1. When I discarded religion (many years ago) and stopped going to church, I had the impression it would free up my Sunday mornings for more productive activities. This was, of course, at a point in my life when "productivity" was something I aspired to (Now its just a half-forgotten concept with which I torture myself when I am in the mood for self-flagellation.)
2. This Sunday morning, I wake up late, still feeling tired and world-weary and turn on the television, the Unseeing Eye. Every life must have an organising principle, I tell people, something around which it revolves- and television is the still centre of my turning world. A month or two ago, I spent a hundred pounds I did not have and bought a digital video recorder. Thanks to this marvel I spend the better half of an hour half-immersed in sleep while a documentary about Albrecht Durer and the "Northern Rennaissance" drones on in the background. I do not really care for such things - but on certain mornings I like to convince myself that I do.
3. Today I will drag myself down to a cinema and see Beowulf. I try to see at least one movie each weekend. I have done this without fail for months now, sitting through one unremarkable film after another, and always returning like a pig to the trough. It pleases me that I am becoming a creature of habit - or, rather, a Creature of Bad Habits.
4. I have to admit that I love cinemas. Not just "The Cinema", but cinemas - the individual earthly portals through which the avatars of the Cinematic Gods present themselves. Popcorn, hotdogs, darkened screening rooms, giggling teenagers in the back rows, the whole air of exalted frivolity that usually attends the multiplexes, the commercials writ large, the movie trailers that promise you so much, that seem to beg you so earnestly to live till December or January or whenever the next mouth watering feature is set to open. I honestly believe that movies will be the twenty-first century's great works of art - or rather that some movies will be. How could it be otherwise?
5. Preparing to leave, I stumble over one of my library books and experience a brief stab of guilt. It's a rather dry sociology text titled "Contemporary British Society" which I have not, as yet, read. I am becoming incredibly averse to the written word. How painful to slog through all those pages, what needless toil, the arduous trek through those tomes. I recently struggled through The Icarus Girl out of duty, and found myself unimproved by the process. Illiteracy is my latest vice. My most recently acquired bad habit.
It is possible to be happy without words - without a language with which to describe your happiness. I step out of the house with music in my ears, into the cold, thinking about nothing. Incredibly happy.
Winter approaches and it is colder than it ought to be. People always talk about how finely tuned the Earth is, how perfectly suited to our lives - but sometimes it seems that She barely tolerates us: permits us to live but offers no real encouragement. If I were to sit by the side of the road or lie against the earth, improperly clothed, the countdown would begin. The hours to my death from hypothermia.
But it is too early to be concerned with Death. The day is too promising, too full of things you love: trains, moving images, the corporeal plenitude of British bodies, the cheerful beep of the Oyster Card reader as is tells you that, yes, you are permitted to pass, to stride purposefully onwards in pursuit of your empty dreams.
