Tuesday 2 September

Time waits for no man, except, curiously, in the year of the Batson: 1863. From my angle (45 degrees, bent at the top) time has stood still for some months now. On my beloved Princess Street I have gone about my business as usual, always surprised to find the same carthorse mid-rear, hoof perilously close to that familiar gurning urchin, caught mid-scamper but still yards ahead of what appears to be a marble Policeman. Were it not for the funky and contemporaneous dress of my frozen peers I would imagine myself live in Pompeii. Today I touched a lady. She didn’t respond. Something’s wrong. While I sense the cotton crunch may by now be an enormous coal shitbag, the flying monkeys at the Exchange haven’t changed the numerals for months. The mechanical journal has been at rest – the whole worldwidewotsit mildewed – but fear not, while others basked in inertia I have been busy planning out my whole life between now and January 1864 (1864! Can you imagine it! Remember when we wondered what we’d be doing in..! etc) and feel confident I can follow its course almost to the letter. So wish me luck as slowly, as if after some distant, brutal winter, the rigid limbs upon the street begin to drip and thaw; horsey stamping some sense into the young man’s brains, a lady in the finest turquoise slapping me full across the face.