Nine working days to go. Nine days for nine years. Still I wonder what I am becoming. Waiting for Christmas, waiting for the weekend, waiting for the end.

I might have a tenant soon, that is the good news. Perhaps that makes me a landlord, but I think that is too ambitious a description for renting out a single flat.

I have always thought of myself as an artist. I may not draw or paint furiously, but I am always creative. In some ways, and with some pretension, I have always felt like an observer to my own life and I believe this explains the way in which I feel like an imposter in whatever role I inhabit. For the same reasons I feel that my life, my existence, is an art piece in and of itself. So maybe I can finally and comfortably introduce myself as such. I am, after all is said and done, an ARTIST.

Detail from the Christmas tree I put up tonight. I was not going to bother this year, But N finally persuaded me. We will be spoilt this year, we will have a tree in London, in Paris and in Devon. So it ain’t all bad!

This feels good and epitomises how I feel when I am optimistic about the future. For this optimism, other than my friends and family, I have only one person to truly thank. Thank you, N, for believing in me, for having faith in our future, for finding happiness and promise in my bad karma. You give me the strength to carry on and if it were not for your infectious confidence I do not know for how long I could continue with this farce before finding myself doing a ‘Reggie Perrin’.