You think things will change, they have to, but instead years go by and nothing happens, creating a biography of no incident or effect.

I woke up as myself again.

Slowly, life recedes with poverty, sloth and disengagement, and those simple pleasures of going out and doing things, seeing things, eating things and so on seem like unimaginable indulgences, as far away from one's life as yacht in St Tropez.

While others do, I observe, but also barely even that. I exist like a jellyfish, like lichen, like a cloud.

I hold a moment up and gaze inside, turn it around and view the emptiness from all angles.

This is the dirty secret of my life.

They were not me, their feelings could never be mine, and I could only go deeper into myself, into a darkness which no light could find, and in the end I still had to come out and meet the world on its own terms.

I saw the future, and ran away to China.

If I had studied law, none of this would have happened. But I didn't think about the future.

I had nothing to say, but this didn't stop me.

I understood my talent was for feeling and gratification, and decided to master the techniques of pleasure.

A consoling thought: it could always have been worse.

I had no ambition, and achieved it.

There was a knot in me that I spent 40 years unpicking.

Going through an honest account of my childhood and youth, it was easy to conclude that I deserved the poverty of the life I had accrued, and any good fortune had slipped past the gods as injustice.

Once again, and not even for the first time today, I marvel at the psychedelic wonder of the world and my place in it.

I abandoned mediocrity for disaster.

I would not take death from the rich.

Beneath it all there was the simple disappointment that the only things I'd succeeded at were avoidance and sloth. I was happy, day by day, and there were always moments I enjoyed, although there was an undeniable lack of color that had been with me from the start, a clear disconnect between myself and the way the world worked, the demands it made and the rewards on offer.

But even then I had to admit that what I wanted could not be expressed without a sense of failure and shame.

Ambition numbed and atrophied, I found peace and satisfaction in my idiocy, until I wised up and saw what I had wasted.

I forget there were others in the world, and fell into myself.

Hiding in a cafe with another beer, I escaped a better fate and wanted to be no one.

The anger that broke me was still inside, all it needed was a drink.

I threw away half my life to hurt my father.