Like a delayed reaction to January I’ve been trying to do all the right things. Become more positive and outgoing despite the incessant misery of a news cycle I no longer want to read. Politics is necessary, but it corrodes the soul and forges barriers that need not exist.

Domestically speaking I am winning and have been since I returned from Italy. I have worked it all out in a scribbled list. Bought myself a new kitchen tap, painted the bathroom ceiling, gone running every (second) day and stocked my fridge with avocados, berries and salad bags.

Going to write a story for BBC Radio 4 and overcome my fear of dialogue. I spend half my life wooing girls in a chat box FFS.

It can’t be that hard surely?

**

Catching up with friends and having drinks with yoga missionaries, former colleagues and ex-flatmates. Sharing gifts from Italy and avoiding conflict with Room A and Room B. This is proving a challenge I must admit. It’s a source of frustration that no matter where I work or how much I earn, London is unforgiving and dazzling with space age greed.

Like when I scuttle down Whitechapel High Street with a new haircut and cream smooth shoulders. Carrying orange plastic bags from Sainsbury’s and my father’s rucksack towards the overground. There are muggings in this area.

Whitechapel is brutal in the evening rain, jet black with poverty, beggars and collapsing canopies as the Gerkin beats on in the distance.

Dazzling with light amidst the emptiness of my travels. I feel edgy and sad where usually I am steadfastly indifferent and preoccupied with other things. I overshare too much and maintain unrealisable dreams.

Where is the signal amid this noise? I ask myself silently. My phone is new, but the message is the same. But that has never stopped me looking for gold stars on a wet weekend in February.

My first ever London job interview took place in Fitzrovia. Arriving an hour early and trembling with nerves, I rehearsed my lines at the Crown and Sceptre. England had not yet banned smoking in public places and I drank orange juice in the corner.

I remember finding the job building with a Google map sheet printed off at Hillhead Library. It was a steamy hot day in mid-July and sweat beads were trickling down my lower back.

I had to go back to Scotland with something.

Writing out verbatim what I was going to say to my English bosses, I successfully got the job and returned to Glasgow the same day. It’s strange how these watershed moments in your life, the unwritten history of small incidents are so vivid in retrospect. How one slipped line could have eradicated my present day.

Construction pits and scaffolding herald a new era in Fitzrovia. Once a bohemian drinking hub for interwar poets, it has now become an investment square for plutocrats. I barely recognise the place walking around today. It’s a forgotten land.

Ghosts laughed here when the century was still young.

Like many people I take my health for granted and expect to be well. Generally speaking my body works and hospitals are distant places I attended sparingly as a child. I remember falling off an older boy’s bike as a 7-year-old and having to wear a sling the following day. No bones are broken in my family. Trips to the doctors were comforting back then. If anything it was a chance to play with toys somewhere other than home.

By the time the human body has circled the sun for several decades, I take a dimmer view of a hospital waiting room. Through human error and abnormality I found myself vulnerable to their presence today. A hapless figure lying sideways with a black pipe thrust down my throat, bereft of the independence and freedom I so often take for granted.

Choking on an innocuous piece of chicken the night before, I had been retching over my sink into the early hours. I felt annoyed that I wasted an evening to discomfort. Although I was sure it would pass easy enough. Listening to the Arctic winds lacerating the beech tree behind my window, I lay motionless as the stray television aerial whipped the adjacent balcony. Storms are strangely comforting in times of stress.

But after hours of spluttering I gave way to unflinching reality that my throat wasn’t functioning with the same lucidity it once did.

**

Checking into my local GP and immediately being transferred to hospital, I found myself with no toys to play with other than my smartphone. Despite not being able to swallow or eat anything, I still wanted to work and get on with my duties as normal. I even brought my laptop to the hospital with the hope of completing some articles in the waiting room.

Sitting alongside trauma victims and watching old ladies on green trolleys, I found myself passed from one expert to another. Watching each doctor strip my independence and freedom from me, it became obvious that I required an immediate operation.

The doctors considered it a life or death scenario, as I could potentially choke to death and was unable to sip a glass of water. A large black nurse then gave me two baby wristbands and booked me an overnight bed. I politely refused the offer saying I wanted to go home after the operation.

‘Do you have anyone to pick you up after the operation, Mr Agnew?’ I politely said that I didn’t and they agreed not to sedate me. Consent forms were thus signed and it’s getting serious now. There was a 1/1000 chance of severe bleeding and lacerations. Unlikely I know.

**

Placing my body on the exam table, I found myself surrounded by six medics in blue coats and green breathing masks. A fuzzy helplessness emerges when you lie down in surgery. Your sense of uniqueness and independence vanishes when surrounded by doctors.

