This last month I've had a crisis in confidence about my writing, mainly because I read some of it and it seemed a bit shit. The one person I trusted to be massively right about everything, whose judgement I trusted, is gone. How does a mind like Kelly's just stop? Where do those thoughts go? What happens to the machinery of that one, unique, impossible brain? Some of her is in me, some of her in everyone she met, she was walking osmosis. But not enough. Never enough.

I'm sitting on my own in a comedy club. I'm two hours early because I was told it started at 8, when in fact that when the doors open. The first act, and I'm here for the last act, doesn't come on till 9. In front of me is an old Belfast Empire poster for a play called "The Black Moth". There is no significance in this. But I choose to see some significance regardless. The last thing in life you would want to be associated with are moths. But there you go - I don't suppose either of us get a choice anymore.

The wind was brutal on my way into town. I saw one of those pinky-party-cowboy-hats lying in the dirt by some railings, its string chin-strap snapped. Sometimes life is so tawdry and obvious it looks like a bad movie. The dog shit parked in the rain outside the job centre the next morning was much more like it.

The Empire is showing "Holiday Inn" and playing Jeff Buckley over the top of it as an appropriate patina of gloom. I feel the Bing Crosby looks, a miserable bastard in a sanatorium. In fact we're of a type: bell-shaped, short-legged Micks with big ol' noggins. He's better dressed than me though, an oily Kramer in a colourful panelled cardy, gull-winged collars and pleated slacks. I'm in my uniform: black shirt, jeans, Doc Martens. There are Nazi-boot boys with a more outré sense of style than me.