Time ticks irrepressibly on by, not giving any respite except that blessed Sunday morn once a year that gives you an extra hour in bed. I love that extra hour, but it does have to be weighed against the vicious killer of small children in the spring. If that lost hour was a person it would be sectioned. I don’t like it. But anyway – the pre-life crisis, you’ll be pleased to hear, is still coming on strong. To the point, as you will have read last week, that I am considering reading poetry. I appear to have regressed right back to the angsty point that people usually process in their mid-teens, I even have a couple of hateful spots on my capacious chin.

A pre-life crisis is the worry of what’s to come, the nervousness of having the faintest tossing clue what you even want to come. The upside of this is that I’ve never yet met an adult who is doing what they wanted to be when they grew up, but I’d still like to have something not to aim for. My two options are the moment are writing and politics, neither of which I really have the stomach to get into at the moment, and possibly (of all the industries one might choose) the most fickle and dicey going. Where do I even start? I suppose I could be said to have started on both already, but getting nowhere fast.

As a neat side-dish we get to my Christian faith, where as a young man you quickly learn to heap an irrational and unreasonable amount of pressure upon yourself to sidle up to a nice young Christian girl (and there are certainly plenty of them, unfortunately none of it is mutual), where you then beg her to shack up with you and fill the earth.

The pre-life crisis point itself comes when I take a moment to sit and dwell upon my utter unsuccessitude in either area. It comes to something, doesn’t it, when you feel washed up and on the shelf at 24. Still, on with life…

A guy who came to speak to us during our induction sessions about coping on a budget (which is a terrible euphemism when you think about it, I’m sure even Roman Abramovich has a rough budget to which he keeps) he said something which stuck with me – poor people can be happy too. London is like a golden door which you can’t possibly unlock without shedloads of cash to sink into it, pretty daunting to sidle up to when you’ve got next to nothing and bills to pay.

It’s been fun to spend the past 8 weeks in London trying to figure what the horlicks one can get up to without having to dish out one’s hard-earned willy-nilly. I’ve enjoying socialising, enjoying the many free museums which will be the possibly the single best and most underrated legacy of the disastrous New Labour experiment. I’ve joined the library, wandered the streets, been to an insanely busy market on Portobello Road (nice chips, shame about the bratwurst), enjoyed an exquisite piano concert on Southbank and spent an otherwise distressing afternoon trying to hunt celebrities.

It’s a useful purging exercise – the Victorians were given to covering themselves in leeches to try and get rid of some blood, they thought it a useful exercise to rid oneself of impurities (and in many ways I would still prefer that to one of Gillian McKeith’s horrid mung bean detox extravaganzas…), and in a purely metaphorical sense that is what I have done. I did know that poor people can be happy too, though – I brought myself up on Roald Dahl…

Burger seller, shelf stacker, website columnist, table waiter, bar man, corporate hospitality-giver, toy demonstrator, table waiter, farm hand, shelf stacker, table waiter, bar man, campsite worker, sales assistant, fund raiser, English teacher, dish washer, kitchen assistant, sales assistant, mystery shopper, top dog, programme member.

Hello, you are here. I suspect I have a new reader or two lurking about somewhere and I thought I’d write a little red spot of a post just to let you know that you are here. This is No Added Succour, my blog – No Added Succour because that’s just the way it is. If you want any more it’s 30p a sachet and a certain laissez-faire. Lots of people ask me why I would blog and tell people things – it’s not that I’ve noticed how many people know so much about me having started blogging, rather how many people I have to be more imaginative with when we’re having a conversation because they’ve already heard my best stories.

I can’t believe that this is a dying medium (although someone let Robert Peston know that I’ve coined the phrase blogging crunch already), but it is a constantly getting better medium, approaching a maximum. I like to write, I like to communicate and I like to share things – I can exercise my wordsmithery whilst simultaneously being part of a community of thousands of people who don’t know I’m here, it’s magic. Whilst I excise my internal monologue why not attempt to at least divert or amuse people at the same time? I love to write, I love words and language and rhythm. The fact that one or two people might like to read what I’ve regurgitated onto the screen now and then is frankly mindblowing. But yes – you are here. And nothing pleases me more.

