After leaving work, swimming, cooking and watching with Mrs Kenny some fantastic road-crash TV called Wife Swap -- which swaps the women from two families and stands back to see the ensuing mash-up -- I stayed up late last night reading A House for Mr Biswas. Second book by Naipaul I've read recently, the other being An Area of Darkness his less than flattering description of India in the sixties. There's a sort of tough grim honesty that comes through in his writing that I really like. Mr Biswas is a marvellous character: unpleasant, confrontational and yet you can't help but root for him.

In a self-referential, postmodern yawn-inspiring way, I've been thinking about this blog. There is something shallow and attention-seeking about it. Obviously its doesn't have the privacy of a diary which means I can't be entirely honest so what's the point. Actually the description I unthinkingly put of my blog as being "fragmentary observations" is just about right. Why on earth would anyone be interested? Does it matter eitherway? Other people's fragments.

When you have a poem published it is a distilled utterance that you are happy to show to the world. This is more stream of consciousness -- and that can be tedious. Perhaps though that is better than mawkishly self-conscious.

Worked late last night on a poem I've been trying to get right for a while called The Silence Transmitter.

Better stop this now. I'm boring myself senseless. I need to do something fresh.