"We drank hard and talked about what Debord, who drank persistently and prodigiously, had written about alcohol"

"We drank hard and talked about what Debord, who drank persistently and prodigiously, had written about alcohol. 'I admire Debord as a perfect and dedicated drinker.' We talked about how, in the early years of his career as a drinker, Debord was always in pursuit of or just arriving at a perfect point of intoxication which, unlike paid labour or any other servile activity, would reveal 'the true taste of the passage of time'. Drinking was a beautiful poetic game, with its rules and protocols. Debord devoted pages to describing this notion."

Irina suddenly leaned over to me and said to me "I'm sorry, you're a nice guy, but you drink too much" before giving me the ultimate private dance. I said to Viktoriya "You don’t like me, do you", and she exploded back with real hatred "Yes. Because you're always drunk". *****************I insist on the primacy of my own experience. My own vision. I can only be alone. I can only be in cold icy mountains. ******************Don't be unhappy, be happy! Think what immense power you have got! You have made the great separation & now live for pure Priapism. You have got money. Winter is coming. I can go to the Bell, the Sunset Strip, Sunset Cinema, Demi and Pamela. In January I can go to Berlin. This is going to  be a season of the flesh. I have got a nice little job I enjoy. I have got money coming in. I have got my own little nest. I have got a week off in December and another week off in January to go to Berlin, for La Traviata and Carmina Burana.

"Where do you live actually?" said Pamela to me. The discipline of saving money is actually a really exciting one. It has made the Bell more exciting for me. It will no doubt make Sunset Strip more exciting for me eventually. I love the things I have got away with in the past, the things I get away with now, the things I will get away with in the future. 

I have got my book-lined London home, filled with ferns, and classical music. I live like a church mouse in a little hotel earning the money to write my books, while enjoying the girls taking their knickers off to loud music, and travelling a couple of times a year to Berlin. I am still sad about --. Do what you want with your genitals, otherwise you will regret it when you're dead.

I wake up midnight with an iron hard erection [30th August 2006]

I wake up midnight, with an iron hard erection. An incredible serendipity. I want European porn again. The Munich Intercity films, the Munich Atlantic City and Sexyland kabins. The Vienna Dorint films. I was dreaming of Kerry Marie a lot. I got the 12:10 bus to Calcutta after a lovely hamburger & fries, without any sleep. Sexy redhead at back in brown jacket & black glasses. Getting on at next stop beautiful black haired Greek looking girl, eyes met, little smile as she squeezed into corner. Pale blue jeans over meaty thighs & bum, pale blue coat, pale blue bandanna headband. White T-shirt. So pretty, got off Vauxhall. Coming into Calcutta just before I left, absolutely mindblowing thick light brown brunette, like Raquel Welch huge hair, red v-neck sweater over massive massive heavy breasts, grey skirt tight over her voluptuous hips & thighs, very self confident ordering her large white wine, sitting at round table behind me. What a sex bomb. I want Sunset again. Black dress Kay. All the money I have spent on strippers and drink this year, and such a small amount on porn cinema & whores. All these Bad Timing and Night Porter pictures form a triumphal way leading to the Ishtar Gate perhaps, of Maria's c*nt. It became clear to me after 1 pint how drink suddenly makes me want to throw my money away. It is such a disinhibitor.****“The paradigm of the romantic bohemian” sitting at the table in the Café am Zoo reading about The Libertines and Pete Doherty in the Observer newspaper, “the outsider painter who pursued his own vision amid a swirl of drugs, alcohol and dissolution”. Oh I cannot wait to get back to Berlin again! If I can achieve this saving, it will be like shaking hands with myself. Sylvia still shines on my horizon higher and brighter and bigger than any other woman. She is a Charlotte Rampling of a woman. In Berlin alone there has been Iga, Diana, Riccarda, Yulia.  “We learnt what our national Church was…a visible testimony of the collective experience of mystery, enshrined by generations in stone and glass. Imagine how we should feel if all the cathedrals were museums. What would be missing? Betjeman gives some hint of what the mysterious something was. It was a something in which, for all his doubts, he most passionately and sincerely believed”. The Arrest of Oscar Wilde in the Cadogan Hotel. “I think I’m excited by extremity. I don’t think of myself as sleazy—I like to think of myself as intrepid. Whether sex, food or going on holiday, whenever I’m confronted by a decision I always do the thing that’ll be the best anecdote.’ Pushing boundaries almost to the point of transgression is his stock in trade, and sex a major topic. ‘I’m just trying to bludgeon ennui,’ he says, ‘trying not to be bored'”. Wouldn’t it be great to always behave myself in London and save it all for Berlin, Vienna, Brussels? Every £50 I spend in London is 74 euros I could use to buy a night in a European hotel. But I have such great memories in London. Cotton and Demi and Pamela. “The smoky Tanz bars of Berlin, where the German public tried to put aside growing concerns about world politics and lose themselves in a seething pit of immorality, decadence and extravagance”.

