11.55 to Chester

And this is where I find myself - on another train out of here. That seems to have been mainly what this year has consisted of for me - coming and going, arriving and departing. That freedom feeling as I get out of a car, board the plane, enter the carriage. And that inescapable sadness of nothing staying the same, and my journey, ultimately, is a solitary one.

     I'm on the train back to Wales, back into the lion's jaw. I can't say the last few days in sunny Brighton have been all that calm and nurturing. I joked to someone yesterday that I was going back up to Wales to escape the intensity. From this train I will go to Watford Junction, to Crewe, Chester, then another train straight to the hospital. And I don't know how to prepare myself, so I shan't, I'll just eat my sushi rolls and read my book (Altered State, about the beginning of Ecstasy culture and Acid House), and remember when I was fifteen and taking pills for the first time, and feeling part of something big, the biggest thing since punk, and briefly, I was so fucking happy.

     Yes I want to read books like this and listen to pop music. Feel young again in all these trials. Go back to a time when things were somehow simple, life wasn't a complex mesh, and I believed in things like drugs and religion and true love. My legs were skinny and my hair was long, and I was about to fall in love, for almost the first time.

     But things were never simple then either, they could just seem it. As they still can now. But today, I am Clare 'complex' Davies, and life has too many wibbly wobbly lines delineating this axis of ours on which we are spinning.