Gloom begets gloom. Darkness is the perfect environment for anxiety. As I’m taking nightly refuge in bed, whatever anxieties I currently have enliven into a rude health they couldn’t hope to attain while I’m in daylight and din. A gutter that has rusted through is dripping outside my window, sounding like a bass drum keeping slow time for a funeral march. It is a noise that, during daytime, would be so unremarkable as to need someone to point it out to me. “Listen. Do you hear that? I think your gutter’s buggered.”

But at night, when the anxieties emerge gaudied from their dressing rooms and begin to dance across the stage of my mind, the dripping gutter keeps time for the worries that need immediate attention. The gutter itself must be replaced. Reminding me (drip) every five seconds (drip) of the accelerating deterioration of the house, the floorboards need polishing, the walls painting, and then, of course … the deterioration of everything, of the friendships, of the faculties, and the organs, the memory, the prospects, the dwindling likelihood of ever understanding crypto … life’s abstract imperfections blossom into a banal........

© The Sydney Morning Herald