Today I was not in my office 
but  spent every  minute of free time, and there was very
little of it,  firming up and finishing
the Global Poetry System  article for The
Times. Finished it on time,  three thirty
pm,  then sent it to the press office at The
Southbank.   It is scheduled to go in on Saturday but who
knows.

I’d like to tell you something.   I documented in my blog in late July when   I met my foster mother. It is the first
time we’d met in twenty years. She found me on facebook. Not that I am hiding.
Each documentary I have made about my life I have directed the documentary
makers towards her and my late foster father in the hope they may explain what they did. And
each time they refused.  I make such
documentary because there is no one to confirm what happened to me which is
after all a central role of family – a group of people (rightly or wrongly)
contextualising each other over a lifetime. So documentary is important to me
in the purest sense of the word. 

Before meeting her I felt confident and while meeting her I
felt confident. But afterwards in the two weeks following I  sensed myself slowly crumble, inside,  to dust.   First it was a hairline crack inside me: a
little question of confidence and then there were more of them.  Then so many that within weeks   I was
struggling to keep myself together. It was like watching the twin towers
crumble and tumble  under the stress. A 
moment came when what was who I am fell
in slow motion,  each floor colliding onto the top of the  other,   each problem
compounding,  a concertina of
collapsing consciousness until   one morning I awoke
 and all was dust.

All was dust or fog: 
a fog that I was lost in. I couldn’t go to the Southbank Centre.  I could barely walk into a crowded room.   My head was full of fog and I felt myself
groping through each day on the ground picking up mounds of grey dust, each
time I tried to make it back in to me  it
wouldn’t, it couldn’t  hold together.  And so I woke each day worrying and I fell
asleep at night worrying about waking the next day. 

In the fog the acoustics change. What is far away seems  close and what is close seems far away.
Friends and colleagues become a  confusing 
malaise  of footprints.   I was
surrounded by hundreds of clicking feet but couldn’t identify them nor where I
was in context with them.  It’s a
frightening thing.

From time to time a face would reveal  through the fog at the end of its sentence and
startled I would try to answer and then  clicking
footprints again.  With arms in front of
me  I found a wall and touched it then
sat on the floor – back to it.   A phone
rings.   I hear the voice in the phone asking where I
am. Another phone rings and another voice where am I. The sound is tinny,
distant.   I don’t as much stick my head in the sand as
the dust. “there’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.” 

Recently it lifted,   the
fog. .  And whereas October and winter
and Christmas are normally when the fog descends as stated it’s  evaporated,   gone.   The skies are clear, horizon attainable,
morning beautiful.   It lifted in the first week of November after months
in all.  Sometimes I feel invincible, especially
at the moment of lift-ation.  But this meeting
(which didn’t need to happen) has taught me a lesson.  

Click
and Read this blog to see what it was like in the fog then to appear on
live TV, interviewed by Clive Anderson.