I am glad I am ruining myself & becoming increasingly mad & crazy at the Flying Scotsman (23rd April 2006)

I am glad I am ruining myself & becoming increasingly mad & crazy at the Flying Scotsman. I am deliberately becoming a grand wreck. It is part of my project to experience new things, push an experience to the extremes. “Crane wrote to a friend, “You may not think it, yet there comes a great peaceful exaltation in merely reading, thinking, and writing.” Yet this was not enough to ward off sporadic spells of intense depression; he first attempted suicide at the age of 15 by slashing his wrists and taking an overdose of sleep medication.” Think of the kindness D— tries to offer you. C——, too. I am lonely. That is why I keep gravitating back to the Flying Scotsman like a moth to a flame, to the girls I know so well & the drink I know better. “Mariani brings alive the doubts and self-recriminations that constantly bedeviled Crane and the accusatorial inner voices that must have haunted him during his frequent hangovers. Alcohol and depression exacted a truly terrible physical and emotional toll on Crane, and his hair turned from premature gray to white by the age of 28. He was frequently jailed or beaten for his drinking, and Mariani’s index lists 17 instances of Crane’s “outrageous and violent behavior” due to alcohol. He embarrassed himself, alienated friends and damaged his ability to concentrate on his writing, but Mariani notes, “Like [Charlie] Chaplin, he meant to pick himself up, brush himself off, and go on whistling into the teeth of fate.”” 

“Like Hopkins, Crane sought an epiphanic vision, and Mariani notes, “In spite of the absence of any God he can name, there is a desperate vulnerability about Crane’s prayer for meaning” in poems such as “O Carib Isle!”….Crane once signed a postcard to his mother with the name “Atlantis.” As Mariani notes, “Even to himself he seemed a lost city.”….Mariani leaves us with the tragic image of a brilliant mind struggling with the desire to push the borders of poetry beyond the familiar and traditional to “new thresholds, new anatomies,” all the while contending with interior realities that were the source of both his greatest inspiration and his greatest unhappiness. Although Crane sank beyond the reach of lifesavers, thanks to Mariani’s book we retain a strong sense of the spiritual gates this poet sought to enter.” Very much on Saturday night I was thinking how fake all the smiles & friendship from the girls is, as they only smile & pretend to like you for the money. There are some exceptions to this, I think. D— is not nice to me just to get pounds from me, nor is C——. Maybe M——, too, and for a while —–. I could of look back at all the arguments I have been having at the Scotsman with a detached amusement. It is just an adventure I am having.

I really don’t care about looking for jobs now (23rd April 2006)

I really don’t care about looking for jobs now. I will never find a better job than this. All I want now is to lose myself in classical music. Just accept this will take a long while to get over. You are heading for ruin. Concentrate on the positives. Concentrate on writing with blue hands in cold stoveless rooms like Nietzsche, heading to the cold icy air of the mountains, where the air is thinner & there are less people. I always want to get to where there are less people. I seem to have lost interest in art museums, in classical music concerts. I am just lost in an emptiness. All there is is drinking. This coming week I will devote to writing, staying up all night, into the early hours of the morning. Funny how sweet & lovely to me the new brown top barmaid was; she was gorgeous to me. Jane was lovely to me. Even though my life is getting better year on year, there is always a period each year when I go into real psychological darkness & desperate straits. 

“But despite his literary success, Crane was a profoundly tormented man. Poetry sustained him in a life that otherwise teetered on the brink of collapse. When he wasn’t writing, he spent much of his time engaged in fleeting homosexual encounters and alcohol binges. In 1932, three years after meeting Lorca, Crane committed suicide by leaping from a ship into the Caribbean”. 

“Crane tends to be labelled as American poetry’s answer to both Rimbaud and Keats. Like the young Rimbaud he believed a poet’s vision derived from systematic deregulation of the senses; many of his poems were written in an alcohol-induced frenzy while listening to the same song on his Victrola over and over again, while his tireless, often dangerous cruising of the Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Hoboken waterfronts – occasionally under the pseudonym Mike Drayton, in honour of the Elizabethan poet – shocked more conservative friends such as Allen Tate and Yvor Winters……..By the time he arrived in Mexico in 1931 he was grey-haired, puffy-featured, and subject to hallucinations, delirium tremens, and corrosive self-disgust. He wrote only one poem there, the sublime “The Broken Tower”, in which he acknowledged his inability to do more than merely “trace the visionary company of love”, or hold for longer than “an instant in the wind / each desperate choice”. A month after completing it in late March of 1932, Crane decided he had no choices left at all.”

