As You Like It
31 January

Well, the days roll by.

I still have difficulty writing here about what I think and feel rather than what I do. I started this entry with a list of done deeds with very little about how I have been feeling over the past few weeks. That seems to me like a drift back to the past rather than accepting to positive opportunity for change.

It's almost as though, when I have little energy, I don't do as much in the world at large and therefore I give more time for myself. As I regain the energy, I put it into the world at large again. I'll give you a small example. For the first part of this month I had absolutely no difficulty in settling myself first thing in the morning and thanking the universe for getting me through another quiet night, planning what I was to do for the coming day and asking for help, remembering friends and extended family and contemplating current issues. Now, I don't make the time to give myself the time to settle.

It's the same with the help business. I'm less inclined to ask for help and less inclined to being amenable to receiving help when I have energy. Maybe that's what this change is about. Learning how to retain the good things when I am in a good space.

The light box for example. It's certainly having a good effect for the both of us. I feel a whole lot brighter for sitting in front of it for a period each morning. It sits on top of my computer so that I can sit here typing whilst absorbing its effects. Ross too is lot brighter. He says he has about 20-30% more energy for this time of year. He's become more positive too. The slump he went through last week seems to have been as much about having some low level bug in his system as a rejection of any tendency towards improvement. In fact, Ross positively seeks out the light box and takes it from my study into the front room so that he can watch crap television whilst it shines on him.

Most of the crap TV seems to be about doing up your home or your garden or buying or selling your house. The only one of these I quite like is To Buy or Not To Buy featuring Kristian Digby - who (it turns out) used to be one of the hosts on That Gay Show. He is also a film maker, TV programme producer and property developer and designer in his own right. Quite the little pink entrepreneur. Big package though.

The only other crap TV programme which has impinged on my consciousness at all is I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here. Partly this is because last Wednesday, when most of the country was experiencing Arctic conditions and we on Merseyside were having a cool and rainy day, I was faced with eleven channels of presenters desperately trying to tell me that three was something exciting about the Hutton Report or ITV2's live reportage from the Australian outback.

The main gay interest has been Peter Andre. We all remember him from nearly a decade ago when his washboard stomach was the talk of bars and clubs throughout the land.

Now, instead of looking like a lean and toned young man, he looks like a somewhat pumped and chunked mature male entering his middle years. And his tits to bear comparison with Jordan's.

The two of the have hit it off producing televisual coverage of one of the few erections seen on British TV.

Our breadmaker is a big success. Having a house filled with the smell of newly baked bread is a real treat in itself. Tasting fresh bread which has the texture of real bread is another. I can't see us buying many loaves in the future.

I'm also moving towards having a proper clear out. I haven't yet gotten round to using the shredder we bought but that will come. Colin thinks that this is my puritanical streak coming through. I understand why he says that. There is an ascetic side to my character.

In this case, however, I think it is more to do with the need for a life laundry to give myself more space. Ross and I live in a very large house for two people and yet there are certain rooms which are unusable for clutter. I want to rid myself of some of that baggage - whether it's books I shall never read again or CDs which will never be played again or clothes which will never be worn again or crockery which will never be used again.

I've also been getting on with more applications for jobs - this time for one with Sefton Council looking after rights of way and cycle paths. I've also taken the plunge and have been in contact with Southport Quakers and have attended my first Sunday Meeting for Worship with them. It went really well and they are very welcoming. Fingers crossed that I can find a spiritual home there.

I've also been trying to get out and about to get some culture. The new season at the Liverpool Playhouse and Everyman Theatres has some good stuff in it so I've made a pact with myself to try and get to some of it. I made a start by going to The Entertainer by John Osborne. Nearly fifty years on, the play shows its age. Osborne does not emerge as the great writer he was hailed as being in my youth. If anything, The Entertainer plays like a TV soap opera with its drunken dysfunctional family.

The cast were good, Corin Redgrave was probably great and there was a great final coup de théâtre as the back of set opened up onto a rainy alleyway outside. I don't think I can stretch to more than two stars however. I hope that other presentations in the season will engage me more.

More engaging was Lost in Translation which Ross and I caught at the local cinema on Saturday evening. We had been planning to go and see HMS Pinafore at The Empire but the ticket agency dicked us about over the tickets so we stayed locally. We probably had the better deal of it. The film was well worth three stars for its quiet portrayal of two people adrift in a foreign culture, adrift in their lives and adrift in the relationships.

I like the way the film was paced. Instead of being a continuous stream of narrative, there was a kaleidoscope of short scenes whose fragments could be added up to a whole. and I liked the fact that the film did not tie everything up neatly at the end and did not try to offer the characters some improbable resolution to their seperate dilemas - even if you sort of knew what they should do.