Liadnan

Sometimes, some places, Mondays are not so bad.

Not, however, now and here. The rain spits down with an air of half-hearted generalised misery, my mind and body are slow and complaining, the cases on my desk are lacking in interest, and even the half-million quid white elephant of a fountain out on the lawn looks depressed. Moreover I can't find a flight to New York for the dates I want below £370 (my dates are somewhat constrained as I have to be at one wedding on Easter Sunday and another the weekend after, but even broadening the dates I could fly to see what happened didn't give any better results).

The clock is tick ticking away my life, and far too much of it has already been wasted in not being somewhere hot with nothing to do save read, drink, eat, and talk to people. This is Just Wrong. Has the world not yet realised it Owes Me A Living? Why am I not rich, famous, and lusted after by hordes of women? Is there no justice? Surely I raised these questions a while ago, yet no response has been forthcoming.

On the other hand it may just be that I spent far too much of the weekend drunk, including an hour on Saturday night standing in drizzle on Caledonian Road while waiting for a nightbus at 3AM. Hardly conducive to good health and cheery spirits. It's partly as a result of this that I spent most of Sunday lying in bed watching the blossom be knocked off the tree by the rain and composing morbid haiku in the manner of a teenager going through puberty. The high point of the day was sorting my socks, until I managed to drag myself out of the flat to wander over to Rob and Steph's for dinner, along with Dan and Liz. Which did cheer me up, to be fair, and was very kind of them. It's just a shame I couldn't stay long enough to carry on being rude about the Mary Queen of Scots thing we ended up watching.

It's not a hangover. Hangover's are straightforward by comparison. Water, neurofen by the shitload, and there you are. It's an awful lassitude and emptiness, exacerbated by the frankly ridiculous -even by my standards- quantities of coffee and cigarettes I've had so far today, leaving my stomach queasy, my nerves strained, and my hands quivering like a sufferer from DTs so that I have to recheck every word I write to ensure I haven't double typed each and every letter. Oh, and there's a bloody T'Pau song running through and through my fucking head and I can't even remember which one it is.

The worst thing about being over thirty is that the question which occurred to you during your late 20s: "is this it?"; has been definitively answered. It, my friends, this is, always and forever. I may have said this before, but no one ever listens to me, least of all me. A prophet is not without honour save in his own country, &c.

Soddit. I'll have a double whisky, no ice, and none of your cooking scotch either, please.

Well, that was a rubbish week.

The only question remaining is whether it will require wine or whisky to make everything better.

That is all, as my brain has unaccountably taken leave of absence. Am thinking of following it. Maybe I will go to New York and see Dr Lovely, if there really are flights as cheap as she claims. Maybe I will go to Slough. Who knows: it's a wonderful world of mystery and adventure out there.

OK. What fucker stole the fuse? For Half of Central London.

I kid you not. Well, I exaggerate slightly. At first I thought it was just Lincoln's Inn library, where I was in the middle of a post of such startling wit it would have amazed you all. But o.. it goes further. The whole of the Inn. The Royal Courts of Justice. Half of Fleet Street. And on and on.

It's quite surprising how little you can do without electricity. As you can see, I have little excuse to bunk off: the laptop has a few hours of power in it, but I am supposed to be working on a bunch of deeds, difficult to comprehend at the best of times. And I'm in a gloomy little basement office.

I'd go and get a coffee. But all the coffeeshops are shut....

Well,I'm back, he said...

Big pile of work waiting for me in my pigeonhole. It seems I am in court three times next week, and on Proper Cases. I'm feeling particularly old, single and sorry for myself for no especial reason. Think I might vanish from here for a while. We shall see.

Feeling tired and depressed, and that I have too much work to do.

Went home for the weekend and saw parents and my sister Kate and her daughter. Dad seems slightly better, happier at least, though I'm not sure there is much long term comfort to be taken. Anna, my niece (3 months) has grown enormously since I last say her a month ago and has become disconcertingly alert.

My other sister was 40 at the weekend too, I was supposed to be going up to Durham to see her and her family but I couldn't afford it. Really quite scary when your sister gets to 40. Surely that's the kind of age parents belong at?

Feeling far too introspective, doubting my perception of myself, blah blah, get on and do some sodding work and stop whining...

I'm bored with being ill now.

To add insult to injury, I struggled into Chambers this morning to discover there was no work for me to do, no one had anything to offload on me, and no one much cared if I went home again. Which is what I intend to do.

Bank statement also arrived this morning. My finances, for many years an attempt at re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic into ever more complex forms, appear to have screwed up badly this month: I have something like 70 quid to make it to the end of the month, unless I turn to those fair weather friends, my credit cards. So I am going to have to talk to the bank manager, who always makes me depressed.

Spent yesterday lying around in Primrose Hill. Actually listened to most of the debate, at least in the background. Most impressive speech of the day was Hague's, surprisingly.

Incidentally, despite the fact I disagree with him and thought he was a shite Foreign Secretary (but a very good racing journalist), I also thought Cook's resignation was massively impressive.

I came round to supporting the war a long time ago, as most of you know: I'm not going to change my mind now, nor do I feel livejournal is a particularly good forum for examining it. Basically, it stems from the fact I'm a liberal interventionist by nature. Yes there are lots of places which could do with regime change in the world. Why this one, now? Why not, frankly. What matters now, I think, is what happens after, both in Iraq and elsewhere. I hope we are able to build a liberal democracy there: I don't think it is naive to think that is possible. I am also, quite emphatically, not a cultural relativist, and I don't buy the idea that somehow Arabs can't cope with (don't deserve?) western liberal democratic values. Perhaps, if we do succeed in that, we can also stop pretending the House of Saud are ok guys.

I'm tired, ill, poor and its sunny outside. Balls to this, I'm going home.