“Caulfield was constantly alert to the everyday excitements of living in a major city" (21st March 2006)

“Caulfield was constantly alert to the everyday excitements of living in a major city. It is unlikely that he ever read Virginia Woolf (“It seemed to deal with a middle-to-upper-class society that I didn’t know anything about and it meant nothing to me”, he once said of the mid-century English novel), but he shared with Woolf a love of urban experience, seen quite vividly, in a novel such as Mrs Dalloway, for example, in all its hallucinatory particulars: “In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans … in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London … “ And yet for the 40 years of his career, Caulfield painted places that offered respite from the noise and sheer teeming variety of city life and the jangly rhythms of modern urban existence. These included restaurants, cafes, hotel foyers and other public places, as well as bars. For many years his first call of the day was at his local, a few minutes after the bolts had been drawn in the morning. “Getting drunk: there was no doubt that that was always the quest,” Martin Amis once wrote of his father, Kingsley (who, as it happens, was a fellow-regular and morning tippler at the pub Caulfield used in Primrose Hill in north London). “Being drunk had its points, but getting drunk was the good bit.” Caulfield liked to breathe in the opening-time cellar smells and observe the shapes the slanting light cut through the fixtures and fittings; he liked to stare into the distance and listen to London. Early paintings such as View of the Rooftops (1965) and Lit Window (1969), and later ones such as Trou Normand (1997), Rust Never Sleeps (1996) and Terrace (2002) are proof that this was time well spent. The arrival of fellow customers he took as a sign that it was time for him to be on his way.” 

An uneventful journey to work, and night. Just one more night to get through. Wednesday night is Chelsea v Newcastle in the FA Cup. 

“Bob the pub waiter, in Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 novel, The Midnight Bell, establishes a pattern the author would follow until the end of his days: rivers of booze, obsessive pursuit of the wrong woman, rapidly diminishing funds, time killed in afternoon cinemas.Drink and tranquillised sleep were sympathetic conditions. “There was a fog even in the cinema,” reported Bob, Hamilton’s befuddled waiter, when he hid away in the picture palace attached to Madame Tussaud’s in Marylebone Road. Earlier, Bob had enjoyed a double-bill in the company of a friendly barmaid (taking his mind off the prostitute he was pursuing): a Richard Dix feature, followed by 20 minutes of Fritz Lang’s Spione. Like Hitchcock, Hamilton learned how to work those weather metaphors: slush, sodden streets, the yawning parenthesis of the English Channel. Autobiography, the writing of fiction, the visiting of afternoon cinemas, gradually merge in Hamilton’s addiction, his heroic attempt to drink himself to death (a macho pissing contest with Malcolm Lowry, refereed by their puce-cheeked contemporary, John Davenport). “It’s a shame,” said William Faulkner, “that the only thing a man can do for eight hours is work. He can’t make love. He can’t drink.”

I rounded off my year in style by getting thrown out of the Hogarthian place for my appalling behaviour (31st Dec 2006)

I rounded off my year in style by getting thrown out of the Hogarthian place for my appalling behaviour. In five years I don’t think I have ever seen anyone thrown out, unless they were actually cracking bar stools over other people’s heads. How low can a boy sink? I think it was watching the Consul in Under the Volcano the previous night that inspired me to these dizzying depths of depravity. I was already worse for wear when I arrived, had one more, discovered Lucky now has dark hair, Crystal discovered I now have dimples, headed off to see La Antonacci. I had a standing place, but found I kept nodding off, and coming round just as my knees were about to buckle. I left after an hour, not even making it to the interval. As Carmen made her escape from jail, the lights momentarily dimmed, and I made my escape from the opera house, running in the direction of rain-soaked Kingsway where I made my fateful decision to get the 91 BACK to King’s Cross. Things then went from bad to worse. Israeli Helen, —–, Stella, Chloe, Arleni, Sindy, Demi. I seem to remember buying Demi a box of chocolates as she told me it was her last night [it later turned out it wasn't].

The Flying Scotsman was only great as an interval between visits to Berlin and maybe it can go back to that again (30th Nov 2006)

The Flying Scotsman was only great as an interval between visits to Berlin, and maybe it can go back to that again. 

You work hard to earn money so you can throw it away on your pleasures. How I admire that man at the hotel who drank 8 bottles of wine a day. 

I had such great high times in Berlin Munich Vienna I had to keep my fix going while stuck in boring London till I could get back again, that is when The Flying Scotsman started to become special to me. I love starting to drink, and then it hits your blood, then you get high, and lit up. 

Benassi Sex’n’Money. 

I have had some great nights on holiday, but they were all nights where I spent money wildly, like it was no object. That is the only lesson. Fuck the pain away.

Life seems to have no meaning except to drink (17th Nov 2006)

Life seems to have no meaning except to drink. Nothing matters except getting drunk. “I give in to sin because you have to make this life livable” Strangelove—Tiger Baby. ********** 

