Good Friday 2010 Where am I?

So, it's Good Friday. I'm ravenous - combining the start of trying to control what I eat with some old fashioned religious penance.

I'm in my parents' house in Dalkey and looking out of the window I can see a Spring Irish sun warming the greys and ochres of the garden wall. Beyond it, there is one of my father's fanciful palm trees, it's fronds tousled (there is no other word) by the wind, and beind them all, the dappled blue-grey pacific expanse of the sea. The horizon is sharp enough despite a little haze, and some ships move slow into and out of the bay.

It's chilly outside and never quite warm enough inside this old granite house, unless you've stuck your bum onto the front rail of the Aga.

I'm here because my parents suggested I come out. They, I think, wanted to check that I'm OK, that I'm not in some state of implacable despair, stuck in Vienna. I also wanted to check on them, now that my mother is suffering from her chemotherapy medicines, and that my father seems finally to have turned the corner from irreverent middle-aged bonhomie to something more like conventional old age. Mortality is upon them, and I wish that I felt more youthful and fit and energetic to give them succour. Perhaps when I've lost more weight...

But I do feel so hungry, and I do so resent it when my mother encourages me. Or is it "controls" me? Or is there a difference? Is the intention different? But when do we ever really know our intentions? When are we ever clear about ourselves? When did my wife ever understand her own intentions, let alone what was happening inside me?

And yet I resent and bristle and seek to escape.

This gnawing feeling in the pit of my body and my will, this gnawing feeling will have to be my constant companion for the next year. My friend, my confidant. And I feel so old and so tired.

It feels so daunting.

I started reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road yesterday. I haven't read McCarthy before. I looked at one of his books. It can still remember how it started: "The flame and the image of the flame..." For anyone who's studied literature, this just felt too literary. But The Road is different. Even the sentences that make no linguistic or logical sense fit perfectly into the mood of the book.

So I'm close to despair and I'm reading The Road.