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************************************************************************** Julia massaged my cock wonderfully Sunday morning as the sun heated up our cold tent. I was half asleep as she did it. It felt like a dream, but it wasn't! The two days were so healthy. We ate tasty salads full of quinoa and drank lovely natural lemonades. I had four alternative health treatments on Sunday in the sunshine as the birds sang in the woods on one side and a balladeer sang about his sorrow from the Indian marquee on the other side. I gratefully received Reiki by four hands, an Indian head massage from Jess, a shiatsu massage from Jeff and a holistic massage in the Tepee from Jini. Mmmmm lovely! We went for a green walk in the wood, chilled out in a net that hung between the trees and chatted to some spaced out cowboys that also came from London for the weekend. It was just great! It is nice to be off for the bank holiday weekend. Hey, I have just seen that in London there is a naked disco called, “Starkers”. It is held the third Friday of every month in the same club I think where the night of the Senses was held last year. It sounds like fun. I wonder if Julia would like to check it out with me. We could stay at the same hostel as before! And before that there is Vinylla on Sunday to which we are going. Medical fancy dress is allowed so I will go as doctor this time instead of the silver space alien. I wonder what sexy idea Julia will come up with. I am off to Ireland tomorrow. It feels strange as it has been years since I saw Michael my brother. He is picking me up from the airport. I don’t know how to react to him. Our connection feels so alien and foreign to me now. I feel we both pretend to be close because we are brothers but the reality is we no longer share any common passions, feelings, interests or values. I sometimes wonder if I am all alone in the world with this type of family predicament. I am packing my bags slowly this morning just before I get a flight to Ireland. Yesterday an agency sent me an email wondering if I was interested in working in Madrid for a while. I was not, which shows I am pretty happy here at the moment. I seem to be in a phase of preparing myself mentally a lot for everyone I am going to meet in Ireland. It worries me as it means I am not that relaxed underneath. Julia gave a magical farewell massage last night after our cappuccino in the No Name Bar and some tapas and Rioja Crianza in the Mediteraneo Café. Her massage is so so much better than Hannah’s vigorous neck and shoulder massage. Julia takes risks and likes to experiment so it is slightly different every time. Last night I loved it all especially when I felt her nails been lightly dragged all over my body and even over my buttocks, my scrotum, my testicles and my cock. Wow. Amazing! My knee feels much better this morning. I think I can do a knee bend from a step without feeling any trauma. If that is the case then it will be the first time in nine months. That would be a major breakthrough for me. If it is then the next step is to get very fit aerobically and lose a few pounds. Now that is an opportunity I will be grateful for. I feel so lucky. Well here I am again typing into my phone. It has been a long time. For some reason I stopped and used the laptop in the mornings instead. But it feels good to be back. It feels good to be back doing what gives me sustenance. I want to get back to writing just the highs and low of my life. Take last week for example. Yaya sent me an email after two months of no communication not even after her birthday. She is fine. She feels great. She has a new job and things look brighter for her. She still feels the same about me, whatever that means. But the fact that she feels so good after years of feeling bad or feeling nothing at all leaves me feeling great. I feel lucky. If I feel lucky therefore I am lucky. This is just one more reason to acknowledge the fact that I may truly be one of the luckiest bastards in the world. 
Don’t get me started on how great this weekend was. I spent time with Bob who has severe diabetes and may eventually have his two legs chopped because of bad circulation. On top of that he had a mini heart attack recently. I spend time on Saturday evening with him and again on Sunday. He cooked me a chicken and I brought him some of that funny tobacco. He was delighted and he even said he could feel the pain drift away from his legs after just two tokes. Am I wrong to facilitate the introduction of class B illegal drugs into the life of a seventy one year old man? We should all celebrate randomness. That is what the fourteen year old boy said to his friend this morning on the bus. All I can see is the back of there heads but I loved it. Here was a young lad philosophizing on the bus on the way to school. We are all just young lads in search of meaning. Aren’t we? But he was putting his case so well I could not stop from listening to the following conjecture from his lips. "People need God because they fear the unknown. I say instead, they should welcome randomness, they should welcome surprise. That way they don’t need God. I love randomness. I wrote in my blog recently that despair, desolation and pain are all just a result of electrical impulses in the brain caused by visual or audio stimuli. Hey, I just love this statement. You know, I have to warn you now, you might go crazy reading my shit. It will freak you out. But if you like randomness like Ami who I forced to read it then you will love how it freaks you out too. I can write a sentence and take a word from the middle of the sentence and ask what that word is all about. I would go on until I wrote another sentence which had a word that freaked me out and write about that. Take spellchecker what is that all about? It is for people who feel a need to be perfectionists. Who cares if your spelling is good? It is just a blog after all man. Who is going to read it anyway? And if they read it who will care if your random weird shit is spelt correctly anyway?” These two teenagers are sitting at the front of the bus chatting and, at theme same time, listening to a shared MP3 player. Each one has one earplug of the headset stuck in their pubescent heads. They are best buddies. Each one is basking in the coolness of the other. Their chats each morning I find are deep and meaningful. It is so unusual to me. I wonder if they have a hidden homoerotic love for each other. I could happily listen to their conversation every morning on this bus rather than drift off to sleep with my fleece pillow. Mia Rose is the You Tube girl whose song and video, "Don’t say it", keeps going around in my head. I love it. " No, you don’t need nothing at all from me. NO, YOU, DON’T NEED, nothing at all, from me. Oh, oh." Tonight, Man Utd play AC Milan in the champions league semi final. I am torn between watching it in the Polar Bar and inviting Julia to a salsa class at the Hanbury Ballroom. I JUST love dancing salsa with Julia but it is nice to have activities that we both don’t attend. No, I will invite her to salsa but not this week. We have our festivals, Spirit of Saturday and Brighton steam room adventures in common but I want her to be part of any salsa class I attend from now on too because it would make it for me more enriched event when it is a shared experience. She does not play tennis or like football so why not build something else together there in the Hanbury. She has written three pages about our emotional car crash this weekend. She asks me if I would like to read it. She says it is not a letter to me nor is it literary vomit. I would like to read it but not now while the topic is still so hot in our emotional universe. It will be nicer to read it a couple of weeks from now when we have somewhat let go of the issue and have almost moved on. I wonder if she will censor it between now and then. She says she won’t. Would she tell me anyway if she did censor or edited the negative out of it? I don’t think so. Not unless it came up in conversation I suspect. Things are strange at the moment. I feel in a funny mood today. My knee has a new complication. I could limp into work but I would prefer to be in Brighton to find a massage bed in some shop for Julia. But apart from that, things are not bad. In case you have forgot, I went to a funky festival called the Fire Gathering this weekend and it was a great experience. The festival was in a big field with a small wood on one side. In the wood were a couple of trapeze nets hung between the trees. The field was next to the big house that was used as a recording studio in the seventies and eighties by big bands like Queen. That may explain the big glass conservatory on the side of this field. It contained a swimming pool, a sauna, a Jacuzzi, a toilet and a big walk in shower with transparent sheets of plastic. A voyeur’s dream! For all the artificially happy revelers, it created a sexy erotically charged atmosphere after the midnight hour. The worst part of this weekend was the freezing cold in the tent at four o clock in the morning. But I guess that is not such a surprise as we had just come out of the sauna in the conservatory after one hour. Julia could not believe that I stayed so long in it. It felt very comfortable to me. The funniest part was the ten teenagers who were dared by a petite pert blonde to do more and more, lascivious things in the Jacuzzi. But the highlight for me was when they all jumped out of this Jacuzzi naked, threw their bodies up against the conservatory windows and rubbed their tits and cocks against the glass for all passer-bys to see. Then they ran out in a cancan styled procession, still naked as a jaybird, into the disco which was taking place on the covered swimming pool. They danced among all the dressed party goers and then ran back to jump into the Jacuzzi again after passing a human formed beached whale in dredlocks. I guess the most absurd thing to happen to me this week was bumping into Penny at the marina. She confessed to trying to give me the cold shoulder at the marina and also few weeks back in the Polar Bar. Why? "Well, remember the time we bumped into each other at the Casino. You were really friendly. Well my friend Marc, who was there with his girlfriend, thought because of your waist coat you were a casino waiter and wondered why you were bothering me when he got back to the table. When you went to sit down in the restaurant with your friend Julia he realised you were a visiting client and not staff. So he asked the barman to deliver a bottle of wine to your table as an apology for his misunderstanding. When the barman came back he explained that you had sent the bottle back to the bar. What a cheeky bastard we all thought and, ever since then, I have blanked you." "I never knew you were blanking me Penny. Actually, if you must know, that evening, we ordered our own bottle of house wine when we sat down at our table. When it came over, I tasted it and thought it was rubbish. So I called over the waiter and asked him to bring us a more expensive bottle, a Rioja Crianza, which I knew would taste much better than the first one we ordered. What a misunderstanding! Poor Mark. There was nothing to get offended about at all. I suppose the restaurant waiters were so pissed off at me turning my nose up at the house wine that they decided not to let you or us know that it was Mark who paid for it. So they charged Mark for his bottle, us for the Rioja Crianza and made us think they were doing us a kind favour by not charging us for a bottle of house wine." "I can´t believe you never noticed me blanking you in the Polar Bar and here today." "Well now that you did it twice to me, I feel offended, and I think you should buy me a bottle of Rioja Crianza sometime." I could not resist coming down to the Kemptown bookshop this afternoon to savour a cappuccino in its chilled out upstairs public area after watching some World Championship table tennis at home. Julia seemed in better mood yesterday but she did not seem back to her full confident self. She still seems tense, fragile and vulnerable. I feel like I am walking on eggshells sometimes with her. Maybe I am just imagining it all and superimposing the events of the last two months onto her current behaviour. I don’t want another partner who is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. That is what I endured with my last two partners. What is it? Do I attract them? Do I encourage women to have breakdowns? Am I that lousy a human being that they can’t say to themselves, "I truly feel that I am so far away from having a nervous breakdown now that I have someone like Gary as an intimate companion in my life!" But no! A repeated drama is starting to happen again for me. Was Julia always like this but actually just hid it from me? Did she play me like a fish and reel me in with her confident, wise, sexy quietly assured ways and then once she was sure I was landed, decided to drop these emotional personality bombs on me? Or is it something new that she is developing to get my attention? I don’t need ever again in this life time a partner who wants to play with the fires of depression. It scares me. She can become single again if she wants to go down that dark and depressing road as a personal experiment. I honestly still feel too weak to handle that again. Looking back, she seemed less negative during her termination and her own father’s death. She was much stronger then I thought. But now at the slightest negative occurrence she seems on the brink of losing it. I do hope I am imaging all this. I do hope she becomes a confident calm positive, happy go lucky person, living in the moment again. I do feel for her. I am so sorry that she has gone through some quite emotional times recently. She does not deserve it. She is such a wonderful human being and I do, when all is said and done, respect her right to feel down on these occasions. “Depression is always about loss”, someone once said. When her boss informed her about replacing her with a more expensive locum she felt a ‘loss’ of confidence in her ability to convince not only others but also herself that she was a good OT. When I complained about her keeping from me her intentions to go abroad on the same day I was sexually intimate with her in her bed she felt she had ‘lost’ something else in her life. She had loss my confidence in seeing her as a good person who had no bad intentions towards others. I think she is a good OT. But I think she has forgotten it. I think she is a good human being with very few bad intentions towards other. But she has forgotten this too I think. Finally I want to say to you Julia, "Nobody is perfect and another person’s opinion of you, even mine, is just that, just an opinion. It is not a fact. The true danger lies in you choosing to believe someone else’s negative opinion of you. Then it becomes fact. So don’t believe them. Never! I am in shock. I bumped into Pauline from the tennis club this morning outside the secondhand shop on St Georges Rd. She tells me that Rohan from the tennis club is dead. He was only twenty seven. I played with him last year before my knee injury. He was to me a boy starting out in life slowly discovering who he was and who he wanted to be. Now he is dead. How crazy is that? I don’t know what to say to Pauline. To me Rohan was the quite gentle giant of the club. He had a beautiful graceful way of playing tennis. Even though I always beat him he never got mad. He was like a yoga spiritual leader who knew the ways of the universe and felt that you should find out the secrets of life by yourself rather than him telling you. Now he is gone. Why Rohan? Why now? Why not take somebody else who deserves to be taken? Why not take someone else like me who has lived a life to the fullest and is not too bothered about going? It is not fair. How was he taken? Now that is even more ridiculous. He was on his way back in a mini bus from the north with a group of twenty-something year old friends who were all at a stag party. The bus broke down on the motorway at one o clock in the morning. Because there were twelve of them, the road side rescue had to send two vans. Six of them got into the first van that arrived. Rohan was one of them. At two o clock in the morning this driver of this van fell asleep and ran into the back of pickup truck that carried their broken down bus on the top of it. The broken down van came loose and fell down on top of them while another truck crashed into to back of them. It was a three way horrific sandwich. All six were killed. The other rescue van arrived home safely with the other six, one of which was Rohan’s younger brother. “Gosh Rohan. I am so sorry. I am so sorry you had to go. But now that I think about it, you always had a wise resigned look about you that said, ‘I already know that my life will end soon and I know how. So it’s OK’ I hope it was painless and I hope you are well wherever you are. Farewell young man, farewell.” 
In the Kemptown cafe Caroline and I are reminiscent about the lost art of letter writing and the receiving of letters from afar. The anticipation of getting a long letter from a loved one is now gone. All we have to hold on to these days in the form of personal communications are emails, and text messages. Our conversation reminds me that on my mobile phone in my pocket I have transcribed into my web diary the letters of Kerry my ex girlfriend from ten years ago. Even though we ended in a bitter way I do remember she wrote some of the most wonderful romantic letters I have ever received. I open my phone and read out one to Caroline. After a few minutes she says, "Stop Gary. I feel dirty. I feel like a peeping tom. A letter like that is private and I should not be listening to you reading it out to me.” I, on the other hand, feel different about it. I feel privileged that someone wanted to write such a beautiful letter to me and I feel it is right to share the artistry of such letter writing with the whole world. We both agree to disagree. Caroline says she would never want to know about the private experiences of other people she is close to and she would never want to share her own private experiences with other people. If someone wants to share with her she says she always tries to stop them and wants to listen to none of it. “It is private and them sharing zomething like that is dizguzting and wrong even if they feel a good about sharing it with me themzelves.” To me it is a privilege to hear and see the private experiences of another. If my parents wanted to talk to me about their sex lives then I would feel privileged. The question is should I share the beautiful artistic words of an ex girlfriend with someone I hardly know, like Caroline. I will rarely meet Caroline ever again and neither will Caroline probably ever meet me again. But she feels very protective about Kerry’s letter to me. So am I doing something wrong in sharing such a beautiful letter with her? If I had told her I found this letter in a romantic novel would she feel the same or is it only because she knows that what she is listening to is a letter written to me, the person in front of her. She has my permission to hear it but it is still wrong to her. Is it my right to share someone else’s letter with her especially when Kerry never said specifically that she did not want anyone else to read her letters to me? The ironic fact is Kerry was an aspiring writer when I was going out with her. This blurs the lines of right and wrong even more to me. If she is using her talent for connecting words on paper why should I feel bad about sharing her connected words to me with someone else? Will her own future short stories and novels not contain some element of personal disclosure too? I don’t know. Caroline has made me think. I feel a little dirty now that I have disclosed to someone else the words of a lover’s intimate letter to me. I would like to ask Kerry what she thinks and if she thinks it wrong that I share her beautiful letter to me with someone else. For that matter, I wonder if Julia would ever give me permission to share her own written down thoughts about us and about me with someone else. Even though they maybe about her feelings for me does that mean I still have no right over them. "Look but do not touch" becomes, "Read but do not ever disclose it to anyone else in your life". In an age of people becoming more and more private and solitary in their modern adult lives is it any wonder that there is an out of balance public rebellion against such private lifestyles in a big media shows like Big Brother. This program shows everything, discloses everything and makes sure with forty seven CCTV cameras that not even the most private experiences of an individual are sacred any more. 
Julia often encourages me to talk about my emotions and I have often told her I feel uncomfortable talking about them. Maybe she does not realise that what is proven to be good for women, may not be actually goof for men. For women, it’s natural to want to talk about emotional topics such as relationships. In fact, women often think, if only men were able to talk about their emotions too, we’d avoid all the conflicts and misunderstandings and we’d have a better, more emotionally open relationship as a result. When someone, an intimate partner, asks me to talk about my emotions I do get defensive, fidgety and distracted. Sometimes I close down completely. What kills me is I do not know why. I love to write about my inner most emotions in my diary but not talk about them. I sometimes feel I am punished for a crime I did not commit when I am asked to talk a about my emotions. That contradiction confuses and frustrates me but now I think I know why. The experts say it’s genetic. It turns out that women were wrong. Too much talking about your relationships is more likely to make it worse rather than better. New research has found that while talking about problems and emotions calms women down, it makes men feel uncomfortable. Men experience more physiological trauma, with increased blood flow to their muscles, when they have certain emotions. It is uncomfortable for them to talk, especially when they feel shame. They are likely to feel shame when a woman approaches them with anxiety or unhappiness. I felt this way when Julia came to my door at midnight two months ago. I could see she was very unhappy. I could feel my body go into shock. I was not looking forward to letting her into my house whereas a woman, a female friend of hers, would have not minded and probably would encourage the situation. It has left somewhat of a mental scar in me and now I at least know why. My whole physiological system was traumatised by the shame her anxious visit brought on me. There was something more powerful than the stereotypical nagging girlfriend going on there. Despite my physiological trauma, I am proud I did find a need to comfort her, and I did. Anyway, why did Julia find it so hard to admit she was wrong about keeping her travels abroad from me? I think I might know why. Our brains are hard wired to protect our basic feelings that we are smart, moral and competent. Therefore any indication that we are not, especially in some realm that is important to us, causes intense discomfort. That is what happened to her perhaps. That is what happened to me too. I admit, I was wrong to publish my vitriol on the internet so soon after I was upset. I am sorryJulia. Guess what? I feel very uncomfortable when I learn that my beliefs might be false or when I make important decisions that I find I may regret or when even if I do something that makes me feel foolish. This, they say, is called, “dissonance theory”. Most quarrels between couples boil down to the, "I am right and you are wrong" syndrome doesn’t? Let’s face it. All couples and lovers disagree on whose memory or beliefs are right. I made a stupid mistake but that does not make me a stupid person. I am sorry Julia. I am still in recovery from my knee accident ten months ago. What does recovery mean to me? Well, recovery means finding a ´new normal´ for my life; learning to embrace all that I have, rather than focusing on what I don’t have. 
