday and they have a branch in London. I emailed them. It’s like £250 for 16 weeks or something very affordable. I think that would be a good thing for me to do: become philosophical. At the moment I think my writing is decent enough – it flows quite nicely, even as it rolls all over the place like water around a basin – but it lacks something. I think my insight on life at the moment is a little dull. I keep making the same points. Capitalism bad, socialism better, loneliness sad, London difficult, money hard, ageing strange, yearning yearning yearning. There’s got to be more inside me than that, surely? I want there to be more inside me. And if it’s not there right now well – I’ll shove it in (oo-eer).

I’m three weeks into my new job (which I’ll not write about in any detail to be on the safe side – I’m a copywriter for a travel company, plus teaching English on evenings and weekends) and I will get paid soon. It’ll be the most ‘extraneous’ money – money that isn’t pre-destined for some bill or landlord – I’ve had since early 2023. And I know this won’t change everything (knock it off with the italics, dear god, you sound like ChatGPfuckingT), but it’ll allow me to take up this weekly philosophy class and take little trips and stuff.

It’s funny, being chronically poor (strange funny not haha funny) – your world shrinks, and your expectations of the world shrink, by necessity, soon after. For two years I had a little mental flag which I would lower whenever somebody talked about a music festival or a gig or a nice camping trip or – well, just about anything more expensive than ‘sitting somewhere and drinking cornershop cans’. I got into this mindset of ‘good for you, not for me’, which at times veered towards bitterness. Even students I taught in other countries where the salary is very low did far more than me, because they didn’t live in London and were therefore proportionally much wealthier. For over three years, I have been the poorest person I know.

And next week – no longer! I’m not a particularly materialistic person, though a new pair of jeans and some new shoes wouldn’t hurt. Beyond that – classes, courses, learning, new ideas. I don’t really believe in fate and destiny and that the universe has a plan for us all, etc – it’s a nice idea but there’s too much pointless suffering in the world for it to be true – but I do feel some sort of vague cosmic tug now and again. It’s like – when I’m going down the wrong path, I can feel it. You get it writing stories. When I’m writing my Athelstan books sometimes I’ll be in a bit of a weird mood and it’ll come through in the writing – I’ll find myself penning a chapter where Athelstan betrays all his friends and does something quite genuinely nasty. I don’t realise all at once that I’ve gone wrong, it’s more of a creeping sense of unease, that something is off somewhat, and I’ll slowly fall into a grump and feel angsty all over the house until I realise it’s the story that’s bugging me. Then I begin to cut it back, deleting every paragraph that doesn’t sit right in my gut until the unease goes away and the story feels healthy again – and fresh – and crisp – and silly – and like home. And then when you begin writing again, it feels right. Or else it doesn’t – and so you cut again, and write again. And so on.

And I think in these last few years I’ve had to cut back quite a few times. Not that anything really bad has happened – it’s just been a gut feeling thing. I’ve started things and thought oop, shit, not the move. Moving to France randomly in 2023 – oop, shit, not the move. Going to 8000 poetry nights in February this year and exhausting myself so much that I never want to hear another poem again – oop, shit, not the move. Toying with the idea of a return to Berlin – oop, shit, not the move. Developing feelings for people I should not be developing feelings for – oop, shit, not the move.

The nice thing about getting paid soon is that I will be able to make these ‘moves’ without the risk of financial destruction. It takes the edge off – unclenches your teeth/fists/sphincter. When you’re fuck-off-poor, everything ‘has GOT to work!’ – because the stakes are high and shitty. Having a little money gives a lot of different freedoms, but one of the most unsung, and perhaps the loveliest, is the freedom to make the occasional mistake. Not everything has to work first time. It’s chill. You can rally and try again.

I’m looking forward to that.