I have found over the past two months that London is breeding in me a more descriptive inner voice; I sit at a tube station, inconveniently thwarted in my onward progress for whatever length of time, an inner commentary breaking down the world around into metaphors, lines and apposite expressions. A well of thought that unfortunately evaporates before I get to my computer, ironically a laptop that sits permanently on my bed (when I’m not in it). I try to carry a notepad with me wherever I go, but sometimes the narrative just doesn’t present itself, and I’d like to think there was some point to each little post I present here, whether or not it’s immediately obvious on first read.

The one good thing about it taking ridiculous amounts of time to get anywhere in London is the time you get for thinking and for reading. I’ve always liked to read, but never made time in my previously very busy and clearly very important life to contemplate, ruminate and fulminate. Not that I’m making time now, but it’s being impressed upon me and I shall use it while I can. Consequently I’m feeling very literary (which explains the added ponce in my writing of late) and am even considering – shock, horror, etc – that next time I got to the library I shall find myself some high-minded literature and classy poetry to exercise my soul. Any (readable) suggestions welcomed, my fellow connoisseurs and wits…

“And what are you, may I arks?”

A goofy, eccentric black woman is getting on the bus dragging two kids, some shopping and her prodigious personality behind her. She is going to chortle and mumble to herself the entire journey, for now however, my attention is drawn to the right of me for the first time since I got on. It turns out I’m sitting next to an octopus on his way to a party.

A poster at the bus stop in Forest Hill lets me know that whatever sinister government agency that does these things is clamping down on benefits cheats. This raises my hackles straight away – I don’t receive any benefits, the advert is trying to make me feel guilty about something I’ve not only not done, but not even had the chance to do. Rather like the television licence ads, when you get to the nub of it, or rather the snitching number at the bottom, the sinister government agency is actually four people in headsets getting information from concerned Daily Mail readers and passing it on to the police. Instead of looking for the people who are breaking the law, they tell you they’re doing it and get you to do all the work yourself. It’s a great political black hole to find yourself in, expending a great deal of effort to make people believe you’re doing something you could have done anyway were you not trying to tell everyone about it.

What doesn’t help here is the picture on the poster – a large woman with a badly-fitting bra and gold hoop earrings that are supposed to scream a certain affluence and do just the opposite, giving the keen observer a brief but valuable insight into what’s hot in the Argos catalogue right now. But seriously – no wonder the civil servants at the Department for Equality and World Peace have got their work cut out when their own chums are printing identikit posters of fraudsters for people to look out for. Fat bird? Crappy t-shirt? Lock her up.

Not that I would ever be able to report someone for such crimes, my curtain-twitching skills don’t even stretch to recognising that the bloke sat next to me on the bus is wearing an octopus costume.

I’m absolutely exhausted, absolutely excited about James Bond coming out in a week and absolutely uninspired when it comes to writing anything here. I shall regale you with some non-fiction and quickly repair to the weekend, where I shall have a notepad, a book and an extra hour in which to sleep off any residual overwork I may have picked up this week. It’s got to the stage where I’m having to shirk social engagements I would otherwise greatly enjoy, but I feel myself slipping inexorably into a vat of unmirth and offense, ready to get upset at anything. That and I bawled my eyes out at the end of The Bucket List this evening. It’s a Rob Reiner film.

But anyway - tomorrow I hope to meet some of the girls from the programme to visit one of London’s many and famous markets, what a jaunt. Sunday I will try and get to church on time - it hasn’t happened at all in the last two months, but how can I go wrong with an extra hour? Apart from I arrived at 1pm last week - it starts at 11am. So many exciting things that I can’t tell you about as it would give up my secret alternative identity as a parliamentary drone.

Simon and Garfunkel just came on the old playlist - computers have transformed the way we listen to music, it’s all ADHD, one song at a time. When I were young you had to listen to a cassette until it got to the other side, unless you wanted to wait hours for fast forwarding and fast backwarding. But Simon and Garf - what treasures, eh?

