Day 0321

Driving new roads, new opportunities for hesitation, error, dry-mouthed fretting. Went for a walk around Bartlow, taking in the medieval church and its mist-wet air, rotting frescoes, sonorously empty still space, the Roman burial mounds, the vast hazy green fields, languid buzzards and their kill.

Middle-class cotton-wool coffee shop, prattling well-spoken little children, parents looking inward, a horrid and enviable and undemanding comfortableness.

Dinner at friends' house in Cambridge. Wonderful how I find myself retelling the same stories and thoughts to different people with an undiminished relish each time. Saying things and believing them later.

Realised that most people have no idea of the depths, the horrendous dark depths of depression nor the insistent gnaw of anxiety. A schoolboy friend casually mentioned how people with depression sometimes find it hard to get out of bed, as if this was not something I would know. The disconnect between people's perception of oneself and the interior experiences we identify with. People benefit from labels, clear cut, externally verifiable signifiers to grasp at when making judgements of character.

Always surprised that people listen to the words I say, most of which I would recant in an instant, and go away with opinions that surprise me when later relayed. I say so much unprepared, contradictory nonsense, arguing for the sake of it, that inconstancy, suppleness and slopiness should be my lasting impression, not anything taken from any of the individual threads of thought that I might leave hanging, any one of which is a tangled, knotted and frayed mess of verbiage, principally said to draw attention to myself and precious little else.