Words flow from my inked-up pen

I got up early, Carol and Rob having left for work already, leaving Mum, Dad and me to lock up.

Mum explained, with weary insistence, that the car was so full of Andrew’s college stuff she worried (in her usual way)that  it might break down if we overloaded it, so I had to go back to Easterby on the bus. I left at half-past nine . . . . Another red-hot day, uncomfortable already at this early hour.

In Dearnelow I bought a Pere Ubu record for £1.99 in a sale and caught the bus back home. I got into Egley about noon, & then did nothing but slip into a boredom too familiar to describe. I lounged distractedly before the TV and then in the back room writing this.

The DHSS sent my SS application back because I’d missed something out, so I walked through the stifling heat to repost it, suitably amended. It’s been too hot to do anything.
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I’ve got a letter from Shelley. She wrote it last Thursday, and she's had a good time at home and has been to a friend’s farm: she penned a long description of an idyllic walk to a quiet lake, writing “I still haven’t come down to earth”; so typical of her! I remember how hyper-sensitive she was last term when struggling with some momentous Wordsworth essay; she kept telling me how tender and unworldly the whole experience had left her feeling, and how vulnerable she was to the stinging ‘materialist’ attacks of Barry and Stu, how close to tears they brought her. She signed off with an airy “cheerio” and enclosed a spent match, a bit of a fag packet and a piece of patchwork wrapped in paper.

After three years, why do I keep at this journal? The initial reasons are no longer so clear-cut and easy to define. If I honestly believe ‘everything is pointless,’ that nothing has any meaning and existence is futile, then why do I carry on writing with such monotonous regularity? If all this is pointless, where’s the point?

I can’t honestly say why I’m doing what I’m doing. To what end? Doubtless none of this is of any historical importance given our age’s excess of mundane records and sources. I suppose it relieves what would otherwise be an utterly structureless existence that seems to drift on and on without rhyme or reason. Perhaps writing this offers the tiniest of constant, unifying threads. I’m writing now just for the sheer hell.

Words flow from my inked-up pen.