Fools said I, you do not know
Silence like a cancer grows.
Hear my words that I might teach you,
Take my arms that I might reach you.
But my words like silent raindrops fell,
And echoed
In the wells of silence

Apologies, oh wise ones, for my lack of attentive tippety-typing these past few cycles of pulsating tiredness we like to call days. I find myself rolling into the house quite hungry at eleven pm most evenings having done nothing much in particular and with not a lot to show for it. Much like life, I suppose - which is not to be disingenuous because I do very enjoy my life at the moment, save for the tiredness and the lack of time to get my copious thinking into pixels. I’ve had to ration back what I carry in my little man-bags, because lunch takes priority and my tupperware box is somewhat copious - I’ve been wedged in awkward spots several times now on the train of a morning simply arising from an overweight satchel and it grates, readers, it really does.

I have some stories about the commute which I have no doubt is becoming intolerably, insufferably turgid to you all, but alas is all I have to write about what with the embargo on all the juicy stuff. I was on the train the other morning - standing room only, as per usual, and the train went over a particularly vicious bump, which just shouldn’t happen in a civilised country. I felt myself tumbling ever forwards, centre of gravity rapidly caving in to a fight it knew it was going to lose. I extended a stretched hand out in front of me, which is the survivalist instinct of someone who doesn’t want to land on their face, let me assure you, not as some may gather, the distinguishing feature of an unrepentant pervert.

I fell over and grabbed this poor girl’s boob who was standing in front of me, it was by far the most embarrassing thing that happened to me last week. She stared at for a moment, and then she turned round. Excruciating.

The other thing that I have discovered on my extensive travels to and fro is the reason why I keep falling over on the escalators: I have this particular pair of shoes with a slightly pointy toe on them, which in my head lend me a manly elegance and a rather raffish air, the man about town, a city slicker (as opposed to Stevie Wonder without a piano; sitty clicker…just thought of that, here all week, etc) - as opposed to the harsh reality where they look like clown shoes and catch on escalator steps.

But ah, that’s life - with it’s vagaries and shames. Now I’m off to bed, I’m ruddy exhausted.

I’m at the bus stop, warmth being remorselessly drawn from my backside by a mean metal bench. A girl approaches. She looks like she’s talking into a hands-free, she sounds like she’s yelling at someone on the other side of the street.

“I’m telling you, those chicken wings are sick, Sasha, they’re bad.”

I believe, in the parlance of lesser-aged contemporary folk, that they must be good chicken wings. Sasha doesn’t know what she’s in for. My bum grows ever colder.

I got told off a little bit during my induction for the leadership programme I’m on for declaring during our visit to the British Museum that I didn’t like it because it was the “world’s largest collection of tat”. I have suffered for a goodly while now from what John Hammond would call ‘a deplorable excess of personality’, but I think that it’s perfectly alright to have opinions as long as you can stand your ground whilst at the same time giving other people a little room to enjoy theirs. This preamble draws me to this afternoon’s activities, which saw me heading towards the Tate Modern for a wee looksee.

What a crock of shit.*

I both like and appreciate art, and I’m not going to go into the Daily Mail mock outrage of what it is, but I do hope none of our taxpayer money is being spent on all that crap. Roy Liechtenstein’s oeuvre of pop art I appreciate, the collection of Russian propaganda posters I saw were a worthwhile addition and I got lost in the depth and dreaminess of one of Monet’s water lilies - I could sit all day watching one of those. For me a Renoir or a Monet is as good as being there - the smells, the sounds, the sights, they’re tangible in the frenetic brush strokes and the vivid colour. But crushed silverware suspended from the ceiling? Film clips of girls moving things with their minds? Every other exhibit was a variation on ‘Carefully Arranged Flotsam’, trying to make some intellectually obscure indictment on society. But seriously - if you need an A4 side of text screwed to the wall somewhere to explain your intellectually obscure indictment on society you’ve failed. Get a blog.

Some of the expressionist and cubist works I couldn’t get my head round - I can see why they came about and how people enjoy them, but I like art on a visual level, whereas post-impressionism art started to take on this expression of thought rather than an attempt to capture light and movement which is what draws me in to Monet and his chums. I remember one time I went and there was a film of a guy rolling a barrel down the street. Another time a glass of water that was supposed to be a tree, a short film of a naked man in boxing gloves, alternately punching himself in the face and attempting to pleasure himself. Whatever turns you on, I suppose.

The best thing about the Tate Modern? Lovely views.

* Please excusez my French, family show, etc, etc