Slowly, my possessions emerge from the plastic crates in which I brought them here. It took a lot of trips to bring them all, multiple runs back and forth. It takes a lot of trips to decant them. Books. CDs. Films on DVD and, in the case of The Pillow Book, VHS. A lifetime’s worth of interest, art and culture. All so small.

One of the things about getting divorced is that it deprives you of a sense of meaning. Before the marriage, these fragments, taken together, added up to a self. After the marriage has broken, the equation no longer computes. Perhaps mathematics is a less useful metaphor than chemistry: the marriage a catalyst which fundamentally transforms the substance of one’s being. When the catalyst is exhausted, when it decays to nothing, what once was whole dissolves into its parts. The covalent bonds between the elements of who you were are broken.

This metaphor, too, is imperfect. I remember little from my GCSE chemistry lessons, but one thing that sticks in my mind about catalysts is that they are always, themselves, unchanged by the reaction they provoke. The marriage, however, did change. The evidence is there to see in the photos which I copied onto this computer on Thursday night, before my trip to Glasgow.

In the photos from New York and San Francisco, she smiles. Her eyes light up. Such hope. In the photos taken three years later, in the place that gave New York its name, she tries to smile, but her eyes are weighed down with the despair of a love in its death throes.

Yesterday I finished rereading Preacher. I read an entire issue of the London Review. I went to the library to update this blog, and, while there, was amazed to see they now have a fine selection of books by Joyce Carol Oates. I came home and ate pizza for tea. I settled down to watch Iron Man with my parents, on the big TV in the living room, only to find that Sky Movies had rescheduled it. I went upstairs and watched Withnail and I for half an hour, then changed my mind and watched Love is the Devil instead.

Not an epic day, but by no means a bad one. Before the marriage, probably a day with which I would have been as happy as my melancholy temper would allow. But now: all is changed. The centre around which all these things once cohered is no longer where it was. Because the centre of those fragments was me: and, all the time that we were together, my centre was migrating, imperceptibly, away from me, and toward her. And with her, for the time being at least, it still remains. And so now I wander, I read, I watch films, I rearrange the glass bead game of my mental life first one way, then another, everything enough to distract, to engage, to entertain: and all of it pointless.

Back from Glasgow

So I'm back in Washington now, though not quite back at full capacity: the broadband gets installed at the ancestral pile in around a week, and so for the moment I'm stuck using the PCs in the recently-renovated Washington Library. To which I was going to include a link, but the OS these things are running won't allow me to c&p URLs, it seems. Whatever.

Glasgow was pretty good. GOMA has two fine exhibitions on at the moment, one a survey of LGBT art which includes a couple of Mapplethorpes, a piece by Pierre et Gilles, and a sculpted hermaphrodite tree, the other a really nice exhibition of abstract art which has something like five or six Bridget Riley pieces. I never really got Riley before, but seeing those massive op-art canvases up close is quite an experience. Some of them are actually physically difficult to look at - by which I don't mean they have unpalatable subject matter, I mean the arrangement of lines and colours on some of them makes it really difficult to take them in, visually. Like a fugue: you can look at one detail of the picture, like an individual line or pattern, but when you do that you literally lose the rest of the piece.

I've also got started on The Way By Swann's. I was expecting Proust to be one of those hyped-up writers who I would take an instant dislike to after five pages of the book, but I'm actually enjoying the experience. There isn't time for a detailed critique here, though I suppose I'll put one up here when the nice men from BT have given me my HomeHub; but the best way for me to point you to the brilliant thing about it is to suggest that you pick up the new Penguin translation (which is the one I'm reading), turn to page 122, read the description of the asparagus, read it again, and notice the point at which, while never being less than perfect, the description pivots from being a fairly standard description of the glories of nature, to something far more, um, physical. And the way he even inserts a tremendously backhanded Shakespeare reference into it. Marvellous.

Also finished off Exit Ghost recently too. Patchy. What Roth is really good on is the failure of the body and the torments inflicted on it by the mind during the aging process, and those bits of the novel are well worth reading - but there's some obvious recycling of other stuff going on in the book, such as the long obituary for George Plimpton that takes over the narrative for about five pages halfway through.