I was absolutely hyperventilating as I waited for 96 to Horse & Groom, then as I walked along the street passing one pub after another, to find it, then pulling open the door to see…Amanda Barrington. Only three men in there. It is impossible to imagine —– working in an environment like this when she could be in the packed to the rafters Scotsman. I escaped, without asking Amanda about —–, as that would give me away, and resolved that I would now be able to go to the Scotsman after all. At Charing X there were no 91s coming, however, so I could not get to the Scotsman by 7, so might as well go to Sunset first so I could at least catch Helen. I saw her do one dance dressed as Salome, plus big Lilou who did look Danish. Snake-hipped Yasmin and Emilia who now looks like her sister, Ruby, Caroline who is Scottish, Nikita. After Helen I went up to Scotsman, already with five inside me, to see Camilla, Chloe, Arleni, Stella, Crystal, Lena. Absolutely packed. Again devastated and empty as still no sign of —–. I was thinking the danger is that now Pamela has comprehensively rejected me, I will start mourning my missed opportunity with —– again, and my mental health did indeed seem very shaky on Saturday. Back to the Sunset for some more Lilou and Caroline, and I was so drunk now I moved into the front row central. Sunset was packed now as well, standing room only, and whole back wall covered by men standing, plus blonde woman, and two Indian girls. Left after 7th beer, just as Caroline sat near me, and headed to say hello to Olga. Her hair is now wavy and looks so gorgeous. With make up on she once more looks like the woman I fell in love with & could not resist. I wish I had my camera with me at that moment. It was so good to see her. Staying with her so long, from 1140PM to 12? I missed the last train of course, and got back to the stop in time for the 20 past midnight N--. I was incredibly wide awake & crystal clear, though by the time we reached —— the headache had started and the eye ache in particular, like someone squeezing my eyeballs.

If only I could have back all the thousands of pounds I have wasted on strippers and drink over the years I would go out and spend it all on strippers and drink (17th October 2006)

If only I could have back all the thousands of pounds I have wasted on strippers and drink over the years, I would go out and spend it all on strippers and drink. Our sad tawdry addictions are the best of us. If I did not have things to be sadly addicted to, I would kill myself. Our vices are the best of us. They are when we glow brightest and most brilliant. Oscar Wilde would not be celebrated today, would not have the West End full of his plays, would not have his own statute in Adelaide Street and his own stained (of course) window in Westminster Abbey if not for his vice. To watch young women take their knickers off on a stage. What a sad, empty experience, but as sad, empty experiences go, one of the absolute best. And at the Scotsman it has been refined to its most pure and simple state. The Nag’s Head and the Old Axe could be this good, but are not. Dodgy doorman demanding an apparently arbitrary amount of pound coins in their hand before they will let you in, body searches for concealed..what? An endless stream of 20 or 30 girls constantly asking for private dances. The fact that the FS does not offer private dances seems to me one of the most beautiful things about it. Anyway, if any of my Scotsman girls gave me a private dance I think I would die. It would be too much, after all this time longing for them. 

So a Journal about the FS pub, and yet so much of what occurs there must remain unsaid, sub judice. 

People criticise the FS because nothing is spent on it to modernise it, but that seems to me the knub of its absolute charm. It is like stepping back into Victorian London. With the Thatcherite revolution, the Millenium, the old Soho basement strip clubs were replaced by the mirrors and champagne and poles of the Stringfellows, and Sophisticats, and For Your Eyes Only, and we were told it is all right to go to strip clubs now, because they had gone upmarket, and respectable. Since when should sex be respectable? Sex should be down and dirty and sleazy or what is the point of it at all. The FS shines out like a beacon in the Stygian gloom, a glowing candle in the peasouper fog, by having resisted the tide. It is as close as you can get to the old Soho experience. It is like a fly trapped in amber. It is a Lost World at the bottom of a hole on a high South American plateau, where Tyrannosaurus Rex still roams and Pterodactyl still fly in the sky. It is the Pterodactyl brought back to London and escaping and circling above the Geographic Society against a Full Moon. 

KARL KRAUS. “Why do I always act so dumb, seem to fuck things up for fun. Just can’t help behaving, as if my head needs rearranging”. It is always something exotic, and steamy. Exotic, steamy, King’s Cross.

When I feel so broken and sad like I did last night & now I need to go on from the Scotsman to the cinema to lose myself in porn & that high (2nd October 2006)

When I feel so broken and sad like I did last night & now, I need to go on from the Scotsman to the cinema to lose myself in porn & that high, and on that high, dangerously excited, to go on to see Demi or Pamela. I need to see someone to take my mind off —–. And then straightaway I am right back into my old life and nothing will have changed whatsoever! Friday night 7pm I had another missed call from Olga. I definitely need to lose myself in the spiritual high of porn and whores to get my mind off the intense sadness of my relationship with —–. That means Berlin may have to wait till April or May. I didn’t try to talk to —– or buy her a drink, because I just want things to settle down between us, which started to happen at the end, when she let her body rest against mine & massaged my shoulder, so that I will feel OK about going to see her in Plumstead on the 18th November, which after all is only SIX WEEKS away! 

I am a dreamy boy, who lives in a world of his own. I am Ernest Dowson, seemingly always submerged in a dream. He spent all his money on drink and whores. He suffered the torture of the damned because his beloved Adelaide did not love him back. I need to go to see Demi and Pamela, to try to console me over my broken heart with —–. “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion” But all the time I am fucking Demi or Pamela it will be really —– I am imagining is beneath me.