The surgeon then began discussing Greek terms such as Oesophagus and pushed a garden hose camera down my neck in the hope of fishing out the damage. Tears involuntary burst out in shock and my body’s gagging reflex felt numb and horrible. Suddenly I was nothing but a lump of breathing flesh, a vulnerable specimen entirely dependent on the skill and kindness of strangers.

Choking on an alien pipe inside my body, I started to panic and tapped my left foot to signal my discomfort to the doctors. But they kept pushing further down my neck and it took up to three expeditions before they removed the errant piece of food (>>5mm in length).

With my throat raw like a rusting mine shaft, I remember the machine green lights and the blind glare of the overhead lamp pouring over me. Someone’s smartphone was vibrating on the shelf opposite. I took some comfort in that. It was alive and buzzing with life. Funny how an artificial object was the only thing I could relate to in the entire room.

Afterwards I thanked all the doctors and nurses for looking after me. A nurse removed a needle from my hand and I was told I would get a confirmation letter within a few weeks. Eating properly will ensure I don’t ever have go through that operation again. What a godawful aberration of a day.

Only I realise now that my sense of independence and freedom is a temporary facade. It can be removed without notice or care. A person’s health is entirely dependent on benign cells, organs and most importantly luck. I have been fortunate on a number of levels on my journey to adulthood.

My throat is still sore, but my body works and functions as soundly as before. That gave me something to think about, as I walked home listening to my stomach silently roar.

Sometimes I feel unworthy of living in Venice. I don’t pay enough attention to details, especially now the numbers are slowing down. Walking back to the hotel with my headphones on, I feel guilty for not listening to bursts of opera or cutlery exchanging hands in restaurants. Spotify is a generic experience. Play, pause and repeat your songs over and over again.

We are going through the first phase of hyper acceleration, an unprecedented boom of global fertility all wanting the same photograph of the Grand Canal. Likewise I’m just a temporary EU migrant passing through the loveliest city in the world. It was an opportunity I couldn’t let pass.

Everyday I see newly married couples snuggle in beautifully crafted gondolas and it’s very much a case of play, pause and repeat. Same posed smile, loving tilt of the head and furrowed brow, I’ve witnessed a thousand honeymoons upload their story underneath a bridge. Seen through the prism of light, it’s a unique private moment, one shared with loved ones and marvelled over by long distance friends.

Only I see the same love story every single day.

Away from the watery parade, I remove my headphones, the plastic grooves gnashing onto my collar bone and enter an inverted Catholic church. Squashed inside the Venetian back streets, I arrive in a chaste world of silence and reflection.

Despite being militantly secular in my global politics, I took comfort in this medieval refuge. Photography is banned in Venetian churches and the circus of life takes a deferential pause. With my rucksack weighing on my back, I stood in silence amongst elaborately carved tombs and dead wooden benches.

It’s one of the few places in Venice where you can share a private moment, a world without flashing cameras and streamed playlists. Outside the craziness goes on oblivious, and I have to get back to my hotel; shower, get changed and go online again. My smartphone might vibrate with loving messages.

There must be something about human nature that turns everything into a routine.

Picture: Inspiring City

With Soho fast becoming a corporate shopping plaza and East End pubs smashed to the bone and re-branded as microbreweries. I find myself conflicted by the changing shape of London. Like Google’s Pac-Man eating its way through the city, the shabby old London is being swept away.

Pretty quickly you’ll have nothing left but glass apartments and rich men with tattoos. It feels decadent and precious to complain about this. Like everyone else, the world you leave behind will be virtually unrecognisable to the one you were brought up in.

Generation Z won’t notice the difference and individually and even collectively you’re powerless to resist change on this scale. But I feel immensely sad walking through Norton Folgate and Shoreditch seeing rows of Victorian warehouses earmarked for demolition. For me they are as beautiful and relevant to London’s cultural heritage as anything in Chelsea or Kensington.

Picture: The Urban Adventures of Keïteï

With luxury developers blinding future generations of their cultural inheritance, it feels cruel and unnecessary to see London’s rough edges destroyed. When I first moved to East London in early 2008, I remember arriving at Aldgate East tube station feeling edgy and insecure. Not ‘edgy’ the marketing term for a Netflix crime drama, but a raw, dirty sensation. I liked it immediately. I felt incredibly naive and very much alive.

Exploring my local area at the weekends, I spotted ivy clad philanthropist mansions, rows of broken factories and scary old man pubs serving only Fosters. After dark the Gerkin would sparkle in the distance and Jack the Ripper walking tours were growing in popularity.

Ironically there is nothing to see on these Ripper tours, almost all the original sites have been knocked down or rebuilt to such an extent they are virtually unrecognisable. It’s pretty hard to ‘feel the atmosphere’ standing outside a Pret a’ manger.