Well, what did I think of my week in Ireland? It felt long, it felt warm, it felt balanced, necessary and comforting. All my brothers were civil to me and my apprehension going to Ireland turned out to be unfounded. Michael and Caroline were agreeable and pleasant hosts for the first two nights. We had a Chinese meal out together with Caroline’s sister and her new boyfriend. Yes her sister has a new boyfriend whom she met on the internet. They are the first steady couple I know who have met that way. On the second night Carl arrived with Grace and Andrew. It was great to meet him again after such a long time. We never talked about how long it has been. No deep conversation took place with any of my brothers over the week. I tried but failed. That is their way to get through life with one’s own brothers I guess. Grace is growing into a fit young woman with a passion for all things horsey. I like that. I like someone to have a passion especially if it is not done to just impress others. Andrew seems thin and insecure at times. However I was slightly upset that he cleaned me and everyone else out in Poker on the same night he arrived. There was no money involved but it hurt a little when he kept on calling me loser. He even called me freak. I am no longer as upset by these comments from kids as I was before. As Anita says, it is just something kids say at there age. Michael and Caroline gave me a lift down to Portlaoise Sunday morning. Thank God. I don’t know how I would have gotten down otherwise. Alan and Anita gave me a warm and unexpected welcome. I was expecting tension but all I got, was love. 
Cathal was a joy. He was pleasant, fun and friendly, no airs and graces unlike Ashling. Who would not say hello to anyone and barked out at her parents which I thought unfair. But that I guess is teenage life too. According to my dad he saw her in town with her schoolmate. There, she even blanked, her own grandfather, who walked up to her on the same side of the street in Mountrath. She is probably just another teenager who thinks the following? “Who am I? How should I behave? How can I be not considered a child and yet not seen to be too friendly with them adults around me. I know! I will pretend to be cold and aloof with all adults.” I have just left, after sun bathing my tired body in Green Park, the surreal world of Fortnum and Masons near Burlington house. I am having a trip down memory lane in London. It has been twelve years since I have been going to my favourite places in London. I never wrote about them before. I never did them any justice. I just enjoyed them and forgot about them, discarding them like a used napkin after a meal. That was not fair of me. They should be part of my memory, part of my history and part of my psyche. After all, these places were my refuge and solace and joy when I was a young man making my way in a foreign land for the first time. One place I find myself revisiting is the Stockpot in Panton street in the middle of busy expensive Piccadilly. It is a cafe for the poor and lowly paid and has been around since 1958. I came here a lot just for the main course which always cost around half the price of the average meal in the area. Even a pizza in a local pizzeria is twice as expensive as a main meal here. I order the beef burgundy with mash carrots and cabbage. It is a feast. The meat in the sauce is tasteless but the mash is lovely. They provide comfort food, always have done. Maybe that is why I felt so attached to this place during my five years in London. It is like the food mam use to make for me as a child. The cabbage is watery and soft. The carrots soft and moist but it is all right. I feel safe here, even though I am in one of the busiest most turbulent parts of London. They owners are like my surrogate family. They look at me like they look at me in Ireland, with an inquisitive puzzled look always trying to figure you out and know you. The meal is getting tastier and tastier as I mix the beef, the dark brown sauce and the mash together. Every person who arrives, arrives with the smile of one who has finally arrived at an oasis in the Gobi desert. The owners welcome each one with a knowing gesture that says that they will look after you as long as you stay here. It feels like a family run cafe by a sky blue Mediterranean sea. I am satisfied once again. I feel whole once again. I am ready to continue on my journey through the streets of Piccadilly, towards a little cinema, called the Prince Charles. The tickets here only cost £1.50, five times cheaper than any other cinema in Piccadilly, and the movies are more creative, independent and fun. In the past, they use to have a guy play his guitar on stage before the start of each movie. Through song he would get everyone to squeeze into the middle of the seating area in order to let more people into the outside seats. Now that was cool. I wonder if they still do it. ************************************************************************** Hey guess what! I have sexual fantasies. I know Julia does too. My most common one at the moment is Julia having sex with another man and woman. The next most common is an orgy. The images I most seem to enjoy recently in my fantasies are Julia hunkered over another man’s cock which is covered by a condom which I have put on it with my own two hands. Another image I like is one where I am slowing sliding my cock into another pussy and from time to time I pull it out, rest it on the ass cheek of the girl from where Julia takes my cock in her right hand and puts it in her mouth for a few seconds. Then she guides it back into the girl’s pussy. But what do our fantasies tell us about ourselves. Experts say that if our fantasies don’t disturb us then they are healthy. In fact they are useful to sparking our libido before and during sex. So they have a useful function too for human beings. Our fantasies may hold clues to areas of our unconscious mind and our desired experiences that haven’t been fully explored yet. They can be wish fulfillments. I am delighted that Julia likes to share her sexual fantasies with me. I enjoy fantasying with her about what we might get up to, given the chance. We don’t do this often but when we do it feels to me so inclusive, intimate, shared and out in the open. I like that. In the end fantasies are about being wanted and desired and when we do, it makes us feel more aroused. This too can be a very effective way for a woman to get quite aroused before sex. Fantasies play an important role in boosting libido, improving relationships, and can regularly have a therapeutic effect on our moods and confidence. But what do the images of my group sex fantasy mean. It may sometimes mean that I am too afraid to say to my lover, "This is what I would love done to me." The other person in the scenario is often more adventurous. That is true in my case. Out of the two of us, I fantasy Julia as the more adventurous one in my fantasies. This they say is a way we wish our over could learn to act. Group sex also involves an enjoyment of being watched and desired. I guess that is true of me too as I am a little bit of an exhibitionist but I also like the fantasy of group sex because of the intense personal intimacy that can unfold from such an encounter. Julia told me that in the past she fantasized about lesbian encounters. Experts say that this does not in no way mean that Julia is a lesbian or bisexual. It only means that she was exploring a desire in her life for a more intimate, nurturing sexual encounter. What does it mean then when I sometimes fantasize bout watching Julia with another woman? They say that this is quite a controlling fantasy. The thrill is that the women are having sex for my delectation, so it is a way of reclaiming some power in our relationship. It can be more common among men who have had a more dominating mother than father. That could be me too. But it can also be a way of excusing a man from having to perform. Wow, that could me, especially now that I have a dodgy knee. In the end what Julia and I fantasy about is probably just down to our own individual personalities. Everyone has different levels of creativity and imagination, don’t they? The most important thing is not to be judgmental of her fantasies and, for her not to be judgmental of mine. *******************************************************
Well I had my 41st Birthday this weekend
and it was pure joy! I spent most of it abroad in a place in
I love this message from my godson.
“ Well that all from me now lets here about you! From Cathal Phelan
P.S Thank you for bringing me to all them places when you were in Ireland and I wrote all of this myself so there was probably a few mistakes byee! “
What has worked out well for me recently then?
“Make it last, make it last, for tomorrow may come, and make tonight the past. “
WHAT DO I BADLY WANT BUT AM TERRIFIED OF MAKING HAPPEN TODAY? 1) 
I badly want to feel completely free where I can within 60 seconds change my life completely and not feel any shame for how it affects all those people around me who know me, love me, need me.
2) I badly want to adopt a 10 year old boy from non western country and spend ten years giving him a life that is much better than the one he had before.
3) I badly want a secondary lover to play with of whom Julia approves of and possibly wants to know as well. Don’t get me wrong, I am not in any way dissatisfied with Julia, I am just being greedy. But after recent experiences, I am terrified to say this to her in case it drives her into a deep long sad depression, the one she fears from time to time. I am terrified to say it directly to her in case she says, “But Gary you know I am in love with you until the end of time and what you want is a completely selfish soul destroying thing for me to agree to. In fact I now want to die.”
4) I badly want to move all my
dollars out of
5) This winter coming, I badly want a 4 month break from being intimate with anybody so as to think about what direction I want my life to go in next.
6) I want Julia and I to have group sex once a month but I am terrified one of us will eventually get aids and our personal life ruined in the process.
7) I want to reduce my traveling time every day by a whole 40 minutes but I am terrified of moving closer to the station as I may have to pay more for a smaller place further away from the seafront with less friendly housemates although.
8) I want to spend more than
a week a year in the company of my parents. Four weeks would be best. Three
weeks great. But I am terrified of being bored, unhappy, poor,
lost and depressed living in
9) I badly want to, with Julia’s help, to buy and build a metal stair on the groyne down in front of us on the beach. I am terrified the council will say no and I will fail.
My GP would not tell me what was wrong with my stomach. She is useless and I wanted to tell her in the reception of the surgery. She said they were waiting for me up in A&E. But all I got were nurses. Not one doctor or surgeon came to see if I had appendicitis. I lay on a bed for four and a half hours with a needle in my right arm and all they could say was, “a doctor should come soon the assess you”. What a load of crap. After four and half hours I crawled out of my bed and demanded that I sign myself out. “I am not going to waste another minute longer lost in NHS limbo”.
I wander out into the pouring rain weak as a kitten from the cramping pain that invaded my stomach and somehow made my way home. I lay in bed with fever and stomach pain and wanted to die. But I was happy to die there rather than in a hospital bed where I was surrounded by drug addicts shooting up behind curtains, old dears babbling to themselves through their incontinence and nurses who only want to keep to their statistical targets before they knock off from their shift.
My stomach is a bit better today and now I am going to sketch a nude of Julia. It is one I have wanted to sketch for ages but just never found the creative juices to do so up to now. I know by doing the sketch I will be close to her even though she is not here. I don’t want us to be spending time together this weekend while I am sick. I could only bring negative energy or no energy to such an encounter and I cherish the fact that we try to unite only to bring fun, laughter and variety into each others’ lives.
I want to give the following universal advice with which I agree whole heartedly.
“Ladies and Gentlemen of the class of 2007, Wear sunscreen! If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis or reliable then my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice....now. 
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind, you won't understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded, but trust me in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine. v Don't worry about the future, or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing on chewing gum. v The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind: the kind that blindsides you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday. v Do one thing every day that scares you. v Sing! v Don't be reckless with other people's hearts; don't put up with people who are reckless with yours. v Floss! v Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long, and in the end, it's only with yourself! v Remember compliments you receive; forget the insults. (if you succeed in doing this, tell me how). v Keep your old love letters; throw away your old bank statements. v Stretch! v Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives; some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don't. v Get plenty of Calcium. Be kind to your knees -- you'll miss them when they're gone. v Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll divorce at 40; maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. v Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself, either. Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else's. v Enjoy your body: use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it or what other people think of it; it's the greatest instrument you'll ever own. v Dance...even if you have no where to do it but in your own living room. v Read the directions (even if you don't follow them). v Do not read beauty or health magazines; they will only make you feel ugly. v Get to know your parents; you never know when they'll be gone for good. v Be nice to your siblings: they're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future. v Understand that friends come and go, but what a precious few should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps and geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people you knew when you were young. v Live
in v Live
in v Travel! v Accept certain inalienable truths: prices will rise, politicians will philander, you too will get old; and when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders. 
v Respect your elders. v Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund, maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse, but you never know when either one might run out. v Don't mess too much with your hair or by the time you are 40, it will look 85. v Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia; dispensing it is a way of wishing the past from the disposal--wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it's worth. So I do apologise to you for this recycled patched up nostalgia but don’t forget to wear the sunscreen.”
What a great weekend. I
celebrated Pride in the morning outside the Redroaster
café watching all get ready for the parade and for
As if it could not get any better, Julia and I had a sexy morning in her flat in the sunshine room. She gives me a wonderful fellatio and I snipped the hairs of her pussy and her ass. I felt like a Toni and Guy hairdresser. Her pussy looked great. Her pussy lips are now even more visible and irresistible to lick, suck, and be entered from behind with my cock. In the afternoon we discovered for the first time the Aquaduct outside of Haywards Heath. For two years I have passed this beautiful place every single day on the train. Now I was finally hear and sharing it with someone special, Julia. We went for a walk in the surrounding fields in the gorgeous sunshine on the hottest day of the year. Afterwards in the car we discovered a wood beside the reservoir in a place called Altingly. We had a wonderful stroll around it and then made our way to Hickstead to discover what my surprise birthday present was.
It was a balloon ride over the Sussex Downs at sunset. Brilliant, just brilliant!
Julia you are a star! The trip was magical. The trip was so mystical. I felt like an angel flying over all the souls below. It was more mystical than the glider as I was outside and not inside a cockpit. To finish off the trip we had a giggle over some Tescos champagne and quiche Lorraine. It was great, just great way to finish off such a marvelous day. Marvelous!
On Monday on the stock market I made a sudden decision to cover my short in PCLN which I had shorted at 69 dollars two weeks before. The reason. This time last year I shorted it and was up ten percent. But after its quarterly results came out it shot up twenty percent. So on the day of its results I covered it and lost ten per cent of my portfolio. So I decide not to have such a negative experience again. One should learn from one’s mistakes, no? So I cover all at $60 and even bought the same amount at $60. BY the end of Monday it was up to $62.5. Brill! By the end of Tuesday it was up to $65. Oh my God what a brilliant move on Monday. After hours on Tuesday they were gong to announce the results for this year so still remembering last years disaster I doubled by long position in PCLN. It was the most audacious AIKIDO move of my life! Half an hour later PCLN announces it has tripled its profits from last year. Yes tripled. It’s shares shot up again. Close of business it stands at $72 and I am all and more. Brill.
“I feel lucky, so lucky and I expect my luck to continue.”
Now at the end of Wednesday it is $80 and I feel my luck will continue. I hope I have explained how it all works with sufficient perspicuity to you.
This morning I saw the wonder in a raindrop when it landed on the moving train window creating a diagonal line of water instead of a round drop. Then I got excited when I found many pools of water as I walked to the office. Raindrops fell in these pools creating expanding circles that disappeared in a millisecond like wandering ghosts in a haunted house. 'Wonder'ful!
Does anything ever work out well for Julia?
Oh well let’s see what she has to say…..
ü One thing which worked well for me today? The way I was able to juggle my high caseload today, it seemed to work today with not being fixed on a plan, but respond to any given situation.
ü One thing which worked well for me today? My journey home worked out very well today, I was offered a lift by colleague, and she drove me all the way home. What a luxury!
ü Yes, one thing which worked well for me today! - My attitude to the weather, when it rained I enjoyed it and when the sun smiled I enjoyed it.
ü One thing which went well for me today was doing my voice exercises and feeling some change.
ü Yes! One thing which went well for me today was my sheer determination which led me to go for a run tonight and enjoy the fantastic sky!
ü One thing which went well for me today was that my self esteem was good and I had confidence in life! Also a chicken gravy which I prepared today tasted delicious to me. Sleep well P.S. Just noticed, that was more than one thing.
ü One thing which went well for me today: a therapy session I conducted with and for one of my patients.
ü One thing which went well today for me: inner calmness and being relaxed, they let me enjoy the day and lowered my stress level at work and the day felt easy.
ü What went well for me today? I had a brisk walk to the centre of town enjoying the sunny side of life.
ü Something which went well today for me: My energy, my passion and my sensuous/sensual experience during our wonderful intimate play of give and receive this afternoon.
ü One thing which went well for me today was coordinating and managing my morning at work.
ü One thing which worked well for me today: I really managed to find fulfillment and great joy in just one cup of delicious coffee this morning. - And the beautifully pink tainted sky this evening made me dreamy and wonder about how the sky can turn evening after evening into an act of art!
ü One thing which worked out for me today: I think being focused at work today made me conserve enough energy so that I could have and enjoy a run this evening.
Good night Jx P.S. I had great joy engaging in your challenge!
This shows me you are a talented positive goal achieving person who can achieve most of your dreams if you put your mind to it. And it looks like you will have fun doing it too. Go girl, go!
Now she challenges me! Recall every evening at least 2 of the following experiences: 1) something positive or 2) something funny or 3) something inspiring or 4) something you are proud of.
But I find that it is all too much to think about at the end of my day.
Ashdown Park Country Hotel 
She gives me a wonderful slow luscious blow job in our extra king size bed. Then there is a knock on the door….
Actually the whole experience was so good I am too nervous to calm down and recall it. Words can not describe the intensity of the magic experience over these three days so I am not even going to try. It is like trying to explain why Van Goghs “Sunflowers” is still so loved by hundreds of millions of people all over the world a hundred years after his death.
Night Of The Senses was just great. xxx
This experience I can just about explain. Let me see, where shall I start for you?
After feasting on Spanish tapas and Rioja wine we finally find the Brixton church in which it is held. Yes a church. This year it is in a church! I am scared. There are numerous hooded black men sitting in the gardens near the entrance to the crypt. They are freaky. Who are they really? Why are they here at this hour? What if last year’s organizers have been killed and replaced by religious Opus Dei African zealots who plan a massive victory over the bacchanal hedonism of all those who attend tonight. What if they plan to lock us all in the crypt at sun rise and as we are all in mid orgasmic communion torch the building and leave us all to burn our way back to hell!
