We've had 11 days of continuous rain and gloom (26th June 1997)

We've had 11 days of continuous rain and gloom. It's been lovely. September weather. Phnom Penh monsoon weather. We've just got a month of hot July to get through, then we're up to August 6th, when everything should get better. 

I can hardly wait for September gloom, rain, darkness, going to pictures, Chandos with my Evening Standard, then walking through the black volcanic cauldron to Dean Street and Sunset Strip. Then coming out to go to Chelsea or the Coliseum. It's a good life. I just need enough to live on. Work for short spells to give me this. 

"But when Wilde put aside the tragic role which he played with such zest, and gave rein to his intelligence, he realised that he had not altered in the least, and that if anything prison had intensified his individuality:" "'At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.'" "'To regret one's own experience is to arrest one's own development.'" "'I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does.'" "'I am far more of an individualist than ever I was. Nothing seems to me of the smallest value except what one gets out of oneself. My nature is seeking a fresh mode of self-realisation.'" "'My ruin came not from too great individualism of life, but from too little. The one disgraceful, unpardonable, and to all time contemptible action of my life, was to allow myself to appeal to society for help and protection.'"

Only a week to go then we're out of June! (25th June 1997)

Only a week to go, then we're out of June! Yesterday was the darkest, stormiest, rainiest day I can remember. I can't remember the last time it rained so much. This is the rainiest week I can remember. This time next week we'll be into July. Then we'll be counting down to August 6th. In February/March 1991 I grew so much, and progressed so much, having been held back for a year. I was held back for 6 months at the Post Office. 

"Rayfield reveals Chekhov as a Don Juan, promiscuous and ferociously unwilling to allow further intimacy after sex. Since he was very attractive to women and moved in advanced Bohemian circles, there were not a few cast-off women in distress whom he repulsed and kept at bay by teasing. He also used their painful experiences as material for his plays. Not only this: from the age of 13 he frequented brothels, and liked to boast to his men friends about the exotic prostitutes he used, dusky-skinned, Japanese and French. Writers are complicated beasts. Chekhov needed privacy and freedom more than he wanted loving intimacy with sexual partners. Out of this privacy came the great stories and plays. How do we measure the sufferings of the women he hurt and abused against his greatness?"