Living in Whitechapel and Bow for eighteen months, my favourite Victorian free house was the White Hart, a corner pub frequented by Cockney geezers and ragtag students. Always a bear pit on Champions League nights, everyone would pack into the pub like a seventies football terrace, creating a better atmosphere than the games themselves.

The food was terrible and you wouldn’t dream of making eye contact with the West Ham fans, but it captured the ramshackle atmosphere of E2. Like many East London boozers it’s been converted into a gourmet restaurant now. Walking past the upgraded venue in 2015, the microbrewery is busier than ever before serving pan roasted sea-bass, pesto mash and tender-stem broccoli.

There is nothing inherently wrong with gourmet restaurants and demographics will inevitably shift and evolve over time. Only entering the refurbished White Hart Brew Pub™ you could literally be in any UK chain bar ordering locally sourced fish for £16.50. It’s safe, predictable and meticulously branded just like their Facebook page.

Alas, when you compare the White Hart Brew Pub to the slow destruction of East London by property developers it’s worthy of the National Trust. As its not only working-class pubs that are being gutted of their cultural heritage. Silk weavers homes, Georgian townhouses, children’s hospitals and historic trading markets have all been replaced by luxury flats over the past ten years.

Across London the grubby underbelly of alternative counter-culture is being slowly dismantled to the point there will be nothing left. Gone already are the dirty jazz clubs and bohemian squats in Soho. They are even demolishing an arthouse cinema for the financial benefit of a tiny global minority.

Destroying what made the area so attractive to visitors in the first place, global capitalism is paradoxically eating itself. Does anyone want to arrive in Spitalfields on a Sunday afternoon and discover nothing but ghastly office blocks and chain coffee shops?

Most people assume all change is growth and movement must go forward, but I am not sure this is necessarily true. Perhaps I am lucky to live here while the residue of past centuries are still visible.

London will inevitably change as buildings are not supposed to last forever. Like any other city in the Western world; fashions evolve, communities die and modernist epochs will be grafted onto any available space. But do you want to live in a smart city where everything looks the same? An urban fire forest that sparkles at night and morphs into dullness at day. Rough edges still have a role to play in my book. Show me the glint of light on broken glass.

I think most people write because they don’t want to sleepwalk through life. Writing is a means of keeping memories alive. If you don’t record, paint or obsessively photograph or film every living moment then why are you even here? I write to stay alive as you forget what matters otherwise. That’s the one thing that scares me the most. Not being able to remember my stories for better or worse. I also want to keep a record of my changing. I am always changing.

School years are easy to remember if your parents keep hold of your jotters, paintings and teacher reports. Thereafter you have landmark birthdays with complementing photographs, graduation days and long hot summers doing nothing at all. Memories feel more tangible when your everyday life is administered year by year.

Only now I find months and years morph anonymously into a cloudy void. This year doesn’t feel any different than the previous four. I’m sure plenty of things have happened, but for some reason I barely notice the difference. Perhaps amnesia has set in prematurely because I’ve lived in the same flatshare for five years. Working as a freelance copywriter chasing unpaid invoices and ignoring voicemails is a repetitive trade at times.

An inconspicuous lifestyle in East London doesn’t provide much visual stimulation either. I’m sure the past few years would have been more memorable if I had gone backpacking in Chile or got married to a blonde jazz singer in Melbourne. Alas, when I wake up in the morning there is no orchestral soundtrack accompanying my footsteps to the bathroom. My laptop screensaver is the same as the year before. Pulling open my black Primark curtains I see the same tattered plastic bag swinging from the communal birch tree every day.

If it wasn’t for my WordPress blog then I wouldn’t be able to trace anything at all. Blogging provides a highly subjective recorded history, but a necessary one if you want to join up the dots. For example I can’t honestly remember when I flew over to New York for an OK Cupid date (yes that’s right).

If I scroll back I can remember arriving in Grand Central Station. It was unseasonally hot and I was jet lagged for the first time. Walking around I remember the towering sense of civilisation, meeting Nicole, queuing outside MOMA together and buying Mexican beers in a Harlem grocery store. But the timing of this otherwise memorable trip escapes me. It could have happened anytime in the last three years. Now that’s what you call experiencing life on a big scale.

From red ochre cave paintings in southern France to tweeting rubbish about football, there is something incredibly human about keeping a record. Skipped behind my bookcase lies a collection of diaries and notebooks I have curated over the years. With literary quotes squashed in the margins justifying their existence, I keep filling them out and dumping them alongside their older colleagues. A scrapheap of memories no one will ever read.

If I am lucky enough to have a family of my own they’ll eventually be boxed and kept upstairs in an oak wooden loft. Maybe they’ll be sparingly reopened for an old quote or a nostalgic rummage through the past. Only to be put back in their place again, a written bond with a young man that no longer exists.