OK so I fell off the wagon but it only cost me £30 (27th August 2006)

OK so I fell off the wagon, but it only cost me £30. I can make that up by not going to Calcutta at all this week, as punishment. And I learned an important lesson, that the Bell really is over for me now. Blonde in low cut white top who came in Calcutta for glass of wine just as I was leaving was highlight of the day. Rebels & Martyrs blonde American in skin tight beige trousers that cut her arse in half and grey vest. Now I’ve lost interest in Vienna, lost interest in everything. It was mighty fine to see Lucy again, though. Those thighs, that arse. She is sexy. And nice to see Florence again in see through all in one blue outfit, and coming in in her grey hooded top.***********This was in fact a very valuable £30 and not wasted at all, because it taught me a very valuable lesson, that the Scotsman really is over for me, and most definitely so is Florence. Lucy caught my eyes a couple of times while she was sitting at side, once when I was squinting to look at pink poster, I looked back to screen & saw that she was looking at me, and when she got changed to leave she also glanced to me. It was also valuable because it made me realise I do not even want to drink anymore. I will not go to Calcutta for my nightcaps anymore either, that will recoup the £30. So what will I do in these lovely dark autumn rainy, storm-tossed nights, if no Scotsman, no Sunset, no Calcutta? Stay in enjoying my hamburger & fries, writing by my lamp, reading, listening to my classical music tapes, watching my videos, all the time saving the money to get me back to Vienna and Berlin. I slept all day today, on the floor! What is happening to my life? I am going through a change. I do not know what I am changing into. It was good to see how much more expensive the Scotsman makes my life. It was a useful lesson. It was good to finally see the Rebels & Martyrs exhibition. I did get a slight erection. Lucy liked my rings as well. MY BUS STOP IS BACK! It is so lovely to be able to go from that stop again. Beautiful dream today, where I lived was like in a forest, all overgrown & overhung, up a little muddy path & steps, and I went down to the valley and looked towards the viaduct crossing the valley & framed by overhanging trees, and red sunset, and rushed back to my place under the trees to get my camera. I so much want to stop drinking. I am so tired of being tired all the time, too tired to read or write.

Uneventful journey home (22nd August 2006)

Uneventful journey home. Anna K was sweet again. Getting on the 87 to work though just before Sainsburys was one of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen. I thought it was Anya at first, or maybe Martini with the huge breasts she used to have. Blonde plaited ponytail, little pursed smile, tight cyan blue top over big big pillow-like soft breasts, black trousers over voluptuous soft arse, very Swedish or Slav looking. Stood side on by the bars until off at Vauxhall. My God, she made me want to go back to Sunset Cinema and Demi or Pamela. It was a mighty temptation and test of resolve, but by the time I got to work and I was asking myself DO you want to go back to cinema, the answer was still no, I still didn’t want to. Just three hours to go. I think rather than stay in my flat I should go home Wednesday night, then I can be on the internet and drinking every night all week. I will have the house to myself and I can come back home Friday afternoon, in time to go out for The Third Man? Or do The Third Man tonight? I have seen that film so many times I must know the dialogue by now. If I don’t go to The Third Man I can leave Rebels & Martyrs to Wednesday afternoon when I come back to my flat. So then I can go straight to Calcutta this afternoon or this lunchtime for a couple before going home on the 3pm train. Or go to Calcutta about 1PM, Rebels & Martyrs, back to flat for couple of hours, back home with  bag tonight. Buy some beers on way to take home with me. I want my trips to Sunset Strip to be special and big events like they used to be in the Carnival days. I slept through to 640PM yesterday! What is the matter with me! I shouldn’t complain. I must be very relaxed. Still no Lilith. I miss Pamela and Demi. Oh I so look forward to getting to Calcutta for a drink this PM! Drinking is my favourite activity I think. I haven’t had a drop since Thursday night.

The richer you are the more you can gamble and the more you gamble the more you are going to enjoy spectacular wins (12th August 2006)

The richer you are the more you can gamble, and the more you gamble the more you are going to enjoy spectacular wins. If you are poor you can only gamble very rarely and very small sums and so even if you do sometimes win it is only for very small rewards. How can I say Munich is boring? How can I say Vienna is boring? You carry the weather with you. If I travelled with £2,000 in my pocket I would have the time of my life there. If I went in with a million pounds I could fuck the Irina lookalike, fuck Maria, fuck Angelique, and have the time of my life. Even in Munich I could go from club to club having a drink with every girl I liked until I found the one with looser morals who would let me come on her breasts at least. But as it is now I cannot afford to look in so many clubs, I cannot afford to buy so many girls a drink in order to find the one I will, and I come away feeling frustrated & that Munich is over, when really it is only that I do not have the starting collateral to enable me to gamble freely. You have to speculate to accumulate. At the moment I cannot speculate. To do is to dare. At the moment, I can no longer dare. This is a very important thing I have realised. Munich can come back to life for me ! Brussels can come back to life for me! Vienna can come back to life for me! All these places can bloom and blossom and shoot up above me letting me shelter under their glorious smutty fronds–if I repair my finances and hoard my gold coins in London so I can gamble wildly and speculate crazily and dare everything when I go back. 