Snap out of it
OK, to get in we have to go
through the basement entrance. A fat woman, who is dressed as a police woman,
herds us into the reception area and towards the changing area. Lubricia is
dressed in a see through pink panties.
I can see her shaven pussy through it.
It is great. I love it. It is my favourite panties so far. On top she wears a
very light pink see through top with flowers embroidered on the lace. She wears
pinks feathered pins in her hair.
To top it off she wears gold high heel shoes.
Fabulous! I put on my Ali Baba outfit.
The girls on reception are wonderful and charming. They are fifty-something and dressed like sexy vixens. Viv in particular is so helpful. She gives a great feeling of fun about the night. We asked for our tokens that we are suppose to get but she apologises and does not know how we can get some.
In the crypt we plonk ourselves down on the black leather sofas. Our eyes
feast themselves on the wonderful assortment of erotically dressed strangers
who passes by in the semi darkness. There are gimps, fairies, bikers, deep sea
divers, an arab, Ghandi,
naked disabled men, naked women, Dali, pirate men, pirate women, a black cross
dresser, woman on dog lead, men leather hot pants, a couple in white chiffon
robes, a dominatrix in a red and black PVC corset. We philosophize. We
ask each other questions. Why do people dress like
this? Do they think it is sexy,? Is it a question of
dressing up like this because anywhere else it would be unacceptable to
society? Is it to be attractive? We agree, we disagree and sometimes we agree
to disagree. I get drunk on the house red and Lubricia sips on a red Martini
which matches her pink fairy outfit.
“So what did you think of it last year compared to this year?”
I lie a little bit. “We have been here just a little while and we like it a lot this year. Last year was interesting but we thought that it was too pornographic. People were fucking everywhere and nobody was really interested in a sensual sensuous experience”.
He is a bit disappointed by my answer, makes an excuse to go and leaves. I think he was hoping I would say we loved fucking strangers all night and hope to have even more this year. When he gets up I see black spots all the way down his spine. It gives me the creeps. I fear that they may be those black spots aids suffers incur at a certain stage of their demise. I get a shiver.
A man who looks like a French Dali tries to pick up Lubricia on the sofa while I am at the bar. He sits down beside her puts his arm around her shoulder and says, “I have not had hard on yet tonight, have you?” I get the feeling that she feels uncomfortable with him so I suggest we get up and move on. She agrees. In order to the get the ball rolling I suggest we have our photo taken.
We look great in the lens of the camera. Lubricia sticks her legs in the air and because the photographer is so funny we can not stop laughing. They do the photos for free and Wendy who is sixty odd sits at the desk to take down everyone’s email address. They are all lovely.
We go up to the second floor
to where the awards are about to finish. It is so cold for Lubricia. We look
down on a naked lady twist her body up along two white satin sheets that hang
from the ceiling. It is so sexy and sensuous. She twists like an Egyptian mummy
in preparation for the wedding honeymoon with her betrothed, King Tutankhamen.
The next performer we both agree is disgusting. It is a guy who squirts
moisturizing cream and increasing larger and larger giant dildos and sits on
them for the audience. Of course the last one is black and is the size of a
large marrow. This makes us want to leave and discover what exists on the third.
Perhaps it will be warmer. Au contraire it is not. But the fuck for forest
enclosure is warmer so we plonk ourselves down there.
However, a blonde guy with antlers on his head insists that we leave if we
don’t want to get naked and have our photos taken for the cause. We are in
shock. We just want to get warm, not get naked. “But if you take you clothes
off, or fuck for the forest we will put it on our website and people will pay
to see it. You will help us to raise money for us to buy land in
In another corner of this
dark cold room is a woman held spread eagle and floating in a harness. She is
been vigorously having her pussy fondled by another man. In to the right is the
Sensuality chamber. Only couples are aloud in here. We look in through the peep
holes and gusts of fresh air come shooting through. We go in and it is even
colder inside the entrance. We say so to an old guy already enjoying things in
there. But he says, “Hey, the only way to feel warm in here is to get on with
it and get naughty”. We don’t pay much attention to his jibe and leave. Oh, it
is too cold for us to want to get naked and naughty and so we move on to check
out the naked lounge and the women’s only room free area. Both look sad and
empty. We are so cold we head back down to the crypt, the warmest place at the
party.
She is so grateful now she has her coat on. Lubricia energy changes. She feels more positive. I feed off her positive energy. After warming up below we decide to go up to the third floor again and this time, truly embrace all the sexy fun that awaits us.
I don’t want to go into the naked room. It only has a couple of sad old men in there and I don’t want them fondling Lubricia. I guide her back into the Sensuality room. She says it is still too cold to get naked but I reply, “Remember what the guy said the last time, the only way to get warm in here is to get naughty so, let’s do it yeh?”
“Yeh!”, she replies and this time there is a glint in her eye.
We go into the corner.
Somehow we lose all our clothes and we become one with the energy of the room.
It feels for us like a Dali landscape. Naked breast float like clouds around
us. A bed floats above you on which disjointed arms, legs and torsos intertwine
and peter out. Our arms become long extend members that reach out to the other
side of the room to another woman’s breasts, another man’s ass and another lady’s
leg. Our fingers become branches and the leaves of the branches become drops of
rouge rose water. Time and the passing of time is not
fixed, it is not linear and it is not important. Time is a couple of slabs of
steak hanging over the corner edges of the mattress behind Lubricia as she
leans back and grinds down on my cock with mean pelvic thrusts.
Connecting with two female souls at the same time during sexual enlightenment is just divine. Tonight, I find I am being lucky enough to do it twice in this room of sensualities. The first time was with the blonde with red fingernails while Lubricia writhed on top of me. The second time comes as Lubricia lies down on the bench and I start to slow fuck her from a standing crouched position. Beyond Lubricia is another leg-akimbo blonde who wears a wonderful joyous smile as she is being eaten out by here skinhead lover. I reach out and hold her hand. She squeezes mine, looks me in the eye, and moans with extra pleasure. The more pleasure she feels from her lover’s lips the more she squeezes my hand. The more she squeezes my hand, the more magic I put into driving my cock into Lubricia’s pussy below me. The four of us are all connected. For a short moment our mounting pleasures tonight are intertwined. It’s beautiful. Lubricia my sensuous sunshine is beautiful, so beautiful, so so beautiful, so so so beautiful.
The next thing I know
Lubricia and I are awakening from a languorous delectable dream on the black
sofa of the Church crypt. Did it actually happen or did I just dream this
fantasy of four. We slowly get dressed and outside we seek a carriage to take
us away towards the sun rising over the southern side of the river Thames and
old
My Mountrath dream: Last night I dreamed I was
playing table tennis at home in the living room of the White Horse Inn in
Mountrath in
My bedroom is my Mind (Mapped):
Photo Mind Mapping suggestions:
re-read it again and discovered the small wooden stick. What exactly is it? But all of a sudden (and I never do this, not out of Puritanism I hasten to add. It just doesn't do anything for me usually) I … started masturbating uncontrollably. It was "wacked" - I really couldn't stop myself. It's difficult to put into words how intensely I feel when I think of you Gary, when I think of the 15 or so minutes we were together, and when I think of it, if you were to appear here now I would not be able to control my hands. I wish I could describe it on this page as titillatingly as you this feeling, but it could never transfer to this page exactly as it feels within me. It is purely animalistic, this feeling – so wholly unintellectual, though not un-emotional. It is quite amazing that it exists so purely and intensely after two months. Feelings like this never normally sustain themselves in me. No matter how intense, it has always faded. "When can you come?" I'm caught between the desire for this, us, to be wholly separate from all else in the world – but, 'a la mismo tiempo', I am living a dearth of sensual energy, passion and eroticism. My soul is withering while you are not here. I know it's only four years since I last felt a man inside me, but I feel like I'm getting ready to set out once again and paddle across an ocean of sexual experimentation. It surrounds me on all sides. I have no energy to be passionate about this journey until I see you again, and this scares me. How can this be healthy or good in any way? It is not. But my alternatives until you arrive, are slim. I crave the release of my pure, raw sexuality. Sexual Desire is not a need, But an esctasy. It is not a mouth thirsting, Nor an empty hand stretching forth, But rather a heart enflamed, And a soul enchanted.
Please write soon. Anais.
The next day I can feel the nearing arrival of all kinds of chariots that carry my distant brother and their tribal members from all corners of the continent.
Before the arrive I have time to put on my coat and take the opportunity to walk up to the golf club before the next rain shower tickles and moistens the skin on my face. Once there I find Dad sheparding the golfers who are taking part in the Saturday morning competition. He seems in full control and so suited to been a leader of people. He makes them feel good and they all come to him if they have a query or problem. It is great to see him in action. I ask if he wants a beer and he says,
"No thanks, I would rather a latte."
I am shocked and surprised, surprised at my own incorrect assumption that he would secretly like a beer with me. I felt like a cappuccino myself too. Over the next hour we share the same pleasure and enjoy each others company as we gaze out at the glorious green damp Irish afternoon.
I know these moments are few now dad. Extreme gratefulness and aching sadness split my heart down the middle. But I would not have it any other way.
Carl is the first of my brothers whom I set my eyes on. He is flanked by Chris his wife and Chris’s parents Joan and Peter. I enjoy exchanging pleasantries with them and we compliment each other over the tea and cakes and over the gorgeous stuffed roast chicken that mam panics over in the kitchen.
"I can’t cook! I don’t cook. What should I do first? I have not cooked for so many people for such a long time. I only cook for myself. That is what I do. Why am doing this? Sure I am treating everyone to lunch in the golf club tomorrow. So why should I fuss over them today?"
"Don’t worry mam. Everything is going to OK. Here let me make the seasoned mashed turnips and carrots to go with the Brussels sprouts, chicken breast, honey roast ham and the cheese sauce that you are preparing for everyone. Don’t worry it is going to be delicious."
I could empathise with her anxiousness and with everyone in the other room. I felt confident and calm. It was all quite mindful and spiritual to me.
In the evening I see mam dressed in all her glory. She wears a gorgeous purple French gypsy dress that it set off by the white shimmering scarf draped over her shoulder. Her hair drops down her neck in black satin curls. I feel so proud that I have such a gorgeous mum and such a gentle handsome father to accompany me to the secret location where the party is about to start at 9pm.
I recognise the big squares of bone and meat that make up the torsos of Michael and Alan. They are standing outside the Lemon Tree in Portlaoise. It knocks me for a moment. Yes they exist, these brothers of mine. They are flesh and blood and big. I was not sure if they were feats of my imagination. It has been almost six months since my eyes set sight on Alan and many a full year since they had set sight on Michael. A shake of the hand is all I can manage. At least I manage a kiss on the cheek fir Caroline and Silvia. To top it off I am greeted up stairs in the cavern by David, Rhiannon and Kali who is one more beautiful niece of six of mine.
I am sitting in the toilet when Anita arrives. I know we have not got on much in the past so I am happy for all those nearest to her to surprise her. It goes on and on and on and it is great. The DJ starts to play top tune after top tune. Within minutes everyone is up dancing. They don’t stop all night. Alan makes sure everything goes smoothly right up to his private presentation of a weekend for two to New York to Anita.
It was a great success. I for one am so glad it has not been a funeral to bring us all together this time. I am so overjoyed. I suggest to Anita and Alan and everyone that we continue the festivities. We all arrange to take over the resident’s bar in the Heritage Hotel, the hotel where Michael and David and Silvia are staying at.
On the door a low hobbling aging nasty man suspects that not all of us are residents. Of course he is right. I am the one who isn’t. Luckily Silvia offers to share her bedroom with me that night, sorry no, she offers to me her bedroom number. OK well that’s not bad at all either, for it fools the night watchman into think I am in room 307. David is furious at the strict behaviour at the door by the man. David blasts him. We all tell him to cool down and let the festivities begin. Silvia and I go for the hot whiskeys while the men go for more pints. Anita and Alan breeze through reception without being accused of not being residents. Lucky sods.
“How did they do that? Never mind let’s all get drunk.“
Anita and I power on as all the others fade away one by one. Michael and Alan fall asleep sitting upright on their stools. By four o clock we are the last to leave. The bouncers stand over us menacingly urging us to go to our rooms but Anita, Alan and I saunter out the front door into a waiting taxi. The bouncers are left a gasp wondering how we got into the residents bar at all on a Saturday night.
Back at the house Anita cheerily asks,
"Now who is going to have a gin and tonic with me?"
I know if it were my fortieth, I would be delighted if someone stayed partying with me right up to when I was ready to stop.
"Well, that sounds like a splendid idea. I am game for that, how about you Al?", I say.
"No, I am beat, I cant keep my eyes open anymore but I will make the G&Ts for you two and head off to bed myself straight after."
"Good man", Anita cheers on.
Come twenty past six, after using three quarters of a bottle of gin to make several more G&Ts. Anita finally says to me that she is ready to go to bed.
With that, the birthday celebrations finish. I am so surprised that I lasted so long after everyone else.
At half past eleven the next morning I feel great and I jump out of bed and onto the bed of Alan and Anita in the next bedroom. Cathal joins me.
Over the next four hours I have a great time fooling around with Cathal. I show him two magic tricks. I teach him one of my dance moves. He teaches me one of his. He is good. Last night at the party he had one girl on his left arm and one on his right. He spun them around at the same time in rhythm to the music. I was so proud of him. What a charmer!
We jumped into the air and slammed into each other with our chests just like the heavy metal rockers do in the music videos. And when it came time to leave I gave him a big hug when he jumped into my arms.
The only thing I regret was not getting a chance to spend some quality time with Aoife. The weekend was brill but it was so packed with things to do and people to meet that it was inevitable I would not get a change to connect with many of those dearest to me.
Remember the swan. Well I was guided by it in my dreams all the way back on the bus to the airport, on the fight to Gatwick and on the train to Brighton. This swan made sure I got back safe and sound and made sure I was secure in my big warm double bed in front of the black iron cast iron fireplace in my bedroom.
December 4, 2007 "Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly." Woke up this morning quite early not knowing if I have had enough sleep last night. I should be going for the bus right now or getting on my bicycle but I just want to stop first and do my morning pages. I am so grateful that my shoulder feels so much better. I am so grateful that my knee feels so much better. I am so grateful to have Julia by my side. Because of Julia my mind over the last six months not has been taken up by the problems of a difficult dysfunctional relationship. It has been quite the opposite. She enhances my daily existence and enhances the good emotional state that I already have created within myself. I really am so lucky and so lucky that she understands me and my ways. Oh my God after one-week my portfolio value has increased by 20%. I am grateful that my finances on the stock market are doing so well. Perhaps today I will realise these benefits. It’s Sunday. Last Monday I entered into the stock market once again. I invested 70% of my portfolio in Virtual machine ware VMW at $77.5. At the end of the day, it was down by 10% at $70. I was terrified I had made the wrong decision and decided I would take a loss and get out at $69. The next day it came back to $77.5. Then last Wednesday they went up to 10% to $85 and then yesterday I was so worried I would lose a 20% rise I put in a cover sell at $95.25. Looking at my Hotmail e-mails in my account today I see the order had been activated and executed. I’m so lucky, so so lucky. I have increased my portfolio by 15% in the last week and 100% in the last year, more or less. I will stay out now and not go back so as to reap the benefits of an excellent year gambling the “Aikido Way”. Now I will concentrate on getting my flights to La Manga in Spain or Forteleza in Brazil. This time I think I want to visit a country I had never been to before. This time I want to spend quality time with me, time to decide where I want my career to go or decide if I’m happy to stay working a four-day week for the next year in London. It is time to decide if I would like a new domestic situation or whether I would like to be a bachelor again or whether I would like to become my lover’s live-in boyfriend or whether I am very content to continue with things as they are.
Three of our tribe are in the house having a little party as I get back from work. Drago invites me to a beer and Taulant gives me an Albanian cigarette which Mario says his sister coincidently smokes too. They invite me to eat their food too. It feel like I am part of a Balkan traditional get-together. It feels right to sit down and share the evening with them. It is good to connect with them. We should do it more often. I would like to help Taulant to find a job in London and I would like to help Mario find a sales job wherever he wants. These are good people, they may come from another part of Europe which I don’t understand really well but they have good hearts. They have tried their hardest in this country to get a job that pays the rent. Mario has gone to interview after interview and in many cases has been offered a job as a salesman. On been offered the job they always ask him for his work permit in England. He does not have one. He has a Canadian passport and Bulgarian passport. His father is Bulgarian and his mother is Greek. However he does not want to use the Greek passport ever. He never has used the Greek passport. To get a Greek passport he told me it is not worth it. “You see, you have to join the Greek army for one year in order to get a Greek passport. Now when you join the Greek army you will find there Greek men who want to have your Bulgarian asshole. By the end of the first year in the army you will find that it has been pummeled by a lot of Greek dick. Your own dream of getting a Greek passport will have become a nightmare. I empathise with Drago, Taulant and Mario who try to find work here and I empathise with Talaunt and Mario who are struggling to get on the slippery ladder of employment in England. But we laugh. Despite the struggles to get on here, they have laughter to keep them going. Taulant takes the piss out of me in our so called living room. “You know why Gary is here? He loves the potatoes. You see, the Irish, they love potatoes and the English, well they know the Irish love potatoes too. The Irish even steal a bit of potatoes from the English. I went to university with an Irishman and I wound him up fierce. I said to him about the potatoes. Ha ha ha! Now I’m only joking, Gary knows I’m joking, but seriously, what is this thing about the potatoes and the Irish? Ha ha ha!” I love these guys in this house. They are my brothers. I want to recognize them as my brothers. I want to help them as I would my brother. This is one reason why I wanted to live in a shared house. I could have rented a one-bedroom apartment. I could have shared Julia’s apartment with her but I I feel a man is not a truly a man, until he lives among strangers. Now I know it is not enough just to live among people, a man has to also help his fellow strangers. And if those people have no blood connection which you, then helping those people is even more noble and more manly. I guess it’s like working as president of a country. You do not know the people who live in the country who will be affected by your energy and efforts, but you know what you are doing affects their lives. So what is a man to do, quietly go about his own selfish and harmless ambitions or stretch out a hand to help those strangers with whom he shares this planet. I may live in a foreign land full of foreigners, but they are my family here.