In conclusion then: meh. This whole business recently certainly hasn't killed me, but it doesn't exactly seem to have made me any stronger or, indeed, stranger. I am writing, though. The work's getting done which is, I suppose, the important thing.

Now to see if this library PC'll post this without mucking up and deleting half the

This is Zero Hour, and your hands are free

Today's the day I move, temporarily, back in with my folks as part of the whole divorce business. Because my folks don't have broadband set up at their place (yet - obviously once I'm ensconced I shall be setting up and paying for some kind of internet access, but these things take time...), I shall be on-line with less regularity than normal for a while. Don't worry though, I haven't gone away for good: I will be back. Yes.



Be seeing you...

Are you still banging on about this, Fish?

They tell you men just want sex and women just want love. They're full of shit. When I've been on my knees crying my eyes out in hotel rooms, it wasn't because I fancied a quick screw. It's because I hate sleeping alone. Still do. That's why I'm still up now, typing these words at almost one in the morning, anything to delay that awful moment of going to bed on my own and giving in to that crushing sense that there is no-one. If you sleep alone in a house with other people, you have the consolation of knowing that there's somebody in the next room that you know, and that, if you had to, you could see them and talk to them and make the bad feelings go away. And most of the time you don't, of course, because it's bad manners to rob people of sleep just so you can unburden yourself of your problems. But the potential is there. Hotel rooms rob you of this, in the most mocking way: there are hundreds of rooms, and there are people in them, loads of people: but they're total strangers, and so are you. You're a stranger among strangers, and the only people who talk to you are those who are paid to do so, and they secretly despise you anyway.

This isn't as bad as all that, because I know this house. Hell, I should do: I've lived in it for more than five years. But there's a weirdness to it, a sense that it doesn't belong to me anymore. It's a stranger now, too.

But I've written more. I've worked on new poems. I've been tidying up work-in-progress. I've submitted work to magazines again for the first time in ages. I'm blogging furiously. I think since the divorce became a reality, since I got back to sleeping on my own again, I've probably written more, in terms of word count, than I managed in the whole of last year. Obviously an awful lot of this has been crap, but if you write more in general then the tiny fraction of your work that is any good will usually be bigger too.

So it looks like solitude is good for my writing. Being alone forces me to think about things, I try and grapple these thoughts into some kind of shape using language, every now and again this results in something good enough to publish or perform. I may hate the solitude, I may hate feeling cut off from the rest of humanity, I might sob late into the night, desperate for the consolation of another human body in my bed, but the fact is the solitude works.

Maybe the price of a productive artistic life is the knowledge that, no matter what you do, no matter what you achieve, every single time you go to bed you go to bed unhappy. That's how it is for me, anyway.

Night night.

Days of Pain and Wonder

It's been erratic here these past few days. I'm still adjusting to the divorce, and living here on my own is like some kind of retreat: it's throwing the kind of things with which I have to deal into very sharp focus. If this sounds like therapy-speak, apologies. But next time someone tells you that they're enjoying being alone, because it gives them time to get in touch with themselves and who they really are? Punch them in the face and send them my compliments.

Because it isn't fun at all. I can't speak for all of us but personally, spending time on my own and getting to know myself better is the most goddam depressing thing on earth. One of the many great things about being married, it seems to me, is that suddenly you slot into a position in which your selfhood is defined in relation to someone else. You don't have to work out who you are, because you're x's husband, y's wife, z's secret gay mistress. And this is much less demanding. The other person becomes an anchor, a fixed point around which you construct your persona.

When you lose that anchor, you go into freefall (if no-one minds me mixing metaphors ridiculously for a moment). Suddenly there is no-one to define yourself in relation to: you have to define yourself in relation to, well, yourself. And also, weirdly, everyone else. You have to look at all the other shambling, farting monkeys in the street and say, hell, where do I fit in among all this? Which cage do I have in this zoo? Am I a babboon or an orangutan? Am I a fucking snake?