In Feb and March I spent £617 on strippers and £547 on drink, another £1,164 in Feb and March alone. So together Feb March April May June July I could have had an extra £2,700 in my Woolwich account, or £1,100 in my Woolwich account and my Barclaycard at zero! Then for sure Munich would be full of life for me and bloom and blossom. Then for sure Vienna would be full of life for me, and bloom and blossom. You should only go into those Munich clubs, Vienna clubs, Berlin bars, if you have a lot of cash to spend; there is absolutely no point if you are on a tight budget. Then no wonder you come home feeling frustrated and dis-spirited. My holidays have got increasingly worse as my debt has increased. Let me go back to those years of repression 1996 1997 1998 when I could only yearn for those occasional visits to the pornographic cinema and a whore. That repression was so sexy, I was like a tautly strung hair trigger, it was delicious. Since then, in contrast, I have been like a gambling addict, Merson or Rooney, going deeper and deeper into debt. That is over now. The girls always say in those places I look miserable. If I went in rich I would be happy & fuck them all.

Go into Brussels like pulling into a great palmhouse, gigantic tropical ferns and trees and butterflies all around me. A steaming primordial paradise. With soot on the leaves. Let it become an overheated closed hothouse. Go into Munich the same way. Go into Vienna the same way. The more poor I became the more I travelled miserably, to Empire, Atlantic City, Pour Platin, Golden Gate. When you are happy people are attracted to you like to a magnet & you have great times. As I get poorer, I become more miserable & only have bad times. How happy I will feel when I reduce my Barclaycard to zero! The long project starts here.

OK so it has taken 8 months for me to get my position this bad. It follows it will take another 8 months to get it back even to where it was before, owing £3,900. How fantastic to see that Paul Delvaux Pygmalion picture again! De Chirico’s Melancholy of the Beautiful Day! Now let me spend all these long hours in my flat, my little nest, my eagle’s eyrie, going through all my old notebooks, manuscripts, book margins, typing up everything from my previous holidays that can be of use in my journals. Finally going through all those newspapers. Oh what joy this next few days off is going to be! I will live on cokes & hamburgers from McDonald’s next door. At night I will treat myself to a couple of pints in the Calcutta. Maybe once a week treat myself to Dionysus and the Cotton Club Cinema and Demi or Pamela. I must get to the Rebels & Martyrs exhibition next week. Of course I cannot give up my nest. What a crying tragedy that will be. That is the best thing in my life. That is the nuclear option. If I spent £800 on beer & strippers in the last two months I should therefore be able to pay off £800 on my Barclaycard over the next two months? This is where I turn my life around, and the fightback starts. I ache to see that Paul Delvaux picture for real in the Brussels Museum of Modern Art! How I ache to see Dali’s The Temptation of St Anthony in the flesh again! “Today, visitors to the Wiertz Museum enter into a highly preserved atmosphere from a revolutionary era favourable for contemplation, inner reflection or daydreams… ” How fantastic to see La Belle Rosine again! Le Tresors de Satan! La Figure Tombale! How much I want to get back to Brussels! I will have to go on a pilgrimage to Felicien Rops in Namur, I think. 

How I ache to see the huge Fountain of Inspiration in Brussels again, and the Mars & Venus on the opposite wall. So full of personal meaning, more than ever now. Getting back to Brussels will be such a symbol of my rebirth. It will be very emotional, before then pushing on to my reunion with Berlin Plaza and Berlin Zoo. Brussels can never be enough on its own. Brussels is always the stopping off point, the starting point, the staging post. I could even go to Berlin for a one night stand in January to see La Traviata?

Oh how lovely to get back to my lovely little flat in the morning! How much I love it. Take that first paragraph above and turn it into a 3rd person story, say the opening chapter of The Willing Cheeks of Fu Manchu. Pulling into Antwerp station covered in trees and rainforest and diamonds everywhere. The well is not empty in Munich. The well is not empty in Vienna. You carry the water with you.

What I wrote 8th September last year? “I would not want to stay living in this house. No point having a place of my own if it is so far from London. I would want a one bedroom flat, lined with my books from floor to ceiling! Tropical ferns all over the floor. Classical music playing. My manuscripts in a drawer. It would have to be more central on a tube line. The only advantage to living in —— now is my mother.” How poignant it is to hear Kings of Leon Red Morning Light and Strokes 12:51 again! Of course I will travel again this year, and of course I will go first to Brussels. I always start in Brussels. I want to spend long long nights lying in the dark of my flat on the floor listening to my Viennese Eroticism classical music tapes or my old Abba tapes. What joy this is going to be for the next 8 weeks. I HAVE been spending almost exactly £100 a week on drink & strippers/whores for as long as I can remember, so it is not unreasonable to guess I could save £80 a week by only going to the Calcutta occasionally, and if we have ten weeks to go until end of October, surely I can save £800?

