Christmas Eve at the local pub

When I walked past my parents’ bedroom and saw my father donning his purple waistcoat, accompanying his purple pink and blue pinstriped shirts, I knew he was Up For It.  My Dad gets a strange nervous energy in bustly social situations not involving children, ie. in the pub.  It makes his voice go high and shrill at any given moment because he thinks his effeminate camp shtick is reliably hilarious whatever he’s saying (although I’ve no doubt some do find it amusing). 

He willingly watched and subjected me to "My Family" before we went out, doubtless thinking me odd when I expressed how unbelievably shit I thought it was.  I remain unsure how I was produced from his loins.  The feeling is probably mutual.

We were heading up the local village pub for Christmas Eve: my Dad, Mum and I, as is traditional.  It’s usually not so bad.  Busy in the tight space of the main front room where we all normally congregate, younger people back for Christmas mixing with the older stalwarts of the establishment.  Our trio trudged the five minute walk up the moonlit snowy road.  It wouldn’t be terrible, I told myself.  There were a few regulars who weren’t too bad.

Tonight it was the Landlord’s smart idea to try out Christmas Carols in the larger, less well frequented rear function room, using the aid of a synth-strong keyboard and a single trumpet player.

My parents led me into the main room, which was busy and tightly packed.  Dad decided to quickly turn around and head for the function room, sold by the Landlady’s sales pitch which mainly consisted of “CAROLS, COME ON!” and wanton enthusiasm.  We wandered dumbly down the short corridor, lambs to the slaughter, took a right and opened the door: one old grey bloke propping up the bar, a daft drunk smile smeared on his suspect face, watching the spectacled Landlord on the keyboard and a middle-aged bleach blonde lady parping painfully on a trumpet.  Dad bought the first round, as is customary (me second), and we took a seat by the radiator.

I hadn’t watched many episodes of Peter Kay’s “Phoenix Nights,” but  it immediately struck me as a reasonable comparison.  We stayed the only willing spectators in the room, but for the old grey bloke at the bar.  It wasn’t surprising.  Dad started singing along, as did Mum, I imagined out of pity.

Then Dad saw the microphone.

MICROPHONE! he appeared to scream in his head, magnetically attracted like a dog to a stick.

The flittering Landlady re-entered the room, offering support to her husband, and joined Dad at the microphone.  The opening auto demo chords led into “O Come All Ye Faithful.”  I chewed on my scarf some more, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.  Dad, dressed in his idiotic waistcoat and shirt, and the Landlady sang heartily

The speccy Landlord at the keyboard was NOT amused.  Furious, in fact.

11/12ths of the pub’s custom was still camped out in the small front room, steadfastly not wanting to sing, not caring that there was barely any more room to stand.

The Landlord returned to the room with a new lead for the amplifier.  The tests worked, a synthy intro kicked in and they resumed.  Dad and the Landlady rejoined on vocals.

After three more carols it stopped being funny and started being quite  depressing.  Still no more people entered the room.  I'd returned the round of drinks and drunk my second quickly.  I'd been there about an hour: most of the minutes excruciatingly backed by that trumpet parping woman.

I asked Mum if she had a key for the house because I needed to go home and stab myself repeatedly in the eyes.  She looked at me and, understanding but disappointed, handed it over.

wag

Sniff sniff sniff pant.  Thing about this cold white stuff is it kills all the smells, hides the scat and the shit so you have to work harder to – what’s that?  A person!  By the gate.  C’mooon!  He’s coming in.  Look at you, tall bloke, I can jump up just as high as your head.  Look!  You coming in or what?  Yes!  Hello to you too!  I can’t say it out loud because I’m a dog.  Hurry up and lock it after you then, come on come on.  Good, right then, you want to play?  Here, look, here’s a stick.  Come on.  Stop trying to look at my collar, will you?  Ahh, that’s it!  Tug of war with the stick.  Nice growling too, for a human.  Oh, go on then, have a quick look at the collar if you want.  And that thing too.  Hmm, shiny isn’t it?  Yes, that’s my name.  How did you know that?  Now stick again!  Yeh yeh.  Ok I’ll chase, nyeowww.. WOah.  This white stuff’s slippery innit?  Again again.  What you doing with that thing by your ear?  Who you talking to?  Throw it again!  Rrra, ok this is fun tug of war but.. woah!  Think you’re clever swinging me round and round, don’t you?  I’m not letting go!  Ha!  Told you.  This bit of the car park’s boring now; there’s not much left of the stick now too.  It was rubbish to start with now I keep losing it in the white stuff.  Who are you talking to?  I’m off for a sniff sniff sniff.  Ha, following me?  Mug.  What?  Whatcha got then?  Is that cat, I smell?  I’m not gonna come just because you’re clapping and slapping your thighs, numpty.  Hang on, why you running away now?  CHASE!  Ok, I’ll win.  I’m a small young dog, sniff sniff.  See?  I overtook you EASY.  Who’s..?  Oh hello mistress.  Uh oh, that’s a lead.  Pfft.  Fun while it lasted, sniff sniff pant.

washed out (dangerous tides 2)

Keith opened the backseat passenger door and poked a thermometer in Barry’s ear.  Although he was swaddled in three blankets and clasping a fourth mug of tea, the cold blast of air combined with the peculiar ear sensation to set Barry’s core juddering again.  His temperature was rising but not all that quickly, according to Keith.  He wanted to take him in to get checked out, just as a precaution.  Barry had wanted to leave the scene immediately before realising he couldn’t.  All the services were on their way.   But he was recovering fine and definitely didn’t want to stay overnight anywhere.  A quick check-up sounded sensible enough.

Twenty minutes earlier the Paramedic had first appeared in front of him, a dark green-uniformed bald bloke in his early-forties of just below average height with a dark goatie.  Like everyone in a uniform, he’d spoken clearly about the situation and EXACTLY what was happening, like Barry was still under water.  Keith had been the latest in a reel of quick-changing people that started with the three figures who’d steered him away from the sea.  One was a dog-walker who hadn’t been either of the men directly propping him up as he staggered inland.  He had relieved Barry of his sodden camera, still slung round his neck, and carried it for several yards – perhaps so it felt as if he contributed in some way.  Then he gave it back to Barry and left the scene.

Another, a hard-faced middle-aged man, had stayed awhile and led him to a quiet corner behind the pub, away from the crowd of onlookers.  He’d seemed unsympathetically dutiful, as if he thought Barry another idiot but would serve him well.  He helped Barry out of his wet clothes, draped him with one of those foil capes marathon runners wear at the end of the race, told him to keep moving and ordered a mediterranean looking barman to make tea.  What was he doing in Wales?

The third man immediately on the scene, he couldn’t remember who the third man was at all.  Nothing about him came to mind.

A siren had grown louder outside before stopping altogether.  A siren for me, Barry thought, that in itself was deeply unsettling.  They’d moved into the pub’s empty conservatory extension, a dining room, and sat down, Barry still trembling, disgusted and humiliated at all of this.  Another uniformed man entered with Keith, a boxy machine, and blankets.  Barry was swaddled further and hooked up to the bleeping machine via several antennas suckered to his body.  The line-graph looked regular enough and the medics appeared content.  The ungraceful man who thought Barry an idiot excused himself at this point and Barry thanked him profusely for everything.

Barry kept thanking everyone around him profusely for everything, and apologising, keen not to miss anybody, not even the mediterranean looking barman for his excellent neverending supply of tea.

Unsuckered from the machine, Barry went to a toilet to take off his jeans and swaddle himself in more blankets.  Keith had shouted in after him to check he hadn’t collapsed.  Barry was trying not to think too hard about the secondary drowning thing Keith explained where swallowed sea water retrospectively swamps the lungs.  He hadn’t swallowed any, had he?  Another mug of tea was forced into his hands as he exited the gents and was shepherded to the car park and into the van of the Sea Rescue people.

There were three, or four of them?  Did they need that many?  One had an aggressive style of care: you do NOT worry about wasting all our time!  This is what we’re here for.

He was seated down in the heat-blasted van behind Miriam, another of the sea rescue team.  Hi, I’m Miriam, said Miriam, a kind-faced, early middle-aged lady.  Hi Miriam, said Barry.  Lovely sunset isn’t it?  And it was, still blazing down over the sea, firing embers into the last whispy clouds.  Her sympathy was more traditional and they spoke amiably of London, having lived in similar areas.

Barry glanced at himself in the rear view mirror above Miriam’s head.  Pale, washed-out, stupid prick.

That was when Keith opened the door and shoved a thermometer in Barry’s ear.  Warming slowly, Barry agreed to climb into Keith’s Paramedic van and be taken to a local hospital for a once over.  They spoke of Keith’s career and his football-playing aspirations, his new hobby of Squash, which he’d become good at too.

After an initial check requiring more suckers and machines, the main two-minute check, courtesy of a young affable Doctor, took about three hours to arrive.  Wear armbands next time, was his reassuring advice.  By this time Barry was tired and hungry and really wanting to be home.  He vaguely wondered if he was being missed at all, it being unusual for him to be unreachable for such a long period of time.

Keith returned to ferry Barry back to his car on the pitch-black, ice-cold seafront.  The sky was densely starlit but the sea, mere yards away, skulked silent, black and invisible.

His car was frozen over by the subzero temperatures and seawater had killed the remote locking of his key, meaning the vehicle was only accessible through the passenger door.  Having shuffled over the handbrake and experienced a freezing blast under the hospital dress chilling to his undercarriage, he sat in the driver’s seat.

He really hoped the engine would start.

He turned the key in the ignition and, except lights on the dashboard, nothing happened.  He slowly headbutted the steering wheel.

It wasn’t the best of days.  But obviously it could have been much worse.  That could be used as a caveat for every bad stroke of luck forever now, he supposed.  At least he didn’t die that one Sunday afternoon…  How long would that last?

Barry plucked the breakdown rescue card from the windscreen holder and, still swaddled in two blankets and a loose hospital garment of the kind women give birth in, he gingerly padded back over to Keith’s warm van.  After summoning the rescue service using the Paramedic’s mobile phone, Keith asked if he’d told anyone, if anyone should know.  It made Barry consider his parents, the one phone number he did know off the top of his head.  If they had tried calling, it was possible his Mum could be nervous.