I went to the “Wednesday Wave” last night and for the first time I said something in that moment where Tim asks everyone if they have anything to say. I said, "Every week I hear someone celebrating the emotional and spiritual benefit they get from coming to the Wednesday Wave. . . But I just want to mention the often unforgotten and unpraised physical benefit that each and every one of us gets. For the last year and a bit I myself have been suffering from problems in my knees and in my shoulder. But, over the last three months, since I have been coming to the Wednesday wave, I have found that the recuperation of my injuries has accelerated far more than during the previous year where I spent heaps of money going to physiotherapists. It is this physical benefit that I want to highlight here today. And I want to celebrate and share this with you this evening. Thank you. " I went for a drink with Sofia, Julie and Maggie afterwards. They mentioned many interesting things. Julie has been to the meditation and also to the Osho Leela house in Dorset. She went there for a New Year's Eve of all times last year. She said it was very intense but very interesting at the same time. At the dancing and doing all the workshops there is a lot of eye contact and a lot of personal interaction. Sophia mentioned the fact that she has been doing rebirth sessions. She said the best of these rebirth sessions occur when there is a pool of warm water involved.
It is best with about six or seven people. They make a pool of water and each person supports you with their hands while you're lying in the water. Somebody is also supporting your head. The try to keep your ears above the water so that you can hear the words that had been sent as they your been reborn. After about 15 minutes floating in the water they take you out of the water, dry you down, put you on the table wrapped in several blankets until you are completely mummified and then wrap towels around your head. Then everybody puts their hands on you and strokes you for another 10 to 15 minutes. After that they take you out of the blankets and put you down in a warm place on the ground when two of the seven people massage your body back into existence. It is gorgeous. Julie asks, "Is it useful for people who have had a difficult birth as a child?" "Yes I suppose it is", Sophia says. "I think then, it would be great from me", says Julie. "I had a difficult birth when I was born. I was born prematurely."
Work is very challenging at the moment. Targets I have set myself are unachievable. Now I have to face telling Steve that it will take twice as much time. Today is the team Christmas drinks. I can't make it. I promised Julia that I would meet her at seven o'clock at the train station for a surprise that she has promised me. Today I want to be happy. I want to only put 70% of my energy into my work today. I want to enjoy my work today as if I was a child enjoying playing in the playground. I found a box downstairs just inside the front door this morning and I was sure it was not for me. I'm looking at the package and I seen my name on it. And then I see some print that says, "Golf Range Finder". I get all excited and all scared at the same time. Now that these 12 golf rangefinders which I bought two weeks ago from a Chinese company on the web site “Global Resources” have arrived, what am I going to do with them? I opened the box and picked out one. They are a lot smaller than I thought from the picture I saw on the Internet. The idea of carrying around one in your golf bag is an even greater idea I think now but, how am I going to sell them? First off, I know, I will make an ad on EBAY. They are already for sale on eBay for £7.99 plus five pounds packaging. But these ones come from Hong Kong. I am hoping to be able to sell them and deliver them quicker because I'm based in the UK. People will see that they will receive their item in the next three days instead of 4 weeks from now so they should buy it from me on eBay. And if I have it priced lower than the others I will be making my product far more attractive. I'm a bit excited about this. I am becoming an entrepreneur. This could be the start of a journey and my first step on the road to self employed riches. Best get on with it then. EBAY are you ready? Let's go.
I'm feeling good despite receiving the news yesterday that I will not be rewarded with a bonus for any of my SAP work in 2007 at my company. I went into my meeting with Max yesterday. In the meeting he gave me my letter which not only outlined my bonus for the year gone by but also my salary increase for the next year. It was zero. Both of them! Surprise surprise! My annual increase for the year was zero but I had already prepared for such an insult. I showed him many examples of where my salary in the marketplace should be £11,000 more than what they are currently offering me. In reply to my suggestion that I'm been underpaid by 11,000 per year, Max said that I might find that his boss Geoff is of the opinion, “Like it, or lump it”. I told him I don't particularly agree that this is the only attitude to have in relation to salary increases. I suggested there is also an appeals process when someone does not get a salary increase. He said,
“I am not aware of this. But I will try and find out if there is one.”
The remaining hours of the day I felt quite good because I had done something positive in going into the meeting. It is good to know that when I decide to leave I will automatically in the first year earn 10,000 more than what I would earn if I stayed on for another year. Max did say that, if I stayed and performed well I would receive at the end of a year and a half, a redundancy package of three weeks wages for every year I have worked at the company. In effect it would probably be 10 weeks wages. 10 weeks wages would be approximately £5,000. That means if I changed jobs now I would be £5,000 better off by January next year than if I waited for the redundancy.
However, in a new job I would not get a four-day week. And from a mental health point of view I am finding a four-day week to be more beneficial to me then moving on to a new job that would give me a five-day week but £15,000 more per year. At this stage in my life, I like a balance between work and play. So it would probably take someone like Max to fire me before I would give up this lifestyle I already have.
So I guess what I am trying to say is, I'm very happy to continue on a four-day week for at least another year and get my £5000. Then I will be ready to move on to the SAP job that suits me best at that time.
I can't talk about Bob Mortimer these days. It is not because he is not interesting. It is not because he is not part of my daily life. It is because it is too painful to write about someone you care about so much and who is also in a lot of obvious pain. If he is in self-denial about his hopeless condition then why can't I be? Bob is a great man even though he is 71. When I am talking with him, I feel like I am talking to a 25-year-old. I can see his full head of black and grey hair, his full bushy moustache, his round gold rimmed glasses, his sensuous Russian winter hat, his tall tweed coat, and his cream coloured slacks and yet he still looks 25-year-old to me. He is such a positive life force. He always asks how my knee is and how is my shoulder? His empathy feels so genuine. I do not look for empathy. But when it comes from a man in his predicament, it means so much to me. Only two years ago he was playing tennis with me. In those two years he has lost the power to run and almost the power to walk. His legs look like matchsticks now. There is no muscle on the bones. Every movement in his legs causes him excruciating pain. Sitting down into a chair is agony to him. Getting out of the chair is even more agony. Going up one step on the stairs is agony to him and going up a whole flight of steps is just hell he says. I believe him. Each step takes about 20 seconds for him. 10 seconds to sum up the energy to get up the first step and, another 10 seconds to get over the pain that had caused him to achieve it. I try to help as much as I can when I am with him on Fridays. He holds on to me as he lowers himself down onto a café seat. He holds on to me when he has to pull himself out of a seat. Sometimes going up a stairs he leans on me to keep his balance. I can not help him much when he's getting into a car, it is too awkward. Somehow he manages it. When he is getting in sideways into a taxi, I always worry he is going to break his leg.
He is deteriorating rapidly on me I feel. Last week I rang him to say I can meet anywhere. He said he had some shopping to do in Churchill Square and that we should meet at half past 12 in Starbucks opposite Churchill Square. At a quarter to one he still had not turned up so I began to worry. I walked across to the Borders bookshop but he was not there. I walked all around the streets thinking he might have had a little accident and is now sitting down somewhere to recover. He was nowhere to be seen. I kept a seat for him on the sofa. He arrived at quarter past one, 45 minutes late. I was not angry. How can you be angry with somebody as nice as Bob? I was just worried. He hobbled in through the front door of the café and I saw that his right leg is soaking wet with piss. I ignored it and acted as if everything was okay.
"Hello there. Are you alright", he says. "I am sorry I am late, I was sitting in the Redroaster café and then suddenly I remembered I was supposed to meet you here. My mind is not the same these days, it's a real bugger.”
This worries me. His mind is the one thing that I felt was in good working order. Now it appears it is not at all. He could not remember agreeing two hours previously to meet me in this cafe in Churchill Square. This is bad. Last week I found his mobile phone was switched off in his house. He did not know it was switched off until I arrived to check up on him. He didn't know that people were calling him. The mobile phone had been like that for days. I am scared that one day this will happen again and he will have an accident in his home and nobody will be there to help them. Then, weeks later somebody will find his body in a corner wasting away. That is no way for you to go my friend.
He has diabetes and suffers severe bouts of depression from time to time too. He has blood clot in his legs caused by all the smoking he did over many years. And yet, he still smokes whenever he can just to say to everyone,
“I have control of my choices in life still. Why should I give up now?”
He is right. But that does not hide the fact that probably over the next year or so he will be rushed into hospital and have at least one leg or foot amputated because of these blood clots in both his legs.
Since I have taken up my part-time status at work Bob has already had one heart attack. People at work begrudge me my four-day week. They even made sure I got no bonus at the end of the year. So in effect I have done myself out of £10,000 this year in order to have these Fridays off to see bob and have more free time.
In essence, I have swapped money, for memories.
It has been worth it!
Bob my friend, you are older than me. You can see the light, And that is what makes you free. Your shell is disintegrating, But your spirit is growing exponentially. My loss of income my friend, Has been worth every penny.
Going forward, in the New Year, I want to organise a cleaner for Bob’s place. They will go once a week and do two hours of work. They should do four hours the first time, and then two hours every week after that. He needs to pay them as well. As Julia says, if he got attendance allowance he could pay someone. But he won’t because as he says, “I am too damned stubborn and independent.”
In reality, he also needs a carer.
It's ironic but, if they had given me a bonus at the end of the year and it was around £3000, I feel I would have resigned at the company. It would have given me a financial cushion to look for another job. By not giving me a bonus and a salary rise I am sure they were hoping I would resign, in disgust. Now I do not have that financial cushion I am less inclined to resign. I'm more inclined to continue for another year with my four-day week. How ironic is that.
Next year I will enjoy a bank holiday Monday every week. This will give me time to find a SAP test manager role by November next year in a sunny part of the world. I would like the temperature to be a minimum 25° and a maximum of 30°. It will probably be in Australia.
“I want Julia to join me there if she can. I don't see us parting ways any time soon, well not on my part anyway. But who knows, maybe she will want to go a different direction in life. And that's fine with me if that is the case. She is fabulous, just fabulous.”
It is the last week running up to Christmas 2007 and I am a little excited by the prospect of my holiday in Spain. Bring it on! I feel scared to do something on my own for such a long period of time. Being there alone without the support and sexiness of Julia by my side scares me. I think I need it though. I think it will be good for me. I think I should do something like this once a year. It would be my ‘annual retreat’ of sorts.
Julia seems to be quite anxious recently. I wonder why? I feel it is because I am going away for almost 3 weeks. That intuition might be wrong. I know it is wrong in some ways to go away alone after we have spent two years together as lovers and friends. 
She understands my need to go away. She did it last year and I was happy for her. Yes, I did visit her for two weeks out of the two months that she was away. But that was coincidence. I could have gone somewhere else for that one to two weeks. It just happened to be that I wanted to go to the place that she wanted to be. Now one year later, I am looking forward to having two weeks alone with me, solo time. It feels right too. How can it feel wrong and feel right at the same time? I know I will miss her sometimes when I'm there alone. I know I will miss her laughter when she's not there. I know I will miss her touch. I know I will miss our conversations. I know I will miss us cooking together. I know I will miss our mutual appreciation of the sunset and the warmth of the balcony. And yet, I still feel a need to go solo for these two to three weeks.
I am trying to stay healthy until I go away. What is working for me is the following:
ü I'm looking after my skin by gently covering my body with aqueous cream every morning and every night. It protects me from the freezing cold that I go out into every morning on the bicycle and come back through in the evening.
ü I drink a glass of grapefruit juice, fresh grapefruit juice, every morning in order to fight off any colds. I fill my body with a jolt of vitamin C.
ü In work, I try to eat a banana instead of a bacon roll every morning.
ü In the evening I try to make a chicken casserole that lasts two nights. They say chicken broth is the best cure and the best preventative against the flu and the common cold. So far, fingers crossed, it has worked.
Normally, this time of year I get quite ill. I often get a cold sore, feel run down, hungover, and generally feel like shit. I want to avoid all of that this year. This is one reason why it's good to go away on your own. You are not subject to the peer pressure to drink and stuff yourself silly, day after day, after day for the two whole weeks over the holiday period. When I'm on my own, I will choose when to do it, and when not to do it. I can even choose to go on a fast of eating just fruit all day or for a number of days. This is what I am looking forward to the most, having complete control of my health and time for two and a half whole weeks.
As the sun begins to rise over frosty Brighton, it is time once again to put on my uniform for work. I put on my grey tweed trousers, pink chequered shirt, my tanned cream v-neck jumper, my tweed jacket, my mustard silk scarf, my trainers (not whilst at my desk of course) and head out the door with my bulging black bicycle to repeat my daily trek to London.
We
have our own Secret Santa in the house tonight. At 48 St Georges Road I am not
expecting many to turn up. I know everyone is busy and also have jobs to hold
down. But from half past eight, it is all starting to come together. Mario is
the first to get the party going. He arrives with wine and nibbles and a wee Christmas
tree. Underneath the tree we are suppose to leave a present for somebody in the
house. I put on the music I have on my mobile phone and the party begins. “Hey
it is not easy, been cheesy.” But that’s what a good party is, quite cheesy.
I know I am going away to Spain on Friday so as you guess it, the party is my
idea. I am being selfish. I want to connect with all the members of the house
before I go away. I thought it was important as last year none of us all got
together at Christmas. It was a missed opportunity.
For the party they make a salad. I brought hot wings. Mario makes egg balls. Stella makes hot mince pies. And Drago, well he is late once again so he will bring nothing. But the atmosphere is better than I expected. It only really starts to get going when the presents are opened. 
I give Mario a book called, “Confessions and shameful revelations of the average man”. I do not tell him my own confession. (I received this very book from someone at work today).
At work, I wondered which of my shameful secrets does anybody about me at work. There are so many and yet none at all. They're available to the rest of the world on my website but I have never told anybody at work the name of my website. So, has everybody read my website at work? Do they know all of my secrets? Is that why they gave me this book? Yes, it was a good present because I do have many secrets from those I work with. So thank you whoever it was who choose it for me.
I kick off the revelations. I start by revealing to my housemates my shameful secret of when an Italian girl cheated on me five years ago in Brighton.
“Her name was Cristina. I feel really embarrassed about this guys but, I was living in a bedsit in Kemptown a few years ago and she was living in the one above me on the next floor. We were seeing each other for about a month over the summer. On the night after my birthday I could hear her groaning in rhythm to what seemed to be the thrusts of another man who was for all intensive purposes, fucking her.
“It cannot be! I must be dreaming it up“, I thought.
It sounded very close. I looked out through the window of my bedroom and looked up at the window above me, her bedroom window. I could see her lying backwards out of the window screaming and wailing in the throws of sexual ecstasy with her arm flaying in all directions. I could not believe it. It made me so furious guys. I closed the window, had a wank on my bed and went upstairs to the door of her bedsit. I wiped all of my cum, all of my sperm all over the door handle of her door. Dosh, dosh, dosh, dosh. You lying cheating bitch, take that!”
“That is my confession guys. That is my shameful secret. Who is next?”
“I guess it is me”, Drago says. ”It is time for me to confess. Guys you must know, I am, a lesbian. Yes I am ashamed of it but it is true. You see, I love women. Yes I love all women. I like to open their legs and lick their pussies. I like to play with their tits and play with their clitoris. So guys, that is my confession!”
“Bravo Drago. So who is next?”
“Mario it is your turn.”
And on it goes until the early hours of the morning.
It is not easy getting up at six thirty but I manage it. It is my last day at work anyway. What do they expect me to do?
Magically all the party mess below has been cleared up. Thanks Drago, thanks Koko and thanks Mario.
My shining sensuous star
Merry Xmas and Happy New Year. Now we’ve got to the end of this year. Now doesn’t that deserve a big back clapping cheer.
So, three cheers to you Julia! Hip Hip Horray! Here here, Here here!
Yes, you are the star, Of my most recent gone year. Thanks to you Julia dear. I feel happier, chirpier, and so much freer.
Dec 21st
I am back in La Manga. La Manga feels good. The quietly lapping waves of the Mar Menor gently kiss my soul. Many different things welcome me back here that I do not expect. The sound of the landlord's gruff voice sounds beautiful. I barely recognize what he's saying but his voice makes me feel good. The excitement of being back has now kicked in. The water welcomes me back, the sound of the rattling door of the apartment welcomes me back like a yapping puppy. The squeaky grinding noise of the elevator to the second floor also welcomes me back.
I asked the landlord, "Has an anything changed? He turns to me as if to say, “Don't be silly boy”.
Then he says, "Of course nothing has changed, why should I change anything?"
His dry answer was so funny to me. I thought he might fix the shower head. I thought he might fix the electricity sockets and I thought he might fix and upgrade the furniture in the apartment. But no, silly me, what was I thinking? And, just as he said it, I could see from looking around that absolutely nothing has changed. It makes me chuckle inside.
I unpack my rucksack. I take everything out. I set up my office on the table by the patio windows that face out onto the Mar Menor. I set up the computer. I set up the painting materials. I put out my diaries to correct, lay out the Psychologies magazine to be reviewed and I lay out my sketching material. Let the show begin.
