Don't mind me. I'll be fine. Really. Like the Irish mother of the world of lightbulb jokes: don't worry, son, I'll be grand in the dark. The lightbulbs will get changed without me, the world will carry on spinning, regardless of whether or not I'm pulling my weight. My New Year's resolution is to not bother anyone with my troubles anymore. I'm shunning the vulgar glare of the spotlight, the harsh focus on my psyche that magnifies every neurosis into a disaster, like dandruff when you're wearing black in an ultra-violet lit nightclub. I want to be small in the world, to downsize, to minimize my goals. To do little jobs every day, enough to cover my costs, rather than endure a career. If less is more, I want much less than that. I want insignificance. I don't want to climb a mountain - I want a molehill to suffice. If pushed. If shoved. I want every year to be a sabbatical.

I don't want any expectations to live up to or down to. But I don't want to be ignorant of bliss, although at times I've often yearned to get off the rattling hamster-wheel in my brain. I want to do what hamsters do, unjailed. I'm not exactly sure what it is they do, precisely, but if it's a case of filling cheeks with nuts and having sex and sleeping all winter in straw, I think I can manage that.

I want the simple life. Instead of paying for therapy, I want to give the money to a cleaner to scrub my linoleum and hoover under my bed and de-grease my cooker and sweep behind the fridge and dust the tops of my books. No more churning over my life, no more chewing the cud of experience. I want more time to bake bread and potter with my plants and give my cats' coats a good brushing, the next best thing to sex that they will ever know in their pet-rescued microchipped-and-neutered little lives. I want to spend less time obsessing about the monstrous wounds of my adolescence, like some demented ruminant of sorrows, and more time tracking down different varieties of olive, which sounds bourgeois but isn't, if you live where olives grow, obviously. (I want to live where olives grow.) (Steady. One dream at a time.) What's wrong with being bourgeois? Guilty for being born, that's what's wrong with being bourgeois. Enough guilt to send me off flying Bohemian class as a career: impoverished starving-artist mode, months in arrears with the rent, yet still drinking coffee made with freshly-ground beans and not shapeshifted in some laboratory, and still eating real butter and none of that own-brand plastic yes-I-can-believe-it's-not-butter margarine shite. There's rebellion for you. There's sensitivity. What a struggle it is to be an artiste! What bollocks. I've done enough garret-haunting living on tuna and Radio 4, and I still don't know the meaning of life.

The unexamined life is not worth living, someone once said - but the examined life can end up unlived. Doomed to write about it, but not to actually do it. To criticise rather than create - to explain rather than explore. To get stuck in the detail and not see the pattern. To get lost in philosophical and theological theories about religion and shame and sex, and to forget to hug or to watch the clouds.

Keep It Simple, Stupid.

I want this Kubrick/Clarke year of 2001 to be as good as my Orwell year of 1984. Then, I fell in love and found an incredible job with an amazing group of actors. We went on to travel the world together and win awards and collaborate creatively and furiously, almost magically; and we got paid more than we needed. I learned about archetypes and Black Bush, and Opus Dei picketed us, so we were doing something right. I didn't know about AIDS, then. I knew about crabs, but who didn't? It was a good year, 1984. I threw the best party I ever gave in my life, that year's eve - for some reason our household was hip, and the gatecrashers queued to get in. I was 20 - then, people in their thirties seemed to be missing a spark; my world was full of everything possible and exciting, and life seemed enormous, all ahead of me. Which it was, for a good few years. Even if, sometimes, I felt so hollow inside I was amazed that no one rumbled me. Or crumpled me.

Life does get smaller as you get older. If you're lucky, so do your dreams, so you're marginally less implausible. Little things matter more, like trees. And pots of basil. And trying to make the lady in the corner shop smile. And babysitting the neighbour's boys, even if it means you can't figure out where those bruises came from on your shins the next day. And listening to an old guy play 'Fields of Athenry' on a tin whistle, outside a cinema in the East End of London, watching a full moon rise over the city skyline, waiting for a guy who makes me laugh inside.