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 ...

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 sensibl...