Wednesday 27th February 2020

It's telling me to write. Indeed the voice is beckoning me to walk flee disappear. Live rough. Sleep in doorways and beg. Beg food and keep walking. Become homeless.

As there is no inevitable end in sight with Leeds City Council and living in hope of a place in the same vicinity as my family what am I hanging on for? Sure I feel utterly meaningless on the eleventh floor, but I do have a roof over my head. Sure I hear the continual traffic noise - bins being emptied at Bagel Nash around five, deliveries being made to the same at another ridiculous hour, sirens from all along the arterial roads (leading up to Chapeltown, Scott Hall, Meanwood) deafening as they flash along Skinner Lane and turn along North Street, but I don't shiver against the lingering cold of a February morning.

This is humanities disease: the insane hive. We are forever on our way nowhere to find where we belong. Such speed. Going places at all times. Creating destruction all along the byways and sowing our future disaster within life's mystery. Slow down. Stop. Let the present be the only participatory sport.

Deciding to become homeless rather than be forced into the circumstances which make it inevitable. Drug abuse, unemployment, criminal activity, a trail of destruction throughout life. The causes external and internal: responsible and inescapable. Without warm beds humans suffer awfully. Without a loving home the same is true. Without a multiplicity of inputs life freezes into a sterility of one dimensional existence.

...

Courtship of pigeons and territorial show it's that time of year again, already, fast forward into Spring from a not very bleak winter. The opposite of last year's Beast from the East. Unless it's still to come, once the warm days have dropped away and the Atlantic reasserts itself. No two days are the same, but these couple of weeks have felt calm and unhurried ... Nature creeps on. Blossom and blooms. The paths underfoot are firmer, the mud is receding and a breeze has begun blowing from the west.