For the most part I think I make a strenuous effort to eschew flaccid sentiment and corny trash in all their guises: sappy boybands, conversational platitudes, paralysing social ritual. It has always been about intellectual probity, the impulsion to nobler things and loftier ideals, principled severity and discrimination, the repudiation of ignorance where such ignorance is remediable. But such trifles and tritenesses, surrendered to infrequently, spark in me a fuller measure of critical sharpness and clear-eyed mordancy. There can be no accurate appreciation and praise of genius without prior schooling in the recognition and execration of mediocrity.

Also, they are confessedly a diversion, and a lazy indulgence in mental laxity. A reprieve from an exaltedness I seldom feel able to live up to; from wrestling with complexity; from stalemates and contradictions. An unvarying excellence of company is a daunting and wearying prospect. Surrounded by ingenuousness, I am entirely at ease, unpressured and unguarded. The constant nurture of ardent eloquence in defence of higher things is a terrible and unremitting strain.

Oh, what pretentious rubbish. That can't possibly explain all the brazen Chen Xiao Dong concerts, the relentless magnetism of KTV lounges, all the other inconstancies, the shameless aberrant behaviour which I cannot reconcile even to myself. I am looking for middle ground, when all compromise appears untenable. I stand here, a neurotic tangle, but with personas pliant; open-jawed, facing my first real identity crisis (and what an absurd notion that is, says the Nabokovian harshness in me): can DDD and DDD cohabit the same person? Henceforth, that is. They have been congenitally conjoined in me. The question is whether the conjunction is possible for much longer.

That has been my adolescent life, that Flaubert quote you see at the top of the page.

I went swimming alone today, rediscovering the bliss of being buoyant, segueing through fluidity, feeling frictionless and unretarded.

I am even dressing differently. G would be happy to know this.