SOUL RANT

I decided to change the heading on the blog to reflect how I'm feeling these days. I no longer feel like a drone - my job has suddenly become more exciting. Maybe I'm just a more satisfied drone. Anyway, doing just what I want to do makes me feel a little less insignificant. Budapest is an incredible city by day and by night. I'm getting out until the small hours two or three times a week, something I was never able to do in London, living so far from the centre. (Haggling taxi drivers down to £35 for the journey home was too depressing.) I'm meeting new people all the time. I am no longer permanently tired. Thank God (for want of a better expression) I came and kick-started my life!

I chose the line "I don't get what the society wants" as a kind of anti-quotation. I feel as if I'm on permanent holiday from the mainstream. I feel like the character in A Disaffection by James Kelman when he says that everything that the society values means little or nothing to him and everything he thinks is valuable isn't rated by anyone. Or my best friend who recently said in despair that he is tired of a world where money, power and war are valued, and where love and nature are not. I can't put it into words very well:

I couldn't care less about Changing Rooms or I'm a Celebrity or Big Brother

Most of the musicians I love are dead or half-dead

I have never seen an episode of Friends

I don't know who Arson Wenger is (can't even spell his name) and I couldn't give a toss about the football results

I have little respect for any of the political parties. Bush's victory and Blair's upcoming victory are both profoundly depressing events. What happened to the Green movement?

I find it hard to make small talk, about anything

I want to write songs and perform them all day long, then go to a wine-soaked orgy in some ruins in the evening. And tell ghost stories round a fire. Creative expression, wild sex, ancient buildings - aren't these great things?

Buying property is not the be-all and end-all of my life - can't you think of something more interesting to talk about?

Don't ask me what I do - it's my day job. It pays the rent. Ask me about my soul

Ah yes! SOUL. There's not a lot of that to be had, is there? (Hip hop has taken over the world, according to today's Observer)

And, most of all, I'm living on a planet which is being criminally mismanaged by fools, careering towards environmental disaster, and all I hear on the airwaves is... nothing. Everybody's forgotten.

By the way, I know I've written something like this before - it's a kind of chorus. It's come round again. Now all that's off my chest, I'm off for a walk in the Buda hills - it's a beautiful January morning and the whole sky is bright.