The Diaries of Alan Benefit

Alright, then. No more excuses. Everything else is done now. The stuff's cleared away from breakfast. My pants and socks are soaking in the sink. I've had a bowel movement and a wash, sprayed my armpits, changed my t-shirt. The computer's on and I've dumped Solitaire, Minesweeper and Pinball off the hard drive. There, on the desk beside the keyboard, sits my fuel supply: a fresh can of Tennant's, some ready-made rollies, a packet of plain chocolate Hob-Nobs.

I was perched at the bar with Sherlock. We'd just got our second pints in and things were starting to bubble nicely. I'd been giving him the lowdown on work ' such as it was. The false starts. The saggy middles. The sentences written in gold in your head, but which turned to crap on the page ' a kind of alchemy in reverse. I had got one idea, though, that I was running by him. A play. Something inspired by my midnight walk around Mariner Plains, with all those dark, empty rooms.

No¦ real life's not about winning the Lottery. Not for most of us, anyway. It's about winning the other game. The daily kick-about. The old one-two. The passes and fouls. The offside shots. The penalties. The poxy decisions. The missed chances. The shouts from the stands ' from the few supporters who always turn out. The brilliant saves. And the occasional goal, of course.

Tuesday Night at The Hippodrome. By invitation only. Me, Sherlock, Yoyo, Billy, a 4-pack apiece, Billy's cock-eyed snooker table, a couple of Sherlock's funny fags, Bruce's Lucky Town in good crackly vinyl on one of Billy's old stereograms¦ ¦tonight I'm steppin' lightly and feelin' no pain¦ Cookin'.

So¦ Christmas Eve at the pub¦ ¦heaving like a blouser's bed-springs on pay-night at a poontang palace in Perth. So many people that you couldn't see the gaps between. Smoke. Booze. Heat. Sweat. Lights. Noise. The craic going at 140 beats-a-minute. Hieronymous Bosch on benzedrine. Beautiful!

Sunday 4th December 2005 ' 5 minutes later Out of the Square I go and east along the seafront into the gusting afternoon ' my shadow loping off ahead of me like it's anxious to get somewhere. The sea's the colour of cold snot and as rough as a shag in a dock-side alley. But the air feels good ' stinging my sinuses like a snort of chilled vodka.

After much soul-searching, Lemon finally decided he'd lived in his bed-sit above the Pink Pagoda Take-Away for long enough.

Sunday 4th December 2005 ' 9:37 pm ...and so, Sunday night at the local, to swamp my miseries. Or so I thought¦ Mad Mack's (The Mad Mackeral to give it it's full name) is the only decent pub in town. It's opposite the clock tower on the seafront, at the apex of a triangle formed by Prospect Hill, Wrack Alley and Eastern Esplanade. The bar is correspondingly v-shaped, looking like the prow of a ship cleaving through an ocean of maroon carpet: Public Bar to port, Saloon to starboard. There's no dividing wall between the two, though. It's just a matter of furnishing and decor. The Saloon is cosier, with its sagged-out armchairs and nicotine-sepia'd pictures. The Public, on the other hand, has red leather stools and a juke box (a genuine Rock-ola 'Bubbler', complete with arching neon tubes and original 50s song list). There's also a TV set in the corner, a fruit machine, a pool table and a dartboard. These last two, given the snug size of the bar, overlap each other's floor space to some extent. If both are being used at once, the players of one have to give way to the players of the other in turn if dart-punctured buttocks or cue-shafted arseholes are to be avoided.

"Mr Benefit? I'm calling from the Daily Mail. "Really? Well, you can go fuck a camel.

Sherlock had lent me a book, Worry Yourself Well , which said it was fine to think of yourself as a failure, anyway. It lowered your expectations of success ' so if you failed, you'd actually lived up to your expectations. Which meant you'd succeeded. Something like that. So I couldn't go wrong, really. I was prepared for failure. Whichever way you looked at it, I could only succeed.

Three days. And what have I got to show? An empty coffee jar. An empty hard drive. A full waste paper bin. A raw thumb where I've bitten the nail to the quick. The start of a beard. A t-shirt that stinks like a gamer's laundry-bag. Sandpapered eyeballs. Indigestion. And an exercise book full of scribbles and doodles and crossings-out and¦ ¦and crap :