Writing this first thing in the morning, for the first time in a while. Just managing to get up and greet the day as it starts to pick up speed is achievement enough for me. Like being the first one into the swimming pool, breaking the surface before anyone else gets there.

I should put ‘typing’ this first thing in the morning, really. I’ve become one of those people who can type faster than they can write in longhand, and it’s worrying me a little. I genuinely can’t remember the last time I wrote someone a proper letter, on paper, with a pen. It’s not good to rely on computers and typewriters for writing; I have to keep my longhand in practice. And notebooks are a lot lighter than laptops. And a lot less likely to make you feel nervous when you’re carrying them about, worried about being mugged.

I used to write letters all the time, and still have folder upon folder of the things, mostly from the 90s. At some point I shall have to go through them all, and work out what’s worth keeping.

Dad writes to me – email, of course – about my thoughts on ‘Hot Fuzz’ and the innate need of some boys to play cops and robbers, or ‘war’, while other boys (like me) never had such urges.

…a lot of my boyhood free time was spent playing elaborate war games with toy guns when they were available and pistol-shaped sticks when they were not. Our favourite part of the walking route to Sunday School – less to do with the parents being Christians, more to do with getting the kids out of the way – was the grounds of a nursing home which had lawns well-strewn with debris from the wind-blasted trees. So we were able to arm ourselves for playtime …But you have to remember this was a South-Eastern coastal town in the early 40s, when every adult seemed to be in uniform, army vehicles and anti-aircraft guns were parked in our street, and many houses were inhabited by army personnel, the former residents having fled from the genuine possibility of invasion. So maybe playing war games in our case was more to do with patriotism than what kind of boys we were.

Tuesday – to Tom’s for working on the Fosca album. We’re resuming work after a long gap, but as ever the work itself gets us interested, galvanised, and as the session ends I’m the happiest I’ve been for months. If you do nothing, you tend to do more nothing. A little work tends to call down a lot more work.

Being in your thirties, you realise not so much what you really want to do in life, but more what you really want to NOT do in life. Thirtysomething life is more about saying no and filtering things out than choosing what you do want. That’s more of a twenties thing – the need to try everything in case you’re left out. If you’re in your thirties, the world is no longer made for you whether you admit it or not. And then you can relax and get on with being who you are, rather than what you’re expected to be.

I’d found myself thinking ‘when can I go home?’ about far too many evening engagements lately: parties, gigs. I also feel the sense of having to keep plates spinning with all the different social scenes I’ve slightly dipped myself into. The trouble is, I know lots of people very slightly. And I know few people very well. So when I get an invitation to a gig or club, a lot of the time my principal thought is: how can I possibly get out of this without looking like a complete swine?

With the majority of invites, I can only see myself standing there, alone, thinking about going home. Thinking that I should be getting on with something creative. When I’ve done that, then I can go back to the parties, and have something to say when they ask me what it is exactly that I do.

I’ve also found I can only take so many solitary nocturnal journeys home on public transport a week. Again, it’s because I’m more and more aware that this is the domain of the younger person. I’m more of a cab-taker. Ideally I’d take cabs all the time, and the times I do have a bit of money, most of it does go on cabs. Happily. No taxi is overpriced for me: not when I feel every iota of my very soul collapsing on every minute of a late night bus or tube. Not when my abiding memory the next day is not the gig or party, but how I felt tortured by the interminable journey back. Not just for all the young people who shout – and who shout at me for the way I look. It’s also the waiting for a bus, or waiting for a tube. And the delays. I feel the weight of every bus I’ve ever waited for. Of course, this is all stuff a therapist would have a field day with.

I feel more than ever the need to avoid my fellow man at night, particularly if my fellow man is badly-dressed and insists on wearing jeans for EVERYTHING. And if my fellow man is louder and drunker and younger than I.

When you’ve reached that sort of mindset, I think you have to stop going to things for the sake of keeping your more peripheral friendships and contacts alive. Some of the spinning plates need to be allowed to gently, more honestly, fall and shatter. If someone really does want to stay in touch, well, they’ll get in touch. And not just nod at me across a noisy room that I’ve decided to commit my evening to. The Beautiful + Damned night is a good way of handling this – if someone really wants to see me, they know where to find me. On my own territory.

How many friends does a person actually need? Real friends? So that none of them say ‘I never see you these days, do come down to my club with a pricy bar which starts at midnight on a Monday night’. I need to have my own haunts, my own social circle rather than hover on the edges of about a dozen of them.

I suppose you shouldn’t really go without seeing a friend – a real friend – for more than a week. Seven days in a week – seven friends maximum? That’d be truly brutal for me. Hah, listen to me, complaining about having too many friends.

But if I am to stop feeling so thinly-spread and start clearing my life of all the unfinished projects and unfulfilled promises that are preventing me from really living, I have to start letting some plates drop. Thinly-spread, spinning plates.

I also have to stop mixing my metaphors.