Too Drunk to Think of a Title

I was all set to cast an eye over a strange recurrence in this election – the one in which we are told time and again that we are voting for or against Tony Blair rather than his party – but I have spent the last hour brooding over my own future and this has left me drained of the will to concentrate. I spunked the rest of my energy away on office matters. All I am broadcasting now is static and silence; the afternoon is not my strong point.

Okay...so I make a decision whether to continue. I have already examined the day’s election coverage and I have forgotten it all. Something about Labour’s brittle lead in the polls and Boris Johnson borrowing a car. Perhaps all the journalistic puddle-stomping over the issue of tactical voting has dulled my senses. This is not an avenue I can go down today.

Besides, the campaigns that I pronounced dead so many weeks ago have not been resurrected. Despite all the jokes about vampires, being undead would be a promotion for Michael Howard right now. So to hell with the election; it will not come into my orbit again until next week now that I have cast my postal vote. I will be playing poker on election night and then I will flee the country the next morning, possibly ending up on a plane and screaming “move over, tubby!” at a dumb-struck Tony Blair. I return from Amsterdam on Sunday night into the cold and prickly atmosphere of an election comedown.

Ah, hell. I cannot speak a word of Dutch and I know little about Amsterdam. And I am likely to be boarding the plane on Friday with a hangover you could photograph, buffeted by winds of bad nausea and thumping brain hammers. I am grateful that I am a Good flyer, otherwise that morning would see me being chopped into tiny pieces by grinning razorblades of circumstance. But that is a story that will be told at a later date, perhaps as evidence at an obscenity trial... For now we will treat this post as a write-off and go back to wishing the day away.

Hold on, though, instead of putting out this weird drone about bad energy, perhaps I need to use this time to construct a thought or two from the hurricane’s eye. Nail down precisely what the hell is afflicting me.

But that is simple. This is a tiny airless office with no windows and an air conditioning unit that pumps out fast food grease instead of fresh air. At the end of the day I feel like the inside of a chip pan...last week it took me three hours to pick the lumps of batter out of my hair.

And I naturally concentrate more in the morning. At university, during the exam season, I would wake up and spend an hour in bed working. Nobody else would be around and the bar would not be open for hours. Then, after a brief trip to the library mid-morning, I spent the rest of the day guilt-free. I would dance across the campus singing “hullo birds, hullo sky”, throwing freshly picked flowers at those who spent seven hours in the library in that blind panic that convinces you that staring at the same page for five hours is somehow Working. I do not know how my strategy worked so well, but it worked all the same. Except when they threw things back at me.

The gift I have, on reflection, is to know precisely how much work is enough, and then proceed calmly and swiftly. And once I hit that mark I toss the files into the fire and go play on the swings. On the night before my last ever two exams, I went out, had a curry and got blind drunk. And I passed...nothing spectacular, but I know that the worst thing I could have done was to have stayed at home that night trying to cram whilst sweating like a pig. And my overall mark for the whole of the degree was precisely enough and no more to get a 2.1. If I had written one more bad word or doodled one more smartarse comment on the page marked “this is a blank page”, I may have slipped down a classification.

But a fat fucking lot of good a 2.1 has done me since.

Something bothers me about receiving a good degree, though, since I could not have written down a single original thought during my time there. In a nutshell, I paraphrased and summarised my way to modest success. I look back now and wish I had engaged more with the subject matter, spent good time ploughing through the book list and constructing new and possibly ridiculous arguments...anything, so long as I was creating something new.

And that seems to be the bottom line. I want to create, but I have been in this swamp of inactivity so long that the mud has got into the fuel line...every time I try and engage the engine it splutters and dies.

So that’s it. With phrases such as “vicious circle” and “self-inflicted” circling my head all I can do now is wait until the day I finally give myself the kick up the arse I sorely need.