In addition to my dusty notebook skip, I keep shoeboxes full of old letters, gifts and Valentine’s Day cards underneath my bed. Occasionally I take a look at them, but I haven’t checked them or my ex-girlfriends emails for over a decade. I know I will never look at them again. But I can’t bear the thought of getting rid of them either. A skip or recycle bin makes no difference to me. Deep down I want someone to read my stories when I’m not here.

Before I longed for a written legacy I remember being assigned a primary school project to recreate the standing stones of the Picts (an ancient warrior tribe in northern Scotland). The Romans called them the ‘Painted People’ because of their elaborate monstrous tattoos embroidered on their chests. On building Hadrian’s Wall in 128AD, the Romans essentially formed an ideological frontier that stated civilisation lay down south – roads, aqueducts, fortresses.

Northward bound was a land of mist, barbarians and Pictish standing stones. The same stone circles I tried to recreate with my Dad’s chisel. Looking back it was one of my all-time favourite school projects, bashing away at a lump of rock in a bitterly cold garage. I’ve resoundingly failed to experience the same sense of joy doing work ever since.

A large number of Pictish stone circles have survived in Scotland. Whatever messages the Picts were to trying convey I cannot fathom even now, but their recorded history remains accessible even today. Like the Picts we too express our own stories in equally vivid and complex ways, but assuming there will still be an inhabitable planet 2000 years from now, I don’t think any of my A.I descendants will be recreating my stories on an interstellar spaceship.

In some respects my skipped diaries are physical reminders of my narcissistic desire to be exhibited just like the Picts. While stone circles remain visible, our digital archives could easily be wiped out by a nuclear inspired electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Collectively we need the Internet to function as a global society.

Electrical magnetic storms have the ability to destroy our civilisation just like fire pulped the ancient scrolls of Alexandria Library. A world without Wi-Fi would be nasty, brutish and short if a magnetic dystopia were ever to take place. Don’t try and order a pizza on your iPhone when it happens.

Bit rot – the slow deterioration of data software such as floppy discs also renders our digital civilisation useless to future historians. Cloud based services are not worth anything if technology moves so fast that you can’t even open them. Unlike calfskin vellums and hardback books accessible in public libraries today, our collective knowledge requires constant software upgrades just to stay alive.

My stories are unlikely to be remembered by anyone and that’s assuming I’m fortunate enough to have children or grandchildren interested in genealogy. My WordPress subscription has to surely expire at some point. What happens if the software company goes bust or evolves into an augmented reality server projecting to a visually attuned audience?

While it probably isn’t a tragedy if my ex-girlfriends emails are unable to be read by future generations. I still want to keep them alive somehow. By taking one glance at them you hear the voice of another person, someone still alive but lost forever. We are always changing and writing helps you capture a particular moment in time. Writing to me is one of the greatest human inventions, holding us all together, providing an emotional bond with the dead, living and unborn.

Change is the one constant on a writer’s journey to the recycle bin. It doesn’t matter how eloquent and grand your thoughts are in the twenty-first century, all it takes is an epic server upgrade and your life stories will become robot.txt. You see that’s the progressive irony of our digital revolution. No amount of technology can save your words, especially anything that is stored on an electro powered server.

A memory palace is more likely to be derived from handwritten notebooks than your Facebook archives. If I want to preserve this particular record it would be wiser to print it off and laminate it for safe keeping. But even my words will fail to outlast the stone circles of an ancient Caledonian tribe. That’s real power if you ask me. All this superlative technology spinning in the sky, and the symbols that will out last us all have been carved with a chisel in the ground.

From working in a rickety town house in Venezia to a ridiculous Russian startup run by 20-year-old rich kids, to corporate Britannia in Oxford Circus. I’m forever spinning against the spectre of global competition. London is perpetually moving forward and banishes the vulnerable into exile. How can you compete against LA, Shanghai and New York? It’s really fucking hard to achieve anything.

I have no sense of accomplishment living here. Dates, plays and interviews make my life vibrant and calamitous. I love walking home along the Strand like a shadowy figure from the 1930’s. St’s Paul’s Cathedral is still my favourite London landmark after dark. Even now in my eighth year of asking. I collect glossy theatre programmes for £3.50 a piece and overload on books I never have time to read.

The lists I enthusiastically compile get ticked off and are repeated the following day. Still my confidence is fragile and I much, much prefer working at home. It astounds me at the age of thirty four that I’m so naive and dumbstruck by seemingly ordinary things.

As modern as tomorrow, there’s something tangible sitting in my black reclining seat, surrounded by shiny bits of silver and tubes of muesli. Picture a decade and you’ll find yourself here, overlooking workers eating salad boxes outside BBC headquarters. Watching split screens, listening to a bewildering range of accents and a slimline French girl with disconcertingly wide eyes.

