A gentle novel in twelve paragraphs

Careful as a picked-up pound coin, face down, I tend to draw the curtains before it gets dark. I tuck the evening in tightly, so that the morning comes to in a hospital bed. "You blacked out, you blacked out, chipped a tooth on the cinema's tiled floor. The film was no good, no good at all."

Candles are not for children. Children are often plain. Planes are the bane of the recreational gardener and gardens are best left alone, brambles, nettles and such act as a magnet for all manner of balls, one day you will mow and be able to move slabs of pyramid that same afternoon.

Eoj Enrohtnud puts his hands on his thighs and thinks of warm things: airing cupboards, cigar smoke and a half-drunk pint of mild left on a picnic table; an hour-glass.

The bays are bites in toast. The light-house a pepper-mill, turning. Mutinous baked beans are empty bouys on the blue table cloth, patterned with a scud of white thread. Deep beneath, whales that look like slippers aimlessly tap.

Who cares what happens?

If you fold the papers in half before you put them into the sack it's easier. Draw the dailys like fags from a packet; slip them drooping between letterbox lips; hear their breathy inhale of news through draft excluders. The flaps snap shut all down the street like chips being placed firmly on red. Or domino's falling. Like a slow clap for the visiting team player who's shot clears the east stand.

Pay me a visit, sunshine. Let me think you are your father. Tell me three times about that thing you've done, that achievement. Show me the back of your hand or anything. Talk to me as if I'm a child. Wish me dead for my own good.

Dreadfully hard to seperate work and play when your official title is pleasure measurer. How good is sex with the air hostesses in the wide aisles on concorde's last flight? How tender is a steak cooked by Anthony Worral Thompson? Who plays better - RSC or the Nash? Plain or milk? Mashed or roasted? Director's cut or original? Injected or smoked? Sometimes I go to bed and all I can think of is work.

Call me Doug. Not Douglas. Call me. Look me up.

Combatting xenophobia. They wear speaker cones for hats in China. They eat rice with their hands like a JCB shifts dirt into a skip. They play some snooker too, to feed their families.

Personally, I find love terrifying. What happens when it happens? I don't want to discover that there's a piece of me missing. What happens to my past? It turns out that the hymn sheet was double-sided, that what I'd thought was just a speck of dirt was actually a mountain.

Above all else. Sing.