Hello Mum, sorry to call so late.

Oh hello – she said cheerily – how are you?

Oh, fine – he bunched the blankets around his shoulders and wriggled his chilly bare feet – you?

Yes, all well here.

Good good.  Um, just a really quick one, Mum, I’m browsing online looking for Christmas presents for Amy.  Any ideas?

No, it’s hard buying for a one-year-old isn’t it?  Well I’m going up to see them all next week and I was planning on talking to them about it then because we’ll…

Barry’s attention drifted off at this point but a sixth sense enabled him to inject interested sounds which suggested he was listening, before clicking back in when his mother eventually paused.

- Oh, ok, that’s fine.  I just wondered, Barry said, importing finality and closure into his tone.  Sure I’ll think of something.

He ended the call with a cheery promise to speak soon and placed the mobile on the driver’s arm-rest.  Thanks Keith.

Wouldn’t wanna play you at poker, said Keith.

The rescue van only took twenty minutes to arrive.  A burly thick-set man named Darren.  Barry told him they suspected a flat battery, but after hearing the long story Darren figured that the key’s waterlogged electronics were responsible.  After surgery involving dismantling, air-conditioning powered drying, scraping, tweaking – all of which Barry thought took considerable dexterity for someone who looked like a bull, like Peter Crouch having a good touch for a tall man – the engine woke.

From the backseat of the Paramedic van, Barry saw the lights of his car ignite and the silhouetted chunky outline of Darren raise two jubilant arms aloft like he’d scored a winning goal.  Keith made a small, impressed whooping sound, Barry nearly cried with relief.

He could go home.

depth

Dumbstruck by the play of dipping golden winter sun, clouds and waves

You crept in behind my back

Several captured images later I turned to leave the island

and saw what you’d done

what you’d begun to do.
Your current already slopped across the causeway, rising steadily

meaning my return would be wet


A short drive home in soggy pants would be all.


Still hurry now, you demanded

Casting your line for a confused urgent impulse

hooking it with aplomb


You weren’t that deep, you wouldn’t rise that far or fast, but get a move on

Wet shoes

Shins

Quickly now

Knees

Thighs

Just get across

Waist

So panicked I barely felt your temperature

Chest

What the fuck

Neck

Head

Incredulous, I swam


How had this happened?

Was this It?

So you were Death’s courier?

Please not yet, please not yet

I had more to offer, just wasn't sure what it was

Still


Winter-dressed legs and arms challenged your current

A hard long loud yell for help

You pressed and pushed me down:

splash

glob

deep breath

salt spat

“..on their way!” called from the shore

Adrenalin fought back: I dug and pushed and slapped

Small progress, toes flailing for a small edge of rock

Slipped by, gone again.

Land was close, I could beat you

Three specs growing larger, running down the beach

Again pointed tip-toes reached for rock

This time toes held, a stubbly slippery gradient met to the full surface of feet



Reintroduced me

affair ground

A long five months ago our Hammersmith pub conversation opened up with “How do you KNOW?”  or “can you ever know, that somebody is The One?”  Doesn’t it always degenerate, get tired and dull, don’t you always end up boring one another?

After which he’d crumbled.  He told me how he was having an affair with a girl in the office, who he was crazy about.  He explained how he was cheating on his wife of a year, which was horrible and hateful but he couldn’t help it, and how the other girl herself was also married.

Now, a long five months later he told how he’d allowed the affair to turn his life upside down.  A divorce was proceeding, although he said he wasn’t really reading the letters, and he’d not only moved in with the new woman, they also were moving back to her native America after a month travelling in Thailand over Christmas.

His ex-wife was heartbroken and had wanted reconciliation even after everything became known.  Her father had visited him at his workplace and tried to persuade him to try again, even speaking of sex and how such things can dwindle but men have ways of coping, other outlets.

My friend rejected this.  He liked the other girl.  He loved her in fact, and no longer loved the woman he’d married.  This was difficult for them to accept and he received hate email, both from her and from her sisters.

In a separate, dark twist his new partner’s husband died suddenly, overnight.  A verdict is still pending.

The original concealment of the affair from his wife was less forgivable, but the manner with which he followed his heart (I can find no less trite way of saying it), grasped a very painful nettle and dared to change his life; I found it peculiarly admirable.

We spoke briefly in the South Kensington pub, before his new partner arrived to join us, about fear and self-doubt, our shared concern of boring people eventually.

If you’re seeing someone younger with plenty of those exciting 20-something years ahead of them – years when they’ll do exciting new things, go to novel or exotic places and meet interesting cool people – how can you not worry that you won’t stand up?  You will appear jaded, lazy and uninteresting, old.  You will eventually bore.  It’s a risk, like everything is.  Like “How Do You Know?”  You don’t, you can’t.

She arrived in the South Kensington pub after about half an hour: pretty, blonde and slightly nervous of me (as he’d admitted to me beforehand that she was – not having met any of his friends before).  He’d been attracted by her quirky creative bent, her desire to make her own clothes and her practicality, the fact she wasn’t a girly girl.  None of that came across.

We spoke of the Interpol concert they were heading to from here, how I’d heard good reports and there was a favourable review in the newspaper.  From the half hour spent, my impression was positive.  She appeared like someone who’d over-lived for 25, had many things happen including the possibly premature first marriage.

I left the couple to head south of the river to my work function, pleased for them and their convictions – more his than hers? – perversely envious of their dramatic, romantic year, sad I might never see them again.

dangerous tides

Barry was stung with new waves of emotion as he carefully negotiated the car back into its space outside his flat.  Stunned relief, mainly; as well as gratitude and a lingering incomprehension.  He sat in the newly silent car for several seconds, air freezing around him.  He contemplated the past few hours and called himself lucky stupid, lucky fucking idiot, out loud.  And he breathed.

He’d had plenty of time to ponder alone in the single ward, waiting three hours for a two minute chat with the Doctor.  Yes he was fine now, yes he wanted to go home.  He had enough time to almost forget the afternoon completely, pawing through niche interest magazines and old newspaper supplements, hearing the raucous applause from the television in the waiting room next door as game show followed game show.  He had time to grow bored and tetchy at the long wait.  It’s best, for your own peace of mind as much as anything else, the Paramedic had told him.  His mind was tetchy when it should have been immensely grateful – which it was, but it still became tetchy again.

*

I could really die here, Barry had thought to himself as he thrashed around in the freezing sea, fully clothed, a large coat on and his camera still around his neck.  This could be it.  Time up.

His head went under for a moment as he prepared a heaving diagonal stroke towards land.  He recalled that handsome lead actor from the film he watched the evening before.  He’d played a wayward character whose life was belatedly showing signs of coming together when it was snuffed out.  Life does that, Barry supposed.  It’s uncaring about human self-regard or interruption.  It can end whenever.

Drowning though? he argued, pushing more water behind him and gasping for air, feeling with his toes for rock, land, anything beneath his feet.  Nothing.  Drowning: really?  That was a horrible way to go, traumatic and slow.

Barry stopped paddling for a moment and treaded water, took a deep breath and yelled for help as loudly as he could.  Hearing his own foghorn blare out tightened the terrifying grip of reality and he began swimming again.

Seconds passed, or minutes.  Who knew?

Faintly aware of a podcast still chirruping in his right ear, he heard a shout returned from land: “..on its way!”  That should give some cause for hope.  He unpopped the earplug and instantly came to terms with the probable death of his new iPod, BlackBerry and camera: beloved gadgets.  He'd trade them.

Was it payback for the disproportionate glee he took from that part of Rich Hall's comedy set a few days earlier?  He had satirised Irish news coverage, and particularly the headline "Cork Man Drowns".  Barry hadn't considered the plight of the man (apparently named Bob), or even wondered if it was comic fiction or not.  It hadn't mattered.

Barry switched from his favoured front crawl to a breast-stroke.  Parting the waves seemed more effective that way.  Should he take his coat off?  No time.  The current still swept across him, demanding.

So he worked.

Was he making any ground?

He must have been.

Anything beneath his feet?

Nothing.

He spat out cold salty water and wished he’d wake up.  This could NOT be happening.  Not to him.  Wake up, wake the fuck up.  It was all too real.

At no point had Barry considered turning around and going back, or even waiting on the island and calling a rescue boat for help.  It simply never occurred to him as an option.  He had imagined that he might have to wade a short distance across the rocky causeway which connected to the mainland, but the water would be no higher than his waist at most - and it wasn't THAT long a stretch to land, then he’d make the ten minute drive home in wet pants.  No massive deal.  He had been impelled forward by his nervous misguided momentum, blind panic and the lunatic strength of his conviction.

Until he was swimming against a reverse current.  Holy fucking cow, he was swimming, in all his clothes, a large coat, a camera round his neck, his iPod still playing.  How the hell had this happened?

This could really be how he was to die.




The light had been sharp and bright all afternoon, the sun dazzling off the ocean to give a not inconsiderable glowing warmth for the time of year.  A peculiar zen-like state had blanketed him as he sat on a rock an hour before on a different stretch of the bay, a gentle hangover from the night before slowly subsiding.  It had been an enjoyable evening with football team-mates he didn't know that well.  The echoing din of a nightclub often left him with an unusual acoustic clarity the next day.

Now in the sea, beating against waves, that blissful calm and peace appeared foreboding, a punctuation mark.

Was he making any ground?  Perhaps, and people, distant dots were racing down the rocky beach towards him now.  One with something, a leash of some kind.  But, hang on… there, there it was.  Like a high-rise suicide in reverse, he found rock beneath his toes.  Beautiful rock, and a more of it, toes to feet, more of it still.  The surface dipped suddenly and a rock thudded into his knee but he felt nothing, numbed to the pain.  He might not die!  Back to wading, wading.  The men were upon him, the leash thing now unnecessary.  Barry staggered bambi-like, up and out of the water.  Ocean slopped off the shoulders of his thick coat, his knees buckling under the weight.  He fell back down and wanted to stay lying, spent on the rock like a beached whale but a voice told him to get up, keep moving, he wasn’t safe yet.  The voice was right.  He rose again, accepting the props of two men either side of him, one of them the owner of the voice, and carried walking up and away, freezing and soaking head to toe.

