23.03.10 The long dark night of the soul
Lying in bed, sweat drenched sheets cling to my freezing body, head racing, brain hurting with thousands upon thousands of unutterable things, opportunities missed, bad navigation on this raging and rolling sea. I no longer feel the presence of the universe, I am alone. The bed springs creak with the weight of life unlived, the pillow gets flatter as brain gets fatter and fills and fills with every single thing I never did,...things everywhere left undone...my life is undone...I am undone. Then I rise from my bed, make a decision and take action...I start moving very, very, very slowly in the right direction, any direction. All is not quite lost... my time is not yet up... the fat lady still stage left...finger tips still grip the ledge...all still to play for...eyes still on the prize..damn well not going down without fighting.

31.12.09 The Old Year
Father Time stumbles in like a ridiculous comedy tramp, beard full of old bits of food, hair matted with blood, dressed in tattered and dusty robes which reek of piss and cider, the very personification of time passed and the wrong road taken; he drags his hourglass like a dead weight, the sand nearly gone. Grimly grasping his old, blunt and broken scythe ready to reap the dying year... with one last pathetic burst of strength he will cut the fucker down. He is mortal, transitory, and wonderfully pointless... He not busy being born is busy dying...?

30.12.09 On Strength
''Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.''

24.12.09 On Winter
Midwinter more than ever makes me think of the Flannery O'Connor Jesus character, 'the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of our minds' Like the Green man, or maybe that rascal Jack Frost? the conversion from the 'Old Religion' to Christianity hasn't fully taken and we still have this ancient residue of the seasons that seeps through, the bearded stranger from remote places handing out gifts, the unknown traveller trying to coax us in to goodwill, peace and joy. The most interesting times come when we have these huge melting pots of culture and religion and belief or disbelief coming together to make something new and even more wonderful, something no-one ever dreamed of 'And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?'...exciting times.

03.12.09 On Crows
"Crow is an omen of Change. Crow lives in the void and has no sense of time, therefore, it sees past, present and future simultaneously. Crow merges both light and dark, both inner and outer. Crow is Trickster. Ted Hughes saw the Crow as the ideal protagonist for a trickster legend he'd been planning: the crow as survivor, inverted messiah, and totem bird of the spirit of England"

02.12.09 On Leonard Cohen
"That has been the background of much of my work ... All human activity is flawed ... it is by intimacy with the flaw that we discern our real humanity and our real connection with divine inspiration." And it is in that redrafted version of Hallelujah, where he ends loveless, maybe Godless, cracked and cold and broken, that the light truly gets in. And this brokenness brings to his lyrics the pain and disappointment of being a flawed human being, and the perpetual effort to be better. My personal journey to find meaning, that is all it is..."

02.11.09
The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over...