The night closes in and I'm sitting here with a half-done bottle of Smirnoff and a weary sense of deja-vu, trying to marshall my ideas while an intense cacophony of dogs, cats, children, wife singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow, television and CDs all play their part in making rational thought tricky.

Ah well. Was ever thus.

The tiresome daily ritual of trying to set up some sort of workable detente between myself and the corporate greedheads who rule the roost is leaving me so disheartened and detached that my desire to be any longer involved in the process is all but non-existent.

And with the dying of that comes another more urgent need. A need to get to the place of definitions.

I used to have a car that was capable of moving at about 140mph for sustained periods. It wasn't a particulary good car. In fact it was a very, very bad car. The one thing it had to commend it was a well-engineered motor that would, in certain circumstances, make it go very fast indeed.

It was a long time ago now, but the memory is still clear.

Being me, I'd decided, after a few near misses, not to push my luck, to stay in range of the nearest speed limit.

So it was only on rare occassions, and always very late at night, that I'd venture out, like a werewolf, with the determined idea to run the thing for a few seconds near to the edge... The Edge ... there is no other way to explain it. To stretch my luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration.

I'd quietly leave the house. Drive sensibly to, well, The Place, let's just say it was near Wales, and then...

Pressed back in the driver seat, and with a rigid grip on the wheel, I'd push the accelerator down. The car would start jumping and wavering. Seventy, eighty, ninety, one hundred. Third was always the boomer gear.

Then faster still. Not even daring to look down any more at the speedo, eyes totally focused on the centreline, trying to provide a margin for the reflexes.

Sometimes taillights far up ahead would come closer, faster, and suddenly -zaaaapppp - gone past.

A second's loss of control and there would be a crashing, cartwheeling slide and a death notice in the paper the next day.

But that is where the edge is.

The only people who really know are the ones who have gone over. The others - the living - are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back.

I won't ever do that again.

But for those who dare, the edge is still out there. The place of definitions.