may 27

Aska in my dreams again, where she makes a periodic appearance- it's worth pointing out that she's always a benign presence (adjudicating crocodile races, talking to her friends on the phone) and that when there's an Other Woman, it's never her. This time I am staying in her house, which looks like a hotel and has at least 4 spare rooms. I am asleep in a huge bed and she comes and goes, wearing a blonde wig and purple blusher, wearing high heels and a suit. She is looking for a job and she tells me that she would like to work at Buckingham Palace because that way you get to know a lot of soldiers. We discuss the trials of job hunting, and how hard it is to go to an interview when you've forgotten what job it' s for. I peer into another room and see Monika sleeping there, a dark -haired hump. After a while Marcin comes. He has a fat friend with him who is carrying a magnesium bag, which is grey and plump just like his stomach and emits chalky puffs as he walks. Marcin gets into bed with me- he has no shirt and the entire surface of his back lies aganst my chest so close that it would be hard to slide a blade between us. I put my hands on his shoulders and feel ecstatic.

Then I am in Cambodia, in a barren, dusty no man's land. I am caught in coils of barbed wire and can't get free. Next to me is the entangled corpse of a woman who has obviously met the same fate. A man comes and cuts me down and carts me off to god knows where- I kill him with a knife, put on his clothes, and I am free. I feel strangely at home considering that I am blond, enormous and don't speak a word of the language. This is followed by another dream of capture , with a group of others. We are being carried off somewhere to be shot. I am in a state of suspended animation, thinking nothing much beyond a hope for intervention, which soon arrives in the form of an ageing white gunman with a face like a skull who appears from a swamp and guns down every one of our captors methodically and precisely but with a sorrowful look in his eyes. I can't help wondering (grateful though I am) if the intervention is any more morally laudable than the crime it prevented.

As winter tightens its grip it's getting harder to get out of bed: I ignore the alarm and burrow under the blankets, and find it necessary to decide what I'm going to wear before I move in order to prevent frozen vacillation in front of the cupboard. The dawn coffee ritual now takes place at Campos, which has an underwater feel and an Italian movie soundtrack- the only people around early on a weekday morning are the business crowd. Women in spike heels wade through ankle deep sunlight with their sombre escorts, trailing a cloud of perfume. Everybody is clean and beautiful and nobody is happy.
Now I'm off to show Jim Martin my complexes. To be continued.