Clockwork Motorboats

I love sitting in coffee shops, even if I am a tea drinker. Right now I'm sitting in a Caffé Nero at the north end of Waterloo Bridge in London. I arrived early (before 0900hrs) and, in a nutshell, I'm living the dream. My dream is just this, sitting in a coffee shop, alone, killing time with a decent book - I've now finished  More Die of Heartbreak  by Saul Bellow, it's taken me months. I have a laptop on which I am now writing these words and I have a copy of Dave Grohl's The Storyteller. I like Dave Grohl and now that I've finished Saul Bellow I can read his book, which is subtitled 'Tales of Life and Music'.  Grohl has a certain level of respectability that I applaud; he is, perhaps, the respectable face of rock n roll with a wife and kids and parents who were both writers. Grohl was the drummer in Nirvana, and he plays guitar, and let's not forget the band he heads up, the Foo Fighters. I can't say I've ever really listened to the Foo F...

Sometimes I fear that I’m losing it. I am not my usual self. I don’t even know what my ‘usual self’ is anymore. Or perhaps I do and I find it rather worrying. I start to wonder, not about my sanity (that’s intact, or rather it’s in far better shape than it used to be) but about whether the person I seem to be turning into is the real me and that the caricature, the ‘act’, the alter ego that I developed many years ago in order to combat feelings of inferiority and shyness, is slowly dying out. Many years ago I decided that the only way to be popular was to play the fool, be the ‘crazy guy’, the Keith Moon, the nutter, the one that was fun to have around until things got out of hand, usually because there was alcohol involved. I was proud to be the one incapable of having a girlfriend for more than a couple of weeks (such a wild and crazy guy!) and although the reality was that if I hadn’t been locked into the crazy character I had developed, I was probably capable of being ‘the sensible...