The idea of going back to the trenches of the tawdry, low-grade state of civil war that passes for sexual relationships in this monkey house doesn't exactly fill me with excitement. Mainly because I've seen the other troops on my side of the lines. I mean, have you looked at men lately? Have you listened to the bastards talk? Have you seen what passes for social interaction amongst 'em? The constant bloody blokiness of it all. Save me, O Blessed Virgin, from ever becoming the kind of man who winks at people and calls them all 'mate.'

It's at times like this when I wish I was a lesbian. Admittedly I possibly have a ludicrously idealized view of the sapphic lifestyle, but for me the chief advantage would be the ability to still date women but not to wind up being associated with the kind of club-brained moron who genuinely thinks he's a modern-day Casanova because he's sprayed some Lynx on underneath his regulation Ben Sherman oxford shirt.

And what's most annoying is that this is the version of manhood which is most widely touted in the culture. It seems these days that if you're not listening to landfill indie, following the football, drinking carling, watching reruns of Top Gear on Dave, and tugging one off over the Girls Aloud calendar, you may as well sign up for the hormone treatments and select your pre-op wardrobe. Why? Why isn't there more of a space for less obvious kinds of masculinity? I mean I don't begrudge the Clarkson-wannabes having some space, I just wish they hadn't colonised almost every inch of the man-territories, leaving those of us who don't buy into the whole package trapped in a tiny metaphorical village like some weird genderqueer version of Asterix.

So, yeah, these are the thoughts which have been carroming around my head of late. On the other hand, though, it's not all bad news. After four years of beating myself against the byzantine bureaucracy that is the world of the mature student, after endless writing of reports, interview transcripts, essays and pages and pages and pages of bloody bloody references, I have at last finished my postgrad psychology diploma. I can do science, me.

This my conspiracy theory which is mine *

I'm basically house-sitting now. All my CDs are at my parents', ready for when I move out. So are almost all my dvds and a lot of my books. We thought this would be a good idea, because my soon-to-be-ex-wife is in Spain for two weeks, then comes back the day before I leave for Glasgow. So we figured the thing to do was move all my stuff over early, to avoid a hellacious day of shuttling on the one day we're back together.

This, of course, turns out to be a mistake.

Because I've no media, you see. There are DVDs, but they're all hers - action films, musicals, and an extensive range of frat-pack comedies. Nothing wrong with any of these genres, but they're not what I want to watch right now. I'm in more of a Love is the Devil mood at the moment, is what I'm saying.

However, one DVD of mine has survived the migration: my 'Best of Bowie' collection, one of only two good purchases I made on my ill-advised trip to Scarborough so long ago (the other was Love all the People, basically a collection of every goddam thing Bill Hicks ever wrote). I'm watching it now. I'm up to the video for the Pet Shop Boys' remix of Hallo Spaceboy . And, of course, because I practically live on the internet these days (like all the rest of you), I've been googling. And I've found some disturbing stuff:

Bowie had a heart attack on June 25th, 2004. This effectively ended his recording career.

Michael Jackson had a heart attack on June 25th, 2009, which very definitely ended his recording career.

June 25th is George Michael's birthday.

You can see, of course, what it is that I'm getting at here.

Every five years, on his birthday, George Michael treats himself by giving a pop star he envies a heart attack with voodoo.

In 2014, who will feel the wrath of George?

* If anyone can identify the source I'm quoting in this title here, btw, they win a very special prize **.



** Okay, the 'very special prize' is a snog. Look, I'm getting divorced, okay? I'm frakkin' desperate. Cut me some slack. Jeez.

The Loneliness of the Low-Impact Writer

Middle of August, I'm going to Glasgow. Never been to Glasgow before, but that's not important. What's important is that I'm travelling alone.

Haven't gone on holiday alone since 2004. Scarborough. In the off-season. That was an exercise in boredom tolerance, but at least I got some poems out of it. And I got to come back to see M, my then-future, and soon-to-be ex, wife.

This time, I go alone, and I come back to my old room back in my parents' house. While I'm there I'll be spending time in the company of some good friends, and I'm sure there's a hell of a lot more to do in Glasgow, but...five years. Part of me is worried about how I'll handle it, and this is an easy trip. A couple of days staying on a friend's couch and exploring the city with them. What happens when I'm having to deal with being properly on my own, rushing through dinner in strange cities and coming back to an empty hotel room?

