“Not entirely trust­ing this page to remain attached, I shall write noth­ing of con­se­quence on it.”

Trawling through eight months and six con­ti­nents worth of note­book. Words writ­ten on the top of Austrian moun­tains; in Quebec hotel rooms where found­ing mem­bers of Godspeed offer clean tow­els while New York free jazz troupes rehearse out­side my door; in Tangier where a café owner tells me of his pre­vi­ous life as a tenor sax­o­phon­ist tour­ing the provinces of Britain, and young hus­tlers train their kid broth­ers in the art of the graft. There are direc­tions to the flat in Buenos Aires of two mar­vel­lous peo­ple in love, no longer together. Take the blue line to Plaza de Miserere. There are shop­ping lists for beans, cat food, soy milk and Jesse Ball’s new book (even­tu­ally found in a Shakespeare & Co in Vienna, where I was actu­ally look­ing for a guide­book for Venice but the only one they had was Venice: A City for Lovers, which did not seem appro­pri­ate for my mood). There are notes for a play. That’ll hap­pen. Somebody’s pay­ing me. It’s about war.

There’s a note that I want to buy the replica FIFA 1954 World Cup referee’s jumper from the shop in Singapore Airport (it wasn’t there on the return flight). Directions to bar­be­cue pits in Texas. Notes fran­ti­cally scrib­bled at a David Mamet lec­ture at UT and fur­ther lines from Ricky Jay’s minor char­ac­ter in The Unit (“you’re alive.” / “a fault I share with all but the dead”).

The words “DMX (’penis be out’)”, which can only mean in some hotel I’d been watch­ing MTV news (though this story seems to be from much ear­lier in 2008, ear­lier than I’d even owned this note­book, per­haps DMX was just on my mind). Then there is a frag­ment of a con­ver­sa­tion from a Canadian uncle, “the strange thing is that he likes the ocean”. Followed by notes on fish­eries strikes, my grandfather’s fin­gers, and the legacy of Joey Smallwood. In a café, some­where in Canada by the page num­ber, a dread­locked guy at the next table fran­ti­cally search­ing for infor­ma­tion about David Icke as the scion of John D Rockefeller Jr.

Thoughts on ill­ness. On hos­pi­tals. On love and the ways it breaks. On freez­ing hands at the edge of the Mall in DC on January 20, “I was there” moments caught mostly in sound bounc­ing back off the build­ings. I will tell my grand­chil­dren, when they ask, about look­ing up the speech on the inter­net later, and agree­ing that it was quite something.

Notes from the Venice Biennale, futile attempts to try to cap­ture thoughts on so much art in so lit­tle time. Ends up just being the names of artists. Maybe I can google Pavel Pepperstein later and re-feel what­ever that thing is that strikes you the first time around.

Addresses for gigs. For bars. For friends. For bands. Hotels and train times to get me from one pocket of not-home to another. Other than the odd pho­to­graph, the only evi­dence of what the hell I’ve been doing.

I thought I’d lost my note­book the other day. I’d left it on the floor of a client’s half-height office after writ­ing down a wire­less key.

Realised I’d bet­ter start writ­ing some stuff down. Now that I’m home.