JSBach: violin sonata no.1 for in G minor

I am oddly calm and at peace with myself and the world this evening. The shades are coming down; extraordinary cloud formations in dark kinds of grey float across the patch of suburban London I can see from my window. The dafoldils in the vase on my desk are coming out of bud. In the kitchen, I am making soup. I have had a shower and a whiskey and soda; I'm in my pajamas with another of the same. Listening to Bach. It isn't feeling that all is right in the world, nor some kind of Pangloss-esque optimism. I don't mean redemption and I don't even mean all will be well and... Out of nowhere a passage from Romans comes into my mind- chapter eight, I think. Paul claims that "all things work together for the good of them that love the lord", and I presume he means by all things not just the nice ones but the really bloody nasty as well. Out of the terrifying chaos of good and bad comes something solid and true. A thought which has returned to me often over the last few days: that out of all the good and bad- out of the particular, unique combination of good and bad- I came, and that without the bad I would have been something different altogether. There is a sort of reconcilliation that comes from accepting that even the trully horrific bits of your life played their part in your own self's fashioning.

Tonight, my perceptions, my sense of peace, have the particular clarity which comes only from having been buggered in the head for a while and then having it stop. It's not unlike the feeling one gets when a heavy load is put down- an inner sense of weightlessness. It's been a hard week. I spent the weekend with my grandparents. I love my grandparents. In many ways I think they are the sum total of the ways in which my family are good. However. Spending time with them is a little wearing. My grandmother is obsessed with my lack of boyfriend. -So, darling, Do you have a boyfriend? is her usual opening gambit. After this has been answered in the negative, she will talk about something else for a while and then, when I am least expecting it, she will fire out -Why don't you have a boyfriend? -Well, I, uh... After this we have -Do you want a boyfriend, -Is there anyone you would like to be your boyfriend, -Why don't you get yourself a boyfriend, and, if I am really lucky, -so, then, darling, do you have a girlfriend? No, nanny. I don't. And I don't know why. It's not a moral thing, if that's what you're asking. In the words of Johnny Cash, I guess things just happen that way.

I am a constant disappointment to her, and have been for years, with respect to my lack of boyfriend. Sometimes I am tempted to make one up. A peer of the realm, possibly, or if not that then someone wholly and utterly unsuitable- a plumber, perhaps, or a peadophile. I would like to see how far I could push my powers of invention without making her suspicious. The only thing that stops me is that she would ask to meet him. She's a forceful woman, despite being about five feet tall and having severe Parkinson's. I'm quite scared of her. I'd have to get someone to pretend, and it's just one step from there to Victorian farse and men disguised as women pretending to be other men hiding underneath tables. I am resigned to being a faliure in her eyes.

My grandfather, on the other hand, is a quietly pessimistic supporter of the UK independence party. He likes Wagner. He likes watching opera with me. This time, he made me watch Strauss' Elektra at ten a.m. on Easter Monday, an act of such unusual cruelty that it ought to be part of basic routine in the Guantanamo Bay area. After the full, unbroken two hours of the film version I felt like I had been beaten about the head with a big stick and then had nasty, insanitary objects inserted into my brain via my ears. The odd thing is, I did quite want to see it. Just not in the morning. On a monday.

All this, and they remind me so painfully of what it is like to have a family. There are photographs of my mother everywhere. I try not to look, because it is too paainful to see her face. I can't think about that. Not now. Not yet. I can't deal with mmy grandmother saying how proud she would have been of me. I don't think she would haave been. Not now. Not here.

I took the train home yesterday in a mood of utter bleakness. I dislike trains intensely. It's something to do with being suspended between there and here; where you have come from and where you are going. You shed identifying marks and for a while you exist in transit, in a vacuum, no longer part of the lives of those you have visited, nor yet a part of your own. I am afraid that I will forget who I am; that somehow I will be lulled by the rhythmn of the wheels and the passing fens, and I will stop being myself, and continue for years, one train after another, dark sea to dark sea, broken only by strip-lit platforms with cigarette butts. The alternative is to return to my life, which, seen from outside, seen from a seat on the WAGN intercity service from Ipswich to London Liverpool Street, seems to be so empty as to barely exist. A small and tightly bound routine all that keeps me from floating freely into negation.

I got home. I sat for a long time just inside the doorway as a patch of light from the window moved slowly across the wall. I sat in the waiting quiet next to a pile of unopened mail. I got up, poured myself a drink, and sat back down again. It's as close to killing myself as I've come for a whille. Unfortunately, at some point during the last week I threw out all my blades. Every single last one; every beautiful, glorious piece of pressed steel. I don't quite know why I did it. There wasn't a moment of truth, a revelation or a turnin point. No ceremonials, no fanfares, no ray of light across my face as I consigned them to the rubbish bin. The opposite of these things. I did it because for the first time in more years than I care to count I felt that I had the choice.

The upshot was, though, that feeling bleak and feeling empty and feeling like I didn't want to resume my life but didn't want to run away, and feeling more lonely than it is possible to describe, and feeling like there was no where I could turn and nothing I could do to just. make it. fucking. stop. I didn't even have the means to kill myself. No blades. No pills. No rope. I sat on. After a while, I got up and went out.

And now peace. In the time it's taken me to write this the evening has settled to night. The candle's burnt down a bit. The soup is probably done, although to be honest I have no idea how one knows when to stop cooking soup. I feel calm and resolute and in a silent far off way I am glad to be alive. If I hadn't thrown out the blades, I wouldn't be here. If I hadn't felt like dying I wouldn't be here. That doesn't change either event. The bad is still bad and the good is still good. I don't believe in that sort of redemption. But you work with what you have to hand, and with what I had to hand this moment is what I have made.

(I am hoping that this principle holds true for soup).