Number 1. Money. By madness I mean your authentic artistic self.

I am currently listening to The Business of Being a Writer by Jane Friedman. These kinds of things get in my way and make me frightened. Money makes me frightened. I have been holding off being 100% me for years. Getting waylaid. Looking for money. By helping other people. I have all these skills. I am keeping the door shut. Why do I keep the door shut? What am I afraid of? The most frightening thing in the world should be the day of your deathbed. That you didn’t use your God given talent, the talent God gave you. Like Tom in his wheelchair. Skin and bone. Or in his hospital bed. Knowing nothing can save him. It is his mind. It is his mind he has to overcome. He has to overcome his own mind. At all times we have to overcome our own mind. And I don’t know why our own mind is such a bastard to us. Why is it such a bastard to us? Why does it play us the way it does?

 Yesterday I was in Lidl, no, the day before. There is this family. This lovely little family. A dad and a mum and 3 kids. One is handsome like he doesn’t fit. They are going to have a barbecue. They don’t have an exuberant barbecue. The dad is holding loads of packs of sausages. The mum is holding some. The boys are holding some. They are excited. They aren’t infected yet. They are being infected every day. The dad is scared. He is checking the receipt. Just like me. Has he spent too much? Have they overcharged him? There is terror in what he is doing. He is hell with what he is doing. He is in permanent hell every day of his life about how much his life is costing.

The following day, yesterday, there is a big family doing the holiday shop. The dad has a walking stick. The big daddy. The grandpappy. He has a walking stick, and the big mummy has infected toenails because she hasn’t been eating properly all her life and they are both worried about their bill. She is counting her bills into her purse. They are having a private conversation. They have let the family go ahead. They are infecting them. They have been infecting the whole family. It has big banged out of them. It was big banged into them.

I must control my fear of money. My fear is controlled when I walk into my madness. As I analyse them, as I watch this, as I write it down, I am controlling my fear. To walk into my madness is to enjoy my mind. My writing. My skill. Just to believe in that. That belief will release me of the fear of money because it will earn me money. This is what I must believe to feel well. And big and grown and middle class.

I don’t want to feel middle class. I want to feel entitled. I used to think it would come to me through osmosis. I have been faking their entitlement for many years. The story that sticks out is Pat’s fridge. It has to be 1991. Rachel is 12. Terry is dying of AIDS. Jamie in his middle class way has made friends with Pat, Terry’s palliative nurse, so they will get preferential treatment. They are entitled to preferential treatment. We all know that. I get invited to Pat’s for lunch, because we can’t look at dying Terry every day. She has a floor to ceiling silver fridge. It is bursting at the seams. She makes a delicious edge-to-edge meal on her huge wooden kitchen table. Couscous that has taken a second. Full of colour. Parsley for Iron. Terry is beyond iron. Later that month when he is a firework, I meet more posh people. They are artists. Their friends. No, one couple is not posh. They are working class. You can tell by the lack of lustre of their oils. Dave and Diane. But Fiona is posh. Her oils are magnificent. A bit Frank Auerbach. She has definitely walked into her madness. Her madness is a pet that she does portraits of. When she speaks, paints, walks.

 Everything I am saying I know then. But I think they are better than me.  I do not know how to articulate it. Plus, Tom and the 70s counterculture has taught me they are going to hell. Its Tom who went to hell. As starving as he was in life. Jamie is still alive. With a walking stick. Money is not the root of all evil. It’s just a necessity to live in your life. As Jesus said give to Caesar what is Caesar’s.  Or something like that. You can buy better tools, oils, paper, a Moleskine notebook, stops you laying awake at night scared, let’s you eat better, your toenails don’t grow hard and get infected, and you don’t have to study your receipt at the till with fear in your eyes.

Tom saw it from his wheelchair, when he knew there was no way out, ‘Nobody is living their life right.’