The duvet which we bought last year is not here. The dressing gowns which we bought last year are not here. Tomorrow I will have to go and buy them at the supermarket. What else should I buy to mark my return? I will buy a lot of fruit, some fresh fish, and some fresh bread.
I check out the local area by foot. I want to eat some Spanish food and then book my table for Christmas dinner at Paddywhacks on the seafront. As I walk around the area near the apartment I find it is, as I had expected it to be. Dead! The English fish and chip shop is closed. There are only two Spanish cafes open and one German bar. But the light of Playa Honda, and Santiago de la Rivera are twinkling back at me, and I feel great. This is what I came for her. I came for tranquillity, quietness and a place to meditate and create. This is the blank canvas I was hoping for.
I drove to the Las Sirenas cafe. On the way I drove around the car park by the Cavanna hotel. I was going to stop to eat in my old cafe where I worked, café Havana. In the restaurant alongside I can see El Senor laughing at the counter. It makes me shiver all over. His presence terrifies me. I realise I am in no mood to meet him and deal with all his inane questions. I know one of them would be,
"And so where is Yaya?"
"None of your business, none of anybody's business!", I would say.
Come on Gary, Let's get the fuck out of this car park and get some food elsewhere. As I am driving out of the car park I can see my old colleague in the cafe. His name is Hilario. I am not surprised to see him there. I'm glad to see him there. It means he is healthy and his back is not killing him like it used to kill him three years ago when I worked in the cafe. I will stop by tomorrow and have a chat with him. I won't answer any of his questions truthfully as I know everyone who lives and works in La Manga are like vampires when somebody new arrives. They fire 400 different questions at them in order to build up the whole picture of that someone's life before passing it on in gossip to someone else. I will not satisfy that hunger. In fact I will play and manipulate the hunger and they will know no more about me than when I arrived.
I am tired but happy at the end of my first evening in La Manga. Before I went out to get something to eat, I switched on the electric heater in the bedroom and I lit one range of the gas cooker. The apartment is warm, cosy and rather inviting. Tomorrow is another day, and I look forward to every mindful minute it will have to offer me.
There were no sheets or blankets on the bed. I have to put them on the bed first. But I want to get some sleep now. I am exhausted but I have to do it. I slowly put on the top sheet and then the pillowcase cover. I had forgotten that in Spain a pillow is something completely different from what they have in England. In Spain a pillow is a long fat sausage that goes on, and on, and on. I put another sheet on top of the first one. Then I put a blanket on top of that. Finally, I lay a fleece type blanket on top of everything else. I hate blankets. They remind me of my childhood. Lying under blankets makes me feel oppressed. They weigh me down. I don't want to feel weighed down when I am here in Spain. I want to feel light as a fairy, soft as a marshmallow and as fluffy as a duck feather. That's it, I am going to go to the supermarket tomorrow and buy a duvet, a warm dressing gown and a pair of flip-flops. This will make my stay here as cosy as the stay last year. My mind races like this as I try to fall off to sleep.
I used the technique of sweeping away these thoughts that prevent me from sleeping. I cannot picture the sweeping brush so I search for one to use as a symbol for this exercise. And then I get it. I should use a sweeping brush that is related to my current environment. In the apartment there is a sweeping brush, a Spanish sweeping brush. Its short bristles barely cover the base of the brush. It is not a very good brush, but it is good enough to clear away any sand that sneaks into the apartment on the bottom of your flip-flops. I imagine this sweeping brush. This is the image I use to clear my mind. I fall asleep very quickly after that.
I leave the shutters to my bedroom open deliberately. I want to wake up to the rising Sun over the Mediterranean. It works. My back is sore from turning over and over and over during the night. I feel a certain light caressing my eyelids as I turn my body for the umpteenth time. I squint across the room and see the lights coming in through the bay windows of my bedroom. I think to myself, it must be morning. The night is over and I feel rested. Where is the Sunrise? I cannot see it from my lying down position in my bed, there is a wall outside the balcony that is higher than the level of the bed. I have to sit up to see it. As I sit up I can see the sky. It is a grey cloud filled morning. The cloud is broken in places though. The place where the sun is supposed to rise is slightly broken. The light of the rising sun bursts out from within a hole in the clouds like a lighting bolt that is shot from the stormy heavens at dusk. My heart leaps when I see the first Spanish sunrise of this year.
As I lay in bed this morning I feel relieved that no ghosts came to mean last night in my room. The ghost of yesteryear stayed away. My memories sharing this room with another woman are now more positive. I can picture Julia sitting here at night with the laptop watching a DVD from the local video shop. I can picture her sitting here are all cozy with the electric heater on.
Then a picture of Yaya bringing in 2 cups of coffee appears in my mind. On the edge of each saucer lays a cup of coffee and a piece of dark chocolate. My chocolate is pressing up against the base of the cup and it is melting into the bottom of the cup. I eat it and then lick my finger. My mind fills up with the taste of dark hot chocolate. This is another good memory I have of this room, a happy memory. As Yaya and I drink our coffee I write my diaries on my computer. She is sitting up reading her book, Dan Brown's “The Holy Grail”. She is engrossed in the book and secretly I feel relieved. To me it means her mind is not occupied by any negative dark worrying thoughts as it usually is here. I'm not looking forward to the day when she finishes the book. Until then it will occupy her mind and give her some respite from the hell of her own imagination.
This bedroom feels like a tall coffin that has been painted white inside. I feel I am lying down in the coffin and looking up at it from the inside. It is a posh coffin nevertheless. Inside the lid there is a pair of lights. I guess they are here so that if you are not dead, you can switch on the lights to see what you are doing. If you're not dead and are feeling cold there are some blankets at the end of the coffin too. They are in the walk-in cupboard that has sliding white doors. This coffin has everything a dead man might want. Outside the coffin you can hear the noise of the day beginning. You can hear the sound of the steel saw cutting through the steel bars that will be part of the frame of the new building that is been built. You can hear the hammer pounding away into the nails of an unforgiving wooden beam. They are doing all that as I am here lying inside the coffin, alive. They do not know I am here, so how can they help me to get out of this coffin? It is up to me, and only me to escape. I do not want the rot away here. I do not want to wait for the worms to arrive. I am master of my own destiny and I will find a way out of here.
I don't feel like writing anything this morning. I am tired and, ‘I have nothing to say’. When you have nothing to say it is best to say nothing, at all. Secretly, I wish I had something entertaining, interesting, stimulating or useful to say, but I don't.
I am on holidays and I am supposed to be taking a break from all of this entertaining anyway. I'm taking a break from entertaining those who are dearest to me. So, why not also take a break from entertaining myself. I can live for a few weeks without experiencing my own wit and wisdom and wonder can’t I? I ought to release myself from the pressure to create something every morning, every afternoon and every evening. I may be putting too much pressure on myself. But in the same instance, I feel that the time is short and soon, I will be back to a life where I have little time for being creative at all.
Last night if anyone had asked me why I'm here alone I had decided that I would not tell them that it was because of my desire to create over the Christmas and New Year. I don't know why, perhaps this attitude in me is due to a mixture of embarrassment, spitefulness and a little bit of anger. I am angry because I don't want to answer people's questions truthfully. Because I know, if I do then someone else in a few hours time will ask me all the same questions again. And I don't want to keep on repeating the truth to those who don't really care about me and to those who don't really mean much to me. I would rather make up the answer on every occasion so that the only person getting something out of it, is me. It would become my amusement instead of my torture and frustration.
I have got my Christmas dinner spot at Paddywhacks Irish pub on the Mediterranean seafront. To me, it is probably the best ‘pub with a view’ in all of La Manga. It has cost me 60 euros for a four-hour Christmas lunch. €10 goes towards the secret Santa. In this secret Santa I have to buy a present for a man I do not know. I bought him a bottle of Cava, the Spanish champagne. I bought not just any old bottle of Cava; No, I bought him the best type of Cava in Spain according to an article I read just yesterday. I did not know there were so many different types of Cava. I learned so much about it from the article. I thought that Cava Brut was the driest form of Cava but I was wrong. It has about 12 grams of sugar. Even in Cava Imperial there are 6 grams of sugar. The sugar is always put in at the end of the brewing process. I love dry Cava. I love the bite and the sharpness and its sparkliness. But Cava Nature has no sugar. It is the only Cava that does not need to be chilled before serving. It is best to serve it unchilled as it is. And that is the Cava I have bought not only for my secret Santa victim but also for Hilario my old work colleague from the Havana cafe. Around each bottle I have wrapped a Playboy calendar for 2008. If you are going to get a present for a boy or a man then just think of him as a boy I believe. This is my recommendation. I think it will work. You have to get him something naughty. Instead of giving them one naughty thing each, I will give these men two naughty things each: A bottle of alcohol to get him drunk and dirty magazine to stimulate all his naughty sexual thoughts. His partner I am sure will thank me the next day because of what he gets up to with her later on that night.
So, as I was saying, I have nothing to say this morning.
I like lists. So does Julia. They guide us. So I made this list of how I want to enjoy my adventure in La Manga. If I manage to do 70% of the following it will have been a very successful trip. 1 Score a joint ( got some on Christmas day – result) 2 E-mail everyone a good start to 2008 in colour and a photo from La Manga 3 Do some Skype calls from Las Sirenas (all the headphones are broken unfortunately) 4 Take a ferry twice a week to Santiago de la Riviera 5 Correct 6 pages of OM003 every day (done, finished) 6 Do the following Fuddy Professor's Mindful Art tasks 6.1 Record my ideas and thoughts when I wake, after a siesta and just before bed.(in progress) 6.2 Review two Psychologies article every day (in progress) 6.3 Paint the clouds in the sky (started, just about) 7.1 Cycle 40 minutes every 2nd day. (15 euros a day for a bike more than for a car - forget it) 7.2.2 Drink 5 litres of water every week. 7.2.3 Savour Piarra pate con pan y tabasco 7.3 Take a jetski lesson – (All closed for winter) 7.4 Play pitch and putt at the end of La Manga twice (closed for the Winter from 23rd Dec – damn just missed it) 7.5 Play tennis for an hour at plaza de sol with Javier (closed) 7.6 Play tennis for an hour at La Manga club - Leave my name first at reception 7.7 Do a 10 min each way walk along the beach every three days (did it twice so far) 7.8 Sauna and jacuzzi at the La Manga club hotel (does it exist) 8.1 Dine at Paddywhacks Irish pub. Enjoy their sausage and mash and their Sunday lunch. (Oh yes) 8.2 Cook some Seared Scallops ( I could not find the name of them in Spanish) 8.3 English restaurant in plaza cavanna ( closed for winter) 8.4 Enjoy some Scallops or grilled Fish at a restaurant in Cabo de Palos in the marina (I had squid and sword fish 1st Jan 2008- delish!) 
8.5 Drink soda water and lime when in the pub ( I did but not often enough) 8.6 Try and avoid these coffees 8.6.1 Irlandez (yes I had two I am sorry to say – they were lovely) 8.6.2 Carajillo con Baileys ( but of course – several times) 8.6.4 Asiatico ( hot and spicy – I could not resist) 8.7 See from the ferry a sunset sizzler at 5.30pm 8.8 Enjoy a menu del dia at the restaurant next to the Crazy Rabbit pub 8.9 Enjoy a menu del dia Trebol lunch 2pm ( I had a knuckle of lamb it was too much food) 8.10 Enjoy a menu del dia Upper lunch (get chicken on Saturday from the mobile van) 9 Read 3 pages of Julia’s diary every day and highlight the lines that you will comment on in your own diary (finished it – yet to do comments)
You know, if it wasn't raining here in La Manga I wouldn't have rain clouds. And now that a rain cloud is here, I see a rainbow appear. That is to say, how can I discover a rainbow if I do not have the dark clouds above? My life has had dark clouds and if I look closely enough at my life's when there are dark clouds I will eventually see my rainbows. Take it from me you have to look beyond the dark clouds on a rainy day and, when the daylight begins to appear, and the sun begins to shine a little bit from behind the clouds, watch out for a rainbow. Hold on to the rainbow. Cherish the rainbow when you see it. Finally, I have spoken with Hilario. I found the courage to drop by the Havana this afternoon. I promised myself I would do it and afterwards as a reward, I would enjoy the sunset from my balcony. Hilario did not recognize me at first.
"Que te pongo", he said in a gruff voice. You would think when a waiter speaks to you like that you are not at all welcome in the establishment, but here it is different. This is the way they speak to everyone whether they know you for one day or have known you all your life. Then, in an instant he recognized my face.
"Gary, que haces aqui?"
He stretches out his arm to shake my hand. I automatically stretch out mind too. I feel emotional. I was going to be cool calm and collective and not reveal anything to anybody here. But with Hilario he is so disarming. He makes me feel like a long lost child and I just want to be natural with him. All his usual sharp mannerisms seem tired and slow. He wears glasses now and looks greyer around the edges. Of course he launches into the usual list of questions. Why are you here? How long are you here for? You used to work in computers what are you doing now? Are you still with that girl? I knew it was difficult for you two to live together in work together the same time.
"It takes a certain character to survive that and I knew it was difficult for both of you Gari."
I answer all his questions more or less truthfully. He makes me a ‘cafe con leche’ and I take the piss out of his technique just like he use to take the piss of my technique.
"What is this? Hilario, that's not how you make it. What is this? Hilario, you have to be quicker. In this game you have to be quick. You understand me brother? Be quick. If are not fast you're dead in this game. If you are not fast you fuck yourself up, you fuck your brother up and you fuck the business up. You got to be quick."
I think he gets it. I think he understands I am taking the piss. But at the same time, he is not listening. He's thinking of his next question. He rearranges empty bottles in the Coca-Cola case. He clears away the dirty dishes from the counter. His mind is racing. I know he has another question for me. But I wait. I wait for my brudder, my blood brother. I know how he is. He is naturally a tense person whose mind races all the time.
He tells me about his two daughters.
"One has a boyfriend who is going into the Army. He has just qualified. She is fine. I am not worried about her at all. She is 23 years old. But the other one, she is 19 years old. She's not that bright, if you know what I mean brother? I have bought her a computer so that she can do her course work at school. You know about computers brother. You know it's necessary these days to know how to use one. Me, I don't know anything about computers. I know nothing about computers. Look at me. This is what I know. This is all that I know, this cafe."
"Remember Mario brother, he talks about you all the time. He would love to see you again. Come around here tonight, Mario be here. He would love to see you. You remember Mario Gari?"
No I don't but I tell Hilario I do. And then I think I remember him. He was a fat boy who Senor Ramon hired as Hilario's protégé. He was thick and slow but worked like a donkey. And that was what Senor Ramon was looking for in a new full-time employee. As Hilario said to me three years ago,
"Senor Ramon did not want to hire you full time Gary. That's because you're too smart. He does not want somebody too smart working here."
As the sun begins to set over La Manga I tell Hilario that I'm about to leave. We embrace like father and son. I might be wrong but there was almost a tear in his eye as we say goodbye to each other. Even if this is the last time I see him, I'm glad I made this connection with Hilario, despite all the bad memories I have of this place. this experience makes me more determined to go out to the car and bring back the Christmas presents that I have wrapped up for him, my old friend Hilario. Before I get back to the cafe I find him standing outside waiting for me.
"Do you want to speak to Mario? I will call him on my mobile phone. He would love to speak to you. I tried to give him the present. He takes it but he is more interested in getting his mobile to call Mario. After searching around the cafe frantically for his mobile he realises he left it at home in Cartagena.
"Brother, thank you for the present. I will enjoy it with all my family. When will you come back again? Come back tonight. Mario will be here."
"Hilario, I don't think I will come back tonight. I think I will come back the day after tomorrow."
"Whenever you want my friend, whenever you want!"
We embrace of the second time and say goodbye.
The sun sets over the hills of La Manga.
Christmas Day 25th Dec 2007 I have nothing to say. Again! Hey, I am the first to arrive at the Paddywhack's Christmas dinner, but I am not worried. The sun is shining outside. I stand out in front of the sea and it is gorgeous. The temperature is around 18°, it is the perfect day. It is the best day since I have arrived here. The sun caresses my face. Merry Christmas Gary! Over the next hour everyone arrives. Even though it is 18° outside Marc and Gaynor the owners lit a fire in the fireplace. How decadent is that? I sit on the armchair in front of the fire and it is cozy. 
I am told I am sitting at a table of 15 and there is another table of 15 behind me. We will be facing the big bay windows that look out onto the sea. The water is only 30 metres away. I get to know the guys who are suppose to be directly next to me at the table. They are two kite surfers, Ben and Jamie. Ben has a broken ankle. Jamie is his friend. He cannot stop smiling. I tell Ben I was interested once upon a time in learning to kite surf. His passion for Kite surfing bursts out and immediately tells me I should do it. “ The community of kite surfers is great. You need someone to help you get the kite top up every time. You especially need someone when you go kite surfing aboard. It will cost you Gary about a £1200 to start. Then the world is your oyster. You can go anywhere. The sad thing about Kite surfing is the fact you find yourself a prisoner to the wind. You're always chasing the wind. But La Manga though is the best place in the world to learn how to kite surf. Don't worry about your knee and your shoulder. The kite pulls you from the waist and as long as you're not jumping you knees will be fine. There, you have to try it. Once you start, you can't stop.” 