So my last night is here, and already I am looking forward to getting the bus back to Calcutta tomorrow & then up to Dionysus, then Cotton Club Cinema, then Demi or Pamela. Do the old thing: wait for the black, rainy days & then go out then! If it is horrible and hot, then stay in. How much happier I feel when I can wear my jumper. My spirits and my confidence are lifted by about an extra 40% if I can wear my jumper. That fat, voluptuous, beautiful brunette was at the 74 stop again this morning, in two tone brown top & long skirt, talking on phone as she paced up & down in front of me, her massive breasts like two conical torpedoes in that cantilevered bra. Yesterday was even better, sitting there already as I arrived, in yellow, so low cut top I could see unbelievably massive amounts of her cleavage. Wouldn’t that be great, to bring all my books here, so they stacked up against the walls up to the ceiling?! All my Nietzsche, my Freud, my Marx, my Michael Moorcock? I will take one trip to Brussels and Berlin, then a second trip to Brussels and Munich & Vienna. Always by Eurostar & train. I love trains so much. The great thing about that is I don’t have to go on to Berlin if I don’t want to. I can stay in Brussels then go home if I want. If I meet someone like Clarisse in Brussels I can stay there much longer. If Munich is banging I can stay in Munich for six days, and forget Vienna. Or if Munich is dead, I can go straight on to Vienna the next day.

I always say the great thing about Interrail passes is you can go where you feel like when you feel like it, but you can do that just with point to point tickets as well! If I get to Brussels and meet someone, I can stay & forget about Berlin. If I get to Munich and meet someone I can forget about going to Vienna. Or I just might feel like I really want to go to Nuremberg instead. But definitely I would rather go everywhere by train now–as long as I get 8-10 days from work at a time! I always want to start off with Eurostar to Brussels, before travelling on to Berlin, or travelling on to Munich or Vienna. Not only is it hot and sunny, the second 87 bus stop under the railway bridge had a closed sign on it as well! Even though the bus did actually let us on. Another reason to stay in for a couple of days? It has finally happened with Alia, she did not smile hardly at all this time. As she saw me come, she almost looked contemptuous, “Oh not you again–why don’t you just fuck off?” It will happen with the black McDonald’s girl in the mornings soon. You carry the magic with you. If I stepped into Atlantic City feeling magical again, it will be magical in there. Like the Junior Senior-J Lo-Hip Teens Don’t Wear Blue Jeans nights, the Jay-Z Threat nights, the Global DJs San Francisco nights.

That pretty blonde girl on the bus back from Vauxhall again. I felt a tension between us all the way. After the driver let her off just before Union Road, she walked along a way, before suddenly darting a look back to see if I had got off behind her. Then as bus finally passed the shops, she was coming away from the paper shop, and darted another look at the bus. I think she has feeling for me. We had the Carnival year, the Astral Years, the C– Years, Black Narcissus Year, the Hotel Years, the Flying Scotsman Years, now I feel we are stepping through a portal, a lens, a wormhole, an Ishtar Gate, into a whole new kind of life. A life revolving around travel again, but deeper travel than before. Still, I was only skimming the surface before.

Standing at Vauxhall bus station waiting for the 87 to take me on to Charing Cross, I felt so much that I was standing at the tram stop by Vienna Westbahnhof. It was an intense moment of erotic displacement. And then as I crossed the concourse of Charing Cross Station I felt so much I was crossing the concourse of the Westbahnhof. And then in the Calcutta Avril Lavigne’s Complicated came on! As I started my 3rd pint, I got the overwhelming feeling I was drinking in the bar of the Dorint, with Natalia serving me. And then standing at the 87 stop home looking up at the modernist Charing Cross architecture thinking it was Vienna. Quite extraordinary. This is what I go out for. There were so many women alone in the Calcutta at this time, I shall have to come at 8-9pm more often. So £13.75 spent. There was the most amazing feeling that everything was now different. Everything has changed. I have gone through the eye of the needle, and I am in a new universe. Yunis was gorgeous in the Calcutta. Everything has changed. Everything is new. Everything is now possible and everything is once more in play. Vienna and Munich have most definitely come back into play. So much so that flying to Vienna for FIVE days was the most exciting thought in my mind. And of course fucking Angelique, Maria and Irina double.

I want to go to Vienna & Berlin with such a big pot of money. Oh I cannot wait till I get to those Brussels windows, and it is just 2½ hours away.

