i like january. january feels like stasis, atomically slow. things do not buzz or hum in january, they slo-mo.  pause button and  fast forward together - life moving soft as this. the sky is white, is my soul?...barren, fermenting undercover like yeast. thoughts slow too - dense, behind curtains...all id. bears hibernate, do souls? maybe they just bathe in the white light streaming down thru the glass house; lazer-gunning feelings with a hot swipe - taping over them with white noise. resting soul, resting brain - but the body goes on: drinking coffee, spaghetti hoops, hello miss burkett yes i'm fine how are you, wash my armpits comb my hair, you know i love you, brrring brring, 20 richmonds superking menthol please, hoover up, corrie's on i'm coming, where's my keys i'll get my coat.

more people kill themselves this week than at any other time in the calendar year. debt and cold they say, but i like to think of them crushed by blank.

i have to organise myself now -  my ideas for writing, the writing itself, time management, my thoughts and feelings, this room. the whole lot of it feels to me to have been dumped on the bed like a mountain of laundry sometime in december, where it remains. 'scatterbrain' they would call me which i always found evocative. i would think of a room in which a man had been scatter-shot to pieces: hunks of flesh would litter the space like the backroom of a butcher's shop. on the way to the fridge you might stumble over a thigh; and in that fridge: an eye.

scatterbrain.

i'm going to berlin tonight for a week, after which i'll attempt to put my house in order. the new writing class might be some help with it - i found it in small part inspirational this week. i'd been nervous of it after the first week - when it seemed to me to be full of people out on bail. there's actually just one or two people there one might count unstable but one or two when you're nervous can seem like them all. anyway the people in question seemed to have calmed down somewhat this week - perhaps the tutor had taken to the one side, or maybe they're more settled.

the main agitator in the group actually turned out to be its best writer. he's an asian guy in his forties who speaks as tho he was brought up by ronnie kray...all apples and pears, guvnors and the like. and he speaks often - when he starts there's a flood. something about him suggests a hot temper, that he might change in the click of a finger. nevertheless - there is something in is unpretentious writing that rings true...feeling and energy.

the other cause for concern is a woman, somewhere around my own age who speaks with an accent i will guess is south african. the type of accent anyway that slips all over the words, seems unformed somehow or messy. like  ronnie kray she explodes with words without respect for etiquette. you can see others in the class biding their time - waiting for a pause in discussion where they think their own voice might fit...not she. as soon as the thought occurs to her it is spewed into the ether, dwarfing anything in its path.

in the first lesson these two hot tempers collided. one told the other to be quiet and there was a tantrum of some type, that reminded me of kindergarten.

this week they were calmer. the south african read a piece about her bulimia, which read a lot like a pile of self-pity. she likened her food binges to her appetite for men - both of which she said were 'destructive'.

after anyone else read to the class she was often the first to comment. ideas had been welling up inside her from the moment she was quiet - so out it spills. i looked her at one point and thought of a balloon steadily going down...squeaking as it might. her insights are usually of the self-help variety, so she will say things like 'i liked the bit where blah de blah. it seems like you are being a mother and father to yourself'. she told me me writing ignited all these colours inside her. 'did it?' i asked. 'ta'.

that she has taken to call me 'darling' is perturbing. she asked if i'd wait til after the class so she might give me another piece of her writing that i'd missed being read out last week. given that i'd just heard about her appetite for men, and that i'd noticed her watching me as i doodled in my book, i skedaddled as soon as i was able: easy enough since she was on the crest of a long winded thought concerning one's inner child..

towards the end of the class someone said ' i just want to say how humbled i am by how much people are willing to share of themselves, their personal experiences.'  topics covered that day had included: eating disorders/ mugging/ rape/self-harm. meaty subjects all, but none of them relayed with an ounce of subtlety or with any aesthetic consideration. 'writing is therapy' the girl nest to me said.

not just therapy, i thought.