It's becoming increasingly clear that my assessment of my own personality a little while ago was pretty accurate really.

John Nice-but-Dull.

A couple of weeks ago, I turned 47.  Now, conventional wisdom has it that, with age, comes stability. emotional strength, the ability to take what life throws, etc.

It's bollocks.

I'm not at all sure I'm any more emotionally mature than I was at 17.  I've learned to grin and bear it better than I ever used to, acquired a stack of coping strategies, found ways to avoid coming across as too peculiar, but... 

Alone, with nothing but my own neuroses for company, it takes nothing at all, a word, a comment, to send me into the same pit of despair I used to live in as a teenager.

I have a piece of text, that was sent to me recently, which I've labelled "In emergency, read this".  It helps, but unfortunately it also makes me weep.  There are, apparently, people who are much tougher than this, to whom such emotional outbursts seem like madness.  I wonder what it's like to be them?

Life is a River. Capitalisation deliberate, in respect of what I've just been watching.

Anyway, it is.  A river with many twists and turns, many tributaries, many paths, many a meander along the way, and many a tricksy current.  Not an especially fast-flowing river, it can be navigated to the left, to the right, but the current is strong.

All of us are afloat.

Some sit in the boat, and let the current take them, occasionally looking at the banks passing by, worrying on how they wish life wouldn't pass them by, never seeing the paddle at their feet.

Others try to paddle back upstream.

Yet others, though they paddle, merely pull the boat into the bank, and wait in the calmer water, but never venture ashore: Waiting, always waiting, and never see the glory of the sea.

A few, too few, drive the boat, explore the banks,  pitch camp on islands, bathe in the rolling rapids, dance naked on the grassy shores, blaze their trail on trees, feast on the river's riches, urge their boat to new horizons.  The river moves on, so must we, alluvium, adrift in the rolling flow.

Quite suddeny, without warning, all I want in the world is a face.  An honest face to fill my world.  A face I'm allowed to be in love with.

There have been so many lovely faces, all of them out of bounds.

Not a-fucking-llowed to love them.  Not one.

Well, not really a setback, as I wasn't particularly expecting it all to fall into my lap anyway, but a first professional rejection, at any rate.

Ginger's agent, sadly, doesn't feel she can take me, as it would conflict with some existing clients.  Fair enough.

Interesting to note that the disappointment was acute rather than chronic.  A minute or so of very intense emotion... which completely passed almost at once.  The alternative plan is slightly scarier, as it envolves me promoting myself, and looking for work on my own, without the benefit of an agent to guide me - but that's probably no bad thing.

In the first place, let me treat of the nature of man and what has happened to it; for the original human nature was not like the present, but different.  The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which had once a real existence, but is now lost, and the word "Androgynous" is only preserved as a term of reproach.  In the second place, the primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond.  He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast.  Now the sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because the sun, moon, and earth are three; and the man was originally the child of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the moon, which is made up of sun and earth, and they were all round and moved round and round like their parents.  Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods; of them is told the tale of Otys and Ephialtes who, as Homer says, dared to scale heaven, and would have laid hands upon the gods.  Doubt reigned in the celestial councils.  Should they kill them and annihilate the race with thunderbolts, as they had done the giants, then there would be an end of the sacrifices and worship which men offered to them; but, on the other hand, the gods could not suffer their insolence to be unrestrained.

At last, after a good deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way.  He said:  "Methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve their manners; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us.  They shall walk upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg."  He spoke and cut men in two, like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg with a hair; and as he cut them one after another, he bade Apollo give the face and the half of the neck a turn in order that the man might contemplate the section of himself:  he would thus learn a lesson of humility.  Apollo was also bidden to heal their wounds and compose their forms.  So he gave a turn to the face and pulled the skin from the sides all over that which in our language is called the belly, like the purses which draw in, and he made one mouth at the center, which he fastened in a knot (the same which is called the navel); he also molded the breast and took out most of the wrinkles, much as a shoemaker might smooth leather upon a last; he left a few, however, in the region of the belly and navel, as a memorial of the primeval state.  After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one, they were on the point of dying from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart; and when one of the halves died and the other survived, the survivor sought another mate, man or woman as we call them,--being the sections of entire men or women,--and clung to that.  They were being destroyed, when Zeus in pity of them invented a new plan:  he turned the parts of generation round to the front, for this had not always been their position, and they sowed the seed no longer as hitherto like grasshoppers in the ground, but in one another; and after the transposition the male generated in the female in order that by the mutual embraces of man and woman they might breed, and the race might continue; or if man came to man they might be satisfied, and rest, and go their ways to the business of life:  so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man.

Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half.  Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called Androgynous are lovers of women; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after men:  the women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female attachments; the female companions are of this sort.  But they who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original man, they hang about men and embrace them, and they are themselves the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature.  Some indeed assert that they are shameless, but this is not true; for they do not act thus from any want of shame, but because they are valiant and manly, and have a manly countenance, and they embrace that which is like them.  And these when they grow up become our statesmen, and these only, which is a great proof of the truth of what I am saying.  When they reach manhood they are lovers of youth, and are not naturally inclined to marry or beget children,--if at all, they do so only in obedience to the law; but they are satisfied if they may be allowed to live with one another unwedded; and such a nature is prone to love and ready to return love, always embracing that which is akin to him.  And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment:  these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another.  For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of the lover's intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment.  Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are lying side by side and to say to them, "What do you people want of one another?" they would be unable to explain.  And suppose further, that when he saw their perplexity he said:  "Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another's company? for if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live live a common life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul instead of two--I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?"--there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need.  And the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.  There was a time, I say, when we were one, but now because of the wickedness of mankind God has dispersed us, as the Arcadians were dispersed into villages by the Lacedaemonians.  And if we are not obedient to the gods, there is a danger that we shall be split up again and go about in basso-relievo, like the profile figures having only half a nose which are sculptured on monuments, and that we shall be like tallies.

Plato: Symposium (quoting Aristophanes)

Well, I predicted it, and here it is.  Nice Time is automatically followed by stupid, stupid descent into Directionless Misery.

There's something that I'm not.

I'm not even sure what it is, but I'm not it.

You know.  So do you.  And you.  And I probably never will.

But it means I'm not... your focus.  Nor yours.  Or yours.

Or anybody's.

In answer to an unspecified question: Yes.  Not for the reason expected, nor for any reason I dare admit to anyone who's able to do anything about it.  But yes. Fuckit.

Life's a bloody funny thing, is it not?

I'm not, as friends will attest, the greatest fan of children.  Mostly I encounter them in supermarkets, trailing unwillingly behind their stressed and harrassed parents, and generally making a nuisance of themselves.  I am, I freely admit, something of a curmudgeon in this area.

The concept of childhood, however, I find intensely moving.  Those mawkish NSPCC adverts, with tiny, wide-eyed waifs gazing helplessly into the camera; the lost child crying for its mother; the small kid let down by those it trusts.  But the joy, too - that innocence, which every child's so eager to lose, and every grown-up at some time becomes so eager to recapture.

And today it has snowed.

There are snowmen.  There are snowballs.  There are small urchins, wrapped almost spherical in impossibly snug layers of sweaters and scarves.  There are fathers, their long black woollen coats bearing the marks of direct hits, gloves damp with the evidence of joyful retaliation.

Laugh or cry?  Both.

The hubris of it, the sheer, bare-faced cheek.  The very idea that I have the skills, the talents, the professionalism to go out there and pretend to be able to do it.

I'm just at the point of ringing up one of London's best headshot photographers, and his portfolio is full of the great and the good.  And it scares the living shit out of me that I'd even dare.

Does life get any better than this?

The smell of warm croissants, a big mug of coffee at my elbow, enjoying a re-read of the latest chapter of a friend's new novel, a work-in-progress that I'm privileged to read before almost anyone else. Appalachian Spring quietly chirruping out of iTunes.

A free man, a free day, a whole new life ahead.

For one extraordinary moment, I was unable to cope with how happy all this made me feel, and I wept.   I am a lucky man.

A nice sendoff.  Curry, booze, a card, many handshakes and well-wishings.

Won the Halfway to heaven quiz in the evening, too.

Now a free man.  Odd... doesn't feel much different, most of the time, but then there are these sudden realisations of quite what a huge change has occurred.  All things are possible.