We break open the Christmas crackers and put on our silly hats. We are sitting around the table like little elves drinking ale. As long as there isn’t any silence at the table everyone is happy. Somebody will mutter some rubbish just to make sure this silence does not happen. This would be the worst disaster at the Christmas table wouldn’t? I observe everyone to see who will make sure silence does not happen each time somebody stops talking. It's like the game ‘pass the parcel’. But here it is your turn the say something instead of pass the parcel. Poor Gaynor and Mark are suffering from last night. I don’t know how they struggled to come in this morning but they did. I do not know how Gaynor is going to cope in kitchen but she does. She is brilliant. Mark looks bad. But somehow he manages to service the tables like a true professional. For a starter, I have bean and ham soup. I was expecting something out of a tin can. But I lose. It is actually home-made. I love it. It is a great start and almost a great finish as I find it is quite filling. For the main course I have Turkey, carrots, peas (yes please), a sausage wrapped in bacon, stuffing and even a Yorkshire pudding. On top of that there is loads of gorgeous gravy. I didn't think I could finish the main course but I do. I cannot face any desert. Instead I got to Dean at the bar and set him on fire when I ask for coffee with Baileys. He hates making coffee. He does know how to make it but I show him. I know Dean. I knew him when I was here three years ago. He came with his friend Dug and his big shiny tattooed van. I am so surprised to see him here still. I was sure they would both not make it here and would have to return with their tails between their legs like I had to.
“Dug is no longer here. He went back to England after a year. He went buck with an English girl Gaz. We had fallen out. At the end of the first year he got his credit card bill and he asked me to pay half of it. It was for €6,000. Originally we had agreed to share all expenses out here and fair play to him I hadn't the penny to my name when I came out at furst. But I wasn't going to pay half of the €6,000. Not when he used to go drinking in Bangkok’s Van Gogh’s bar in the Zoco every night. He didn't just drink beer Gaz. He drank rum and cokes. The bill used to be about €100 every night and all I was drinking were halves of lager. I told him I would pay €1000 but I wouldn't pay €3000. We never spoke again after that. Remember Julio the Spanish guy? Well I had to kick him out of the house as well. He stopped paying the rent the cunt and he wasn't working. So my landlady said to me one day that, if I got Julio of the house I could stay in the house rent-free until she sold it. She trusted me you see. And she wanted to ‘hula hula’ Julio out. So I had the house all to myself for another 6 months rent free. Now I have a nice little window cleaning business here in La Manga. It is finally starting to get going after three years here. I have around 100 clients at the moment. Hey Gaz, we've got to play a game of tennis again? I’uv not played tennis since I last played with you here three years ago!“ It is good to see Dean again. I lasted only twelve months here, he lasted three years. I could have been him. It takes a certain character to survive this place. Dean gave me a good tip to help me long a little with my sun children project. I tell him I was grateful for his advice even though I didn't manage to achieve anything. 
Everyone's getting slowly pissed in the pub and I am still surprisingly sober. It is a nice feeling to be in control of my mind. It doesn't stop me from enjoying the craic though. I invite Jamie to have a game of pool with me after the presents have been given out. The secret Santa is great crack. Everyone is banging on the table and waiting in anticipation for a little present. Finally, after secretly hiding all my frustration at not receiving a present, my number is called up. I get a nice watch. Unfortunately the strap is much too big, so it falls off my arm very easily. What is the point of a watch these days when you have the time on your mobile phone? I don't see the point. But don’t forget, the point of secret Santa anyway is to receive a useless present! Isn't it true? Job done then! The present I got for a man is received by a guy who is about 55 years old. When he opens and sees the bottle of champers and the sexy calendar there is a big smile on his face. He is delighted. His blonde wife goes red. She grabs the Playboy calendar from him and throws it underneath the table in disgust. He is embarrassed. Everyone on the table voices their disapproval of what she has done. She has to get underneath the table to retrieve it and gives it back to her husband. As the meal finishes she insists that she helps everyone to put the presents into the car for safekeeping. Of course I know her real intention is to get the Playboy calendar out of the pub as quickly as possible before everyone else in the pub sees what her husband had received at Christmas from his, secret Santa. I can see there are three people in the pub with us who are not native English speakers but are actually Spanish. I introduce myself. They are Javier, Veronica and Virginia. Virginia is cute, very cute. She is tiny, I like tiny girls. She is about 23 years old and far too young for me but I want to flirt with this girl anyway. She has long curly hair that his blonde in some places. She has a small tight ass and a short sexy top that shows off her belly button. I'm nervous and excited to flirt with her. I invite them to play pool with me. We play doubles. Virginia is with me. Every time she has a shot I offer to help her make it. I put my hands on her body slowly move it into a position to make the shot. Stop me, this is too exciting. I feel like a 15-year-old boy on his first date. It is hard enough to speak English when you are excited and embarrassed, imagine my situation trying to speak Spanish on such under such nervous conditions. It is all good fun around the pool table. She is nervous, and this makes me nervous too. Ironic isn’t? It is great fun too. They girls are your typical Murciana. They are curt, straight talking, deep voiced, good-looking and matter-of-fact. Javier is from who is from Peru originally has been here for 23 years. He's a nice guy. Then they leave to go to the Bondi Beach bar. This is the Spanish way. Never stay very long in one bar. I say might come along later. I play it cool. I plan to leave an hour later and turn up casually as if by accident. I find it is so difficult to break into a group of Spanish people who are out on the town. But I want to try and see where the night takes me. I offer to give Jamie and Ben a lift to the Bondi beach bar in an hour’s time if they want to continue to party somewhere else for the rest of the night. I am not drinking so they can come along in my car and continue the drinking session. “Gary, but we already have a driver for the evening and he is not drinking either. He will be yours too if you want it. So why don't you start drinking with us? That is to say, you can join our debauched party if you're not drinking only because you have to drive home. Come on and join our party and I will get you so drunk that you will be crawling before the end of the night. If you don’t then I may give you the worst kite flying lesson you ever had and you won’t even know it.” Ben’s enthusiasm is infectious. I would like to say to him that actually I'm not a drinking only because I am driving. I am also not drinking because I like to be in control and I don't like to be drunk. I cannot say this to him. The peer pressure is too much. I have lasted so long but now I feel like giving in. It is nine o'clock in the evening. What is the worst that can happen now I start drinking? I acquiesce to Ben’s tempting offer. As I do, the Spanish come back into the pub. I'm so excited Veronica and Virginia have come back. “Is it because of me? I hope so. Let the fun begin, give me a drink.” 
Ben gives me a bottle of beer that has a shot of vodka in it. Veronica tells me that some other guys from Murcia have come in to meet them. They are outside on the beach drinking. I go out to introduce myself and to enjoy the full moon. Yes there is a full moon on Christmas Day here that is reflecting wonderfully off the water. It's magical. I want to celebrate so I down Ben’s beer even though it is laced with vodka. The Spanish guys are called Carlos and Jose. They are great guys. We laugh so much. I love to laugh! They teach me some dirty Spanish words that are only used in the state of, ‘I must see Murcia’. They teach me the word ‘picho’. They say I should use this word at the end of every sentence in Murcia. I think it means ‘cunt’, but in the friendly way. I know they are taking the piss out of me in this place and are winding me up. It is all good fun. To me, it's a good way to get into their circle and a good way to into the company of the girls. They also teach me the Murcian expression, ‘Lets go hunting for a hundred horny girls!” It is, “Vamos de golfas!” Carlos invites me to smoke a joint. I smoke it and my head starts spinning. It is great. But that is the end of my cool, calculating flirtation with the girls. Now I am like jelly. I don't care anymore. Carlos also gives me a little piece of hashish as a Christmas present. “I love you Carlos. You are the man!” I can't believe it. This is what I have been looking for the last few days. I have been looking for just enough hashish to make a joint at home on the balcony. What a result. Now that I am in extremely drunk, I gracefully accept all invitations to sing karaoke by Carlos and anyone else. They are such piss artists. Julia, the 45-year-old blonde who is drunk as a fart at the bar wants to sing. Somehow she ropes me into going on stage as well. She makes me sing, “Save all your kisses for me”, by the ‘Brotherhood of Man’. Then, Carlos makes me sing, “We are the champions”, by Queen and “Flash”, by Queen also. I am crap, crap, crap. They made a fool out of me in front of the girls. I made a fool out of myself in front of the girls. I can see my ‘street cred’ going down way too fast as I see the look in their faces. The girls were clever enough not to join us. But hey it's Christmas. It is so embarrassing. “But hey, it's Christmas.” If I can’t make a fool out of myself Christmas, when can I? After Queen’s songs, Julia gets up again to sing Mustang Sally. At the microphone she says, “Holds on, I am sunging this song fur Gary!” Abandon ship, She has caught me off my guard. I can’t believe that a drunken married English woman has announced she is going to sing a song for me. I feel scared. Where is her husband? I know he is one of the big ones at the bar. She is drawn to me but she's going to get me into so much trouble here especially if I encourage her to continue. I try to avoid her gaze as she points at me from the stage. She twiddles her thong and sings the song, at the top of her voice. “Why is it that it is always the women you don’t want badly, want you badly? And it is the women you want badly, that don't want you. Run!” It’s time to disappear from the scene before it gets messy. I stagger outside into the light of the full moon. I hide myself behind a wall. I sit on a white plastic table to take in the moon’s black beauty. It is wonderful to be alone again. I love being with people but love being alone more. Especially, if I am in a beautiful place just like here right now. Sitting here in the darkness as the waves lap up against the sand, I squint my eyes and narrow my focus to take in the moon, the dangerous dark sky and the glittering glistening sea. It is like a scene from a Van Gogh painting that was stolen for the ‘Fortis Banque’ in Paris. Most of his paintings were a celebration of life and a celebration of nature. This to me right now, is a celebration of joy. I have had enough. I want to be alone for the rest of the night now. I'm too drunk to drive so it is better to walk home. Before that, I want to get a ‘sandwich mixto’ in Las Sirenas. I need food inside me now even though it is one o'clock in the morning. I do love the ‘sandwich mixto’ here. It is a great snack. All it is, is a slice of ham and a slice of cheese that is placed in between 2 grilled slices of bread. But it is scrummy! After my snack I begin my walk all the way home. No wait, I exaggerate. I am not walking, I am staggering. I keep my head down in order to avoid all the gazes from passing Spanish chariots that contain the drunken spewing Spanish. In La Manga drivers have a tendency to slow down to ‘steer and stare’ at you, even if you're not a girl. It is quite disconcerting and intimidating, even for a guy like me. I stagger on. I'm wearing just a cardigan as I walk and it does not feel too cold. Maybe that is because I'm warmed up by all the alcohol inside me. I love the fact that my knees work normally (well almost) after one and a half years of dealing with dodgy knees. I'm not sure they can take this silly stagger home but they feel good at the moment. This is my first real exercise since I have arrived. I pound the pavements for a half an hour until I get to my apartment block. Finally, now I am home. I struggle to get my clothes off. I am so drunk. My arms are like jelly. Imagine trying to take your shoes off with jelly. Imagine trying to take your socks off with jelly. “Jolly well jolly hard when you are as jolly as I am tonight.” Imagine then trying to take your trousers off with two blobs of jelly. Imagine trying to take your cardigan off with two blobs of jelly. Somehow I jolly jelly manage it and fall into an abyss underneath my dream catching duvet. At last! “Merry Christmas everyone!”
"Before you go to bed try and think of ‘the thing’ you want to achieve most in life."
Now it does not matter if you can not think of something it just matters that you try.
By being in a dreamlike state you will be able to dream about it and come up with one simple step that will go towards you achieving it.
However if to say, this is a very simplistic piece of advice. In reality, things are more complicated I have found out. You see we have different areas of our life in which we want to achieve things the most. We have our work life. Therefore we should think before we go to bed of what we want to achieve most in our work life. We have health. Therefore we should think of what we want to achieve most in life in regards to our health. We have passions. Therefore, we should think of what we want to achieve most with one of passions. We have a relationship with a partner. Therefore we are to try and think of what we want to most achieve with his partner.
It doesn't seem as simple any more does it? I know, I am sorry. I am sorry to make it so complicated. That is life. But, if we get our heads working on this we can actually discover truly what we want to achieve most of in regards to each one. Now that's a great exercise to work on, isn't it?
As I was thinking about this today, I was thinking about my health. What do I want to achieve most with my health? I realised there are two parts to it really. The first part of course, is what’s new that I want to achieve most with my health in the future? The second part, I realised is that we have to ask ourselves what area of my health to want to maintain the most in my future life? Now it gets even more complicated exercise. Well let's do it with health first.
I want achieve most in the future with my health is a knee and shoulder that is back to 100% fitness and I want to have a body like a professional athlete. What I mean is, I want to run 100 metres in fifteen seconds and a marathon without any adverse injuries coming back to me. Now let's take part two. What part of my health doI want to most maintain in its current good condition. I want to maintain my skin in good condition for the rest of my life. I want to apply creams in the ointments twice a day as gently as they would be applied to a baby. This winter has been great I have not suffered no where nearly as much as I have suffered in many of the previous winters that I have spent in Brighton. That is because of the regime I now use throughout the year and especially in winter. It is a miracle to me. I want to continue it for many many many years to come.
Now let's take a personal passion I most want to achieve something in. Today I came to the conclusion that what I really really want to achieve in the future with one of my passions is to play professional pool on the European circuit and eventually the world circuit. If this is so, then I should choose one small step to go in that direction.
Now the second part for passions. Which of my passions do I want to maintain that the current high level?
I want to maintain my writing and webpage design at its current high level. You see would have taught passion I wanted to achieve most in with the in the future would have been writing in doubt I will would have wanted to publish a book as soon as possible. But pool seems to be winning out at the moment.
Let’s have a look at my career as an SAP professional. At the moment, if I went to sleep and think about what I really really really want to achieve in the future with this career I know I would come up with nothing. I'm not inspired to take it to the next level in any way at the moment. But, I am truly determined to maintain my four-day working week which is, as you know, part two of the exercise for this area.
Oh yes new look at each part is you should choose one small step task to complete in order to moving along in that area that is most important to you.
What other areas could I look at to apply the two-part question and think of a new step to execute in each one?
I don't know. I'm stumped. Maybe because I am afraid to look and then area. Is my mind playing tricks with me in not allowing other areas for me to focus on? Few come do strange things to your mind. Maybe you have just touch the surface of the areas that I want to look at. I think Gary, think God dammit. I want Fawcett. Me choose an area in order to just say something here right now that I want to really really really achieve something in it. And then tomorrow I will feel when actually now, I do want to really achieve anything in the future that extra special to me in relation to this area. Now I'm babbling on, aren't I?
I sat out on the balcony
today. It is the first time since I arrived here that I have done this. It
was both wonderful and terrifying. Wonderful, because it is the first time I
felt the warmth and heat of the sun as I looked out over the water towards the
mountains. The magic of this feeling terrified me too. I was not prepared for
it. And somewhere in my terrified state I came to the conclusion that this was
the best place to read a book on Reiki. It was the best placed to read about
how to use symbols of Reiki II.
As I sat in the sun absorbing the raise of light that are toasting my forehead, I send long distance healing to my father, my mother, Julia, Christina and Yaya.. I was trembling afterwards. By the time I am finished every dog in neighborhood is barking. I know it is because of the power of Reiki II. If I was a dog I would be barking too. I can not sit still. I have to move I have to go out. The energy here on the balcony is almost overwhelming, but it is great too. Now I am back on the
balcony. I came to watch the sunset. The mountains are black and grey and
jagged like the back of the Dragon. A fiery ball is descending over this
Dragon. It may be descending into the mouth of this beast as it seems to be
descending into a hollow. The setting sun is bright white and it has gleaming
wings. It is like a spaceship about to land and make contact with the beans on
this planet. The birds are saying, “Let’s celebrate its arrival”. The skip,
chirp, hop and trip away happily. They glide on the air in the warm part of
light that the setting sun creates on the water. Instead of a red carpets
being rolled out towards the spacious space ship we have a yellow and gold in
one. If you walk in the light you will not get wet. If you walk outside the
likes you will get wet and drown. This is the way to the spaceship and
eventually to Atlantis. When the space ships lands it will not be possible to
journey across the sparkling water. This is because the light of the water is
not from the Sun but from the stars. It is a carpet of stars that float on the
water all the way across to meet the mountains that dissent at having to stop
at the edge of the sea. I imagine walking on this carpet of stars towards the
spaceship.
The jellyfish that slumber on the banks of the water below are actually beans from another planet. They came in the spacecraft that sets down every evening behind the mountains. Their numbers grow. Their transparent and shimmering skin glistens in the light of the setting sun. After been here one week it is strange to say it but, this is my first setting sun since I have arrived. I take a deep breath. Sun kisses the tip of the mountain. Two lovers entwine. Acknowledge in each, The unexpected Divine. Darkness and light, cold and hot. I kiss your orb, I kiss your arc. I kiss your eyelid As you pass to the dark. Sleep well my sunshine. Say good night to the sky. I will protect the moon Until I see your smile at dawn.
Last night I watched the stars. I woke up at three o'clock in the morning. I could not sleep. I walked out to the balcony and it was freezing. Low and behold I was appalled and delighted to see that the sky was clear and full of stars. The lights, which were switched on below to light the way of the walkers along the seashore, have now been turned off. The glare no longer imputes my vision of the stars. I must make the most of this opportunity. I put on my trainers, socks, trousers, cardigan top and my girlie dressing down. I am nicely wrapped up. I take a pad, a pencil, the aliade, the star map and the light of my mobile phone out to the balcony. I cannot find anything in the sky that is on the map. It is frustrating and yet engrossing. The sky is mine tonight. I look up at the sky and try to mark down on paper all the stars I can see in front of me. Some of them are more obvious than others. You have to squint a little to capture the meekly glowing ones. But they are stars nonetheless. They're just further away from the eye. It is like finding the perfect partner. You just have to look more deeply into their soul to discover how brightly they shine. When I compare what I have put onto paper to what is on the star map I realise I cannot see any similarity. Maybe it's because of the star map which was made for viewing from Ditchling Beacon outside Brighton in Sussex in the United Kingdom and not for a place in Spain. Perhaps I should go to the Internet cafe and look up the star map for this location in La Manga. I'm still so excited that, despite the freezing cold, I have mindfully spent the last 40 minutes gazing up at the sky at night from my balcony. When the next clear night comes again, I will go out I will go out warmer and with a hat. The depth of the water below me is only 2 feet. You can walk from a mile out into the water and it will remain only 2 feet in dept. However, I see a man in a white rubber suit and a long thin bone in his hand walking out into the water in front of me. It is not Jacque Cousteau. He even has his head covered by this wetsuit. What the hell is he doing? He pauses for a moment to put on his mask and snorkel. He lies down in the 2 foot of water. My God he's starting to snorkel. It must be freezing out there. What makes a man want to go snorkeling on a cold winter's day? I'm intrigued. Every few meters his arm comes out of the water and then plunges back down into it as if he is spearing a shark. He puts a lot of effort into it. It looks like he's killing something with his spear. Perhaps it is a shovel. It looks very strange. What could he be killing or digging up out there in the middle of the water? Is it treasure? Is it the spoils of crime? Now that the time has passed since the crime was committed, has he now come back to reclaim his reward for risk?
