The children want to play in the tree.

Ice makes glassy cracking noises in my drink.

Too warm for this time of year, but reminiscent of other years at this time, looking forward necessarily to the future defined by a calendar and wondering, as close as I come to planning what might come next.

Most people around me change. And what prince constancy?

A bookie's ticket in the shop on Cleveland Street. God knows how many we collected off the ground filling in time at the Scone Cup. A bookie's ticket by a stag's head made for my wall.

My laptop keeps my legs warm.

Disgrace

The dog is on the table facing him. It has long kelpie ears. Very briefly he takes a silky ear in each hand, the greatest affection he can manage. Then he sends her to death just like the rest.

Jonquils wilt slowly in the kitchen. Freshness of first spring incompatible with the artificially heated lingering winter. There's a fridge half cleaned out and old food waiting to be discarded in bowls on the bench. There's Sarah Blasko and her bordering-on-jazz showcasing all the icy space of Sweden. There's Nick Cave and Mark Dapin sharing lunch. These two people intersect. Two people with whom separately I've failed to be able to string together any semblance of conversation.

There's a pineapple down from the north coast waiting to be made into a cake. Its carbon miles don't count because we were already going that way.

And Sarah Blasko wanting to be Feist wanting to be a bewitching someone from the sixties? I think she will get me in the end, though.

Cave says that the more incident free his personal life is, the more volatile, violent and explosive his imaginative life is.

I made a mental list of the things that make me happy and this was one of them.