Thursday 30th October

He woke heavy but not broken.

The night had left its film — beer, blue cheese, the uneasy truce between body and will — yet the morning light over Leeds was clean enough to try again.

He ate yoghurt, brewed Lavazza, and felt the quiet resolve that always arrived after excess. Day One again, but softer this time.

Outside, the A64 hummed with commuters. Inside, the flat was stripped to cold air and maize drying on the sill. He liked the clarity of cold; it told the truth. Heat was lazy. Cold sharpened.

By seven he’d showered, made the bed, left the window open to let the night out. Dawn lifted over Sheepscar — pigeons balancing on gables, the driver of the X98 swearing about a fault — and still he went.

The bus idled through Oakwood and on toward Wetherby, past shopfronts that once were cliffs, through light that was neither fog nor sun. He thought about sobriety, about focus, about the long pattern of falling and returning.

At his mother’s he found the true rhythm again. Lola waited — older, slower, still radiant. He helped her onto the bed, shared the beans from the night before, and the day softened into the kind of peace only a dog can guard.

Later, she stole a glove. He let her win. Slobber and g-love. Presence enough.

The rest of the day unfolded in small certainties: a bus idling, low clouds like unspoken thoughts, the steady pulse of ordinary love. He read his old entries — Segovia, Cortes, October porridge, Lola’s missing toe — and saw how even when he was forcing himself to write, the writing had been a lifeline.

By evening he understood the quiet thread running through it all. Not achievement, not revelation — just continuity.

Cold mornings, warm coffee, the sound of a dog breathing beside him.

Each word proof that he was still here, walking himself back into being.