FRI JUN 20

I saw Nat; we exchanged pleasantries. I thanked him for the postcard; he thanked me for mine. Yes, I had had a nice time. He had survived okay without me—even flourished. Over the last two weeks Nat has been trying to form a band. What on earth prompted such drastic action? Had he missed me after all? While the cat’s away…

Acute boredom had forced him to such an extreme. A friend of his younger brother had put him in touch with a bass guitarist, who is fifteen years old and goes by the name of Greg. He has a hare lip, cleft palate and other malformations. Nat ungraciously calls him “Freak”, but they seem to get along well enough. Greg is obsessed by “punk” music of the last decade. I had thought it extinct by now, or at least out of fashion. The punk styles have been transmuted, absorbed and adopted by society, though the polemics—always a minority taste—remain untouched.

Nat informed me that “punk is not a fashion, it’s an attitude”. I have heard this somewhere before. I must say I am relieved that both he and Greg take this view and will not be resorting to the war-zone dress sense of many punks. Nat gleefully described the “corpse of punk” as having no life in it whatsoever, and it was this decayed grandeur of a fallen subculture which had so attracted him.

I let him know at the outset that I can in no way relate to punk. He intimated that it was the same story with his parents. “It’s just their generation” he said; “at least they’ve got an excuse!” But like me, they are pleased that Nat is at last taking an interest in the outside world, however warped that interest might be.

WED JUN 25

Despite Nat’s new-found hobby, he still suffers with his death wish fixation, although he often denies its existence, and on such occasions cannot explain where the doom-laden feelings have gone. However, I am convinced his overall mood is changing from despair and blackness to a subtle mixture of melancholy, an aching for what has been and what is to come, and an authentic but harrowing form of déjà vu. His efforts to convey this complex set of impressions and emotions found a resonance in me, for he managed to communicate his feelings perfectly, although they include things for which our language has no words. The way he got his ideas across was most memorable. For the most part he employed gestures of the head, but the phrases “life golden sad” and “hyper-manqué” also stay with me.

Nat is beginning to accept the fact that his doom-laden emotions will never fully disappear. With more work, however, we can hope to lessen their domination of his personality. Naturally, he finds it rather dubious to desire to dispel something which has been so large a part of him throughout his life. He tends towards the light but darkness pulls him back. I wish I could give him a pill that would provide the thrill and insight of his love of death, whilst simultaneously freeing him from the threat that it poses to his life. Such a pill, sadly, does not exist, and psychology favours all-pervasive healthy normalcy over morbid unwholesomeness, however visionary it might be.