Watching a child on the tube, I wondered what kind of person it would grow up into. Would it be gay, right wing, brave, arrogant, or charming? I looked down and saw I'd spilt burger down myself, staining my shirt and my sister's scarf. If you want to see loneliness, sit in a gay bar by yourself, then take a nightbus home. Every face has the same reflection, milky and only half there in the window - briefly obliterated, again and again, by the glare from a passing streetlight and the couples who huddle in their own universe beneath it.

Ephemeral fortune - the state by which man carves his destiny. It's all a matter of perspective, gotcha. Lots of resolutions, lots of new beginnings. The builders outside are singing along to Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive in close harmony. Sometimes your life takes on elements of a bizarre Broadway musical. It's all about going over old cracks to lay new roads. Is that a mixed metaphor? Who cares. I like mixed metaphors. Here's a simile instead for anyone who doesn't. The past is like a healing skin, stitching together its wounds and stretching out as the body beneath it grows.

Another day where I worked straight through without a lunchbreak, and given/asked for a pile of paraphernalia at the last minute. There's too much to do. I didn't even want to go to the club afterwards but I went, prompted by images of myself alone at home, unable to sleep. You can't always feel an opportunity coming, but you certainly know when you miss one: the hard rock at the bottom of your stomach, swelling as it gorges on doubt, neuroses and futility. The certainty that if you carry on like this you'll one day wake up just a person.

Passing time. A day spent tending to the hands of the endless hours: buying fob watches off eBay, cleaning watches, fixing the strap on my favourite pearl-blue anti-clockwise wristwatch, opening the back of my favourite pocketwatch (the one that regulates the synchronicity of the universe) to try and find out again why it hasn't worked for the past two years. I failed. A drawer full of half-working watches, of antiques, replicas and spare parts. I am nearly a god because I keep all time in a drawer, yet remain so painfully human because I just leave it there to rot.

Onward motion, the quintessential will applied through action. I'm certain now that, regarding some things, I've moved on. I've been certain before, naturally, but this goes beyond idle belief. Though I value previous adventures, there are others I want to have. This dear city is my home. It's also my prison. I must busy myself in action before it becomes my gallows. I must wrap myself up in life to avoid succumbing to a slow and stale death. The next time someone says they're ready to move on, look to see if their feet are twitching before you believe them.

Lucifer was conspicuous only by his absence today. There was no spectacle on the 6th of the 6th of the 6th, no omen of impending fire nor even the slightest whiff of a serendipitous calamity. I don't think anyone so much as tripped over. There was that boy born with three arms, though. Maybe I'm spoilt, but I was expecting something a little more impressive than a mediaeval carnival sideshow. Is that it? What else is there? Mass death by hayfever? If the Devil truly exists then surely he couldn't resist a grand entrance.

One is coming. One is coming.

Oh, what a night. Write this down now so you don't forget, while Sophie's singing. You thought it was dead. But it's not, it is alive! You thought you're shipwrecked, marooned in a dull world. But you're afloat, bobbing about in your silly human boat. And what a drug it is: arbitrary, ephemeral, but real. Still alive. I'm slightly human, after all, and it's not so bad. Expect disappointment and you'll find it. Expect only the best and you'll just fall short. But just sit back and see where it goes? That's an adventure, and adventures are what I love.

Generation X live in their own solipsis where things like the serendipity of Soho Square exists, a place where you never know who you're going to meet. Today, whilst sitting with Jon, it was my best friends from secondary school, "The Twins", two of the nicest people I've ever met. We always bump into each other by chance, but I made certain I got their numbers and tethered chance to the mast this time. All these old friends coming back like veterans to the cause. Is it that the oldest of ties, together, could be enough to keep Fenrir tethered?

I walked the canal to Camden, following stagnant water rather than dirty sidestreets, trudging sunbaked pavement by pondwater through hayfever clouds. As I sat with a beer under the willow tree at The Ice Wharf, I felt like one of those adults I would watch as a child sitting with my dad in pubs, someone who chatted into his phone to unseen best friends about grownup things, wearing the remains of a Friday suit and drinking beer, a cigarette in hand. My dad once said if he could live one year of his life over again, it would be 26.

Summer cooked the earth beneath us. You held me instantly, not letting go, your naked back soft beneath coconut sunlotion and a thin film of sweet sweat. I inhaled your hair, the honeysuckle I thought I'd never smell again. It felt like an hour we stood like that. You said you missed me. You meant it. I missed you too, the perfect-fit part of myself I'd denied myself this last year. I missed you and still love you. But something's changed. Today, that made us both happy. Here's to Naples. Here's to dormant volcanoes and ashy relics of past lives.

