In which I resurface from a hibernation of spirit and the collapse of an era

I make no apologies but I hope you will be giddied and cheered to know that I am, with feeling, back on my bullshit.

Without a shred of dignity or credibility left in the tank, I am sure that those of you who trusted me to write a weekly diarising of my life and commit to that every Sunday will be feeling disgruntled and let down by the fact that the wheels came spectacularly off the trolley after week ten.

In my defence, we last heard from me when it was the first week of December and therefore the powerful majesty of autumn was eroding into the bitter misery of a southern winter which comes, invariably, with the sickly chill of death and misery and none of the crisp, icy whimsy of winter fed to us by Tchaikovsky and other propagandists of similar ilk. It is not to be missed that I have mustered enough creative energy to put pen to paper, so to speak, in this week in late March where the sun has made an unexpected but welcome return and yesterday I was carried off by the delight of finding a tulip at the bottom of the garden.

With brighter days and the promise of many a spring spritzer on the near horizon, it is duly appropriate that we reflect on the dark times just passed, a hibernation of the creative spirit and a time of infelicitous ennui and circumstances most desperate.

Perhaps the first spiritual recession indicator that may have twigged everyone on to my impending crash-out came when I spontaneously and without planning, purchased myself a car. After a surprisingly limited series of phone calls and a speedy credit check, I found myself the owner of an orange Vauxhall Mokka which I have been driving all over the southern counties and northern England while accompanied by a motley rotation of qualified older drivers due to me being painfully too anxious to consider rebooking a UK driving test after failing twice-over for stupid technicalities like being a smidge too far left in a box junction and apparently ‘impeding the flow of traffic’ if such a thing can be considered credible and proportionate at the junction of Shakespeare Street and Queen Street.

While my driving has occupied a great many hours of my time, it has not been the only cause of my disappearing from the scene. Indeed, the scene itself briefly imploded and collapsed with the surprise closure of our sacred temple of social graces, the Douglas Arms. Without expectation or preamble, an entire community of seasoned drinkers of all flavours of queer and creative spectrums found ourselves spiritually homeless and stricken by the grim spectre of bereavement; naturally, with proprietor and helmsman Les at the prow, an evolution has occurred and we have been transported to pastures new and slightly larger just a short jaunt from the historic Theatre Royal; but the grieving of our old haunt is still a wound to be treated with gentility and mild antiseptic until we are more established in our new patch with one or two fabulous cabarets and ideas salons under our belts.

By a miracle of the great goddess and also modern industrial strength anti-histamine, my health has remained stable throughout the worst of the winter months which is something unheard of, but I hope it is an assurance to you all that I have not succumbed to the wasting or to septicaemia or any other horror and am in robust health and good spirits; as well as can be expected for a person in their thirties.

I did have one slight emergency (both medical and spiritual) when it became apparent that I’d taken an allergic reaction to the escargot I had for lunch during one particular working Tuesday. It’s important for me to clarify that never having had an issue before, it has come to light that I am allergic to one specific type of snail over and above others and therefore must now be more refined and selective when taking them on and not simply devour an entire platter unquestioningly while sitting at my desk and writing press releases, lest I should have to explain to my boss why I needed to leave work forty minutes early and in respiratory distress and be subsequently mocked for my boujie tendencies. But, outside of this damaging happenstance, I have been otherwise hale and well.

What have remained largely unstable, however, are my creative tendencies and my personal mythos and brand. Shaken to the foundations by, I think, the possibility of losing the greatest intellectual salon ever seen across the South of Scotland (certainly since the closure and soul-poisoning of the once scintillating Globe Inn), I have been confronted by the gruelling question: who am I outside of the social forum where one can debate the meaning of art while also coquettishly tossing the synthetic locks of an ambulating wig of unknown origin, slowly circulating the heads of great beauties and intellects of the scene.

Thusly, in a prospect not to be relished, but I have been undertaking some soul searching and making one or two refinements to my approach to the diarising of my life; these, I leave with you below for absorption and socialising:

• Firstly, the reels have got to stop. Yes, I know you did not ask for them, and I know I was forcing them all on you as a way of me experimenting with bridging the gap between my feral (though hotly celebrated) instagram presence of 24/25 and this blog format; however, the emotional and creative energy required not only to cut them together every week but also to bring myself to be arsed with filming every aspect of my sometimes mundane life, was too much. I could not, for example, have weathered filming myself in respiratory distress after indulging in one too many garlic butter snails at lunch time, and I am also prohibited by the prudence of the Law from filming while driving and therefore my opportunities to find suitable content are much diminished. You may see one or two pop up from time to time, but there will be no Sunday regularity and I shall take on no critique or argument.

• Secondly, I am reserving the right to depart from the formula, subject to my own discretion, as there do come Sundays where the thought of extending myself creatively into a diarising of the week preceding could not be less appealing to me and I am forced to the brink of madness by trying to romanticise such innocuous highlights from my week as browsing for interesting organic squash at the posh supermarkets in Penrith; you all know what I’m talking about. I will do my level best to lower the drawbridge and let you all into the tapestry of my life, but you’d be better served taking me out to the Open Arms and plying me with sparkling wine if you want unfiltered access to those most mundane of experiences.

• Thirdly, I am also reserving the right to just start writing a bunch of other nonsense and tomfoolery outside of the prison of a weekly diary, because there are times where my creative frivolity cannot be contained by anything so linear as a Monday through Sunday write up and I need to indulge in the spiritual gymnastics of, for example, criticising my villainous detractors, creditors, and adversaries with the caustic vitriol reserved for non-time-limited character assassination.

• And, finally, I am retiring a mainstay of my instagram grid since 2019, moving beyond the limitations of my aesthetic ‘quote column’ which was suffocating my creativity and forcing me to post in groups of three, fucking heartily with my algorithm and making me look like, if you’ll excuse my pretension, a pick-me bitch. You can now expect a more visual feast on the grid, interspersed with the biting wit which characterised my ‘days of 30’ story arc; an outcome I am sure will be pleasing to those of you who can stomach many of my succinct one liners but baulk at the daunting prospect of a foray into the verbose terror of my unfiltered internal dialogue (and a very pleasant day to those of you who have made it this far, sanity and wits intact).

Without further preamble or elaboration on what occurred between December and the present day, I shall sign off and leave you tantalised and in expectation of more from me over the coming weeks and months, in whatever format captures my caprice (and that I can be arsed with).