24th Mar – I had strings, but now I’m free. There are no strings on me.

As if by a switch, suddenly it seems undeniable that I am set on course to arrive at that place to which my life has always been headed. My ideas about returning to England to launch a political career are exposed for what they are: a child’s game. What a ridiculous person I am. Only a little while ago, I was talking in terms of redefining and radicalising the centre ground of British politics, believing that I was the person to do it. Me! Me?

Reports of his intelligence spread like wild fire round the Tally-Ho! until he tripped over the dangerous carpet and broke his nose on the fruit machine.

That must be why great men like Napoleon would manage several campaigns at once, Winston Churchill too, their failures forgotten amongst more pressing matters that could not be overlooked lest they failed too. Like the venerated men and women in offices, banks and laboratories today, they got ninety percent of that which they turned their hands to wrong, but nobody noticed because they were always on to the next project, telling everyone how clever they were about that. Individually their little projects and ideas were as pitiable as my own but taken together, they formed a formidable sweep of enterprise.

When you have but a single bristle in your broom you are not fit to launch a campaign. And when the bristle-monger will no longer offer you credit, then what then? Simple, do what we are somehow conditioned not to do: stop swimming against the current of the receding tide. Acknowledge that you are never going to reach land.

I, Richard Delaheade White, of no fixed conviction, do solemnly make oath and declare:

I am in the last siphoning swirl of water running to the drain and I accept its dominion over me. I am being sucked out on the ebbing tide to go down the world’s plug hole to wash up somewhere in the Doldrums. Like that time we put a message in an empty bottle of Dandelion and Burdoch, and dropped it into the viscous tides of Askam-in-Furness, only to receive, three years later, the reply ‘Fuck off you faggot’ written on its reverse.

As my father so presciently observed, ‘One day, you’re going to hit rock bottom.’ It is only spoilt by the fact that he is not here to add an, ‘I was right, wasn’t I?’ to bookend his scientific analysis. He enjoyed being able to do that, but he often ruined it by saying it before the event that he predicted had happened.

Even were he still to be detained within the white Formica video-booth, ante-rooms to Purgatory, where he could locate any moment of his life, such is his way that he would still deny to his angelic mentor-cum-coach, that such words ever fell from his lips. He would say something like, ‘I know I didn’t say it, because I don’t believe it that’s true.’ He often said that, when challenged about his earlier assertions. I hope that God has upgraded her digital library systems from the unindexed Beta-Max she was using when I was last there. Not that papa ever had much time for evidence – not when his own memory was so infallible.

But since that day when his words were first uttered, I’ve tracked his prediction from what was once a faraway speck on a distant horizon, to what it is today, an event horizon on a looming black hole.

A little while ago, a cool head and a hard decision could have arrested the decline, and changed by orbit, but now, like time ticking down to an unprepared for exam, racing thoughts suddenly flip into physical symptoms, until anxiety induced trances prevent me from doing anything other than capitulate to the coming inevitability.

Then what? When you hit rock bottom the only way is up, right? I don’t think so.

The clue is in the name, it is wrong to see it as an opportunity. No, rock bottom is not like calling the bottom of the stock market. When contemplating it, you’re better advised to address your musings to the sort of events that happened before the Big Bang.

On reaching the portals of the Rock, the next phase is to watch your flailing arms grasp desperately for the plug hole as you’re washed away, finally realising your true plight; finally seeing what everyone else sees so clearly about you – that this was always to be your fate; that you have but a single role left to fill – to attend the end. You see them on the street in wretched holes like London, where the Invisible Hand that allocates all resources to the correct place sees to it that they are left on the street to perish on their own terms, only to become a drain on the state when they are scraped up off the pavement and taken to the crematorium. Poor, is having no one who’ll miss you. Nothing, is when you can no longer rely upon yourself to do you a good turn. Rock bottom is when you can’t even get re-homed in Milton Keynes.

I have spent these days contemplating which is stronger: the silky spider’s dragline that attaches me to life like an astronaut’s tether, delaying for now the moment when I am no longer able to resist the vacuum pull of the black hole; or is it the single thread of silk in my broom, with which I must my quietus make? And only now do I realise that I might have been better off employing a different metaphor. Something like life’s struggle being akin to walking the edge of a razor blade, like little Marlon Brando went on about in Apocalypse Now. Then I could have fallen off, and become detached from the silk tether holding me to life, by having the blade slice it in two; or more originally, perhaps, having it scythed apart by Scrubber’s Haircut, using a stale baguette from Patel’s mini-market in Irkutsk. But that would have meant that I had an actual tether, not a metaphor, and, as you can see, in real life, I’m detached.