Ambitions and eulogies soar in the glass palace opposite me. It takes a gregarious type to entertain so many vested interests for ten hours solid. And that’s before you factor in the What’s App messages, emails and midnight phone calls to Shanghai, Chile and New York. I can only bow to my own inertia in that respect. I can only talk for so long before I shut down.

I’m merely a observer of personalities and soaring ambitions. Money is the point, but it’s not what motivates them. They want something bigger than remuneration and no one in the glass palace ever struck me as being overtly materialistic. Not in the traditional sense, because it goes beyond money, it goes beyond the champagne and lobster cliches and four-day weekends in Monte Carlo.

What I find more interesting is why people try to achieve what they do. Why people keep working fourteen hours a day when you already have everything you possibly need. They play for glory and glory alone. The effervescence of London’s West End is exhilarating at times. Especially when I remember where I come from, and the shy insignificance I feel watching the globe converge in front of my very eyes.

Booking my flights to Venice last September had none of the usual fanfare. No shiny guidebook purchased from Waterstones, no ‘going local’ through disruptive technologies or Spritz cocktails. This was a flash visit for a purpose, a clandestine mission lasting less than 36 hours. After a deeply frustrating summer and a broken fairytale pulling my strings, I threw the dice and gambled on Venice.

On arriving at Marco Polo Airport around noon, I had the afternoon to work out the route if I could find my hotel in time. Armed with only a rucksack, I repeatedly told myself this was not a holiday, I couldn’t contemplate doing anything fun. Chopping along the lagoon waters at breakneck speed, I sat next to a brash American family as cormorants sped past us on the aquatic highway. Young couples on mini-breaks took shameless selfies and a Dutch family hawked up guttural consonants throughout the sea bound journey.

Everyone else on the vaporetto was decked in holiday attire and carrying bulging suitcases. I felt considerably out of place as we pulled up at St. Marks Square. Battling amongst a swarm of visitors I marched towards an astrological clock with sweat trickling down my back. Much to my dismay patches the size of Venice were already starting to develop.

Still blisteringly hot in early September, I checked into my one star hotel and was curtly directed by a mute receptionist to my room upstairs. I had to squeeze past a monstrous boiler just to get inside. Collapsing onto my rickety single frame it immediately began to squeak – this was going to be a long night and bloodsucking mosquitoes certainly made sure of that. Such was the sense of decay, I could have mysteriously died and my body would have lay undiscovered for about 25 years.

My interview took place a few days before the Scottish independence referendum and I felt incredibly tense refreshing Twitter for new polls. The #indyref certainly contributed towards a heightened sense of anxiety, one which crystalised my entire summer and fed into my Venetian journey.

Meanwhile I had to get this job whether Scotland became an independent state or not, and finding the office was proving difficult. Navigating a densely packed medieval warren and trying to pinpoint a tiny calle is not easy. With the lagoon heat saturating my energy, I kept on getting as far as Rialto fish market and nervously backtracking to my hotel exhausted and hungry.

Unlike Scotland nightfall descends more vividly in southern Europe and I failed to find the office despite searching for hours. My all-important interview was at 11am and not being able to find the office would hardly be a ringing endorsement of my intelligence. Even with my spatial awareness deficiencies, I simply had to find it after coming all this way.

After dining in a backstreet tattoria close to St. Mark Square, I coughed up my Euros for a pizza and returned to my upstairs hovel. Darkness had pulled its cloak over the island and there was a tangible switch in atmosphere, a balmy restlessness of knives and spoons entwining in lobster restaurants. Lying on my creaky bed frame, I conceded to my overheated melancholy and purchased £10 phone data triggering multiple What’s App conversations.

My first message came from an eccentric Croatian guy called Matej who had been communicating intermittently with me on Skype for months. Highly intelligent with superb colloquial English, Matej told me about the job and encouraged me to apply for the role, but pleaded with me not to mention him at all. I never knew what to make of the veiled secrecy. Being a straight up northern European my instinct is to apply for jobs the traditional way and let emails take care of the rest.

Things are done differently in Venice as I soon found out. Matej aggressively pleaded with me to meet him at Rialto Bridge saying “I’ll be really pissed with you if you don’t come!” On Skype chat he always appeared to be a shape shifting chameleon, and had a bizarre penchant for self-publicity. His alter ego Facebook page left me wondering exactly what ‘Matej’ I was going to meet later that evening.

He was also a domineering figure and clearly enjoyed playing games with people. Luckily I liked him but was suspicious and nervous too. I always appreciated his friendliness and sense of humour, but I didn’t know what to make of him, or what his motivation might be for inviting me to apply.

