I was sitting in the car park listening to a podcast about secular Buddhism. The car was parked in the hospital car park, and I was waiting.

...perhaps it's just that I was a child when swearing was first allowed on British television and I took to it like a pig to shit.

Thinking about what matters and what doesn't. 

I don’t understand much at all. This isn't some kind of introduction to a kind of stand-up routine, or some falsely-modest attempt at self-deprecation. I just don't understand much.

Life is fast.

Growing up was a good thing. Getting older was good. You could wear different clothes, make some decisions of your own. You could, one day, smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol, get married and drive a car.

I have this serious sense that I am about to be exposed as in some way inadequate. I am 53 years old and still, from time to time, wake from a nightmare that tomorrow I have a test for a course I never attended.

We are aliens in our own world, no different now, really, than when our pre-historic antecessors watched the Sun rise and the Moon set, wondering in fear when they would stop their mysterious motions.

It’s been an emotional few months. Well, an emotional life, really. What are we if not a mixing bowl of emotions? See? I told you.

Prayer is personal. It doesn't need to be explained, much less defended or even talked about. I don't know who made all this, but I know it was made. What else do we need to know?

After four hours rolling from side to side in bed last night/this morning, thinking about all the exercise and writing I haven't been doing, I got up and opened The Unknown University - a collection of poems by Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. I read the first two in order - I never usually read poetry books in order - and I decided the time had come to write on.

Horses who stood out in the rain with her and horses who said they would but never did. 

Maybe we all need to stop and think. To look at the world and our place in it. To stop obsessing over stupid and meaningless matters. To be vast.

Dust settles; perspective shifts. 

Never mind the stupidity we have to face day after day created by men who stink of hate.

The world has become like this big old mansion you can walk or run through, opening doors into rooms without knowing what to find when you go in.

First and foremost, I was inciting nothing. Then, let's consider the demonstrable fact that "eat shit and die" is an established phrase in the English language.

I get ready in the light-dark-light and again wonder at the capacity of the human eye. The dogs are asleep. It's pre-dawn. I'm going for a run.