How am I trying to spend each day at the moment?
9.15 A few mins of morning pages 9.30 Sun Salutations 10.00 Breakfast 10.30 Update 6 pages of OM003 10.57 66sec gazing at 2 beaches 11.00 Sketch 11.30 Emails and chat 13.30 Lunch . Fish fillet 14.30 Sun bath dragon 15.00 Reiki Distance heal 16.57 66sec gazing at 2 beaches 17.00 Update 6 pages of OM003 17.30 Mind full sunset 18.00 DVD 19.30 Sketch digital photo 20.00 Dinner lentejas and ham 21.00 Alina Reyes 21.30 Star gaze - look for new object in the sky 22.00 Reiki Distance heal 22.30 Party
I woke up once again with a pain in my back. I don't know where it has come from. It might be the bed here in the apartment. I have to change it. I have put down two double folded blankets underneath the sheets. At least this will give me a cushion between me and springs of the mattress from Madras. But still, after doing this, I find I am waking up in agony. It feels like the pain of a blunt knife piercing by kidney. Because of my shoulder pain over the last six months I have not been able to relieve any pressure on the right side of my back while I sleep by swapping sides during the night. In the morning around eight o'clock I always wake up with this awful pain. This means I do not get a good night's sleep. My GP said it is muscular and that it will go away. 3 months later it still hasn’t. I told him I wanted to be able to sleep 10 hours a night and wake up without any pain. Was that too much to ask? Help me someone.
Yesterday I played golf at the La Manga club. I played in the afternoon sunshine among the bobbing robins, the slinking swans and the diving ducks. They all play in the bushes and on the little ponds that dot each golf hole. Julia my lover and friend made this golf trip to the La Manga Club my present, my wonderful present for Christmas. I don't know what to say. She amazes me. The best way to thank her I suppose is to enjoy it thoroughly. I am mixing with the richest people in Spain and England. I saunter up to the first tee and enjoy the sun beaming down on my face as I line up my first shot. I remembered to bring the golf range finder that I bought from China to sell on eBay. I tested it. The best test of a Chinese golf range finder is on one of the finest championship golf courses in Europe, isn’t? The length of the hole mentioned on the card seems to be different from the length that is displayed on the golf range finder. I put this down to the difference between meters and yards and blast my shot straight down the middle of the fairway past the ducks.This is great exercise for my shoulder and knees. I pull the trolley along that contains my clubs. I have not played golf for six months. I remember the technique. Keep your eye on the ball. Swing the club like a pendulum. 
On the green it is different story. You have to become gentle again in order to coax this little yellow ball into the hole. I hit it too gently at first, and then I hit it in the wrong direction the second time. Finally I get the ball into the first hole. It is great to be in the open wilds imbuing the sensual smells of the pine trees. I continue to mindfully enjoy everything like this over the next five holes. On the sixth hold there is a long fairway in front of me. It is time to do a Harikari. I take out my Malteser chocolates and put one into my mouth. The burst of sugar and chocolates whizzes around my body. I take out my Bluetooth stereo headphones and connect it to the music player on my mobile phone. “Mission Impossible”, by U2 puts me in the mood to take a running jump and hit this golf ball as far as I can with a Big Bertha driver. I stand about 5 yards back from the ball. Then like a crazy bull let loose inside a china shop I launch myself at the poor little golf ball. At the last moment I let fire a massive swaying swing at the ball. Instead of hitting the ball I take a lump of sod out of the ground. I have completely missed the friggin ball. But never mind. This is great. I will try again. Ten yards back I take another long run at the ball. This time instead of removing a sod of turf I beeline miss the ball altogether. I Back up another fifteen yards. I run. I swing. I concentrate on my swing. I connect. I play like that all the way down the fairway to the green. I play with joy like a little kid instead of playing like an adult who wants to impress millionaires. What a great day! At the seventh hole I find I have lost the last of my balls. I am completely satisfied. I feel like a kid on Christmas Day who has exhausted himself from playing with his brand new cowboy outfit. How often does one get that feeling at Christmas?
Finally I am naked on the balcony under the sun. There is a danger in lying on top of the glass table. Each time I lie down I can feel the glass bending and suffering under the pressure. If my weight does crack it, I will get several shards of sharp splintering glass up my sphincter. But it is a risk worth taking. The idea to get naked under the sun came to me as I walked along the seashore this afternoon. I found a man not of an unsimilar age to myself lying on the beach completely naked rolling a joint. He has a black beard and is already quite tanned. It reminded me of the man who lay in the mud on a beach in Formentera. It was in the movie 'Sex with Lucia'. It was a sign from me. I got to get off these winter clothes and get naked with the sky. So, here I am spread eagled on the glass top table. The Sun grills my forehead and fondles my balls. The hot lips of the sun rays slide up and down my Cock. They tickle my testicles. I take it a deep breath and then let it out. The geese pierce the pure tranquility with their cackle. The water is dead calm. It is like a mirror. It is the sun's mirror. It is the sky's mirror. The Sun in the sky can bask in reflection of all its glory when it looks down narcissistically on the water top. I had forgotten how nice it is to be in the sunshine warming up all of my body. I had forgotten how nice it is to relax and soak up the warm embrace. Another five months may pass before I have this experience again. I may be dead before I experience this again. Better to enjoy it now for there will be plenty of time to stare up at the stars is as the maggots slowly eat their way into my corpse in the ground.
Good morning world. It is the last day of the year. It is the 31st of of December. It appears my parents want to drop in on me. They have given me one week's notice. They are planning to probably arrive three days before I actually leave from here. I don't see the point. It worries me. They have not planned the trip well. It seems so sudden. What is going on? Why do they feel the need to do this? Is one of them dying? Does this person have six months to live? Do they just want to spoil my retreat? Are they angry that I did not plan my Christmas holidays around them?
This means my last week will be not about me completely. It will be in a lot of ways about planning their arrival. I think it is quite selfish of them to gatecrash my retreat. I would understand their desire to visit Spain if they had planned it few months in advance. But just to announce it to me the week before seems inconsiderate and disrespectful. It seems that they have been spoilt by David for two weeks and now they want to be spoiled by me for another week. It would means me hiring a car to pick them up at the airport. It would mean me sleeping on the sofa as they take my bed in the apartment. It would mean me not been able to lie naked and the balcony to sun tan myself in the afternoons. It would mean I would not be able to do many of my daily tasks I had chosen for myself here. It would mean I would have to be the chauffeur and guide for them. It would mean I would have to be cook and chaffeur to them. Selfish Gary is angry.
However, I admire their spirit of adventure. I admire their spontaneity. This is how I have lived my life for 10 years in my 20s. Ready to travel on a flipping flip of a coin. Although I never used to do it as an imposition on people who lived in the country I wanted to enjoy. I usually felt too guilty to do that. I would have liked to have had the balls to do what my parents are doing now. Although I must say, I have dropped in on them on a couple of occasions without any warning. They have always accepted me with open arms on these occasions. I feel I must do the same. It is only fair. I just have to snap out of my selfish moldy mood of the moment and and into that wonderful guy called, gregarious Gary. I do like this person sometimes. It's just that it seems that I have to take him out of the box sooner than I expected.
My back is killing me this morning. I must find a solution. I must right down a list of steps I should take to get to a solution. If I get up after five hours of sleeping I do not wake up with this excruciating back pain. But if I sleep for seven to eight hours or more, I get this awful pain. It does not make sense. I want to be able to sleep for a full eight hours without any pain. Perhaps the solution is in the mattress. Perhaps the solution is in exercising before I go to bed. I don't know.
Yesterday I played tennis in the La Manga club. I played for an hour. It was perfect. The weather was great. I had fun. My muscles are aching a little today. That is a good sign. I am using my body again for the first time in a long time on the tennis court. Every Sunday it is free to join a group of people who turn up at random to play. Okay so it's about 20 km away. That is what I have to do to play tennis with a few people who are of a similar level to me. I managed throughout yesterday (well during the hours of light of the day at least) not to drink coffee, alcohol or to eat red meat. I drank orange juice, lots of water and I ate olives. When the sun went down, just like during Ramadan, I was able to eat and drink what I wanted. I had sausages and mash. Yummy! Yes, I went all day without drinking coffee. I had not done that for a good while. 
The sun is shining again today. She begins to warm me up around half past 12. It is time from my sun salutations.
You know, I was just thinking, I would like to tell Julia that I am looking forward to coming back to my life in Brighton. I know it was around this time in Yaya's Christmas holiday that I began to get worried about are her not returning to me. I wanted her to let me know she would definitely be returning when she had promised me she would return. I wanted to feel it. I wanted her to have said it positively in her voice. I know for sure I do not want to stay here in La Manga in Spain. So I want Julia to know it. She deserves to know. She deserves to feel reassured that I will be back in her life soon. I wonder how long the timeframe is for Julia before she starts feeling the absence of a lover. Would she start to feel pain, frustration and exasperation when she has not been with her lover for one week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks are a number of months? How long can she happily be separated from them? Everyone is different I know. I think it also depends on who decides the temporary separation should happen. If it had been Julia who had decided that we be separated over this Christmas I feel her answer might be different. When she wanted to go away for two months last year I think it meant that she was happy to be separated for this length of time without feeling too much pain or any at all. And now that I have caused this separation, is two months still her answer? This intrigues me this question.
Julia’s new job
I would like to make a comment about her new job. I wonder if her behaviour at the moment in this job is different from her behaviour in the last job and the job before that? What I mean to say is, is she able to function as an experienced occupational therapist as she usually is able to do? If not, is it possible that there is a control drama happening between her and her boss Helen? I think this may be the case. I read in her diaries that Helen dismissed Julia’s suggestion to set up a system to record the needs of the children. Helen’s behaviour and Julia’s reaction reminds me of a control drama. Perhaps Helen is in a control drama because of Julia’s soft voice and shorter demeanor. It may wrongly be causing her to not treat Julia with the respect of an adult. Perhaps Julia feels unsure still in her new job and is taking on the role of someone else who is not the quietly confident systematic person that I know and care about. This behaviour reminds me of something else that Julia wrote in her diary once upon a time. It is the ongoing adventure and struggle to understand her relationship with her mother. I think when she was a teenager she said she struggled a lot with this relationship. Mother was overbearing. She did not give her the respect that she felt she deserved. If this is so then perhaps it is happening in some way again in this new job. It has all the possibility of happening again again in a new job where she feels insecure and unsure of her own ability. I remember from the book, ‘The Celestine Prophecy’, that the first step is for them to acknowledge there is a control drama happening. The second step is to talk about it with the person with whom the control drama is happening. Perhaps Julia can mention it gently to Helen. She can say,
“I feel that there is something going on here that is negative. You may be judging me as a child rather than as an adult for certain reasons in your own mind. And as a result Helen, I may be unconsciously not acting as a confident occupational therapist. Perhaps now we can change that and act as respectful working adults on a day-to-day basis?”
The third step is to plough a lot of love energy into this accusation and statement. The idea is not to leave the inner person feeling attacked law and with self-esteem. If Julia combines the ‘outing’ of the drama with all the energy of love and respect she can muster then both people can benefit from such an experience.
I do hope in Julia finds her feet in the job and not only finds her feet but also the starts to enjoy each working day like the child who is lost in play, on Christmas Day.
I also wonder if she thinks I invest enough time in her as a friend and a lover.
I know I have selfishly invested three weeks in myself here in Spain at the end of the year. Has it affected her negatively?
This is the story of Andrea the girl from Colombia.
Hello, I am Andrea from Colombia. I’m 5 foot 2 and a mullata with long black hair. I have brown eyes and I love my tits. They are big and beautiful. You would like them too. I have a small tight ass which I would like pumped up like they do in Columbia where you can go for cosmetic surgery and have implants put in your ass. Imagine that! I have four tatoos on my body. I have two on my belly, one on the base of my spine and one on my ankle. On my belly I have a dolphin. I love dolphins. I want to have my own dolphin. I could have one in my garden in a pool. I know it is crazy but I want one. They are so beautiful. The tatoo at the base of my spine has disappeared. It disappeared when I had the epidural injection given to me during the birth of my son Oscar. A doctor once said to me that one should never give an injection on top of a tatoo. But my surgeon gave me one the day I gave birth. The pain was, excruciating. I have never known pain like it. I had a Caesarean when I give birth to my son eight years ago. On my ankle I have a tatoo of a Celtic symbol that to me means, ‘Life’.
Yes I am Andrea. I am from Medellin in Colombia. My La Manga story is not an unusual one. In fact I do not know why I am writing this story. What is the point of writing my story if I do not know the ending? Even if I knew the ending what is the point of writing my story if it is possible that the ending to my story is ‘not’, a happy one.
Never mind, I came to La Manga one month go. I came from Italy. I have lived and worked all over Italy as a go go dancer. But I lived here in La Manga eight years ago too. I worked in Cayo Coco, which is now called the Bongo Bar.
I have a son here. He is beautiful. His name is Oscar. I left him with his father’s parents before I went to Italy eight years ago. Now that I am back, I want to see him. I have a photo of him. He is beautiful. He has my lips. He has my eyes. He has half my character and unfortunately, he has half of his father’s character.
My passion is applying make-up and music. I can spend hours creating a new look in the bathroom. I forget the time, I forget the day, I even sometimes forget the week. I lose myself in it completely. I am very good at it. I am a perfectionist.
I am crazy no? It is because I have many things in my head at one time. I cannot contemplate or meditate.I can not concentrate long enough to read a book completely. My friend Marciella, I love her, she is one of my sisters. Well, she was one of my sisters. I had four sisters in Rome. Well now I have three sisters. Marciella, she died last year in April. She fell from the balcony of her apartment in Rome. It was tragic. She was so young. She’s my age 28. We were so close. We both came from Colombia. We knew each other in Colombia. I knew her when I was 15. She was so full of life, she should not have died. One time when we got drunk we slept together. I am not a lesbian, let me tell you that first. But you know when you’re drunk you do crazy things. The next day when we woke up we looked at each other and just laughed. We were not embarrassed, we were drunk. She was so much fun. Actually, it happened on a second occasion as well. We are not lesbians, but we love each other and we have fun together and well you get drunk and things happen. She was always playing practical jokes on me. I never knew when she was serious and I never knew when she was joking. At her funeral, I was so drunk. I went up to her coffin where she was laid out in. In front of everybody I put my hand inside the coffin and grabbed her hand and pulled it. I said,
“Mariella come on now, stop joking, get up! I have enough now of this fooling around. Get up please, get up and stop you’re play acting, let’s go!”
Okay, maybe I am an alcoholic. I do not take drugs and I do not smoke. I just like to drink. On New Year’s Eve I drank so much. I do not remember what happened to me after two o’clock in the morning. All I remember is at six o’clock in the morning I was standing at the bus stop for an hour and a half waiting for the bus to go to the Zoco plaza. When the bus arrived I was dying for a pee. I asked the bus driver to wait for me. I ran to my apartment to have a pee and when I came back he was still there waiting for me.
You know I lost my virginity to an Englishman when I was 15. I was 15 and he was 19. He was a sailor, an English sailor. His name was Wesley. I remember him so well. I remember walking into the bar and seeing him for the first time. He was so beautiful. I remember the hotel room he brought me to. He did not know I was a virgin. After losing my virginity I went straight away to have a tattoo put on my body. It is the one at the base of my spine. When I got home I said to my mama,
“Mama I have two things to tell you. The first is, I am no longer a virgin.”
“Who did you lose your viriginity to?” she screamed.
“To a sailor. To an Englishman called Wesley.”
She was not happy at my first bit of news.
“You lost your virginity to a sailor a sailor, an Englishman? Not to a respectable Colombian?”, she screamed.
She was furious and when she heard the second bit of news, she hit the roof.
“And the second thing I have to tell you Mama is, I also have had a tattoo etched on my spine. Look here it is!” Mama hates tattoos. I thought I might as well get one seeing as she was going to be furious with me anyway.
You know the night Wesley left he came to see. He was waiting outside for me but I could not move. I could not go out the door to see him. I could not stop crying inside. I do not know why I didn’t go out to him. To this day I do not know, I swear. My friends Francisco said, “Go out to him, go out to him.” But I could not move.
Who knows how my life would have been different if I had gone out to him that night. Imagine the children we would have had. That is why I am attracted to Englishmen I think. Imagine the combination of my Colombian Latin genes with the genes of a blue-eyed blonde haired Englishman. The baby would be so beautiful. It would be the most beautiful baby in the world. Have you seen the new baby of Angeline Jolly and Brad Pitt? The baby would be like this baby. So, so beautiful! And that is why am not attracted to Colombian men, that is why I am no longer attracted to Italian men and that is why I am no longer attracted to Spanish men, the sons of bitches. I know I will go to London. I have to meet my Englishman. What you’d think? You’d think I might meet Wesley there too? Do you think it is my karma? Wesley is from London you know. What would be the chances of me meeting Wesley again 13 years later? I would recognize him instantly I know. But would he recognize me? I’m not so sure. I have changed a lot since I was 15. Yes, I think it is time for me to move to England.