Unsure whether it was a good idea to meet him beforehand, I left the hotel and entered the darkness with mosquitoes famishing my wrists. Guided by spooky gas lamps and painted arrows, I arrived at Rialto Bridge teaming with flashing cameras and selfie sticks. Matej was standing there on the lower steps, a skinny flamboyant man with a rib hugging t-shirt, and we shook hands and both silently observed a hitherto internet character morphing into life.

Matej stressed we couldn’t hang around Rialto in case somebody saw us. Venice is a small island and you bump into friends and acquaintances every day. As a stranger in a foreign land, I blindly followed him down a series of calles past a fifteenth century monastery, which had been serenely converted into a beautiful hospital. In hushed tones he made it clear we couldn’t be seen talking in public, as far everyone in the office knew, we weren’t aware of one another’s existence.

Along the way I learned a Swedish guy was being considered for the job as well. Matej’s plan to parachute me into the office was suddenly in jeopardy. I felt threatened by this development too. Suddenly this trip wasn’t an inauguration after all and I could end up flying back to London with nothing.

Arriving at a back street tenement in Castello, I was introduced to three people in a gloomy Hopper-esque kitchen. Accepting one of their beers, Matej went on to explain the owner ran the office like a saloon bar and “you need to tell them how you can make the company lots of bookings without spending any money.” Then somewhat depressingly he lamented the state of the website and lack of bookings, much to the annoyance of his room mates, who were probably all too familiar with this angst ridden story.

After discussing the Scotland’s exit from the UK, I said my farewells and headed back to the hotel following the yellow arrows. Mataj’s cloak and dagger tactics had been a great help and I warmly reassured him I would stonewall him at tomorrow’s interview. With the office directions firmly embedded in my head I was confident I could find the place and get through this final, final round. Like everything else you need to throw the dice for extraordinary things to happen. I had lost enough in the proceeding months.

I flew over to live three weeks later.

Everything feels so temporary in autumn, although I much prefer the Americanism ‘the fall’. Usually I have these fizzing climaxes and quixotic dreams whirring in my brain, but they’ve fallen dormant since mid-summer and I have no idea why. Running past girls dying their hair the colour of the sky, I’ve cropped my head like a peppercorn and I’m looking forward to going away.

Walking home to an inanimate roundabout telling me to have a great day, I go on sugar raids and early morning runs amongst glass fronted units of investment. I need to reassure myself that it’s fine to have nothing to say. Too many people have something to say. Word gets round eventually.

I don’t believe in the Father, Son or the Holy Spirit. As a secular liberal I actively oppose all Abrahamic sky-gods on principle. You only have to watch the news to see what they have to offer and it’s not pretty. Just there are occasions, where I find myself a wilting agonistic, one longing for a communal bond with my fellow wo/man. It happened by accident of course, when I travelled to Zaragoza, and checked into my 3* hotel. Muddled and half asleep, I collapsed onto my bed for a solitary hour’s rest before dinner.

Come evening, I surrendered to my roaring appetite and headed towards the city centre for meatballs and patatas bravas. Along the way I took instantly forgettable pictures of the Cathedral Basilica on my smartphone. Why I persist in taking photos I never check or upload onto Facebook for approval I do not know.

Zaragoza city centre was jostling with life on my arrival and the sky had faded into a particularly tender shade of blue. Africa swifts were swooping down for dying insects, doll kids were playing tag and a marching band of lanky olive teenagers were blowing their own trumpets. Life here is good.

Before settling down for the dinner, I pushed open the cathedral’s main door and intruded on a Saturday night mass. I had no intention of staying long. I just wanted to have a wee look and nothing more. Skirting around the back like a Protestant ghost, there were rows upon rows of t-shirted families blessing themselves in front of old men in white robes. I don’t understand Catholic rituals or what you’re expected to do.

Having spent so much of my adult life London, it now feels strange for me to mingle in an exclusively local place. A city where everyone looks the same. Apart from the revellers checking their WhatsApp messages at the back, this could have been Zaragoza forty years ago such was the regional sense of familiarity.

When the cathedral began singing I realised this wasn’t a proper mass at all. I could barely breathe as the coral ensemble sang. This was music without applause or fanfare. Singing for the love of singing. Shrivelled chess pieces on wooden thrones provided the bass and the mixed choir pitched in with a feminine treble. Listening to ‘Gloria’ soar down the cavernous nave, it felt like I was witnessing a medieval painting bursting into life.

Travelling can throw up these moments of spiritual commonality. Even if like me, you don’t believe in anything at all. But putting my indifference to organised religion aside, I wouldn’t want to see nights like this disappear entirely. For if nothing else, I now have one beautiful memory of Zaragoza that I could not possibly save, picture or record.

