9th February 2000

I opened a silk box last night, at least that's how D put it and it was so funny I had to laugh when she did. D's a crafty, clever old woman who knows how to make an old man like me laugh and stop being self-centred. I'm glad I got to know her. Never open a silk box, now I know. Sometimes I'm convinced she's making up all these little proverbs, or that they're translations of Greek proverbs, and then it turns out they're English like "use the eye of faith", and the consultant's are all suddenly saying it and it feels as if someone upped and changed the whole english language whilst I wasn't paying attention just to spite me.

Last night I was wandering around the innards of my harddisk when I chanced upon a file I didn't recognise. I viewed it and it turned out to be every last email a particular individual once sent me, emails I was convinced I had deleted forever. I don't remember making the archive, but I must have done before I went off the deep end and deleted all the mails off Pegasus mail.

Have you ever had this need to throw away something important to yourself, intentionally; no I don't suppose you have. And after you've lost it whatever it is there's a temporary sense of relief mingled with some wistfulness and doubt about whether you should have done or not; and then you find you didn't really do it right and you never really lost it and doubt turns to certainty and wistfulness turns into something far greater.

I only read one of the many emails last night; just the top one, I didn't mean for to even find the archive. It was a singularly strange email sent by a singularly strange individual who had been deprived of sleep for 50 hours at the time of writing; I'll attribute it all to sleep deprivation. I know you didn't mean the things you wrote then, or maybe they didn't come across the way you intended. And I discovered that I'm not so old that I've forgotten how to cry after all.

Stood outside hospital this morning watching the clouds careen by with my shoulder to the dewdrop-coated handrail and the wind blowing as coldly as it usually does in London, and I bared my neck to the wind's bite and closed my eyes. Grey clouds against a pale blue sky, with little gossamer hints of sunlight framing the clouds. It was quite a sight.

The emails are still in my Pegasus inbox, I won't delete them this time because I don't see the need to, but I won't read them again either, there isn't a need to and I can't anyway. So you see, I don't delete mails either except in fits of madness and I'm quite sane tonight. I'm sane and coldly sobre when I write this - I was wrong.

It's 1.25 and I have to wake up tomorrow at 7 am.

Never open a silk box.