8 December 2012 - Dear Dairy, exact position unknown

Just remembered that it's 32 years today since Lennon was shot. My friend Dunc thinks that his lifestyle would have caught up with him by now had he not encountered his assassin. I suggested that lung cancer is a card he may have turned over, had he made it further through the deck.

I am on the point of writing those Christmas cards, but can't write them without adding a note of some kind. That extra necessity seems to have increased the burden above what I am prepared to shoulder tonight.

I was about to write to a friend in Madrid who has been having a hard time but, in my rehearsal, my questions and hopes about his situation quickly gave way to an outpouring of my own. The whole thing collapsed into an excuse for me to burden him with my despair. Poor bastard. He doesn't need that on top of everything else.

I feel close to burning out. Too much going on - externally and internally. I've moved myself too close to the fire. Maybe to try to find that thing inside me - inside all of us. Now I am beginning to burn. But I'm not sure there's an option to move back from the fire once you've drawn closer.

I am being burned by expectation, too. Expectations of others and my own expectations of myself. I'm not sure the two can be seperated. Just pulling in different directions. Too many people asking too much and I'm one of them. Whatever, the psychological strain is now physical. I need to pull myself through this, as I have done before, but the question is: do I still have that strength?