Yesterday's post about the new series of Dr Who had absolutely nothing to do with the driving theme here, except that it was something we sat down and watched as a family. Its about the only thing that I don't feel agitated over.

Its amazing that generally speaking I can barely tolerate him being in the same room as me, the sight of him dithering away his life has the same effect on me as someone running their fingernails down a blackboard.

He drivels on about this or that, and I don't care about it, but once he's gone I care about the fact that I don't care. For example, several close members of his mother's side of his family are seriously ill and he passes on news to which I respond with suitable platitudes but I can't care, and I can't care because he's telling me as if I'm entangled with them via him when what I want is to be free of that entanglement and at liberty to care about these people as individuals.

Does this sound perverse? It does to me. I think it is some sort of act of self-defence.

A couple of posts I've laboured over have vanished because of connection problems of one kind or another. One of them started to explore the far darker passage when I came to suspect that I'd lost my mind. Emerging from that dark period (and how I did it has to be dealt with at another time) I found evidence that was inconclusive in my effort to establish whether what he did was borne of malice or of simple ineptitude at human relationships.

I still haven't recovered from what he did to me to drive me to that place or what he did while I was there, and I doubt that I ever will and the hardest thing I now have to do is love the person I've become and stop hankering after the person I once was.

This self-defence mechanism, if that is what it is, suggests that I've a lot further to travel, a lot more work to do than I sometimes like to think.

I'm going to scrub out the oven now.