Those whom the gods wish to annoy...

Next week I return to that palace where I spent a week or two once before, although, this time perhaps, a little more mature or, at least, a little more guarded with the most naive among my impressions. As I remember, it is a magical feeling walking across that bridge into what remains of the Victorian morning mists. I cannot wait. Whatever life brings me as I drag on toward obscurity, my memories of my work-experience at Westminster will, no doubt, stay with me forever!

A strange thing- although I purport to have changed, an incident from the last placement still sticks on the inside of my skull. I was walking through a courtyard with the Research Assistant assigned to look after me; on our way to lunch, I think. We were talking about the future. I don't know what he expected me to say- something about politics, maybe; business, perhaps, on the periphery. Instead, I told him that I wanted to be a poet. I don't know where it came from. I may have only been 18 but I had enough sense to comb my hair and keep stum on my unforgivably extreme political opinions so why didn't the brain's automatic 'Sense not Sensibility' mechanism kick in?

In all honesty, I cannot say. Blame can be laid at the door of Pugin's architecture, all the history, my own distorted sense of romanticised self-worth... I would be a little less perturbed had that particular juvenile impression just faded with time or less embarrassed, at least. It hasn't. Whether I'm walking beside the river or through the Bentalls Centre; in Kingston, Killarney or Aldershot town centre, I still feel that it would be preferable to leave this life a poet. What little of the transcendental touches upon the ordinary details of my existence seems to lift me higher than any career ambition or work placement to date (no matter how special)...

I would be lying if I didn't mention that these days I guess I want the other things, too- hence the LSE application, the renewed interest in politics, all the work I do on essays etc- but, were it to come down to a brutal choice, I would still go for poet (or, at least, Guardian columnist and poet) and end up with one published pamphlet, a cardboard box and a bottle of gin. I no longer have religion and, currently, nobody to love and lust after... without these things aren't careers mere totems, after all? I don't know.

In all honesty, the whole 'writer' thing has messed me about so long that it really doesn't deserve to stay on the crumpled, yellowing scrap which I jokingly call my agenda. It stays however, though I continue to mess about, too- just a little less conspicuously than in the past!