A small crowd of thirty or so had gathered in the main pub for the nearby caravan park.  Mostly young, pale faces gawked at him and he half covered his own, humiliated by the attention, trembling and exhausted.  But breathing out, breathing out.  A siren grew louder.

an ice-cube tray

Ah, I thought, just before heading to the checkout, I wonder if they have any ice-cube trays?  Surely they must have, this supermarket is huge and has its own separate kitchen accessory department.  But maybe it’s not in there.
Here, I’ll just ask this..
“Excuse me?”
..young, really hairy and quite peculiar looking man.  He looked up from stacking a low shelf.
“Do you sell ice-cube trays?  You know, for.. making ice-cubes.”
“Oh yeah probably do you want me to come and show you where?”
“No no, just point me in the right direction.”
He pointed.
“Over that way?”
“Yes about aisle 38 are you sure you don’t want me to come and show you?” his teeth seemed to reverberate when he spoke.
“No no, I’m sure I’ll be fine thanks.”
He scared me a bit.
I pushed my trolley down to aisle 38, which wouldn’t be it.  Perhaps 40.  Yes, this looked more like it..  But where.  I trailed up and down an aisle of Tupperware.  I couldn’t see it.  There was another green uniformed man…
“Excuse me?”
This young man looked urgent and fraught and busy and redfaced.  He stopped all the same.
“Do you sell ice-cube trays here?  You know, for making ice-cubes in.”
“I don’t work in this bit.  They keep moving stuff everywhere.”
He went and walked off down an aisle which homed crockery and cutlery, rather than the one we were standing in, which seemed appeared most likely.  But what did I know?
“No,” he mumbled.  “They keep moving stuff around.  I don’t work in this section.”
“Dyou think you could find me someone who does work in this section?”
“Wait there.”
He scuttled away.  I wasn’t hopeful of ever seeing him again.  I hung out at the top of the Tupperware aisle with my trolley.  It was a crap aisle.  He didn’t come back.
I drifted downheartedly towards the adjacent clothes section.  Last try.  A middle-aged woman stood around but not at a checkout, looking spare.  She wore a darker T-shirt which signified that she belonged to the clothes section.
“Excuse me,” I asked, hope flailing.  “I don’t suppose you know where the ice-cube trays are kept?”
“Now,” she said.  “Are they a band?”
I took a breath.  Something inside me simmered, boiled, bloomed, ticked over.  I breathed out.
“No.  Doesn’t matter actually, thanks.”
I went to the checkout.

six people behind

There she was again.  About half a dozen people behind him in the passport queue, snaked back around the partition.  Had she noticed him?  Should he try and catch her eye?  He turned his eyes back to his book and shuffled forwards again, smiling at the old lady in front.  They had exchanged a few words when her husband was allowed out of the longer queue to pass through the empty gateway reserved for those with new electronic passports.  “Just make sure he doesn’t get on the wrong flight now,” he'd told the lady.  “It’s ok, I have his tickets.  He can't go anywhere,” she said.

Now he glanced back over his shoulder at her again, she was looking away.

“Maybe see you on the flight back,” she had said when the taxi dropped him off a week ago.  They’d shared a cab because no buses were forthcoming.  Her friend was going to take an earlier return flight, she’d said, so now she was travelling alone.  He didn’t find her attractive but she’d appeared clever and chatty a week ago, she was around his age, and he’d barely conversed with anyone for a week, not properly.

He shuffled forwards again, the old lady in front was beckoned to have her passport checked, before passing through to the gate.  He resigned the pretence of reading the heavy book, and waited.

For fifteen minutes he sat under a small television screen with his laptop, half watching football highlights, half checking his emails, surprised there was a free connection in the lounge next to the runway.

Realising he was still quite alone and the seats around him hadn't filled with other waiting passengers, he checked over his shoulder.  Fellow passengers were already queuing for the door, staff were tearing ticket stubs and people were slowly trickling out onto exposed concrete, towards the metal vessel.  Still the queue back into the lounge was bottle-necked, a mess of fifty or so people straggled back out.  Seats near the line were occupied by those apparently unfussed about the choice positions aboard the aircraft.  He had wanted a window seat for the return flight but this now seemed unlikely.  He slumped down onto a seat and waited for the clot of people to thin out.

She was sitting on a seat backing onto his.  “Oh, hello,” he said, genuinely surprised because he hadn't noticed her when he'd decided to sit.  “Hi!” she smiled, though she couldn’t have escaped if she’d wanted to.  She wore wooden jewellery – earrings and a necklace.  He didn’t know what he thought of it.  Ikea?

They exchanged the story of their week, fast-paced and generally positive.  He grew giddy with freely speaking to another person, aware of speaking unnecessarily fast, blurting.  He slowed and let her speak.  He noticed she was reading a chunky serious book he’d also read and would comment on, if time and circumstance allowed.

They kept chatting: the holiday, areas of the island, walking, the day when it rained, tourism, travel, vehicles, motorbikes, driving.  This took them through the door and out onto the runway where the plane waited.  They took the rear staircase into the aircraft, had their ticket stubs checked a final time and looked for seats in the mostly full plane.  There weren’t two together anywhere, even across an aisle.  She took an aisle seat; he found a window seat further down with extra leg room, sandwiched between an emergency exit and an old couple.

*

The aircraft came to a halt at its destination terminal and the aisle seated passengers lumbered out first, unlatching the overhead compartments to withdraw their hand luggage.  They stood waiting while the window-seated sat waiting, and the middle-seated hovered half up, half down, waiting.

He saw her standing waiting further back.  They exchanged brave, tired smiles.

During the flight he’d considered giving her a business card.  Her line of work wasn’t far removed from his.  He had clients like her employers.  He had no other ulterior motives, although if she did, would he be averse..?  She was bright and interesting.  He often wondered if he could convince himself to do that, compromise on physical attraction, block it out and pretend it wasn’t an issue if there wasn't any, as long as someone, one reasonable enough person liked him.  If he could go through the motions because it was better than continued, protracted, maddening solitariness.  Perhaps he could do it, for a while.

Finally at the aisle, he turned to collect his bulky hand luggage from the overhead locker.  Just out of grasp, it was slid in his direction by a fellow passenger: the nervous looking young man who he’d almost dropped the bag on when hoisting it into the locker before take-off.  He’d put an apologetic hand on his shoulder and said that he thought he’d distract him from any fear of flying.  People around them had laughed.  There was a warm buzz.  He felt briefly liked.

Now standing in the aisle with his bag, he realised that he was about half a dozen people in front of her again.  Would he stop somewhere and give her his card, mention business, 'if your employer needs..?'  He paced down the aircraft, down the steps, across the new exposed concrete, into a door and on down the long connecting corridors.  He felt free and fast, unshackled by too much trailing hand luggage, children, babies or companions to keep pace with.  Finally he was halted by the final passport control.

It wasn’t long before she joined the same queue, snaked about half a dozen people behind.  Another exchange of tossed eyebrows; this whole passport nonsense eh?

He was summoned, boredly checked and waved through.

Having no other luggage to arrive on the carousels, there was nothing stopping him from walking out and away.  But he paused, waited to see if she’d enter the baggage area soon.  She wasn’t that far behind, after all, only six people or so.  He waited for ten more seconds, gave up and passed under the Nothing To Declare sign.

getting away

I solemnly kicked the tyre one last time and told it not to be flat when I returned.  It rested snug and full on the gravelly airport car park, but at half past eleven the following Monday night I did not want to be calling roadside rescue.  On discovering the flat tyre, a neighbour had loaned a fancy electric pump, I had pumped the tyre, and despite parking it a short limp away from the closest garage overnight, pumped it had stayed.  By not reporting the previous evening’s finding to a garage, it was a possibility I was gambling with and an outcome for which I should be prepared.

In the litany of queues which led to the aircraft, in front of me was an unnecessarily urgent, twitchy woman, the air of spinster about her, but with a man her age; and an elegant, attractive, solo-travelling woman was at my rear.  I knew which I preferred to be sitting next to, and which not.

As it turned out, it was neither.  By the time I boarded the sleasyjet budget flight, only aisle seats remained.  I plonked myself next to an affluent looking couple and, specifically, a man with a boastfully loud voice and proud collar and tie.  I was sure to give him no encouragement at all to speak to me, nodding a polite hello before opening a book.

The book was David Mitchell’s latest, highly rated, booker nominated effort.  Only a short way in, I was struggling and disappointed with it.  Little was going in.  Half way through the flight I swapped it with Tom Perrotta’s debut (awful cover), which I’d picked up cheaply a couple of months earlier.  As predicted, it was an easier read.

A sense of traveling inside a flying television advert was transmitted through most of the journey; that relentless cajoling of Stewards and Stewardesses to buy unnecessary and overpriced items.  I’d never heard the term ‘ad-funded’ applied to flights, but saw no reason why it wasn’t.  It seemed equally as applicable here as everywhere else.  I wanted them all to leave me alone, yet there were folk like the affluent, proud but airy couple next to me who appeared to buy almost every time.  Drinks, snacks, lottery tickets.  “You’ll buy anything, won’t you?” I cheerfully commented to my neighbour at one point.  Not sure he was too pleased.

The other surprising source of amusement was a generally well behaved eighteen month old.  Confident, loved an audience, did little short of marching up and down the aisle towards the end, introducing herself and waiting to be cooed at – which she predictably was.  I saw her father donate her mother his iPhone across the aisle, and attempt to entertain her with.. photographs (photographs?) – apparently unaware of the glut of iPhone applications which cater to tots.  I donated my iPod, pointing out the Wheels On The Bus app.  This was gratefully accepted and kept the infant entertained for a good half an hour.  Further tips were given to mother and father when the plane came to a halt.

My hefty sports holdall had survived the crate size test without too much of a squeeze at departure, so had been allowed aboard as hand luggage, much to the surprise of my neighbour when I swapped Mitchell for Perrotta.  “However did you get that on as hand luggage?  It’s massive!”

