His left eye was very bloodshot and he summoned up the courage to ask me why. It was obvious: it is the eye over which his fringe hangs. He is allergic to his own hair. I have noticed that when it is long, he has a most appealing way of flicking his head back so as to banish any offending tresses from his face. It is a most singular action.

FRI APR 27

Nat is still strenuously avoiding gainful employment, but manages to give sufficient money to his parents to appease them. He looks incredibly unwholesome. It is, however, difficult to gauge his actual state of health, as his appearance has always been weird. His hair is very long and lank and now clings to his neck. This is made even more bizarre by his solution to the bloodshot eye problem: he has cut off his fringe entirely. This quaint coiffure is as singular as the house in which he lives.

I told Nat about the many successes I have had using primal therapy on a large number of “patients”, most of them friends. He was greatly shaken, as if he had imagined himself to be my one and only “baby”. He soon recovered his equilibrium when I revealed that I have yet to witness a more violent reaction than that which his regression sessions had produced. He even gesticulated in a mildly frenzied manner with his spindly, agile and twig-like, lily-white fingers. This prompted me to enquire about his weight.

“Thinnest live longest” came the improvised rhyme of a reply. This unexpected outburst of optimism could hardly be met with agreement.

WED JUN 20

I am glad to know that Nat is keeping up with his correspondence. Any outside contact, however second-hand, is to be encouraged. He hasn’t seen Simeon (who married a wealthy antipodean lady) for ages. He showed me a letter from his friend and old Anarchy Centre cohort Mark, with whom he has recently reestablished contact; strictly on an epistolary basis, of course. The missive was impregnated with a sickly smell which seemed already known to me, and yet whose origin I didn’t care to elicit. It went on at great length about “the old days at Wapping”. I got the impression that Mark’s life is not immensely dissimilar to Nat’s. They put into letters what most people discharge daily into conversation. Mark seems, of the two, the more eccentric. If I deciphered his noxious scrawl correctly, he is unable to sleep in his bedroom at night, having painted it in his favourite colour, black. He has not found the result conducive to slumber, for he fears he might take his rest during the daylight hours. It is now his plan to paint the room white and sleep all day.