Everyone else fitted in easily. I just ate and offered polite banter as expected. He said the tree-hung blue bottles were to keep ghosts away. I suggested growing lavender along the wall. No one questioned me. We lounged in drunken sunshine, as when we all first met. Summer's not a time of year but time out of it, a place that's timeless; just heat, the scent of grass and hot wet stone, and smiles that come naturally. You kept smiling at me. I wanted to smile back, to move closer, but my reflection looked too ghostlike in your blue eyes.

Fate. Is a snake evil? Can a truth so strongly felt be the source of all lies? Something of malice, hatred, twisted from darkness? Your arms flail in the void, and you grasp a few strands. They support you, steady you, keep you safe. Finally you see a distant light, and you're illuminated. You see yourself, everything for what it is and your place within it. Then you look down and see you're grasping snakes. Writhing, lying, poisonous, dangerous snakes, black as the darkness they hid within. Can the only light you see be darkness? Is a snake always evil?

Our eyes face the stage, but mine watched you the whole time. There's one part of your face I find most enchanting of all: your right cheek in low profile. You smile in incredibly complex yet simple portraits of dimples, curves and blushes, all on quite smooth skin beneath lazy Tuesday stubble, your eye visible only by its lashes. I only see this part of you when you look away from me. When you smile at someone else. But sometimes you turn around, just for a moment, and smile at me. In those brief moments you take my breath away.

Regally, a starling sat perched on the balcony above me out by the garage. We saw each other simultaneously and it flew down, hopping about on the concrete with some food in its beak, I couldn't tell what. Every so often it cocked its head and considered me, blinking once or twice in that quizzical way birds do. It hopped beneath some steps to eat, so I knelt down to see what it was eating. Indignantly it scampered out and flew back up to the balcony. Respecting its privacy, I stubbed out my cigarette and left it to its lunch.

Thursday, the day after just another day. And on that day, my Dad told me two words. Cerebral Sclerosis. It's likely she has only months. The scars of last year have not left me. I still can't seem to feel despite this news. I know what death is and I accept it, I anticipate it, long before it happens. I dreamt of my grandfather, I told him, unknowingly, how strange it was to see him again since I usually just see him in dreams. I remember only his smile, a quiet unspoken response to an unasked question I can't recall.

Had to hurry straight home after work to do nothing at all. All I want to do tonight is play computer games. Not go out, not get drunk. I just want to spend this heatwave exactly like I spent summers when I was a kid - staying up late in my room, tidying, reading, playing games and lying in an exhausted repose at the end of a long uneventful day, sweet scent of sweat-dappled legs on clean cotton sheets lingering in the air, watching the nightly fly-ballet as each chases another around a bare lightbulb. All so very long ago.

Evidently it must be something about the weather that makes people waste time. I spent the day pottering, not leaving the house, barely getting dressed. I made breakfast, I tidied my room (a constant occupation for any Gemini Monkey) and generally lounged about. Outside my window, the sun burned down from a brilliant blue sky, heating up forgotten memories of summer holidays spent in the park, in the garden, time innocently wasted as a kid with friends, all decades ago and perfect then. It is so important to take days off from being an adult to do these things again.

I dreamt of disintegrating, of decomposing and melting into nothingness. I hardly slept at all, just two hours between 6 and 8am, after lying awake staring at the waning light of the moon. I've been possessed by hayfever all evening. A tarot reading answered, quite clearly, an entirely different question to the one I asked. Everything hung cold and plain before me, no emotional subtlety, no warmth in the inverted maternity it offered. All things must come to an end. All things must go on. Living in contemplation, in patient abeyance is not living. Life must go on. It must.

New week, same old shite. Monday means the weekend's Summer Holiday is over before it began. I'm finishing off a short story I started two years ago. Recent events have somehow summoned the energy to bring it full circle, to give it closure. Recent events have given me the focus, the interest to write again. Recent events have encouraged me to question who I really am, and accept what I'm not and cannot do. I am not a ghost. I cannot go backwards. I must push the cart forwards, and not worry about every keepsake I drop along the way.

Cancellations are good. They're fine. Really, it's all fine. I've no reason to expect anything from you other than what you offer me. But do I? And what? In many ways, this is all new, again, but not overwhelming like before. Now it's just confusing. I don't understand where these feelings come from, or what they mean. To be honest, I was a little surprised at just how much my heart sank, but I don't think it showed. One rule I've learnt from this obscure little game is that there's nothing more unattractive to someone than appearing interested in them.

Oh, what a surprise. I'm sick of waiting for you all the time. You make me look bad - lazy, indifferent, simple, rude even. And you just don't care. You don't make any effort to make up for your laziness. You make no effort to change or to better yourself, and that is always what infuriates me the most. How much money do I give you everyday? Money I could do with, that all goes to waste when I have to pay to make alternative arrangements to compensate for your uselessness. So screw you London transport. Next time I'll walk.

