There was something about the way the Clogs album was recorded that made me think I could hear breathing behind me. The cat, maybe, or the plants. But no, the cat was sleeping upstairs, dreaming of its glory days biting through the jugular veins of Sclater Street rats and spraying the walls of the live-work space it used to live in with rodent blood. And I can’t hear plants, even with my new improved hearing. If any plant could breathe audibly it would be my sempervivum, on the windowsill, looking at me all underwater-like and purply green. But it was just the music. The sound of wood. You could hear everything and some more besides; it was a beautiful recording. When I look through my 1950s binoculars at the cornices on the church tower, that’s what it sounds like.

When I cleared up the house I listened to Alms by Re: and it made me feel safe because it sounded like the city. Like the squat that caught fire the other day. I mourned the loss of the 70s mosaic shop sign that said Jon’s Scooters, and hoped that the alsatians and the white cat and the dude with the sideburns who all run the music shop next door to it hadn’t suffered any damage as a result. but their disco lights above the door were still flashing and the blue acoustic guitar was still in the window. Re: sounded like the little burnt-out shop and the regenerated tower blocks both. It sounded like the greasy-grey water in the canal and the enormous old film studio now turned into luxury Ballardian office-flats that towers over it. Sometimes buildings make you feel safer than humans; likewise, sometimes noise makes you feel safer than voices. Sometimes the city feels so safe I think I’ll never leave.

In the bookshop I found Peacock Pie by Walter de la Mare. It reminded me of being a child in a house where there was a lot of dust; of watching the dust in the sunlight and reading for hours with my back against the radiator and my fringe in my eyes. The poems in the book lived in a world where everything was sketched dark and scratchy from the pen of Edward Ardizzone and lit only by fireside, moon, gaslamp, small patches of sun through trees. I could see me then, and me now, and I had that still moment of knowing I was same person always.

At the party last night I danced in satin shoes and purloined Ritter Sport with one hand while spinning dancehall, country, high-life, psych-rock with the other. It was fun, but when I got tired I had to go home on my own and there was no-one here to hassle. I tried to toast a bagel and then forgot to eat it. I thought about the next issue of Plan B, blank pages ready already for filling. David revived his Friendster profile, and in the process seems to have broken the whole of Friendster because now it doesn’t work. I wrote him a testimonial and cannot for the life of me remember what it said.