I get in from the hospital with a chicken pie and a bottle of cheap Beaujolais.I went into the town centre but everything was shut. All that was left of Belfast were leggy emos* squatting like pigeons outside the city-hall and a drunk with a series of face-wounds laughing with ambulance-men.

Lovefilm have sent me "The Never-ending Story". I don't ever remember requesting it but it doesn't seem any more ridiculous than anything else I can watch. The Childlike Empress is a bit creepy, Atrayu a bit shrill and Bastien a bit of a weed but you can't argue with a luck dragon. I sit and watch it, pushing the chicken pie on the plate, swilling the thin acid tang of the wine around my mouth. Today had been another long day. I'd had another sleepless night staying up till four at North road, declaiming bullshit to Stephen, and then I went home and watched a Hancock DVD until six. I had four hours sleep and then couldn't sleep any-more. The rest of the morning I spent in lead boots, wobbling around the house, getting nothing done: it took me three hours to complete a bath. I make it to the hospital at four, getting caught up in school-run traffic, but my taxi driver is agreeable silent probably because I'm openly weeping in the rear-view mirror.

I am assailed by moths. I turn on the bathroom light at night and they fly in, big as birds, shit-brown and shivering next to the brilliance of the bath. They fly at my head while I'm trying to piss and I whip at them with towels like King Kong buzzed by Sopwith Camels. If King Kong used a towel. Which he should have down as they reduce these things to smears of brown dust in seconds. As soon as one is despatched another one bundles in, flying in fifteen different directions and always arriving at the same point - the back of my head. This is the only animal I will kill and not eat - even flies get the benefit of the doubt. This fear and hatred of moths is inherited from Kelly. She was obsessed by moths back in the Victoria Road flat - constantly digging through cupboards, ruthlessly combing through clothes, looking for tell-tales signs of their presence and, on one occasion, freezing tainted jackets or exiling them to the shed, where they slowly rotted. Rather the jackets are rotted and ruined than fallen to the moths.

I remain vigilant. No moths on my watch.


*Belfast is the only place I've ever seen goths wearing fake tan.