4 am. Woke and found the ansaphone blinking back at me. I'm avoiding Karen because she wants to know exactly what happened with Thom the other day. First, I must speak to him. But it's not Thom that needs protecting. I suspect that in her decent, healthy way, it's Karen's heart that will break. Coming from a poor but aspirational family ( oh it's never hard to see why people get together ), she never understood cannabis. It was this no-nonsense, sex-is-better pragmatism, that I fell in love with. Anyone can analyse anything, especially these days, but I remember the way she could divide any problem into its various parts, make a plan, and see it through. Where I saw horror, shame, eschatology; she saw a letter, a plug, a new calender. I was in awe of it...My lower leg was itchy. I threw off the duvet and grasped it with both hands, scratching like a dog for a bone. Karen was reminding me of Rachel. She, too, has an aptitude for the stuff of life. She works in the marketing department of an Energy company. Lives alone and, in essence, is deeply introverted. In fact, on the Jung scale of introversion she would rate as the hardest to reach. And yet she covers this with a diary full of somewhat needy male and female friends, a passion for cooking and, seamlessly, for astrology and tarot cards. She tells me I am the only man she is sleeping with but I know her horizon always shimmers with possibles. Wish she were here now. I padded out of bed and, forgetting to piss, went straight to the attic. The other night, while sorting through the photos of me and my mother, Agnes, I had momentarily rested my head on a pale blue folder. I didn't want to look at it that day and, since then, its presence has percolated into a mild dread. It's the novel, I'm sure of it. In my early twenties I spent a few months in Paris and- speaking to barely a soul- in a furious act of sublimation I wrote a hundred thousand words. I retrieved the folder and placed it gingerly on my desk...I left for work with two distinct, uneasy feelings. Is it possible there was once a time when I had ambitions to be a writer? Is it possible to write a novel without the overriding sense of being someone who writes novels? And when living in Paris..?. I am playing with the Gods here. Who knows how the day will end.