February the 28th, 2012

The dreams seem to have gone. I even spent last night alone in my flat and didn’t have too much of a creepy feeling (the jitters hadn’t completely gone, but that might just be memory playing on reality). All in all I feel good, this year is going well. I do worry a bit how this blog will go if it’s about a happy man with a lovely life, but there you are.

Monday, 27th of February

I think Louise was surprised tonight at how upbeat I was (do people who are happy also go to therapists? It seems a bit like inviting a plumber around when there’s nothing wrong with the pipes, but maybe there are those who were unhappy but now they’ve gotten over it just go to continue having a chat. It’s a fix they can’t break). Having spent the weekend largely at Julie’s I had avoided my flat, while being with her seems to stop the dreams. Therefore there was a freshness to me, a joviality that Louise maybe hadn’t seen before.
In the event we spent a lot of time talking about my book, and how it was written the last time I was depressed and contains huge echoes of that. (Even if one produces a horror story about a Faustian pact, it can still be personal). Louise told me that a good thing some therapists recommend is writing down one’s problems, as you can of course see them more clearly in black and white. It didn’t feel like it at the time (I wrote it in the white heat of unhappy misery) but maybe the whole thing did me a lot of good. Maybe this blog is also doing me good, as despite all my moaning so far this year, I now feel happy, with a nice girlfriend and a holiday ahead. Okay, there are moments of paranoia and I’m sure there will be more dreams, but I can work on that.

Now if only I could lose the sense that if everything is so good, it’s bound to go wrong shortly.

Saturday, 25th of February

It felt like a particularly long week at work this week, it felt a particularly long week at home. I didn’t see Julie (she was too swamped herself) and somehow I failed to go out with any of my friends. I just went home to my flat at the end of the day and endured the odd sense that someone else had been there. That somehow I don’t live by myself anymore, that I now flat--share with somebody I don’t know and have never seen.
I remember reading once about when Sid James was having an affair with Barbara Windsor. That was not a particularly smart move as her husband at the time was Ronnie Knight, the South London gangster. But rather than beat James up, Knight merely broke into Sid’s flat and moved all the furniture around. There was nothing Sid could do about it (he could hardly go to the police about Ronnie Knight), it was just a way of showing how vulnerable Sid and his home actually were. The fact of arriving home and knowing that someone has clearly been there – invading your private space – is hugely disturbing.

Nothing like that has happened with me. In fact I couldn’t put my finger on anything being moved at all, but I just have a sensation that there is something there – someone there – and that they want me to know it.

Probably I should have gone out this week, got out of my head – but one always has to go home, right?