A Pocketbook of Insanity. Part IV
=April Tuesday 13th=
I have just committed my flatmate to Parkhouse Asylum.
I need a stiff drink.
=April Wednesday 14th=
I wasn’t up to writing about it yesterday.
Perhaps this is why I never manage to keep a daybook for very long: either I bore myself with the trivialities of my life and drop the thing in disgust, or the moment anything worthy of comment transpires it’s usually seeped in tragedy and my thoughts fade into a miserable reverence at how bleak this world can be.
It was why I stopped writing in Afghanistan.
At first I’d recorded my thoughts along with happenstances of import. (Notes on the country, the people, the soldiers posted, and the living hell we all made for ourselves there in the name of Empire, or independence or whatever the deuce - scarcely damn mattered in the end, did it? It all boiled down to blood and sand and who was the last man standing.)
I felt - at the time - such things ought to be written. But all too soon I felt not like a stalwart chronicler but like a bloody-beaked vulture, pecking over the carcass of everyone’s agony. I only picked up book and pencil in that blasted hotel so I had an excuse for why I was still abed.
(No, John, of course you’re not wasting away in bed, you’re writing. An epic, no doubt. Opinions and views worthy of Ruskin himself). Oh, and to distract me from the wallpaper... Perhaps all in all a pretty piece of Whitechapel petticoat would have worked just as well?
I’m procrastinating.
It would seem I’m still not up to writing about what transpired with Holmes.
Next...