From straddling the funky barrios of Barcelona to the desolate hills of a Spanish civil war town, I embrace poetry and conflict with a muddled confidence. My first European trip went reasonably well overall. I had a gorgeous chicken paella and a bottle of Rjoja in the bohemian quarter of Gracia, courtesy of my Italian friend Michele (pronounced Mickel with a kicking K).

He’s possesses a Mediterranean confidence I will never have in a restaurant. If I didn’t have to speak the language or work forty hours a week then Barcelona would be a superb place to live.

In stark contrast to my gourmet decadence, Belchite was a ruinenlust fantasy confined to stray dogs and miserly farmers. It drizzled melancholia from the moment I boarded the bus in Zaragoza. I was the only non-Spaniard hanging around the church gates that morning. Curiosity brought me here just like Pompeii, Herculaneum and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

‘Cormac McCarthesque’ I wrote on Twitter, as I snooped around a muddy red farmstead with a stray bag of groceries. I arrived earlier than expected and had time to kill. Armed with only my phone, I heard an electric saw fizzing ominously in the distance. Barking dogs were confined like battery hen chickens and a farmer’s van drove past me at a terrifyingly slow pace. Neurotically I half-feared being gagged, bound and murdered by an Aragon serial killer. No one can hear you scream in ruinously silent Belchite.

This rural hinterland has a poetic magnetism crackling underneath the rubble. A rare beauty that could have been magnificently preserved but was left to fall apart. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Although on walking past blown up cathedrals and desecrated high streets, I do wonder why I attend war zones on holiday.

**

On returning home to East London, I came back to a healthy citrus orange tree in the kitchen. I’m buying a few more plants at Columbia Road tomorrow. My latest fixation is sprucing up the kitchen with mint leaves and tiny bright fruits. On a side note, I caught an anarcho-socialist football match in Forest Gate today. I still can’t decide whether the game was a post-modern interpretation of lad culture or a genuine celebration of non-league football. My devotion to sport has wavered this year.

My to-do list has been buzzing with suggestions recently. Two winter jumpers have been added this weekend, alongside a double mattress, curtains and a boutique lamp for reading after midnight. Never satisfied I also want bottles of Jura Superstition, Aperol and Bombay Sapphire for my bedroom cabinet. Even though I rarely drink them, especially on a school night, I take comfort from knowing I can entertain if needs be.

Like a vibrating string in a Newtonian universe, I keep planning for every eventuality that could or might be happening as we speak. An optimistic dalliance with a melancholy lens, I have to keep moving forward in a year where so many acquaintances have vanished into a database I’ve lost the will to use. People do fade away over time and I’m going to Munich~Innsbruck~Venice tomorrow morning with little fanfare. It feels common place to leave the country now.

Even now I am thinking of things I need to do and whether I’ll ever have enough time to achieve them. It’s a luxury of course, but travelling gets harder every year. Straddling so many fantastical ambitions, dreams and disappointments simultaneously.

Dozing on my pillow, I wake up and have thirty minutes to spare. Outside the pneumatic groan of the 394 bus trails past on route towards Hackney Downs. My phone is buzzing with messages and the second alarm is just about to go off.

It’s noisy outside and the estate is getting ready for work.

Housewives are chattering outside my balcony and packs of kids in woolly hats are going to school. Local drivers are in the hunt for a parking spot. Downstairs a coarse man nursing a semi-circle of ill-health is effing and blinding like a complete utter cunt.

My alarm is now vibrating on a cold sheet of cotton.

Surrounded by grim tower blocks and dazzling towers of chrome and glass, I prepare for eight hours of home working. Gone are the crashing bells of Venezia and waking up to water taxis and gondola men whooshing past at dawn.

Ole! Ole! Ole!

I lived in a paradise for six months. That gives me comfort as my body swivels on a chair and switches on a bright electronic light.

I miss being dumbstruck alive by sensual things. Everyone is so particular now. Retreating into their algorithmic enclaves and branded avatars. I’ve been writing postcards and sending them intermittently to friends across the world. Further away the better. There is something tangible about bad handwriting, stamps and a printed seal. A time capsule of silly scribbles you may never receive.

I love buying postcards from galleries and side street shops. Its a teenage habit of mine I’ve never shaken despite considerable pressure to do so. In my late teens, I used to bunk off college/university and spend hours in Aberdeen Art Gallery spinning plastic racks of Marilyn Monroe. Many of these remain on my wall to this day.

I love the faith you have to place in the postal services. The fact you’ll never get an immediate acknowledgement from the recipient. To believe it will be carried by van, train, plane, aeroplane and finally on foot to a letter box near you. That’s amazing isn’t it? I miss writing to tell the truth. Just picking up a pen and feeling wonderfully naive.

