The aesthete

It's been a long day. I'm trying to write a song before Friday with a series of constraints which would terrify Bach himself. It's a fairly exhausting task. I've been up and down the ladder to the loft so often I've started to feel like one of those bemused blue bottles that frantically bash against different windows in a house. It's rained all day for the first time in ages, which means water's coming through our roof again. As I sat in the loft, I could hear it drip-dropping into a couple of plastic containers Nathan hastily shoved up there before going to work. I think autumn leaves get into the guttering and then all hell breaks loose. There's a patch of mould on our sitting room ceiling. When the roof leaks, I feel like a proper bohemian! I'm not sure any man should get to 41 and have a roof with holes in it, but we keep shuffling onwards!

I went to the gym and marvelled at a young lad who could only be described as an aesthete. He entered the changing room wearing the most immaculate, yet fuddy-duddy suit, with a bow tie and braces. Everything he wore had been perfectly pressed. His shoes were shiny as glass. He couldn't have been older than 25. I was a little surprise to discover that he was Polish or of Eastern European extraction. He spoke to ask if the towel on the bench was "yours or mynce?" His demeanour, however, was utterly English... Like someone from a public school in the 1960s; the sort of lad who would have been beaten up down Rushden High Street when I was a kid. He changed into his gym gear, and I was amused to see that everything he was wearing - a perfect sky-blue-coloured football kit with knee-high socks - had been equally pressed and carefully arranged about his person. His trainers were just as shiny as his work shoes. I didn't know you could get shiny trainers. He ran like a gazelle on the tread mill. Actually I'd go as far as to say that he pranced...

I'm not sleeping much at the moment. Except for the night before last... the night after I'd stayed up all night. Nathan forced me to take a sleeping pill; a little blue thing from the States, and I entered a rather pleasant coma for about nine hours. Last night, however, I was up again in the night again... Worrying. Pacing. Going over little snippets of conversation from the day. Hearing little bits of music in the back of my mind. I fall asleep fairly speedily every night, but then, within ten minutes, I'm awake again. I've worked out that there's no point in my lying in bed wide-eyed and panicky, so I come into the sitting room, wrap myself up in a blanket on the sofa and switch the telly on, which usually does the trick. Late night telly is quite fun. Last night I got to watch an episode of the English version of Storage Hunters, which is car-crash telly in the extreme!