My day started with breakfast in bed, which was unexpected but very welcome as I had had another night interrupted by two hourly visits to the bathroom. So having indulged in a lazy breakfast I got up and get ready to go to the gym. The gym is my place of restoration but I need the right conditions. So we drove to the gym, bought bottles of water and headed to the changing rooms. As usual I climbed up onto a cross trainer, set the timer for an hour, the resistance at 15 and my ear phones at maximum. I have found that my favourite musical accompaniment to exercise is Rammstein, a German rock group, who were once the cutting edge of rock but have become mainstream now.

For me the German language has a raw harshness that suits rock. It provides me with a loud rhythmic background to my exercise but blocks out the outside world, deafeningly so. I have found that once Rammstein is up and pounding I can drift off into whatever internal dialogue or fantasy I want to whilst maintaining a good exercise pace. What I have also found is that loud, very loud music during demanding exercises drives my unconscious to the surface. I have been known to speak out loud when immersed in an internal dialogue that consists of me arguing with someone in my fantasy or a deliberate conversation that I undertake to sort something out. One of my retreats is this form of conversation in my head, which helps me work through issues and ideas. As I have said in these conditions my unconscious seems to surface much more easily so the conversations I have can become informed from all sorts of things that pop up from seemingly nowhere but very often are the things that I do not want to acknowledge or find difficult to own consciously. Any way todays Rammstein filled session was a good one and let me think about my recent reaction to the civil partnership photos that had me in them. 900 calories and 750 millilitres of water later I was me again and feeling steady, no less fat but fitter and more relaxed about facing the world, just not mirrors.

I take my time to shower and feel a thousand times better then into the lounge to meet my partner. We return home to prepare lamb for the oven and settle to watch England play France at rugby. Good game, wrong result. We eat the lamb as consolation and settle down to watch some TV and to write the blog.

Whilst siting in the gym lounge I read a column in which someone wrote about his response to a version of a Dickens novel but where the cast of the film came from a diverse range of cultures and orientations. He noted that some people of either an older generation or having specific knowledge about the era depicted would take exception to the way in which the novel had been “tampered” with. The author of the piece came to the conclusion that it did not matter what people felt about it as the book was a piece of fiction so it did not matter, it was not worth getting upset about. First thought about that was that this was a sensible response. I think Rammstein kicked in about now and I began to think about how we construct our world, how each of us as individuals constructs our own internal universe in order to manage our lives on a day to day basis and crucially how we make meaning of our lives. There is therefore a crucial relationship which we forge between our internal universes and ourselves, or our idea of ourselves, thus we survive with a sense of self and the external world in a way that makes sense to us. Of course we all have our own individual internal universe, they are all fictions based on our unique but imperfect and incomplete experiences. Small discrete samples of being alive at any one time, at any one place. So if this is the case then why would I bother to get upset by anyone else, after all their universe and their relationship with it is just a fiction. So what does it matter if I ignore it, impose my own interpretation on it, who cares, it’s not real it’s a work of fiction. So maybe it’s not alright to piss around with someone else’s attempt to make meaning of their universe in their time and place, because is that not what art is. So my comment to the person who thought it was okay to re-people, reconfigure, reimagine, reinterpret, and re-profit from someone else’s art is write your own fucking book.

It’s world cancer day on the 4th of February. I got a package through the door with free address stickers with “I’m a cancer supporter” emblazoned on them. There was a plea for money as well. There is blackmail and then there is misplaced insensitive charity blackmail. Its all in the bin. I’m doing my best to support myself. I did think I might have my own stickers that state. “I’m a cancer suffer send money to me now!”