This allowed me what would’ve been a quicker exit, had it not been for my need to buy a plug adapter, forgotten twice earlier in the day, and the need to rehydrate – having spurned all offers of heinously priced sleasydrinks.

Once this was done I exited the building and broached a hazy, sticky evening.  No buses or commercial bus stops were quickly evident.  I saw the two plain girls who’d been sitting around me on the plane inspecting a solitary signpost.  “Have we figured it out yet then?” I asked as I approached.  They turned round, smiling and human.  One of them was half Portuguese so spoke the lingo.  She also dressed like an old lady, a cardigan done up to the neck.  We agreed to share a cab into town.  During the twenty-minute ride I chatted with the other one in the back, a London born software engineer.  Smart, well-travelled, interesting, not quite as plain as her friend.  There was the unspoken potential of swapping details and meeting up while we were both in the area, and I was clearly alone.  I considered offering a card but didn’t.  We settled up the fare at a narrow old street which the cab driver assured me led to my hotel.  “Maybe we’ll see you on the flight back!” one of them said.  I nodded maybe, waved and clunked the door shut, before embarking on yet another frantic inventory-check of pockets.  I had everything, yes, didn’t I?  Yes.  I had everything.  They drove on.

The cab driver was correct; it was an easy, short walk.  I was greeted by a plump, professional native receptionist with huge breasts and a low cut top.  All that quite necessary leaning over the desk at forms was rather traumatising, the dark lolloping parting staring me out.  Paperwork completed with the minimum of fuss, she handed me a key to Room 101.  I knew a few people who might put me there.

Room 101 turned out to be rather better than just one room of bad, wrong things cast into oblivion for all of time.  A large, high-ceilinged, ensuite bedroom adjoined a separate kitchen and living space, enabling me to cook from my paltry canon of meals and keep a reasonable amount of food.  This cheered me, although this was tempered by finding that the power-points failed to match the adapter I’d bought in the airport.

However, that provided the next exchange of note.  After a small grocery shop at a nearby supermarket I asked the checkout girl who was dutifully packing my bags for me.  A short girl with a pretty cherub’s face, she somehow immediately knew my nationality and spoke to me in perfect English.  I explained the plug dilemma and she wanted to help so much I was almost compelled to hug her.  I said that I’d looked in the appropriate aisle but I didn’t see one, so not to worry.  She seemed sure there were and, as there were no other customers, we walked back over.  She was crestfallen to find there were none.  I was sad and touched that she was so sad for me and I wanted to take her home.  The customer service difference compared to back home bludgeoned me over the head with a baseball bat.

Zigzagging back through the muggy damp, hue-moistened streets to my apartment, I was stopped.  “Eh, Amigo,” the handsome young guy of a handsome young couple said to me, before opening a map to consult.  “Ai! Ingles, desculpe!” I shook my head, he tutted and shook his; his cute girlfriend smiled and we walked our separate ways, me floating lightly on the perverse thrill of being taken for a local here of all places, where most people are tanned and beautiful.

Steamed open

He pushed the door open and the conversation inside ceased, he became an interruption.  He pulled the door closed behind him and sat down, his swimming shorts squeltching against the marble.  Opposite him was a large, smoothly bronzed man, and along the stone bench was the middle-aged woman, her legs stretched out in front of her.

After several seconds’ silence, she resumed.

“So I only come here on Tuesdays and Thursdays usually because it’s much quieter,” she told her original company.  “At the weekend there are so many children.”

She spoke in clipped, Slavic tones.  The man nodded his agreement, not caring one way or the other, not appearing hugely keen on having the conversation at all.

“So many children,” she confirmed, her distaste of children clear enough.  “But now it is nice and quiet.”

The man nodded.

It wasn’t THAT quiet, the younger man thought.  He’d been on weekend evenings when it had been quieter than this.

“Do you work every day?” she asked the man

“No, I don’t work,” he said in softly spoken Welsh tones, wanting to leave it at that.  But he soon realised that she wouldn’t.  She would pepper him with questions for as long as he sat there, or twitter away to anyone who’d listen.

“Oh.”

“Took early retirement last year at 50,” he conceded.  The man did not look 50 years of age.  Bronzed, smooth - was it possible to reach fifty and still be so hairless? the younger man wondered.  He must wax.  Muscular too, the peak of physical fitness, early retirement at 50, financially secure.  The younger man opposite him steamed enviously.

“The army?” she guessed, almost childishly, “or a builder?  Down in the mines?”  She was enjoying herself, flattering him with macho professions.

“Steelworks,” he said.  “They were laying lots of people off you know, youngsters coming through.  I volunteered because I had a private pension.

“Oh, perhaps one day some easy job will come up?”

“No, I don’t want to work.  Moving abroad soon.”

“Oh yes?  To where?  To Spain?” she guessed at random, wanting to get something right.

“Bulgaria.”

“Bulgaria?”

The unexpected country halted the flow of her questions.

“I am from Russia originally and so we don’t trust the former.. you know,” she trailed off.  “We think they will look to cheat us or..”

Both men smiled at her loyalty and old-fashioned caution.  The younger man thought of breaking his silence by saying something comparable about being an Englishman in Wales, but didn’t.

“You are going to buy a house there?” she asked, apparently recovered.

“Bought one.”

“Oh, so you and your wife will settle there now, yes?”

He smiled and mumbled about a new life, never qualifying who the ‘we’ was supposed to refer to.  The younger man wondered at this clean-cut man’s sexuality for a second, the rough and tumble of steel worker life.  For all his size and obvious strength, there was a coy softness about him.  Men who looked like this usually had booming voices that travelled effortlessly, natural mannerisms which could fill a stage.

“That's enough in here for me, I think,” he said.  He stood up and, looking mildly harassed, left the steam room.

Minor grievances / Galgutted

Scanning the library shelves I kept repeating the names of the three authors in my head: Dunmore, Galgut, Chalkas (?) – if that’s how you say / spell it.  I held little hope for any of them, given their contemporariness and likely popularity.  However, as I reversed through the Gs, then spun around to face the GAs, I saw the Galgut.

The day before I’d taken a long, scenic, glorious walk through rolling countryside and listened to many podcasts along the way, mostly cultural reviews of film, music and books.  One had passingly discussed this booker shortlisted title, In A Strange Room, by Damon Galgut.  I had heard it discussed in podcasts before.  It appealed: a dreamy sounding semi-autobiographical tale of three separate but interconnected journeys, a slim book of the kind I might stupidly aspire to write.

There it was.  I took a sharp intake of breath and pulled it from the shelf – brand new but with that uncomfortable protective seal which all library books wear, like a disagreeable plastic sheet on an infant’s bed.  As if conscious that the book could easily be spotted in my grasp and confiscated from me, I held it low to my thigh and made for one of the large windows across the large open space, then flopped down on a comfortable armchair, already sated by my smug glory.

“Memories come back of other places he has waited in, departure halls of airports, bus-stations, lonely kerbsides in the heat, and in all of them there is an identical strain of melancholy summed up in a few transitory details…  From this particular place he will retain the vision of a cracked brick wall growing hotter and hotter in the sun.”

“…a sort of primal nervousness descends.  But this is also one of the most compelling elements in travel, the feeling of dread underneath everything, it makes sensations heightened and acute, the world is charged with a power it doesn’t have in ordinary life.”

Damon Galgut, In A Strange Room

Shit, I thought, not quite as eloquently as the book.  This was good.  I suddenly felt compelled to devour the whole book in one sitting, however long it took, then I quickly realised I couldn’t.  Guilt, inboxes and paying duties would call.

I read 33 pages, saw another book en route to the automated machine – DBC Pierre’s latest – then tried to take them out.  The machine rejected the books and ordered me to take them to a manned desk.  My gut squirmed with irrationally strong fear that the book would be wrenched from me.  “No, can’t let you have this one," the bald, blank man told me, indicating the Galgut.  "It’s been reserved by someone else.”

It shouldn’t have been on the bloody shelf in the first place then, SHOULD IT? – I didn’t say.  Because what was the point?  Just take it.  Accept another slap.

These things have been snowballing of late: minor grievances which in and of themselves are just that: small irritations.  Some are marginally larger than others irritations, but all are essentially inconsequential.  The second DVD rental in a short space of time which was faulty, ruining an long-anticipated pleasure; a bicycle too broken to justify the expense of fixing; a temperamental iPod; confusingly unclear directions during the walk; a weak handbrake which made hill parking unwise; slow drying laundry; the biting misery of the lonely which must be concealed for the sake of coolness and self-pride, but which never gets easier.

You have to be realistic and rational in the face of these things, however minor, significant or stupidly allegorical they can appear: this route doesn’t make any bloody sense!  Woah, deep man.  Fuck off, brain.  And there are no direct correlations here.  Finding the freezer door open can invoke preposterous anger.  Be strong, keep going, take on the next week, see if anything different happens.

I sulked out of the library and walked a short distance up the road to purchase the book from the nearest Waterstones book shop.  I wanted to read all of it now I’d bitten a decent chunk off.  I hadn’t wanted to buy or own it, but now I’d started, I would.  Fuck the library bastards.

Taking it from the new shelf I found my deeply programmed frugality offended at paying full price for such a thin book, the small thrill of its newness and the lack of a protective plastic cover almost non-existent.  (Another thing).  I paid a smiley young shop assistant with a grudging smile, instantly regretting paying by card as soon as I'd entered it in the machine.  I had enough cash on me.  (Another thing).

Why was I being such a miserable bitter dick?  I was my father again.  Like the day before when I was mentally composing the letter of complaint to the author of those terrible directions.  I hated it when that happened.

I left the bookshop and walked past a church, a lone woman crying under its arch.  She could’ve lost a loved one or received bad news about her health.  What were my problems compared to these grown up ones; serious ones which could form plot-lines in hospital dramas and Eastenders?  Nothing at all.  Comedic ones which might make Adrian Mole or The Inbetweeners.

