It’s cold today. There’s a certain strangeness abounding in the air or is it just in the air around me? It seems to be duller than usual; the grey buildings have a hint of yellow to them and the sky is a pale grey colour, infused with maroon. There’s an omnipresent drabness about and it is impinging on my mood. I doubt if it is malevolence but the weather has been very inclement of late, maybe that’s it – the weather.

Ex-wives and husbands, do they ever go away? Just when it seems that I have crawled out from the tar-filled abyss that has held my life for the past couple of years something happens to remind me that I am still mired within the confines of a restrictive relationship that has never done anybody any good.

There seems to be an invisible mechanical interlock that triggers the movements of another spouse on the other side of the ocean. Maybe it’s just co-incidental but it seems sinister to me. Is somebody stalking me? Is there someone who has placed the haggard finger of fate on my shadow, deciding that I am getting above myself and pinning me down for a while before slowly dragging me back into the pit of marital depression?

It’s a fortunate thing that I have a new car, otherwise it would probably sit down on me and, knowing my luck, I’d have a ten mile walk in the driving rain to find someone to fix it for me, only to find that the man has cancer and has been confined to bed for the rest of his life.

I have to work today with this feeling of impending doom hanging over me. I can feel the chill of the Damoclean shadow as it stretches wider and longer through my life. My brain is fuzzy and filled with cotton wool; dulling the senses and making me feel hung over. Maybe it’s an overindulgence of red meat, as I don’t drink alcohol anymore. Is that it? Is it hormonal? But I am not a woman and it’s usually women who can turn to hormones as an excuse for things that aren’t right in their world, or is it?

Maybe my period is due. If I had breasts and they swelled then I would know, I suppose. But as I haven’t got them then I can’t tell by handy physical means. When the breasts swell do the nipples become enlarged and irritated too? Mine aren’t. It’s a shame, in a way, that penises don’t suffer the same temporary deformity; then I would know for sure. For now though, I just have to surmise that I am not at the peak of my cycle.

Tomorrow will be a better day. I have to console myself with this promise. But tomorrow never comes, or does it? I miss my kids. I miss seeing them everyday even though I know that I wouldn’t see them everyday anyway. There’s a certain peace in the way we talk now. We talk like adults, whereas before I was just an annoying intrusion into their everyday existence. Homework was always an issue and so was the tidiness, or lack of it, of their rooms. Curfew time was always debatable as were bedtimes and rising like a lark each morning. Still, they know that I love them and that I need them and am there for them whenever they need me.

I need new clothes. I sometimes feel that I look like a tramp who has just been voted the filthiest tramp in the world and been summarily banned from every hostel in the country. I’ve had these clothes for years now; I try to be urbane when it comes to clothes. I've tried fashionable and chic, I've tried trendy and man-about-town but I can’t seem to quite pull it off. It’s the shape of my body, I suppose, and that’s not my fault, it’s my mother’s – or my father’s. What can we do about parents, siblings too? Do they all have to be bastards? Does everything have to be competitive? Does every syllable have to be analysed minutely for insults or for hidden meanings? Surely the foibles we learn as children and repeat as teenagers and adults are directly influenced by what we are surrounded by and imbued with when we are growing up? If a child hears the words “fuck off” enough, what are the odds on him or her using that phrase sporadically in everyday life? So why do we have to suffer a slap in the face for the act of repetition? They are only words after all, nobody died.

Isn’t it funny how words can get us into trouble? Words, by themselves, are all right; it’s when we arrange them in a sentence that they can become inappropriate, abusive and insulting. They can also be arranged in an intelligent or amusing fashion. What a shame they are mostly used to wound, more often than not by someone who is not sure of their stated moral position and need arrows to inflict judicial injury on one's person.

People who don’t pay debts are bastards too. I’ve met enough of them, I can tell you. How can someone look at you for months on end, day after day, smile, laugh and joke with you, ask for work to be done and praise or condemn the job depending on what way his mood takes him and then mysteriously disappear from the face of the planet when it comes time to pay the bill?

Maybe my period IS due; I hope I’m not pregnant. Don’t be silly; men don’t get pregnant, just pregnant pauses or pregnant pauses filled with poignancy; poignant pauses. Go to work for the day, lose yourself in something constructive, the benefits outweigh the negatives. Tomorrow will be better, but tomorrow never comes….

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