Taking Drugs to Read Kierkegaard

'And what were you doing in Hulme Free State?', W. says. 'What was the failed Bohemian up to?' Half-sleeping in his room, shivering with cold, he says. Half-sleeping on his mattress, pigeons cooing outside the boarded-up window. Half-sleeping and wishing they'd keep it quiet out there.

In the mornings, going down the piss-smelling stairwell to buy milk, I'd be planning my day's reading and my day's note-taking, that's what I told him. As the speed began to hit, as my skin dried and my eyes dried, I'd be ready in my room with my books. As I began to sweat, I'd open my library copies of Kierkegaard, of the collected works of Kierkegaard, in the Hong and Hong edition, and I'd be poised with my pencil over the page.

I read Philosophical Fragments as gangs of Hell's Angels fought outside over drug deals, and the Concluding Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments as I heard gunshots in Woodcock Square. I read Repetition in the laundrette, and Fear and Trembling as I queued for patties in SamSam's.

I lay out on the greens in the summer with the two volumes of Either/Or, and cracked open the spine of Stages on Life's Way listening to the pirate radio station broadcasting from Charles Barry. Didn't I spill warm beer from my can of Red Stripe on the pages of The Concept of Irony?

I opened the first of many volumes of the Journals as autumn turned to winter, and my breath froze in the air. I began The Concept of Anxiety as I stamped my feet for warmth by a fire of old plywood on an upper deck. And I filled my notebooks with my thoughts on The Writing Prefaces and The Book on Adler while the muggers waited in the dark corners of the decks with their stanley knives and screwdrivers.

Did I bother the Rastas about Kierkegaard? W. wants to know. He can imagine it, he says. He sees it in his mind's eye: a drug addled idiot talking Kierkegaard to the Rastas. Did I bother the hippies about Kierkegaard? W. can see that, too. A speeding idiot blathering about Kierkegaard to the hippies. And what about the ravers – did I bother them? He can see that, too: bug eyed ravers looking blankly at an idiot chattering about Kierkegaard …