Queuing in Starbucks I made a silly face at an infant who was staring at me from a nearby table, then I made that pu-pu sound which tots in their teen months seem to be engaged by.  A toddler equivalent of the kissing noise which alerts cats.  This one smiled even more widely at the noise and his two female guardians laughed along.  Three seconds was enough of that.  I smiled weakly at the adults, didn’t remove my headphones and faced ahead again, remembering I was supposed to be annoyed and embattled and a dick.  I shuffled forwards, looked gravely at a smug plump banana muffin, all full of itself, and waited.

end of days

In an extraordinary move intended to ease recessionary burden and tackle binge drinking, the coalition government is set to abolish the traditional sequence of days of the week.

Less ability to organise meetings and generally plan our lives, as well as an uncertainty about being able to tackle the professional effects of getting drunk, will alleviate numerous recessionary tensions, according to the proposal document.

“Everyone knows Britain would be better if we all just chilled out a bit” said David Cameron, through a plume of dense, sickly smoke.  “This move, while we appreciate its radical nature, will be welcomed by people.  Nobody really LIKES planning things after all.  Making lists, yes.  Planning, no.  Knowing that Monday will follow Sunday, and Tuesday will follow that, those balling Sunday night butterflies: all gone.  The knowledge of predictable Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday – poof! Vanished.

“Finely scheduled meetings and events are a bore.  If we wake up without the certainty of knowing what day of the week it is, then we must simply all just roll with it.  If we find the midnight draw has revealed it’s a Sunday, stay in bed.  If it’s Thursday the 14^th – then get out and move because you’d orchestrated a seminar for this date, although you didn’t know when it would be.  There’s the new excitement there, the unpredictability.  Consider this a reinjection and reinvigoration of edgy British life through simply not knowing.”

Nick Clegg managed to stifle his previously uncontrollable giggles to echo the sentiments, before going on to add: “We all know routine is dull.  Days of the week are outdated now and have been for a long time.  We need rather more spontaneity in our otherwise tepid lives today and these plans will deliver that.  Sure, it’ll take a short time to adjust and the markets might go a little wobbly for a few days.  But hey: it’ll be fun, guys, you know?  Just go with us on this one.”

Through the mill

Glancing at his pint glass across the table from mine, I noticed the liquid level was an inch further down and remembered his gulping, intimidating yet nonchalant drinking pace.  Beer was like water to him and appeared to the similar affect.

One to one, man to man, it’s difficult to NOT keep pace; you just have to.  I would be drunk before too long.

I remembered his pace from that small Croatian island three years ago when I was on the cusp of my move to London.  A group of us had been thrown together and got on well, unknowable pledges to keep in touch had been made at the end of the week, Facebook friend requests had subsequently been accepted, occasional messages, but no more than that.  Then a week into my new term in Cardiff we bumped into each other in the street, met up for lunch, and now beer.  Copious, free-flowing, fast-paced beer.

I could reign it in though.  First game of the season tomorrow, after all.  Didn’t want to miss that, not after playing myself into the starting line-up thanks to a couple of passable pre-season performances.  Wouldn’t mind seeing the England qualifier too.

Another?
No need to feel the obligation of watching England really.  Not after the summer.
Go on then.

They were having no discernible affect on him at all.  Whereas I was feeling drunk and wobbly.  He was taking more toilet breaks more than me.  Perhaps that helped.  Neither of us had eaten.  We’d sat outside the trendy bar in the street since about five o clock, watched the sun affably fade and the evening rise, the cackling leering weekend Cardiff emerge.

We got on well and shared similar interests: books, music, outdoorsyness, occupations.  He was a proper valleys boy, a couple of years older and about a foot shorter.  Walking next to him felt awkward, as if I was patronising him by being there.  Daresay he was used to it.

A colleague of his walked past the bar and joined us.  I teased her, possibly flirted, drunk: infected by Cardiff’s cackling leer?  She failed to conceal a smile, said she didn’t like me and bought us a drink; the last one as it turned out.  Rum and coke.  I was done with San Miguel after more pints than I could remember.  They had to get trains back to their valleys.  I couldn’t drink anymore and could now get home for the football highlights.

Jermain Defoe had already notched his first of three when I arrived back.  Fuck me, I was really drunk.  I drank lots of water, which made it worse: stirring an unsettled stomach.

Today saw the worse hangover I’ve experienced in years.  My head has pounded relentlessly, I vomited until there was nothing there, just stomach lining, bile and tears, I spat blood at one point and had brief fleeting fears.  I text messaged an apology for my absence to the football manager, explaining it as some sort of food poisoning.  Sorry.  I’d really wanted to play too.

Instead I slept, more than I have slept in any single day in recent memory, mostly in bed, one hour on the sofa after Football Focus.  It came in wave after sickening wave, just when the worst seemed beaten, complemented by shivers and shakes and fever and cold.  Movement induced nausea and further horrible, exhausting wretches.  Sipping water was pointless, reintroducing itself with mulchy interest inside minutes.  I slept more.  There was no other answer.

Around five o clock, twenty four hours after we had met the previous day, I awoke again.  There was an absence I was emotionally grateful for.  The squeezing and pulling at my stomach had weakened, I could move my body without wanting to hurl.  Could I sip water and..?  More gurgling and clanking, but no cold sweats and nausea which heralded those intense contractions and that gravity-defying rush.

A carefully devoured cup of tea and slice of buttered toast was heavenly.  Each crumb and drop savoured like it was the first thing I’d eaten anything for months.  Would it go down and stay down?

I waited.  Things gurgled and processed.  No sweating or nausea or horrid expectation.

Yes, it stayed down.  Now I was confident I would pull through and this traumatising ordeal would be over.

I stank.

Fallible Friends

My oldest friends and the ones I’d like to consider my best friends have always reliably disappointed me.  I get burned so frequently it’s bewildering and, at risk of sounding unnecessarily soppy, upsetting.

One of my earliest memories of this was aged fourteen or fifteen, being dropped by a parent at the cinema of a small town where we’d agreed to meet, only to discover that plans had changed but I wasn’t informed.  They weren’t there.  There were no mobile phones.

I went to see the film anyway, the first of many cinema screenings I would see alone.  At the end of Congo, a largely unmemorable film about a mountain Gorilla, I cried buckets.

There was the time not long after when I was dropped outside the house of a friend.  A big party was on, these parties had developed cult status, the host had a freer leash than most of us.  He was allowed to smoke at home.  I had finally been invited to one of these parties.  I had ARRIVED.  I found the house completely empty.  I was suddenly alone in a small countryside hamlet I didn’t know.  I walked for miles to find a phonebox.

I’m the last informed, the one people forget or don’t bother to tell.  Of course I can speculate (like you can), but I’ve never understood why.

They remain my oldest friends, but they’re inclined to do this even now I’m now back in the same city as several of them, a short walk away.  And I knew they would be.  Old friendships have been renewed.  I’ve been for drinks with a couple since returning; one has visited my new place: everything done at my instigation.  It was the latter guest’s birthday on Sunday and they all went for a pub dinner, another friend informed me by email.

“If you are offended at not being asked, dont be,” my friend’s email instructed.  “He barely wanted to have that and didnt invite anyone else either cos he's not terribly fussed on his birthday.”

I did practically nothing at the weekend and had asked if one of the group fancied meeting up for a pint, only to receive a belated ‘too busy sorting for holiday’ reply.

You can do little more than accept it, raise an eyebrow, curl a lower lip, shrug.  Given my hopelessness with females, I’m not unfamiliar with borderline excessive inward-looking, what-the-FUCK-is-wrong-with-me? analysis.  But this sort of thing doesn’t exactly help to plump up the ego either.  It gets really bloody cold out here.

Dead Dog

Klinsmann had been going downhill for a while.  He was getting slower on rare walks, which were shorter than ever, and limped gingerly when he rose after a sleep.  Cocking his leg looked like it took too much effort and he’d recently taken to squatting.  They knew there was a lump.  It was just about how big, how fast.  Now he’d begun yelping and whining when he moved up and down steps.

Graham knew it was probably curtains.

In the hallway he crouched down and looked Klinsmann in those big soppy eyes.  Face-to-face with his reliable old friend, Graham held Klinsmann’s head, tugged at his sad drooping jowls before scratching behind both his ears.  The Labrador closed his eyes, enjoying the soothing nails of his master like he’d enjoyed them hundreds of times before.  Graham stopped scratching; the dog opened his eyes and looked at him.  What?

Klinsmann slunk out onto the driveway and looked at the car.  Leaping into the back of the car had long been out of the question.  Do we have to? his face asked Graham.   Afraid so pal, Graham leaned down and took the dog in his arms, lifted him up and onto an old rug which lay across the floor of the boot.  He felt Klinsmann wince and tighten before whining as he touched down onto the rug.

Sssshhh.  Easy now.

Graham had bought the young puppy when he was on the cusp of giving up.  As much as he tried, other people still didn’t seem to work for him.  Or he didn’t work for other people.  Maybe both.  Graham worked alone from a small converted office room of his house.  Always of modest ambition, he didn’t mind his work itself.  But he was growing sick and tired of feeling sick and tired, and bored and lonely, and not having conversations with anyone for days on end, sometimes weeks; of barely having any relationships at all.  He pretended it was all fine to anyone he did speak to, of course, because that’s what you do.  Saying anything else scared people and made him sound like a self-obsessed idiot.  If ever he did say anything, they gave empty platitudes and he nodded and shrugged.  It was all rather pointless, so he stopped doing it after a certain age.

Having been raised around them, Graham always liked dogs and often entertained the idea of keeping one.  The idea wasn't one which could be realised while he rented properties, but after buying his first place – yet  another new start in another part of town which would surely herald new things (what those ‘things’ were exactly, he wasn’t sure) – getting a dog was a realistic option.   It was a greener part of town too, with easy access to other parts of the country.  Walking would be good for both of them.

Conversely, he took up light smoking around the same time, despite never smoking before in his life.  Once he got the hang of it, the breathing and taking it in properly, it was enjoyable, a sensation like no other.  There would be no global disaster if it sped up his time to expiry.

Like the smoking, Klinsmann made him calmer, less anxious.  That was, once the frenetic puppy years and misbehaviour were done with.  He became a handsome, fit and noble looking young dog; people said they complimented each other well.  They looked at them both, admiring the affable dog and pretending not to glance over Graham with that mixture of pity and sympathy.  They thought that by now he would have found a..  Perhaps there was something wrong with him.  But maybe the dog would help with.. you know? some had suggested.

