A good number of people have passed through the doors of Hilltop during my stay. There’s me and Tim, and then Lene, Jemima, Jamie, Mayah, Allan, the three percussionists, Angie, Irini, and Colin, and now Meilyr. Many communal dinners, bottles of wine, fireside readings, discussions and the odd walk. I find myself oscillating between loneliness, distraction, and joviality. I remember the Neil Young lyric, “I need a crowd of people but I can’t face them day to day”.

Over the weeks I’ve tried, privately and publicly, to keep an account. I’m one of those people who wake up feeling they have just appeared, blank, ambiguous, a collage of fragments, suggesting some thing. Often inertia. Without artistic purpose I would disappear completely, as I sometimes almost do.

A journaling practice gives a sense of continuity – however false. I thought it would be a good habit to build. And yet, always, the huge difficulty of accuracy. In describing anything at all as real. There is very little I can say conclusively and without doubt, and encountering this daily is dispiriting, vertigo inducing.

Much more easy and honest, then, to be through fiction. What are the events of today? How am I? It’s impossible to say. Instead, to paraphrase Fernando Pessoa, I feel by imagining.