I saw my baby today. My God he is crazy just like his mother. He was so angry to see me. But when some idiot came up to me and gave me hug, he really got angry. He shrieked at me,
“Get away from here, leave me alone. I do not want you here.”
I chased after him. I found him in the bathroom with a chocolate milkshake in one hand and a toilet brush in the other. He was waving it at me. He tried to hit me with it. But he missed. The chocolate milkshake went all over his face and his hair. It was so funny. He was so furious. I told him he shouldn’t ever hit his mamma. But he was furious. I decided to leave and as I left I asked him what he wanted as a present on the day of the three Kings. He forced out through his gritted teeth, the words, “…Harry Potter”.
He is angry at me now but maybe one day, he will stop being angry. He will be glad that I tried to connect with him. I hope he remembers I tried. I adore him. He is mine. He is the best thing that has ever happened to me. Men, I have no luck with men. They cannot bear to be with me. It is because of my fury. When I get drunk I get violent and I beat up the man in my life. I beat up my last boyfriend twice. He said he would give me three chances. He did not wait for a third time. I don’t understand men. Why don’t they stay? I need a man who wants to stay around and support me and help me become a better person. Why can’t they stay? Why can’t they help me through it? If they stayed who knows the violence and the drinking may stop. I am a bad girl. I am a crazy girl, I know.
That’s another thing about me, when I eat, I vomit it up afterwards. After I vomit I feel well again. That’s right I feel well after vomiting. I know, I know what you are going to say, I’m bulimic. That is the word you want to use this and it. I think that is the right word. I don’t think anorexic is the right word. Yes I like to vomits, I like to get drunk, and I get violent when I am drunk.
I forget what happened to me on New Year’s Eve. I know I was in the Mosquito restaurant on New Year’s Eve. I went back in there last night. I wanted to check whether I didn’t do anything wrong. I can not remember. The chef looked at me differently as I came into the restaurant. I sat down at the end of the restaurant to watch everybody from a distance. The wife of the owner is very nice. She is beautiful. I asked the waiter if everything was okay. I asked him what time I left from there. He said there left around two o’clock.
John came over to the table. I love John. I asked John if I behaved on New Year’s Eve. He said everything was fine. John is Karl’s friend. They are from England. I love England. These men have been here for six years. John calls himself God or, ‘John the hairdresser’. You can get everything at the hairdressers he tells me. This week he only worked for 4 hours, imagine that.
“Andrea, in the summertime, every evening I walk down the front of the marina here people stop me at the first café and invite me for a drink. When I leave there and walk down past the second café another set of people invite me for a second drink. This is what happens to me all the way down the front of the marina as I walked past every café. Everyone knows John the hairdresser. Isn’t that right Karl? “
Karl looks like a retired vampire basketball player. He is a taxidriver here in La Manga. His eyelids droop down over his cheeks. These two guys work as two players. They are smooth, confident and have a glint in their eye as distinct as a candle flame’s reflection in a glass of red wine.
“Andrea, even though I am 60 I can last all night with one of these little blue friends. It is Viagra. I only need a third of a pill. I have my own supplier here in La Manga. Everybody came to me for things when I had and I hairdressing shops in London. I supplied everything. Everything a man wanted I supplied it, including condoms. If I was working there today I guess I would also be supplying Viagra and these new pills, what do you call them, Rohypnohol? Yes I would supply the three things a man, on a night out on the town, should never leave home without. Ha ha ha! Did you know Andrea, that in a pharmacy here in Spain each Viagra pill costs eight euros? But I can get three for €12. Is that not right Karl? In fact just recently I had a very very very good birthday. Isn’t that right Karl?”
Andrea linguistically confused interrupts, “John, I do not understand you. I do not understand anything you say. I am sorry. John, on New Year’s Eve I left here at two o clock in the morning and I do not remember what happened to me until I was sitting at the bus stop at half past four in the morning. My stomach and leg muscles, they hurt me a lot John, did I dance a lot? I must have danced lots this night. Do you remember?”
Then with a sideways glance John whispers,” Karl did she dance a lot? I do not remember. I know I had a good night though after leaving the Kalua bar. I am sorry, we can not help you there.”
Oh what a beautiful morning. I think everything is going one way, my way.
Last night, I tried to think about what I want to achieve most in life from now on. I was almost asleep when I started the exercise so I am not sure what I thought about. I think one thing I came up with was,
“I would like to do something that would improve the lives of at least a thousand people in my lifetime.”
It may be a short story or may be a book of short stories. It may be a short novel like one of Paulo Coelho’s. It may be a book of all that helps to inspire you and fly your kite. It may even be a collection of videos on Youtube that people can use for guidance (ha ha ha ha ha ha funny funny funny so funny). At the end of it all I want a feeling that when I have died I had helped to improve and make richer the lives of at least a thousand people. Perhaps I could be a politician or a very senior politician to make happen such a large positive noticeable improvement on the life of at least a thousand people. Then the word priest came into my mind. If I had been a priest or a monk when I was a teenager would have I have had achieved this along the way as well. I may have!
So what small step can I take? I could look at my writing and pick 12 experiences that have a lesson to learn from it. I could make a book out of them. I could print them off and secretly deposit them in the library or a church or in a social centre.
I could create a new userid for SAP. Something like, “The secret tips of a SAP soldier”.
What is my personality type? Well there are five different types. There is the extrovert, the neurotic, the conscientious, Mr Agreeable earned Mr Open. You may not be surprised to know that I am Mr Open. I would have thought that it would have said I was Mr Extrovert but I am only a medium extrovert. The same goes for Mr Conscientious and Mr Agreeable, I am just a medium. They most interesting result to me to come out of this investigation is the fact that I am far from Mr Neurotic. This is great. It will save me a lot of unpaid psychotherapy bills. This still does not answer my frequent question to myself, “Why do I attract so many neurotic women into my life?” Is it because I am Mr Open who is quite agreeable and quite conscientious? What bad karma that is!
Yes I am Mr Open! I very often start a conversation with a stranger, especially girls. I sometimes make sure others are happy. Very often I create an artwork, a piece of writing or a piece of music. I often prepare for things well in advance. Well in my Aikido stock gambling that is the case anyway. I rarely feel blue or depressed. (this usually happens when one of my relationships ends, even if I am the one to finish it). Failure makes me feel very uncomfortable. I rarely plan parties or events. Although, I did plan our house party at 48 St Georges Rd and I loved getting everyone together. Once a year it’s not bad is it? However, I never plan a party for my birthday each year. I just don’t like the fuss. Well actually I would love if someone secretly got 50 people together to surprise me on my birthday just to tell me how great I am. I sometimes put other people’s needs before my own. When I find my life becomes out of balance I panic and strive to correct it. Even though I am an atheist, I often think about spiritual questions. I guess I think I will find the secret to something in doing so. It is interesting to me and it is a hell of a lot of fun to elevate my mind to think about such things.My mind functions better when everything is tidy around me but I often let things get into a mess. I rarely feel stressed or worried. That is apart from at work when I invest more than 70% of my energy in any given day. I tend to get stressed when I start a new job and when I am trying to impress my peers. I get stressed and worried at the end of the year if they do not give me the bonus or salary increase I feel I deserve because it also means they do not think highly of me any more. Because I am Mr Open and my frequent disconnection with reality, some family members and some women, especially neurotic women, find it difficult to spend a lot of time with me.
Does it matter if my sex drive differs from my partner Julia? It should not, so long as we are both able to accept and respect these variations. It’s the way we interpret differences that can be so damaging. It is not the sex drive that is damaging, it’s been contemptuous of each other’s sex drive lack of that can be emotionally so damaging.
Did you know that 70% of my sexual libido is influencedThere by my genetics. And because I am a man my libido tends to belong in that area where stress and compulsive types live. Even if there are some difference between me and my partner Julia I want to acknowledge and respect what stimulates and turns her on. I am open to explore and experiment within that.
Did you know there are 10 types of libido? They are, v The Sunsual libido, v The Erotic libido, v The Dependent libido, v The Entitled libido, v The Addictive libido, v The Reactive libido, v The Stressed libido, v The Disinterested libido, v The Detached libido and v The Compulsive libido.
I am a mixture of the couple I feel. But mostly I am the person who has an erotic libido. I like hot passionate sex. I like to push boundaries and try new techniques. Unfortunately as a result I may be a little judgemental of other couples who are content with routine six. I try to encourage people to explore new ground while valuing their own approach. I get a lot of pleasure from sexually satisfying Julia. I hope she knows that I do not only do it for validation and to prove to her that I am a good lover but because I LOVE TO SATISFY HER.
Now I want to know from the ten libidos mentioned above, what type of libido does Julia feel she mostly has?
Yes I actually met Andrea the Columbian go-go dancer here in La Manga. We went out on the town two nights in a row. I was fascinated at first by her but I got bored, frustrated and a lot poorer from her disrespectful take, take, take belligerent selfish sexy attitude. In the end I told her I had enough of her company and that I wanted be alone and return to the healthy space where I was investing my time and magic in just me and my art.
When I asked her if her tits were real she lifted her top up and asked, “Feel them and tell me!” They were lovely but sagging a little from the year and half of breast feeding she bestowed upon her son Oscar. I lied and told her they were perfect. I half fancied her. She was sexy at least. I might have shagged her given the chance. But a few wanks alone in my apartment was just as good (if not better) as I did not have to put up with her selfish violent ways in order to enjoy a few delicious orgasms.
The behaviour of takers is often seen by others as aggressive and selfish, even narcissistic. But underneath there is usually a real fragility and low self-esteem. It’s almost a hunger for what they think others have. There’s a sense that, “I don’t have enough as I am. Therefore I need to take from others as much as I can to feel complete.” Was this Andrea?
I give a lot I feel. But there are other times I want to give little or nothing. While takers tend to be focused on their own boring needs by enjoying and exploiting each new encounter and occasion to the full, givers are often on the lookout for opportunities to improve the lives of others.
On a biological level, giving to others stimulates rewards pleasure centres of the brain that has been shown to prolong life expectancy.
I guess what I’m I am always trying to avoid is ‘reciprocal altruism’.’Reciprocal altruism’ is a form of social karma where I would only do something from someone on the understanding that one day, they will do something back for me.
There is a danger that some of my gifts might be seen as efforts to put me in a position of social power. I would hate that my gifts have such a subtext. They are not tokens of intimacy, symbols of relationships which are trying to indicate that our relationship should be passionately cherished. I do not want my gifts to be seen as my need to prove I am a good person either. There is also a danger that my giving is sometimes about protecting myself, in that I make it impossible for Julia or any others to justly criticise me thereafter.
I try not to feel slighted when people don’t return the energy I put into the world. But sometimes it happens to me. Does it happen to you? Do you sometimes feel slighted? One can feel guilty when someone else gives them a present. It usually happens to givers who have a problem with giving too much. I did not feel guilty when Julia gave me the golfing present. I was shocked and delighted but I did not feel guilty. I wonder if she felt guilty when she discovered her cruise ship present from me?
I guess I am a taker but I am more a giver.
I am more a giver because I like being important, but I also feel, it is more important to be nice. I need to be liked by others more than other people seem to. I frequently give to charity. There was a lot of love in my family when I was a child. My efforts to achieve and succeed in life are seldom interfered with by others. If you can’t say something nice about someone then I believe just don’t say anything at all.
However the taker in me believes the following. I don’t feel uncomfortable when others do things for me. I don’t believe that most people on incapacity benefits are truly in need of it. Christmas is not my favourite time of year, it is too commercial and all about gluttony for most people. I’m not usually crushed when others have bad opinions of me. I just think they are wrong.
Do I believe in rituals? I believe I do. Why do I persist with seasonal rituals when I am an atheist afterall? That is why sometimes I drop into an empty church for a moment or two. When I am sitting there all alone, I feel the world is no longer about consumption or overindulgence, or even about me.
I leave that church feeling smaller but calmer. There are many types of rituals.There are rituals of gratitude, rituals of reflection and even community rituals. Rituals of gratitude can significantly, yes significantly boost happiness levels, like saying thank you before a meal like, performing Ricky on the food before a meal or, sending Reiki to the sea or towards the setting sun before you turn away from it.
Lighting a candle is a lovely ritual. Light a candle and reflect for a moment on the year ahead in 2008.
Giving a gift is a very lovely ritual. It is not about the size of the gift. It is about the gift. When I give, I give myself.
My ten nephews and nieces often make me look naïve despite all my travels and experiences. They are far from naïve themselves. They understand the subtleties and complexities of today’s spin doctors and marketing machines to an extent which makes my generation naïve in comparison.They are often incredibly confident, adventurous and articulate. They may end up living at home in Ireland for longer than I lived at home but with today’s tuition fees, competition for jobs, super expensive housing and rent, what choice do they have?
Why am I so popular? I like to take in what people are actually saying. I often think of small but practical ways to make a connection like offering to fetch drinks and food. I try to go beyond the facts and ask what they like, what they feel and what they think about certain things. Perhaps it is mostly because I often give people what I wish they would give me.
What have I achieved on this break?
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She then took me to a place with one of the most amazing views in 
It consists of a white cotton bottoms
and a golden waistcoat with a gold and chocolate sash. To top it off I wear a
gold and black star studded mask. Together we are, “the genie and the fairy”.
Two men and women play on the cushions in
front of us. One is dressed as a doctor and tries to fuck her from on top. He
looks disinterested and bored. The other caresses her tits and looks like he is
enjoying the moment. Because of his joy he looks sexy. Because of the others
disinterest he looks not at all sexy despite being the more attractive man.
Another man sits down beside me and cannot stop chatting to me. He is very
friendly but I am on my guard for the killer question from him. He tells me how
he is a teacher, and is here with other teachers who teach disabled children.
But they are not with him now. They are supposedly upstairs watching the
awards. He is bored and so came down here to see what else is going on. He says
this is first time here but I doubt it. He asks if we have been here before. He
can not stop asking questions. I say yes and he gets excited. 
On our way we go outside to the gallery of photos and the dome with
mirrors. Last year we had such as sexy time inside her. This year it is empty
and after sitting inside for two minutes we can not take the cold any more and
leave. It is such a pity as it has wonderful ornate Indian stools on which you
cold have a lot of fun. I wish I had worn my doctor’s coat as originally planned.
That was great last year. It kept me so warm. We discuss why we are both so not
in a party mood. Despite looking so sexy Lubricia’s says she does not feel sexy
or horny. She has a headache. I feel unable to motivate her into being more fun
and adventurous. It is a dangerous situation. It is up to me to save the
evening and I am feeling tired, negative, sober and low in energy. The red wine
has worn off. It is looking like we are going home early. I give her a
neck massage despite my low state. She loves it. I say, “That’s it. I know you
Lubricia. You have to be warm to be sexy and horny. So I am putting the foot
down now. You have to get warm now. Fuck being dressed up sexy. We are going to
get your coat and you are going to wear it the rest of the night. The most
important thing now is that you get warm and you stay warm.”
One woman
reaches under Lubricia’s leg and pulls my cock out of her pussy to stroke it.
This hand has no owner. I love it. The hand then strokes Lubricia’s pussy and
inserts its fingers inside her. Then the hand comes back to stroke my cock
before disappearing into the night. This makes me so horny I drive my cock back
into Lubricia’s pussy where the stranger’s finger’s had just being. This is
turning out to be the best experience I have ever had at The Night of The
Senses. My hand reaches out and my fingers wrap themselves around the fingers
of another hand that caresses my left leg. The fingers are long and slender and
painted red. This stranger wears sexy red varnish and a wedding ring. As her
partner thrusts into her pussy I caress her large breast and nipple with the
tips of my outstretched toes as Lubricia watches on. I love the holding of this
woman’s hand as I fuck Lubricia. It is more intimate and sexy than most of the
connections a man can have with, another woman. Lubricia observes me connecting
with her hand and nipple. There is a man to her right who is dressed in a pink
svelte suit. Lubricia loves watching his hand caress the pussy of his lover. 
This year I get a chance
to rectify that. We have all struggled through the year together in this house
and it is only right that we come together for a few moments to celebrate and
recognize this fact. Who knows, this time next year many of us may not be in 48 St Georges Road. The people who live here are just great. Stella has her non-alcoholic
idiosyncratic ways about the house. Mario is wonderful even after enduring his lamentable
struggle to find basic work in this country over the last few months. Koko
will never turn down a friend or a cousin a place to sleep.
I have been waiting almost 6 years to learn
how to use them. They are meant to be used for long distance healing. But my
spirit was never ready for it. And now I am ready to read about it. After you
have learned the symbols you can send them to another person who is far away.
The person should want you to heal them. In your mind's eye you first imagine
asking the person if it's okay for you to heal them. Everyone has a right to
hold on to their suffering. If you get a ‘yes’ reply or gesture in your mind
then you can continue with the long distance healing. You imagine a colour
that you would associate with this person. Using this colour you superimpose
it is on top of the symbols as you imagine sending them towards the person. We
send a long distance symbol first Zo Ha Ze shon Nen, then the emotional healing
symbol ‘Chucku Rey’, and finally the physical healing symbol ‘Psi He Si’.
If I did it for real, I know, I will never come back. And people
may eventually ask, “What did happen to Gary? He went to Spain Christmas and
never came back.”| Me | My Life | My Needs | My Thinking | My Photos | My Health | My Sunchildren |
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