Over their thirteen and a half years together, there were a couple of possibilities which withered and faded as quickly and predictably as a struck match, nothing which Graham invested much meaning in.  His pessimism didn’t stop him from trying or hoping, but maybe it still shone through somehow, or he continued to exude whatever it was that consistently repelled.  Klinsmann and tobacco became effective crutches.



The dog was good company too, a trusty dependable and dependent friend who could offer genuine affection of some kind, as well as a physical presence, from a buoyant puppy to a slow old dog.  The blonde blot on the floor plodded from room to room towards the end, grumbling and groaning in search of sunbeams which never stayed in the same bloody place.  He only became human.

*

Graham cut the car engine in the tight car part of the surgery and looked glumly ahead at the brick wall, concentrating on his breathing, not losing it too soon.  A glance in the rear mirror showed no excitable golden crown of Klinsmann's head.  He didn't care where they were, or he already knew.  The dog recoiled when Graham first tried to scoop him out of the boot, his eyes large and doey, his ears low and defeated.  Touching the cement, his rear legs bent and he expelled a small trickle of piss.  He squatted and gained some command of the flow.  They stood in the car park under an overcast, drizzling sky, watching the unusually luminous liquid running down the slope of the car park.  Many minutes had been spent over the last thirteen and a half years waiting for Klinsmann to piss.  Together they hobbled slowly into the surgery, Graham swallowing hard.

The Labrador’s hind legs buckled accommodatingly when Graham deposited him on the examination table.  Klinsmann flinched and tightened as the Vet inspected regions where he wasn’t used to being touched.  He was simply too exhausted to growl, although Graham could sense that he wanted to.  Ssh now, Graham smoothed his velvety ears, the fur there not as coarse as it had grown elsewhere.

The tumour had indeed grown, the Vet confirmed.  Can’t expect it to get better I’m afraid.  In pain now, aren't you?  Graham nodded too, his eyes filling in direct correlation with the horrid, inexorable direction of the conversation.  His hand didn’t leave brave Klinsmann’s head.

The Vet delicately inserted a needle into Klinsmann’s rear left thigh, and pressed home the lethal fluid.  Off you go boy.  Thanks, Graham whispered, gently cradling the dog’s head in his hands.  Klinsmann's chest stopped rising and falling, no air came from his nostrils, the Vet walked across to the other side of the room.  Graham wept silently, bent over his dead dog.  When he finally stood up straight, wiping his stinging eyes, the Vet looked at him from a table where he was feigning attendance to paperwork.  Seeing this kind of thing became tiring.  He looked at Graham, level and sober.  I’m sorry.  For the best.  Do you want to take him or..?  We can look after him here, if you..?  Miriam at reception can sort out the details.

Graham hadn’t thought about that.  He had nowhere to really.  Not in his small, untended garden where nothing grew.  He remembered digging graves for the dogs of his childhood: the mud sweat and tears.  What then?  Was it really worth..?  It was just the body of a dead dog now, after all.  Graham looked down at the perfectly still Labrador once more and kissed the top of his head.  Then he stroked him one last time, from his spongy nose, over his skull, neck, bobbles of spine and down to the tip of his tail, which he gripped in the fist of his right hand.  Bye lad.

Graham swallowed again, feeling his cheeks tearstained and grubby but not caring.  He took a handful of tissues from a tactfully positioned box, wiped his cheeks and blew his nose.  He turned around, thanked the Vet and accepted the forms he was proffering, before walking out of the room.  The lady at reception accepted the forms and offered him those sympathetic, pitying looks he was used to receiving and she was used to giving out.  Punchdrunk, he unthinkingly signed his name, gave a bank card and entered his pin number.

The house was empty when he stepped back inside the front door.  No fond, doddery old boy welcome, no other movements, no presence, no groaning or sly blipping farts.  Only stillness and ticking.  A faint waft of him – perhaps not as faint for visitors, he was used to it; patches of moulted hair which needed hoovering, his empty basket, that picture of him on that Welsh mountainside looking all regal, pretending he was Lassie.

Travelly twaddle

Apropos of nothing, here's another 24 hours from last summer's South Africa notes.  It grazes issues of drinking, irritation with other tourists, masculinity and contemporary South African racism..

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Yesterday morning Paul ferried us from our modest house down to the guest lodge where we were charged with presenting camera-trap images to imminently departing guests: an airline pilot and a doctor. Both were decent seeming folk who were probably suffering little personal impact of the recession.  An uncomfortable bumpy ride in the back of a jeep later, the seated areas filled with guests and Stella, and we were out of the conservancy where the guests had deposited their hire car.  We bid them goodbye and safe onward journey before continuing ourselves into the town.

In a small blocky house within a small blocky suburb Stella and I received a presentation from The Snake Man, an expert in reptiles who keeps roughly a score of wild, deadly poisonous snakes in his house.  These included an apparently housetrained Black Mamba which he had reared from an egg, and one which roamed loose in the house – the deadliest of them all, but entirely tame.  Or so he assured us, waving his fingers and poking around the sinister smile of the snake.  Not massively fussed on taking the trip, I was a little bored throughout, even though it lasted only an hour.  Stella was characteristically enthused, voraciously taking notes for improbable future reference back at her school in Botswana.  She remains tiringly smackable.

This was underlined again afterwards. Martin and Paul had driven on after leaving us with The Snake Man, and headed off to collect Martin’s brother, Gavin, who had spent the previous month nocturnally tracking wild dogs via webcams.  Their three hour round trip gave Stella and I plenty of time to kill in the small town.  Hopefully no industrial riots would pass through the town, like the week earlier.

The khaki uniformed Snake Man dropped us in the smaller of the two main shopping centres.  Stella and I went first to an American themed diner for a coffee and stunted chat, then visited an internet café a few doors down.  My inboxes were again devoid of interest or hope.  We then we headed to the larger shopping centre, five minutes and a couple of blocks away, to mill around the Spar supermarket and buy a few items.  I walked too fast for Stella.  As usual, I asked if the pace was ok and she wheezed yes, fine, cough-splutter, she always walks this fast. Only briefly did I succeed in losing her.  For the remainder of our dead time we spent a little too long in the garden of a coffee shop, reading paperback novels, all possible conversation long since exhausted.

A couple of hours later the horrible Land Rover, now containing Paul, Martin and Martin’s brother Gavin, pulled into Spar car park to collect us.  From there we were transported to a bikers’ bar, where Martin, Gavin and I alighted, and where we spent a handful of hours and several beers, enjoying the change of scenery, if not the density of burly bikers and leather.

Gavin was nineteen and dopey in the style of a less developed Joaquin Phoenix.  Pale through his recent nocturnal work, he had a large, effortlessly well-conditioned frame and sprigs of hair sprouting from his chin in a desperately try-hard attempt at a goatee.  He had little of interest to say and a not particularly compelling style in which to say it.  Reunited, the brothers changed the unrealised dynamic Martin and I had developed.  Their conversations were immature and rather boring, depending much on well-worn Cardiffian phrases such as “Aeyy,” together with a clenched fist of buoyance meant to indicate that something is good.

The sun dipped, a small handful of females were surreptitiously ogled for little reason other than they were female.  One barmaid bore a passing resemblance to Angie from Eastenders in looks and style.  We’d been trapped in the secluded conservancy valley much too long.  The bar’s music was predictable modern rock while a home camera clip show played on a loop, interspersed with local advertisements for mechanical services.

Martin’s phone rang and we were beckoned outside and back into the Land Rover where Paul had come to collect us with his young friend around Mart’s age.  We headed 4 kilometres out of town to a farm, stopping once en route at an off licence for further alcohol supplies.

A slippery wet dog tongue greeted my ankle as I put my foot down on the gravel of the farm’s drive.  The rest of the dog appeared equally good-natured, and led us indoors.  A main farmhouse building, it soon became clear, was a part-renovated barn that only revealed itself fully the further into the building you went.  Immediately inside the front door was a homely kitchen and lounge, where the young chap’s parents sat watching the rugby on a handsomely sized television.  The whole place wore the look of a long-term project subjected to sporadic bouts of effort and money.

Paul set about making a large saucepan of chicken curry and rice while his young friend led us further into the building to show off his room and a genuinely impressive set of speakers.  Corrugated iron roofing and incomplete brick walls surprisingly didn’t detract everything from the comfy homeyness.

We sat in his room drinking beer, admiring his photographs, an ex-girlfriend in a frame and on his computer.  He was a good looking young guy who looked like he might have done better, yet he was still clearly hung up on her.  We talked of regular young man things: sport, music, girls.  A couple more of his friends arrived and more beers were drunk.  I was feeling their effect by now and was well ready for the food when Paul began scooping out dishes of curry.

We ate hungrily, watching assorted sport on the man-of-the-family’s cable channel.  There was considerable banter about fighting and the danger of trouble down at the bar we had just left and would shortly visit again.  Martin and Gavin, apparently seasoned fighters trained by their father, gave typical Cardiff bravado.  I sat quietly, not fussed enough about the potential confrontation not to go back to the pub, wondering how much of it was masculine bullshit.

Still struggling to correct his nocturnal body clock, Gavin passed out in our new friend’s bed.  Paul and the parents remained when the rest of us clambered into and onto the back of another Jeep, before speeding coldly through the night back into town.  There was never any hint of trouble or violence.  More drinks were drunk, locals were met, girls were admired – only a handful spoken to, all were aloof.  It became fairly busy with well age-mixed clientele yet a gender disparity weighing heavily on the side of males.

Obviously there were no black people: customers or staff, the apartheid in bars seemed as strong as ever. Casually flippant racism throughout the young was still rife too, and the use of “Kaffa” quite common, even by the otherwise genial Paul.  African black people from the area were considered a race apart, different from any other sort of black person, cleanly pigeonholed, bracketed and dismissed.  “They don’t help themselves,” was a frequently used allegation when we passed them at roadsides.  It wasn’t unlike the attitude towards Baboons.

