For some time now I’ve been living with the Dostoyevsky syndrome.
It’s been a few months at least, at just 20 minutes a day, but not every day. Not every day? Pah, devil take you. Because 20 minutes with a Russian master at 6.30 in the morning, even not every morning, is enough.
Read MoreThere's nothing worse than shaving, except maybe migraines, waterboarding, Nick Clegg’s blue-grey suits, hypothermia ... loads of things are worse than shaving, but it doesn’t always feel that way when you’re doing it. The average man spends (approximately) 13,350 hours of his life shaving. I never quiz others on their technique but suspect it’s all much of a muchness – starting at the same point every time, up the neck, down the jawline, looking at your face, blady bla ...
Read MoreTruth be told I feel a bit like Jason Bourne. I wander through town unnoticed, like any other member of public, but I have a secret, I have the codes. Under attack from a rogue bladder or bowel movement, I know exactly what to do, exactly where to go.
Read MoreI hadn’t even realised my phone was missing but had the obvious first thought: “These are terrorists, this goes right to the heart of government, I can’t trust anyone.”
Read MoreUntil now, there was nothing I enjoyed more than coming home through the park from a friend’s birthday party half-cut, playing in the autumnal leaves. I’d run and dive; I’d lift them in both hands and let them rain down on me.
Read MoreWhen it finished, the “watchers” were asked what they had written down. In my case, I’d drawn a doodle with lots of arrows in it, a vaguely phallic squiggle and a single sentence in amazingly scruffy shorthand: why do people role-play?
Read MoreThe newest of my Paul Dalgarnos, who I’ve been chums with for a fortnight, simply clicked on “accept”, with no further comment. It was enough that I was a Paul Dalgarno.
Read MoreDavid Beckham keeps coming to mind. It’s embarrassing to admit he plays any part in my style choices but I suspect, in his own invidious way, he does.
Read MoreSometimes people tap you on the arm and say, “Oh, hey, I’ll give you a laugh,” but what they really mean is the opposite, that you have to give them a laugh. If they’re particularly enthusiastic they’ll promise you a “real laugh”, and so that’s what you have to give them: a real laugh.
Read MoreI keep overtaking him and he keeps coming back, overtaking me. He actually ran in front of a car yesterday – to get the edge on me, I think.
Read MoreIt’s a kind of dwam: not free-form thinking, because you have to concentrate on the disc and its trajectory, but a certain reverie, a contemplation of all things disc-shaped.
Read MoreYou don’t despair. You do your best, but always with the caveat that it’s your best under the circumstances. And circumstance, as with readiness, is all.
Read MoreAfter more than an hour of falling on rocks and cursing I spied one of their static burning torches, then another. Oh, blessed light.
Read MoreI’m looking in my bathroom mirror with both thumbs and index fingers round the follicle of a grey hair. Maybe it’s not grey; it could just be the way the light’s coming in the window – because you do often get grey shards that alight on one hair in particular, changing its colour from brown to grey,
Read MoreI don’t see people the same; there’s been a fundamental shift in the way I feel about the world and my place within it, none of which, as far as I can tell, has been conscious.
Read MoreThe buzzer went and the six men I’d seen leaping from a van below could be heard bounding up the tenement stairs: four floors, eight narrow flights, 10 treacherous steps on each.
Read MoreI’ve lost count of the times I’ve been cajoled into dancing at an event, having refused at first, only to find myself, five minutes later, the focal point of clapping people who’ve cleared a space for me to do my Cossack dancing party piece.
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