New and old, home and abroad, we wait for news, for details, for relief. For joy. Is she okay? Is he all right? They must be exhausted. And what about... it seems wrong to refer to call it 'it' now. Is he a boy? Is she a girl? Are they ginger? What's their name? Somewhere, everyday in the world, a new life's made, a fleshy little bundle of potential, ability and promise. We know where this one is. And we know who made it. It's a miracle, and like any human we just want to know what to call it.

Very surprised and delighted it's a girl. I heard just before lunch, and walked through the brilliant sunshine of Tavistock Square, under blue skies and deep green leaves. A perfect day. Life renews everywhere: a pigeon nesting her eggs on my balcony, a caterpillar silking itself to my kitchen wall. Beth and I sat in the square and talked about the usual topics. There was something in the air: a scent, pungent and sickly, like rotting meat. No wind today, nothing to blow away the stench, or the thick blankets of pollen that make my eyes stream until they're bloodshot.

Eventually, you have to put away childish things. Inevitably, you outgrow clothes, toys, the games you played with others. The world gets bigger as we do, the cup less easy to fill. Even trees spread their branches wide, away from the trunk, away from that pure nourishing vein of sap swelling so bountifully from the rich sweet-scented grass. Just because you get older, because things change and you with them, just because the human world grows duller as you grow further into it, and its taxes and jobs and mortgages and pensions, it doesn't mean you have to grow up.

Now and again I feel very lonely. Not lonely in the language that most people would consider. Imagine talking Italian when it's not your native language. Imagine listening to it. You just want to find someone who speaks English, someone with whom conversation isn't a strain because of your limited vocabulary in even the smallest of concepts. Someone you can speak in your own tongue with. Sometimes you meet someone who can get the accent right, but they always seem to muddle the declensions in the end. You don't expect to be understood. There's no one. No one at all.

It's our second tacitly appointed weekly evening together tomorrow. Already, pre-emptively, I'm growing defensively dismissive. I'm a fool when infatuated. It doesn't bring out the best in me. Quite the opposite. In today's tarot reading, despite asking specifically, love didn't remotely feature. Instead I was shown the glowing future of an adventurer, a man of passion in imagination, not romance. I can accept that. Peter Pan never got married. He never settled down with Wendy and had a mortgage and three kids. Peter had adventures, everyday, and didn't stop until the day he didn't die.

But peter was never alone.

Every year I've missed this competition. I don't expect to storm it. I just want to submit something I've faith in. There's always so much against effort: laziness, lack of inspiration, tiredness, hayfever. Now my boss's commenting whilst I sit here, after hours, trying to get this done. Lots of "Oh, oh I see"s and "make sure everything else's done"s. It wouldn't be an issue if I'd gone home. I've bought Mr B his present. I called you, and you helped just by letting me hear your voice. Then He called. Friends and lovers will save you. Environment is crucial.

New best friend wanted. We are looking for someone who keeps promises, does not treat others like a convenient accessory, and can fulfil a promise to attend the simplest of social events arranged weeks in advance without cancelling at the last minute. Atmosphere of compromise with my diary commitments and not just yours essential. Applicant must be proficient in both highbrow and Heat Magazine-esque conversations. An ideal candidate is one who does not sever all contact as soon as something in trousers with a floppy fringe appears. Smoker preferred but not obligatory. Part time heavy drinkers only. No timewasters please.

-Christopher. +100 Words. +Jon. +James. -James. Alistair Appleton. July7th. +Bradley. Quitting job. Moving to Canada. +Paul. -Paul. Bradley. Staying in UK. Keeping job. Beasts of the Field. Moving to Canada. First Christmas without mum or Rhi. HenGar. Bradley. Switzerland. Staying in UK. Beasts of the Field. +Moving flat. Mnemosyne's Elephant. Moving to Canada. Quitting job. +Steve. -Steve. Bradley. Hayfever. +Christopher. Tarot. MacBook. +Eddie. Christopher. +Jim. Ber. Mum. No cancer here. -Moving flat. +Katherine. Keeping job. Staying in UK. Jim. Christopher. Bradley. Moving to Canada. Quitting job. True Beauty. -100 Words. Desire to write ‘The End', but life isn't like that.

Everything's come full circle. I didn't intend it to happen this way, but ain't it just life that it did. Death and rebirth, that's been the theme of the past year - this seamless garment, what you leave behind and what you encounter. Some things you just can't leave behind. Some keepsakes you needn't stop to pick up once they've fallen. Some things you're destined to find. I get it now. Time will flow, one way or another. Time will change things. Life will grow and move on, over scars and stitches alike. You really can't put barriers in time.