“You had nothing to say about it and yet made the nothing into words.” – C.S. Lewis

“All the bright precious things fade so fast and they don’t come back.”

I sometimes wonder if I’m alone internalising a quixotic half world that doesn’t remotely correspond with reality. I feel like a ghost amongst regular human company. An inoffensive fraud concealing an internal monologue no sane person could possibly comprehend. I always think of her at Christmas. I shouldn’t do really – its silly I know. She made me want to be a better person by doing nothing at all. That’s probably the greatest compliment I can give to anyone. Keeping alight my inner writing fool as the years pass on by.

*

I think I’d like a daughter if I were ever to have kids. I’d like to spend time with someone I could actually talk to. Someone who could grasp what I have to say.

A beautiful little fool.

Earlier today I spotted a man standing on a tube escalator watching a film on his laptop. My headphones were jammed full of noise candy at the time, listening to sweet, sweet songs I don’t even like. This endless thirst for distraction is never ending. Sometimes I fear we consume so many stories that we don’t take part in any of our own. Have you seen it yet? Don’t say anything, I’m only on episode four…Come home, throw open a picture book and close the door.

Bumping into my face every day, I walk down towards Old Street station on a weekday morning. During rush hour you feel like you’re marching your life down the tube. Going eye to eye with a petit woman in a scarlet coat, I utter ‘excuse me, excuse me’ before heaving my way into the scrum.

Come evening and walking home on foot, I like to claim some of my life back from the tube. With my sonic buns keeping my ears warm, I depart from nearby Palestra, a technicolour glass mountain in South London, and head north of the river.

Crossing over Blackfriars Bridge, I take my first steps towards the crystal empire, one that sparkles over demolished warehouses and future proofed roads. A military helicopter drones over the river and casts a security shadow over the city. I feel strangely enthralled by its presence. It’s hard, aggressive and brutally exciting.

Weaving past tourists in cagoule jackets, I navigate past St Paul’s Cathedral towards the Barbican Centre. Streams of scarfs and bobble hats march past me, splitting through a demolished hospital and cobbled lanes. The Georgian corner pubs are packed full of businessmen drinking pints of honey. I don’t want to ruin the historic splendour by stepping inside.

Cutting through the Barbican tunnel, I navigate over pelican crossings and storm past commuters with stringy headphones. A Tinder match alert vibrates in my pocket (Anita, 27, 3 miles away) as I stream another pop song. Like you I’ve commodified myself as entertainment.

Nonetheless I stay on course and arrive at Old Street roundabout. There is a large inanimate object telling what ‘auld lang syne’ means in English. Commuters are pouring out of the station towards the pyramids dotted along City Road. A maelstrom of human energy and piercing noise, I feel exhausted just watching the traffic.

I’ve lived here for five years now. I have nowhere else to go. The dark glitter pours over me as I walk my way home.

Listening to a robin sing this morning, I kept looking amongst the branches until I spotted a red breast fluttering near the crown. Spring sunshine was pouring over Lewes’s suburban lawns and ruinous Abbey grounds. I hadn’t heard something so beautiful and unforced in a very long time. ‘A bird sings because it has a song’ or so the saying goes.

East Sussex is geographically far removed from my home in Aberdeenshire. Its the southern end of the green isle, but it felt familiar today only warmer, prettier and less remote.

Standing on Lewes Castle grounds, I remember being an eight-year-old boy, accompanying my mother to Aberdeen’s zoology building. I would bring along my binoculars and pack lunch box to RSPB meetings: a meal composed of ham sandwiches, crisps and two bourbon chocolate biscuits wrapped in tin foil.

We drove there in a poky blue Volvo and the conveners always had southern English accents. I always remember this because they were markedly different from the kids and teachers at my local school. Bird watching shaped my early childhood until the age of ten. But it stayed there for some reason, like many sweet things that drift away in the pursuit of conformity.

Gone are the speckled breasts of thrushes, goldfinches and robins. Living in a big city estate with no garden, birds are now crows roosting over defecated cars. Unlike my RSPB years, I don’t hear any songbirds when I leave the house in the morning. Just the caw-caw-cawing of scavengers and a 24/7 motorised world.

Its funny how far south you have to travel just remember how you used to experience spring.

Typecast again after another audition, I walked home across the river through a vision of high capital. I looked powerful and resolute as I caught myself in the mirror, approximately one inch taller at 6ft 4″. I was the man for all things. You can trust a man in a suit. He has authority and purpose.

A blonde Russian beauty made eyes with me at Bank station; a petit Indian businesswoman looked twice at Moorgate, and a man in his early thirties asked me directions to Aldgate East.

It was a power trip compared to my life in trainers, but the suit hid the truth. It betrayed what I was really thinking. I don’t know what I’m doing here. Living in the centre of the empire and dressing up like I’m a king.