But yes, I am being uncharacteristically frivolous for this one time of year: I spent £60 today alone, without really meaning too. That was more selfish though: I’ve essentially bought two of my presents, both because they were on special offer, and so cheaper than my parents would have found them for (both videogames too of course). Now I find out that this one game I asked for, and bought today after failing to contact my father because the deal was amazing and ended today, has already been purchased for me. Usually my father doesn’t get around to Christmas shopping until at least the 15th, sometimes the 20th or later. Who’d have thought he’d get his act together this year? Still, I’m sure it can be easily sorted. What I’m more worried about is lugging all these gifts home, since I’ve elected to go on a train rather than get picked up a day later.

Aside from being uncharacteristically frivolous, I’ve also been uncharacteristically happy of late. I’m worried it might have a negative impact on my writing, because I haven’t done any for about two weeks. The reason for this happiness? I, who write so pessimistically about relationships, have somehow stumbled into one quite unexpectedly and pleasantly. Really, I don’t feel things could be better at the moment, though I’m sure it won’t take me long to find something to be depressed about. Hopefully anyway, or my writing career might be over. Is it ironic that loneliness makes me feel contented, and happiness makes me suspicious? Probably not, it’s just strange.

I suppose that’s not the only reason for my lack of new material though: I was ill for a few days and had to pretty much stay in bed for three days, and only managed a walk to the shops for some much needed food on the fourth. All I could do was lie there playing videogames and watching internet tv. It was terrible. But on the first day I was well, my girlfriend came over and we made a gingerbread house, in honour of Annual Family Gift Day and because we like making gingerbread together. Actually, I make gingerbread with a lot of people. I’m a gingerbread whore.

It’s not the best gingerbread house I’ve ever seen, but it turned out better than I excpected it would when we first tried to stick the walls together, and I don’t think it’s bad for a first attempt. It tasted pretty good too. Obviously that’s my girlfriend on the left in the second and third pictures, looking better than me and my unstyled hair (hmm, I hope she doesn’t mind me putting pictures of her on the ‘net…). You can read her blog here, or at least look at the pretty pictures.

One last thing before I round off this post: for a while it was my goal to get this site in the top one million on the Alexa Ranking, because it hovered around 1,000,500 for ages. Recently, it not only past that arbritrary goal, but got in the top 900,000, and is currently fluctuating around that number. So thank you to everyone who reads my site, I hope you stick with it through these occasional droughts and like it enough to show other people. I’ve pretty much finished at uni for the year now, and my girlfriend will be going home for Christmas, so I should have some time and some loneliness to spur on some writing I can put up here.

It is easy to forget, sometimes, that these are the cities of humans, that there is not one square inch of these vast areas untouched my human hands, or untrodden by human feet. There used to be grass here. Silence and desolation too. When sunlight strikes obliquely the uppermost walls of buildings, and we look up to see the golden rays cast over the rough surface, creating microshadows in the tiny divots and at an angle to the minuscule lichens, far above the tired hum of the city below, we are reminded of this time. So too are we reminded of this time in the transitory minutes between the light and the dark, the dark and the light: for when dawn blotches pink or dusk washes orange across our sky, and we see motionless the silhouettes of chimneyed buildings across the horizon, we forget the people contained within and think only of the unceasing passage of time. We know in those twilights that the world turned before we were legion, and will continue to do so long after we are gone. Perhaps for some, looking up at those sunlit buildings, a small uneasy fear is born and passes over them like a shadow across a field, to be carried away a moment later on the hot fumy air.

For myself, seeing the sun carve its path across greystone walls, I feel only a deep, sudden, stilling calm, hitting like a wave, pulling me down into deep-sea silence where I see the world without people and realise that it wouldn’t be so bad. It holds me before buoyancy returns me to the surface. And then I’m back, walking in between the parked cars and unlit windows, and for a few seconds it seems as if that vision has come to pass, until a man walks by with a dog on a lead. The twilight is over and the world, in its absolute day or absolute night, is again the human world, ours until the next rising or setting illoominates our human mortality.