Until a few moments ago, I would have poured scorn upon any grown adult too timid to grab life by the horns and shake it upside down to see what fell out of its pockets, but as I perch here on a ‘seen better days bed' in a Parisian hotel that's barely one step up from somewhere George Orwell might have stayed, spreading cream cheese onto a bread roll using my finger as a knife, maybe I am the one who got it wrong.

I have taken an impromptu road trip to play in the Garden of the Reaper. There's something about the memorials the living set up for their dead that draws a bow across the soul-strings of our own mortality. 

OUR FIRST BIRTHDAY

It wasn’t how I thought my life would turn out, not at the time. I figured I had made some good decisions or at least enough good decisions to put me in a place that was decent enough to jump off from and make my next ‘life move’. That’s not exactly how I was thinking about it at twenty two. No twenty two year old thinks about their life like that but if I think back hard enough, that’s the thought process I can see taking place inside my head.

Perhaps I’m being optimistic about myself otherwise I wouldn’t have been sitting in the drivers seat of a £400 Ford Capri with my worldly belongings scattered on the passenger seat beside me - which is more or less exactly where I had been for at least seven days.

On the one hand, you can’t get much lower in your life than this unless I add the remaining facts into the story, which are that the only thing on the passenger seat next to me is a half smoked packet of cigarettes and the Ford Capri isn’t mine. It’s a new low for me but one that I’m appreciating more as each day goes by. I might be down and out but I still have half a packet of cigarettes to keep me company. I even have a little money in the glove box to buy some more when I run out.

I was in my studio playing a little guitar when, from across the gardens at the back of the house came the smell of a barbecue and the sound of something called ‘we’ve got friends round’.

I pressed on with figuring out Chelsea Hotel #2 until it got harder and harder to concentrate what with the uber volume of football talk/latest fashion talk and the smell of 300 sausages rocking their skins off on a grill.

I sat there for a while with Bess on my lap and tuned her up again while half listening to the conversation.

I guess stereotypes become stereotypes for a reason. A bunch of guys talking about the game and a bunch of girls talking about their dresses. Not the amazon burning down, not Christmas, not what books they were reading or even the weather. Football and dresses.

Maybe that’s why we never have barbecues or friends round - because we don’t have the necessary social skills to pull one off with any grace.

London's St. Pancras train station is not all it should be. 

Outside, there is one of the most majestic buildings in the West End called – I believe – St. Pancras Chambers, which is now an apartment block and damned impressive by any standards.

I sold a pen to a guy who lived there once. He was either a collector or a cheapskate but when I looked at how much it cost to rent an apartment there, it was obvious that he was wealthy enough to have bought several versions of this particular pen from a store across the road.

The pen in question came into my possession when somebody gave it to me as an ‘unwanted gift’ and requested I make good use of it. Truth be told, it was a nice pen too. A Mont Blanc – but it was very obviously a pen designed for either the female of the species or a person with very small hands. Either way, it was no good to me. I’m a one-pen-man and that vacancy is already taken. I put it up for sale on a leading internet auction site at a very reasonable price and it sold immediately. The guy actually wanted me to take it there in person so that he could meet me but the price of postage is very different to putting juice in the car or taking the train itself and the actual amount of time taken is not quantifiable. Which is how it found itself being entrusted to the Queen and her legion of mail delivery people.

I wonder what she does? She doesn't look like she does anything, which means she must be one of that dying but ever so interesting breed known as 'ladies who do lunch'.

She is dressed extremely nicely and is wearing a silk scarf to set her outfit off. She does not appear to be waiting for anybody - in fact she seems to be very content to simply sit and 'be'. I would guess that she is the same age as my mother, but she is not my mother because I hope that she would at least say hello.

She sees me looking at her but looks away quickly when I don't avert my gaze like polite people would. Now I feel bad because I have made her feel uncomfortable, so I look down into my coffee and stir it again because I can't think of anything else to do. Nobody else in the coffee shop is aware of this because they are too busy being important with their phones - even when they are out for coffee with other people. The coffee shop is upstairs in a bookstore. In the far corner there is a man reading a book on a kindle. He knows this is wrong which is why he's sitting in the corner but he cannot hide his shame even from himself.