Paul returned to the bar to join us and act as our taxi later on.  His ever-present Khaki uniform was covered by a plain fleece top and he sat with us drinking coke, looking bored and sober.  The unremarkable music stopped, lights came on, drinks stopped being served, yet there was no mass exodus.  The barstaff came and joined us.  A young girl we had admired in the bar in the late afternoon and who had worked until closing, had also enjoyed a brief stint working at the lodge.

Finally we left, crumpling drunkenly into the Land Rover.  Paul’s young friend passed out on the way back to the farm, me wedged in the middle helping to keep him vertical as he swayed right and left, front and back.  Back at the farm, now 4am, we swapped him for Gavin, ate remaining cold curry and played with the soft dog.  Paul sat watching the cable TV sport, not seeming to mind the lateness or feel any sort of urgency about getting home and sleeping.  I had never imagined being able to sleep while travelling the long, steep, violently bumpy track which led to our conservancy, but as I recall little of that trip aside from intermittently lolling forwards and headbutting the soft seat in front of me, I must have.

removal

Ambling down the main high street with open and sober eyes for the first time in a long time, I noted all the shop changes: the ubiquitous supermarket chains which had ceded banks in ornate corner buildings, the prime-located bar properties with boarded up windows, providing only an advertising platform for other entertainment, ongoing pedestrianisation construction work which was making an eyesore of one area.  Not much of it was pretty.

It was that dead time shortly after most office workers’ home time and before any revellers hit the town; human traffic was sparse and fleeting.  I turned right at the end of the road, past the castle and onto the main pedestrianised shopping street.  I glanced into travel agents at managers’ specials, yearning for heat, a break before starting this whole thing properly.

But it had started properly already.  I was all moved-in now and had finally completed my construction of Ikea furniture.  Hours and hours of sweat and strain and swearing.  It wasn’t all seamless but it stood up, didn’t buckle or collapse with its contents.  Or hadn’t yet.  Standing back to admire the books I’d placed on a newly assembled bookcase felt like a watershed adult moment: arrival of a kind.  Thirty years old in a few months.  Now I felt it, but suddenly it wasn't all that bad.

I had moved myself from one capital to another, single-handed in one day, which wasn’t easy.    Much lifting and carrying led to the aching of muscles I was unaware I had and bleary after four separate three-hour drives.

The final journey from London to Cardiff was miserable.  Having cleaned, cleared and packed up my small flat, I looked back at its dark emptiness, still not wanting to go, and slumped onto my old small sofa one last time.  Much as I liked my new flat, its space and size and reasonable location, I liked London better than Cardiff.  It had more; more everything.  Things could have been different here if..  Too many ifs.  Things weren’t different.  I stood from the sofa and left the flat: 10.30pm on Saturday evening.  Trundling my way through West London towards the motorway I saw people done-up for their Saturday nights, young bottle blonde girls exhibiting a little too much flesh, a swaggering hopeful teen.  Traffic headlights blotched and blurred through watery eyes and mournful acoustic singer-songwriters whined: songs about endings, change, new starts.

*

I wandered on down the pedestrianised shopping street early yesterday evening, conscious of my headphones.  Their lurid blue and different design felt more ostentatious here, somehow.  I was paranoid and inaccurately exaggerating the parochialism of the place.  They probably did sell them here too.  They had chain shops and the internet; it was developed.  It just wasn’t London.  Less had changed on this street and the same stores had largely remained.

Did I want to sit down and have a pint?  I had an enjoyable book, the weather was overcast but perfectly ok to sit outside for half an hour.  Pints were cheaper here.  I shunned a rough Wetherspoons for a classier looking bar I half remembered.  For a second I considered the possibility of bumping into someone I knew from my time here before leaving five years ago.  Come on, it’s not THAT small a city, I dismissed myself and the idea.  The chance was slim.

The first section of the bar was practically dead, but for a table of young female office workers.  I glanced around a pillar as I approached the bar and saw a table of two guys my own age.  Our eyes connected and held.  We’d worked across a desk from each other for four months about seven years ago and hadn’t kept in touch.  Never matey, I always felt he didn’t like me but was never sure if he exuded that to most other guys; only a year older, there was a certain superior aloofness which was never quite aggressive enough to be arrogance.  It’s possible that he was threatened somehow, despite, or even because we were similar, with similar interests and skillsets, perhaps characters too.

For a second I dithered after saying hello, explaining my newbie situation.  He gave his own appraisal then said he had a similar pair of headphones to those which hung round my neck, except his were the next grade up.

Still a tosser then?  No, he didn’t say it in that one-upmanship way.  He was all right.

Was he all right?  Or was he a tosser?  I never had worked it out.

Did I want to impose anyway?  Yeah, go on, he’s probably decent enough really, maybe matured a bit, smart enough guy.  If he thinks I’m a tosser it doesn’t matter as I’ll probably never see him again anyway.  Steady on.  Smaller town, remember?  You can’t apply that as readily here as you could in London.

Ah, bollocks.

“Dyou mind if I join you?”  For a line which often requires a degree of boldness, it can also be difficult to say no to that: as if it contains its own inherently respectable power.  They affably agreed, moved their bags to make space, declined the offer of a drink and I got a pint.

I only stayed half an hour, a weak pint of bitter’s length.  We spoke of the university administration where he worked; public and private sector differences, careers, the directions our lives had taken over the last seven years.

He looked at his phone and said he should be going soon.  Keen not to encroach any further on their time, I gulped the last mouthful of bitter down the wrong pipe, obstructing the smoothness of my departure and damaging the up until then credible social performance I'd given.  Now momentarily reddened and spluttery, I shook hands and gave the business cards requested, donned my outdated headphones and found a new way home.

Putting things in boxes

“Do you have a box, Patrick?” the Headmaster of our village primary school asked my friend at the beginning of assembly.  Even aged 10, or somewhere around there, I was tickled by Sir's banal question (I strangely loved Sir's inanities at these cosy assemblies) and stifled a giggle.

The memory returned as I was retrieving cardboard boxes from the eaves of the building in preparation for my move: large sturdy boxes capable of transporting books and pictures, imprinted with the names of obscure independent grocers who can't possibly still exist.



I pulled the brown cardboard back through the small hatch and into the attic bedroom of my flat, increasingly populated with boxes, plastic bags, miscellaneous tins, probable junk, suitcases, smaller bags and strewn clothing.  And I've continued to mull it as I've gone about counting down the last things - the last time I'll do this or go there, and regretting the things I've missed, forgotten or never got round to doing.

There’s a broader need for boxes.  When certain real-life chapters end and begin it’s difficult to perceive them in a segregated, neatly ordered way, but more natural as one linear chain of indigestible noise – which is how we experience them at the time.

“Life is just one damned thing after another.”
Elbert Hubbard US author (1856 - 1915)

It’s hard to compartmentalise, box up experience and place it to one side, to neatly shelve times, places and people before taking a deep breath and taking another step forward, having another go.  Although this is what we tell ourselves we must do, particularly if the recent history experience is unsavoury and not one we’d wish to replay – not that the brain gives us much of an option.  It's possible that comes with greater age and even more retrospection.  (I could read this in thirty years and think: oh yes, my blogging period, what a prick).

But amidst change, relatively young adulthood and eighteen-month hops of experience, memory doesn’t tend to have fixed borders.  It segues to and fro, slopping dangerously over the sides, ignoring laughably empty pleas: we’ve changed, we’re different now, we’ve moved on, that’s all in the past.

Still, we try because it’s human instinct: self-preservation through self-image, to feel as if we’re developing, evolving, learning and growing through the experience of change.  Not simply making one fuck-up after another.

This wasn’t really what our Headmaster was driving at.  He just wanted to talk about boxes.

"Um, probably Sir," Patrick said.

A marriage rocked

Yesterday evening I was reminded that my routine failure with females may not be THAT worth the constant whingeing.

Marriage is terrifying both as a concept and in practise: the bond you’ve made, the contract you’ve signed, supposedly for your whole life with all the people you love watching you.

The average age of newlyweds is getting older with generations and there’s less of a stigma attached to singletons and divorcees in their thirties, forties and fifties.  It happens.  You might argue that it happens because we communicate better, or we communicate more, or because we’re less willing to simply keep up appearances.

Yet there still exists an implicit pressure on twenty-somethings who have been together a while to do just this; those who look – to all extents and purposes – like they’re ‘made’ for each other.  If they’ve been together long enough, their families want to see some semblance of security,  maybe children; they’re nudged in that direction and if they’re happy and solid, then why not?

But if they are childhood or university sweethearts who haven’t known many, if any other relationships, does there always exist a tiny glint of attraction towards the unknown, towards the other?  Is it an innate undercurrent fear which those sort of couples learn to deal with?  It might lie blissfully dormant or never be realised (safety first).  But it might equally just need an unknown figure to appear and prise the edges apart, so that glint becomes dazzling, hot, scalding.

My former colleague was an amusing, bumbling and self- effacing guy who often exercised pleasing amounts of self-doubt.  (I always warm more easily to those who exercise self-doubt). You might have thought him slightly quirky if you only saw him loping caveman-like around the office in his baggy striped jumpers, or at his desk hiding behind a giant box of cornflakes and coffee pot, but.  In conversation though – one-to-one or in a group – he engaged indiscriminately with everyone, he was funny and candid.

After living with his long-term girlfriend for four years, they married and bought a house.

Our roughly four-monthly pub conversation kicked off as usual: work, the office, colleagues and former colleagues, my move.  Then I asked about married life and he gave hints which I entirely failed to pick up on, only later realising that he was trying to use it as a segway.  What do you think keeps couples going until they’re old?  How do you keep making a relationship work?  What is it?  Don’t all couples get bored of each other after a certain time?

I gave bland answers: separate and shared interests, doing new things, travelling, planning, shared experience, family.  Our chat progressed to a point when I mentioned my curious evening on the night of the USA-Ghana World Cup match.

“Yeah, I had a..  a strange evening then too.”

“Really, what happened?  You go first.  You’re not being..?”

He breathed in, looked down and away.  He was being..

“You ok mate?”

He wiped his increasingly glassy eye.  Did he just wipe his eye?  Fuck.

“Hey really, don’t tell me if you don’t want to tell me.  Shall I go first and..?”

