On Monday 29 April 2013, Deo volente, I fly to Turkey -

I scrawled those words into my moleskine two weeks ago - On Monday 29 April 2013, Deo volente, I fly to Turkey - 

Ever since my bowel cancer was diagnosed, three years ago, I've stopped making use of Letts Diaries - I'd bought my first Letts Diary when I was aged eighteen - now I blush when I read my pretentious entries -

Yet the diaries reveal, like dim lights, the vague outline of the person I once was - I am sure that my eyes would fill with tears if I saw myself, as I was then -

I decided to switch to the moleskines because they looked like explorer's notebooks - they were the sort of notebooks which might be found in a tent, buried deep in snow - their pages would be like icy razors -

I had to write short entries, living for each day, in the journey I was now to make -

I'm still on this journey - so, when the date came near to my flight, I wrote those words - like a mariner might write, in his log, as his ship sailed closer to the edge of the world -