Get back to basics, I suppose. Hand luggage only. Don't draw attention. Short trips: do what you came for and get out. Keep yourself to yourself, don't strike up conversations with strangers and for god's sake don't introduce yourself to women. You're a 32-year-old lower-tier poet who works in a bookshop, not James Bond.

And take a notepad. Write. You never write anything of lasting worth while travelling, but the exercise, stretching your mind to describe something outside of the usual comfort zone, observing and reporting, keeps the muscles limber for when you do have to write something important.

Keep quiet. Keep yourself off the radar. No-one cares who you are. No-one cares where you came from. No-one cares why you're here. They have stuff to be doing. So do you.

Write.

That's how you deal with it.

It Rained Today

It rained today. The shop where I work is in what is essentially a big tin box on a retail park, so on the second floor you could hear the rain hammer down like some nightmare tropic downpour. M tells me roundabouts were blocked in all directions, and at one point in Sunderland she sat behind cars in one lane of traffic and watched a cup float by in the flooded waters of the inside lane. The weather continues hot, too, so when the rain does eventually evaporate, going outside is like walking into a sauna. The other day I foolishly went to the pub in the post-monsoon heat, and it was like some tropical way-station out of The Yage Letters. In between desperate gulps of stella I looked around in vain for Dr Benway.

My stepdaughter, meanwhile, has contracted swine flu. M will do a food run for her tomorrow, depositing bags of shopping from Morrison's outside her cross-emblazoned door.

There are further economic upheavals. The death toll in the war continues to rise. And I read recently that some scientists feel we're already beyond the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that can safely support an advanced civilisation.

For all I know, an eagle has been hawked at by a mousing owl and killed, too.

On the other hand, I am getting divorced, an experience which does tend to cloud the perceptions.

My question then: is this actually the apocalypse, or could it just be me?

Adam Fish battles the Christ-bots

So I'm busy today, copying files over to my new laptop from the one my wife and I used to share. I'm doing this because we're getting divorced. It's all very amicable but it's still kind of depressing. I'm copying over our photos: JPEG after JPEG charting the path by which it's came to this. Photos on our honeymoon, in which my wife is smiling, happy and full of love; photos from our last holiday together, when the love was still there, but visibly fighting on her face with a strong sense of dissatisfaction and unhappiness. The unhappiness of someone who knows what she'll have to say; but can't bring herself to say it just quite yet.

There's a knock at the door.

Probably the kids from down the street: they'll have lost their football in our garden again. This wouldn't happen if they played on the huge field behind the estate; but obviously this would entail them going beyond the tiny radius their parents have designated as a safe zone. I hope it's them anyway; rather have to kick a ball back over the wall, even with a knackered ankle, than explain to my neighbours that no, I'm not lending them any more money until they bloody pay me back...

But it's neither the kids nor the neighbours. It's a pair of women, smartly-dressed, carrying a leaflet. Religious nuts.

'Hello,' says one of them. 'Do you ever think about people who've lost loved ones?'

Does no-one ever ask if you want to talk about Jesus anymore? Obviously experience has led them to the conclusion that the trick is to approach the problem obliquely. Well, bollocks to that.



'I'm an atheist,' I tell them. I'm not actually, but I want to close down this discussion quick.



'That's alright, people have all kinds of beliefs,' the other woman says, in a patronising tone of voice, before the other one breaks in. 'But if you think about people who've lost loved ones...'



'What I think, ma'am, is that trying to foist your unsupportable beliefs on people by using their genuine grief over their lost loved ones is both intellectually dishonest and morally cowardly.'

Silence. These people hate it when you tell them off in an articulate manner, instead of just telling them to fuck off. But then...

'Alright, but when you think about people who've lost - '

What a feckin' cheek! I've just accused this woman of intellectual dishonesty and moral cowardice and she still keeps up her bloody spiel!

'Look,' I say, 'I'd like you to go away now, please.' And then, before they could respond, I, for the first time in my life, had to actually slam a door in someone's face.

Bloody religious nuts.