Park life

I went to my GP's practice on Friday, a place of disorder, different from the prim Georgian living room of the surgery in Lancaster. I wanted to ask about my hernia, which I'm tempted to ignore, and my alcoholism, which I shouldn't.

I veer between worry and carelessness about my drinking. Every night lately, I fester in thoughts of being unloved. "You no more love me than you love the second lampost on the left," I say to an imagined Wendy. I run and re-run, the incident when Helen came over and I was exiled while they all partied, because the Little Dictator would be there. I can't get over it, and it's happening again on Saturday, when Kitty, Wendy and her auntie will be celebrating Wendy's birthday. "I'm a second class, inferior, arm's length friend," I moan, a muttering obsessive churning his self-pitying phrases. I try different positions in bed, seeking one that will be so comfortable it will smother this vandalising chatter in my head.

At the desk, there is a bureaucratic problem -- I am an "inactive patient", which means that they've lost the registration forms I took in months ago. I went home and typed in "help for alcoholism Bristol", and found a meeting of a group which practices a combination of CBT and something with the forbidding name Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy. My gut feeling was that it wouldn't work. Apart from my Dad kicking me in the head in the hallway when I was nine I had a plain childhood, albeit with lots of moving around, so there's no early trauma narrative to get cathartic over.

Neither do I have a contemporary sorrow to explain my drinking. I'm in a financially precarious state, but it's one that lets me read, and acquire sunburn in Castle Park of an afternoon. Having once been imprisoned in a callcentre, I like to lay down, settling for sleep in view of the current bondservants in the glassed panopticon opposite. I am recognised in the park now by its habituées -- the black men who ask me why I'm not exercising with them, the Spanish bin man, the purple-haired, sexist punk, the generous Malaysian drunkards profferring endless Stella. I don't want to give this up; I never went to the course.

On my way back home, I popped into the local hardline Muslim bookshop, where I had a fruitless conversation with a polished young man over a book in which I was showing interest, which explained why music is haram. Joylessness, the overlapping centre in the Venn diagram of religions. I went to a Somalian cafe, where I had an espresso for a pound and felt self-conscious.

Walking home last night, I was approached by a man who offered me a box of wine for a fiver. As I didn't want to see him burdened with it in his arms, which might have developed chafing sores as he carried it home, I agreed to the bargain. I think it's important we do our bit for strangers.