A Day in the Life...

I wake up at a quarter to eleven. I do most days, unless someone has cruelly booked me for a Zoom call at some ungodly hour. I do the washing up from last night's dinner, and give the house a quick once-over. I'll put the TV on. I like to have burbling black and white nonsense as a background for brunch, sets you up for the day. At the moment I'm not eating bread, so I'll have scrambled egg in a pitta pocket or fried mushrooms with tarragon. I really miss bread. But I've convinced myself it's a bad thing, so no more bread. 

God, I love bread. 

After brunch, served with a pot of Empress Grey tea, I go for a walk around Stormont, except on weekends when there are other people around. I steer clear of humans, and especially humans with dogs. "It's okay - he's friendly!" Well, I'm bloody not. On weekends I pound the mean streets of East Belfast. Nothing's open until one o' clock anyway. Some sort of religious thing, probably. Even the 24 hour Tesco is closed until one on a Sunday. It closes at six too. It's a confusing place. 

It's almost always raining but I don't mind the rain, especially if I'm not meeting anyone I know. I used to regularly meet the DJ David Holmes in the grounds, but I think he's moved. He was a dog walker. A little white thing, like a yappy cloud. The dog, I mean.  

I'll usually walk around in the rain for an hour and imagine it constitutes some sort of exercise. For a man of my increasingly vast proportions - and really, I've reached Violet Beauregard levels of hyper-inflation - walking represents the only form of exercise I feel safe with. I was working out with hand-weights the week before I had the three week headache that medical science was unable to explain, and I'm convinced it was a contributory factor. Every time I stop drinking, eat well and take on light-to-moderate exercise, I enjoy a massive health implosion. It's the universe saying "Never try, John. Just never try," like one of my home-town friends might. But, I carry on doing it. I'm indomitable. Or stupid. So, I'm on another health kick then.     

God. Bread. 

After exercise I'll either take a bath or I won't, depending on how much I stink. I don't like showers as I can't see without my glasses, and my balance is somewhat compromised since an accident made my legs different sizes and shapes.         

By two I'll look at my correspondence. And at 2.01 I'm ready to work. I get no correspondence. I get Twitter reminders from a bizarre collection of people (Matthew Sweet, Michael Legge, a woman I once met at a book launch) none of whom I've ever interacted with in any meaningful way. I get e-mails from Amazon showing me several different examples of the last thing I bought from them. I get begging mails from local Arts centres and, mysteriously, a sustained correspondence from Etsy. It's not me it's you, Etsy. But crucially I get no mail. Neither spontaneous e-mails or replies to e-mails I might have sent. Nobody writes to the Colonel. Now my endless back 'n' forth with Disney's accounting office has reached its conclusion, my Gmail account is a barren, windswept place. So, by 2.01 I am ready to start doing what it is that I do. Which is staring at a screen. 

I don't find writing particularly hard. I rarely suffer from a writers block, and if ideas aren't coming, I keep on writing until something happens. This is my job. I do this every day. I treat it seriously as a pursuit and, increasingly, as a way of earning money. So, everyday I sit down and I type. And I delete, I edit, I add, I scrawl and I scrape, like scratches on a prison wall. As I get older, and I'm old even for my age, as the pleasures of drinking, dancing and carousing don't appeal as much, the work - to sound portentous - is all that's left. That's were the satisfaction lies. That's what I want to do. To get a story right, just once. A properly told story without an extraneous or minced word, humming with feeling, as it wends, easily and gently as a wide-mouthed river. Natural, organic, platonic. I'm so far from that it's laughable. But it's something to aim for. I'd rather be good than popular and I'd rather be both, but we live in an increasingly polarised world, with a government of ignorami, planning to cut funding for arts degrees by fifty per cent, the money to be spent instead on maths and science, the so called stem subjects. We hate art in this country. We think its stupid. We see no value in it. Any news story is about how much an old dead guy's painting sold for at auction, or about how ludicrous a modern artist's ideas are. We prefer our artists safely white, male and dead, so the estate can start shifting some proper units. Art is only good if it can be owned by rich people. 

My art is not owned by rich people. But occasionally enormous corporations hire me to produce something art adjacent, and that allows me to write other things, things that I hope to shape into a kind of rough perfection. I believe one good story is within my grasp, and I'll keep at it until I get there, assuming I recognise it when it arrives. Beyond that point, convinced I've finally cracked it, I'll discover the next story is the worst I've ever written. It's tricky stuff, this. 

I stop for dinner and the news at six, and then it's back to the desk for another couple of hours. There is no glamour. It's a broadening bum and backache existence. But this is what I want to do. One day it may even make me happy. 

At nine we'll watch a bad film and, if I'm drinking, I will reward myself with wine. A reward for typing for a few hours. At the moment I'm not drinking, as the rewards were starting to outpace my efforts. Sounds dull, doesn't it? It is, gloriously so. It's quiet. Sometimes the tapping of keys is the only noise throughout the breathless afternoon. Once I learned to put away incident, all those raucous screaming days and nights, once I learned to appreciate stillness, to focus and think, I began to do things. My boringness has made me productive. I was interesting for a quarter of a century: feckless, unreliable, loud, grating, funny and sexy and drunk. I'm happy not to have to be that any more. Now I can write about it. Now I can breathe in. I can listen to the wind in the trees and close my eyes. And think of bread.