“Yeah, you go on.  Just need more to drink then I’ll..”

I went on with my commentary of that evening, aware that he wasn’t really paying attention, glazed over, trapped in his own world and whatever was going on in there.

“And that was that,” I concluded.  “Now you?  If you..?”

“Mate, I’m totally fucked.”

He did the breathing, looking down, eye-wipe thing again.  His eyes looked full.

“You told anyone about this?”

“One.  Best mate.  This girl in the office: over the past month we’ve started sort of going out, I’ve taken her to places and we’ve stayed out together until three four or five in the morning.  She’s exciting and different and likes me.”

“Single?”

“Married too.  But it’s shit; she hates it, and him.  They’re getting divorced, selling their house and she’s moving back to America soon.”

“How old?”

“25, so only a few years younger.  Got married when they were stupidly young.  But mate, she’s so different and like nobody I’ve ever met: hobbies and interests and.. drugs.  I’ve always been liberal about that stuff but never tried much.  We’ve done lines of coke at lunchtimes.”

I looked at him quizzically, laughed.

“Yeah, scored them off some drunk on the train back from Brighton.  It’s overrated to tell you the truth.  But she’s just..  You know those shit montages in films which show couples getting together, doing stuff and falling in love?  It feels like I’m in the middle of one of those.  Thing is, I don’t know if this is what it’s like meeting someone new, if this was what it was like when I first met.. and everything about her was new and interesting.  I can’t remember what it was like.”

It sounded amazing, the bastard.  I shovelled back the encroaching jealousy.

“And your wife?”

“She suspects.  I slept on the sofa last night.  Probably tonight too.  Doubt she’ll believe I’m here with you, with good reason.  Before it all got to the stage it has now I’d talked about not knowing what I was doing with my life, and our marriage.  We’ve barely spoken for weeks.”

“But this girl is moving back to America?”

“I’ve said I’ll go with her but I don’t think she took me seriously.  She’s impulsive and spontaneous. She likes me, we’ve done – although we haven’t slept together.  Mate.  I’m totally obsessed with her.”

We sipped our drinks.

“You’re sure you’re not a convenience for her?” I asked.  “Attention from a decent bloke and something to do while she sits out the dregs of a crappy first marriage, and before she ups and leaves for home?”

“No.  No, I’m not sure at all.”

He held his head in his hands but was no longer on the brink of tears, at least.

We continued to bat it back and forth, speaking of little else for the remaining two hours until closing time: life’s too short, you don’t want to live life regretting.  But I also voiced my suspicions that he was being played by some sort of whimsical Zooey Deschanel in 500 Days Of Summer character (although subsequent Facebook snooping revealed a crazier looking girl), and also that he could have ruined his marriage.

This seemed to be less of an issue: he was tired of his marriage, or so obsessed with the new, exciting girl that he couldn’t be bothered to resuscitate it.  He was scared but prepared for whatever will happen in the next few weeks.  Weakness and that glint of unknown attraction, boredom with his wife; it could easily contrive to make him a single man again in a short period of time.

Fuck David Cameron’s family policies. Marriage shouldn’t be legal until you’re 30.

Viewed through this lens, failing to persuade females to see me more than once might not merit constant whingeing.  Relationships and marriage bring levels of stress that single, one-off meetings can’t really match.

Perhaps I should be relieved.

Brixton

Noticing on a mobile maps application that the connecting A-road between Clapham Common and Brixton didn’t look all that long, I dismissed my fear of traffic in these parts, picked up my cycle (with its increasingly ineffective brakes), and aimed myself in the direction of where the A23.. no, the A32..  that big green road should be.  I wish my brain stored A-road numbers more effectively.  Middle-aged men pride themselves on such skills, but it’s not developing for me.  Yet.

Brixton was a place I’d meant to check out for a long time, thinking a gig would summon me there at some point, but with two weeks remaining of my London stay, it still hadn’t.  I popped in my earphones and began to weave between people sprawled out on the common and those loping through the sunshine towards the Ben & Jerry’s festival gate.

Then watchfully, I pedalled out into the snarling, give-no-inch traffic.

The connecting A-road was simple and not long; little more than a five or ten minutes spin between residential streets which slowly opened up and out.  I freewheeled down an incline into what I figured must be the centre, a heavily made up bottle blonde with hoisted short skirt to my right: either seriously craving male attention or a prostitute.  She stood out, not least because this didn’t appear like a place for such dress or try-hard glamorous style.

I dismounted at the base of the hill, looking over a surprisingly cultured looking, arty plaza; well- polished buildings neighboured less well polished buildings.  Two bike locks felt appropriate all the same.  The new sense of place was vivid, despite the proximity to the white middle-classness of Clapham and its own urbane pretentions.  Brixton had fewer, didn’t need them.

The concentration of ethnic minorities was immediately striking but the place had a vibrancy and creativity about it which other strongly black places like the downtrodden feeling Seven Sisters Road in Tottenham didn’t.  Here there were artistic hubs, even iconic places like the Academy, places of obvious congregation, wide open spaces next to narrow market streets which could quite easily fool you into thinking you weren’t in London, or even England.

I walked up the street with my earphones in.  A young black man walking at a similar pace said something.  Hello?

I unpopped my earphones: “Hello mate.”

What did he want?

“How’s it going?” he said.

“Um, good.  You ok?”

“Yeah I’m good.”

“Good.”

Perturbed by the exchange, I stopped to look at my phone and he kept walking.

Young people were, by and large, pretty.  Most looked like they were, or should be in a band.  This was a south of the river Camden, possibly with an even richer mix of people and less contrivance.  Most of these people weren’t essentially rebellious angsty middle class kids who studied other people slightly too hard.

In a narrow market street dense with butchers and meats and rivalling scents, a woman wheeled a trolley in front of her and out across the road.  A second glance revealed her to be wheeling a sack, out of which poked the rear end of what appeared to be a serious looking snake.  I couldn’t imagine this happening in Richmond.

It can be easy to feel like you stand out in your ethnicity when displaced from a native white middle class domain, especially if you’re naturally self-conscious, self-aware.  But the truth is that there are many places where nobody cares.  Places like Brixton.  I could totally understand for young and zesty folk, for those who seek and embrace life in all its forms, Brixton could be a place to live unjudged and unhampered, and to feel a rugged texture of experience.

flung forwards

Wednesday lunchtime I was running through Richmond Park, vaguely mulling over quite how pathetic, whiny and self-absorbed my last blog post here had sounded, and also wondering about the move: a move I’m now fairly sure I don’t want to make, but quite sure I will.

It makes sense, I have no real need to be in London, it’s more affordable and there are many more pretty places within easy reach.  But still, I’ve grown to like London more over these past few months, its opportunity and scale has been better illuminated under the summer months and I will be sad to leave it.

It feels like a personal retreat of sorts, a defeat, having moved here originally for a job I was made redundant from, then failing to secure another one so going it alone and sitting at a desk in a small room on my own for over a year, although remaining solvent, doing ok; but also roundly failing to find a female who would believe I was worth expelling any effort for.  The almost three years since arriving haven’t exactly flung me forwards so I return west, tail between legs, shrugging, mumbling fuck em like a bitter old drunk.

I have little to be grateful to London for, but still she’s just as much a cruel temptress as ever she was.  I have flirted with the idea of cancelling the move and retracting my notice and staying put, trying to find somewhere else in London.  Not allowing her to beat me.

Although I still want change, the whole reason moving was implanted as an idea was because I want change, difference, space which is properly my own.  I want to close this chapter and open a new one, “start afresh” – although starting afresh loses its freshness when you start afresh roughly once every eighteen months, which I seem to.

So I wondered if I could stay in London, when the allure fell away of moving all that way back to a smaller city riven with ghosts – an antipathy aided through being conned by a private landlord at the first attempt at moving.  There MUST be something within budget in London, maybe a bit further out from the centre.

But there isn’t, not really, not of the standard I want.  My property-seeking motivation has wilted; I should just do this and cease my infernal, overly dramatic whingeing.  It’s beginning to bore me.

Sweating through the park I approached one of the main bisecting roads where all traffic is restricted to a 20mph crawl.  A red car was coming from the left while a clutch of serious looking spindly cycles attacked the incline to my right.  I easily had enough time to cut between the two and make it to the other side.

Injecting a degree more pace, I pressed down hard with my left foot, then my right, which fell further than expected, deeply into a soft crevice a yard before the road’s edge.  I buckled over and the road loomed up to meet me, smashing gravel into my right knee.  My momentum carried and I bowled out into the middle of the concrete strip, rolling once or twice (momentarily wondering if this might even look cool – not the falling over bit, the rolling bit – like I’m an accomplished stuntman who does this thing all the time) before finally halting myself with my head, grit pricking the right corner of my brow.

Did it look cool?  Doubt it.  Definitely hurt.  Hurt quite a lot, in fact.  Ouch.

There I stayed for a brief second, sucking it up, feeling stupid and hurt, yet realising I still had a firm grip of my iPod in my left hand, both earphones were in place and music was still playing (there’s a result at least, well done!)  The red car must have slowed to a stop because it hadn’t hit me.  I rolled back onto my heels and stood up.  “You all right, mate?” a passing cyclist kindly enquired.  (No, everything really hurts).  I waved an embarrassed hand in acknowledgement and gingerly hobbled across the road, conscious not to look down at my legs, struggling to breathe with the pain management.  I waved an arm of gratitude towards the red car too: Thanks for not running me over.  Also meant to infer ‘I’m fine, Go.’  It went.   I ripped a piece of dangling skin from the palm of my right hand, inspected grazes to upper arms and hip, felt blood trickle down my right shin and began to run again.  It was the sort of pain which could be run off and ignored if you just kept going, stretched it out.

There might be some kind of glib metaphor here: when it comes to moving, crossing, making decisions, just keeping going when you’ve tried to move quickly and taken a clumsy fall in front of an audience, emerging cut and bruised, uncertain and wary of fully inspecting all the damage.  That’s what you do: clumsily fall, injure yourself but ignore where, get up again.  Run it off and it’ll get better, Forrest; keep moving dumbly forwards.