Christ, I must confess I’d love to see Deborah tonight, dancing to that Calling track, She’s all that he wants, she’s all that he needs. Remember how Carol came up to me & kissed me on the cheek for no apparent reason? How Melani looked at me in the dark? Then the next week turned to me in the bar and said “How are you?” “I LOVE opera!” The events at Heathrow yesterday make me more than ever want to go everywhere by train. I went back to the Calcutta last night & it did not feel like Westbahnhof at all! Because I was still hung over and tired from the night before. I slept on & off right through to 5PM in the afternoon! All those dreams of a Hogarthian Flying Scotsman I used to have, where it had side rooms with beds where real orgies took place, and Sylvia was always there. It was a bawdy Rabelaisian Rake’s Progress place in those dreams. The great days of the Scotsman ended when Sylvia left. Janet was the only one to come close after that. Czech Republic, Hungary, how I love those Eastern European women. One day a long time from now I will go back. Once again the Calcutta was much more female after 9PM, pretty blonde bob with suitcase sitting at small table by jukebox. Another sexy brunette in white top at tall round table. These late Calcutta nights will definitely become a feature for me now. I would like next week to be a week of movies. Miami Vice, A Scanner Darkly, The Third Man. So after my first week of hoarding, how do I feel? Happy. I have saved £62.26 which means the pot now contains 92.32 Euros. That will be double next week which will mean I have practically paid for three nights in a hotel already or the price of the train ticket. Let us say that I have now covered the Eurostar ticket. I am frightened of conversation. The prospect of conversation literally terrifies me.

I think Brussels was so exciting because I knew it was just the first leg of my European tour (7th August 2006)

I think Brussels was so exciting because I knew it was just the first leg of my European tour, and after sampling the delights of the Museum of Modern Art, Wiertz, Pullman bar, and Gare du Nord, I could head off later in the week on the long train journey to Koln and Munich, and that night be heading over Bayerstrasse to the White Coffin, on Saturday getting the train to Nuremberg for the Pils and the Caribic, before then heading off again to Vienna, knowing that Manhattan and ML Revue and Pour Platin were waiting for me, before heading off a few days later for Berlin, knowing that Stuttgarter Platz was waiting for me and the Berlin Erotic Centre. Maybe this time I can finish up in Copenhagen for The Makropulos Case? 

I want that Interrail pass again! £380 for the train pass, then maybe cheap Radisson hotels in Brussels, Vienna and Berlin? Ah but it is spending money that is the thing. Now that I have given up the Cotton Club and King’s Cross, perhaps my finance will improve a bit? JUST IN JUNE AND JULY ALONE I HAVE SPENT £424 ON STRIPPERS ALONE!!!! What did Pete say? I need to see how it is destroying me. Get this: Since the New Year I HAVE SPENT £1,778 ON STRIPPERS ALONE!!! What hideous wastefulness on something that I was increasingly starting to despise. If I could have that £1,778 back now, it would pay for the Interrail pass, and every hotel for two weeks, and give me all the whoring money I could ever need. Since moving into the flat on November 17th I have spent more than £2,000 on strippers alone. And it is worse than that, because the vast majority of my drinks bill in that time–£515 in June and July alone! £1,867 since December 10th! has been consumed in the strip clubs. Without the Bell and the Cotton Club I reckon I would now be owing just £2,400 on my credit cards instead of £5,900. These are sobering figures. For sure I could go on that long train journey to Europe in December if not for that. PLEASE GIVE UP THE STRIPPERS!!!! Just concentrate on the Calcutta, the Cotton Club Cinema, and Demi and Pamela from now on. By the end of August and September that should save me£900 alone. DO IT. Do it, so I can see Brussels again, I can see Gare du Nord again, I can go to the White Coffin again, I can go to the Pils Bar and Caribic again, I can go to Pour Platin and Manhattan again, I can go to Berlin Ciro again.

For someone who always claimed not to like blondes (1st August 2006)

For someone who always claimed not to like blondes, the blondes in The Killers Mr Brightside, Stereophonics Dakota and Robbie Williams Sexed Up videos remind me of an awful lot of them: Riccarda, Iga, Diana, and now Florence. Just one more night to get through! Then back to the Calcutta and the Bell! I am such a drunk. Like Guy Debord, the point of life is seeking the perfect point of inebriation.
Because of that I lost Florence.
Because I lost Florence.

All I like doing on my days off now is drinking and watching the girls strip (21st July 2006)

All I like doing on my days off now is drinking and watching the girls strip. There is nothing else. No more cinema. Though I would like to see Taxi Driver at the Empire. And Rebels & Martyrs at the National Gallery.
What name can I give to Sunset Strip? The Cotton Club? The Black Feathers Club? The Tallulah Club?
I am eccentric and wild. I work as a Night Manager in a quiet West End hotel, living like a church mouse. Heavily in debt I spend all my money on drinking & strippers & occasionally whores, while writing my books. Whenever anyone meets me they are concerned and shocked “Are you alright?” “What’s wrong?” “You are unhappy” “You seem distant, and not relaxed?” “Cheer up, mate. It’s not that bad!”
Whenever Jodie Foster’s Tallulah comes on, I feel all the love in the world engulf me. The love of my life that I feel in those places despite the derision that they gradually start to feel for me when they get nothing out of me, how derisive —— is! I feel like going next Tuesday just to spite her. But no, that is not me. The love of being drunk, and increasingly lost in myself. That is when I am happiest, and feel most loved, and comforted. I had to make do with that for the first year of my life. Oh if only I could travel again! To Vienna, Berlin, Brussels, yes even Munich, and Oslo, and Budapest.