Now We Are Three

My gorgeous, clever, artistic, funny, lovely wife, Karen, died on 19th July 2019 at Warwick Hospital. She'd had a successful breast cancer operation the previous month in June (only a small lump so surgery was not too invasive) but after 5 days at home recovering an infection had flared up that the best attempts of the ICU team at the hospital could not get under control.

I won't go into detail here but it was the worst two weeks of my life and I daresay our sons, Ben and Tom, will tell you the same thing. Right up to the last few days none of us had any indication of just how serious things were getting and we were all hopeful that Karen's return home was imminent. It was not to be.

9 months later I am only just coming out of shock and starting to deal with her loss and what it means for me and the boys.

The three of us are all well and safe and financially secure. Because Karen was smart she had set up various policies and insurances when we had first married that have saved us from life becoming much harder. Karen told me about them at the time - I have vague recollections of not really listening because (a) I didn't want to think about such hardline eventualities when we were just setting out on our lives together and (b) I'm crap with that kind of thing; Karen's being an accountant meant that, in my mind, this area was her domain and I was happy to defer all details and organization to her. I'm glad that I did; she did us proud and it is a comfort to know that even now she is looking after us. 

It is a bitter-sweet thing to revisit this blog and re-read the 1000+ posts published here. Karen was always very supportive of my writing and this blog in particular. Despite the many film and book reviews and attempts at comedy writing that are contained here, this blog was essentially a family archive - an online diary of our lives together. That is certainly how Karen viewed it and, rereading my posts now, I can see that inadvertently I captured much of our lives together even when I had not consciously meant to or had been writing about other things.

I recognize that by the very act of writing several posts a week I was savouring our lives together and appreciating being in the moment by celebrating much of it online. For that reason alone I regret letting this blog fall into disuse as we, in the real world, fell (like we all do) into dull unthinking routine. I know it is hard to do but, by God, seizing the day sometimes just means feeling the moment! None of us do it enough. But in this blog I had a bloody good go at feeling as many of them as I could. I am thankful for that.

Within these hundreds of posts I also recognize a happiness and a contentment in my writing that had never been there before. The source of that happiness, of course, was my relationship with Karen and our boys and our very happy home life together. I don't think I will ever have it in me to write like that again. This was a special time. A one-off. As cliched as it might be, Karen and I were soul-mates and when we were together my soul finally realized it had a singing voice and couldn't help but sound forth joyously. I had expected and hoped that it would last forever. Certainly for the rest of my life. Karen and I often daydreamed about what we would do in our retirement together... none of it very grand (a bit of travelling, days out, mostly mooching around the antique shops of Stow-on-the-Wold which had become our special place) but it would have made us both very happy.

It is hard to wake up each morning now and know that Karen is no longer here with us. It is harder still contemplating that I may have another 40 years on this earth without her. She was only 52 when she died. 2 days before our 14th wedding anniversary and a few weeks before my 50th birthday. To say last summer was a steaming pile of horseshit of galactic proportions is to put it mildly. Like I said, I'm only just now coming out of shock; the grief has moved from a hazy, dream-like pain to a sharply focused agony as the permanence of this horrible new world sinks in. 

Karen had suffered a horrific childhood. A physically abusive mother, raped horrifically when she was 3 years old... just one of those things on its own would have been enough to give someone PTSD for life. Karen had a double dose and for much of her adult life battled with the debilitating effects of it. She put an immense amount of work into getting herself "sorted out". Counselling, therapy, self-help... everything. She was incredibly brave and courageous. Some people never recover from such an awful start in life and slip into drug and alcohol abuse and worse. Karen didn't. She clawed her way out of it, determined that her relationships and any children she had would not be scarred by issues caused by her traumas. It was a long, tough, constantly uphill fight. But she did it. Anyone who knew Karen will tell you what a strong, warm, kind, wise and empathic person she was. She was the most honest and truthful person I have ever met. And, if I am honest, the only person on this planet that I can say without equivocation that I trusted 100%. I knew I could trust her with my soul. 

The boys and I feel like we have been robbed; that life has cheated us. 16 years together (14 married and 18+ months dating before that) is not nearly enough. We all deserved more. Karen deserved so much more. So there is pain, and grief, and sorrow and anger. But there is also thankfulness. I was lucky to have found someone like Karen. So lucky. Luckier than I probably deserved to be. 

Each day now is painful. Because every day without Karen feels like an utter waste. I don't want to move on. I don't want to forget or the memories to become faded and dull. I don't want life to close in around her absence and callously continue without her. 

And yet here we are.

Our boys need me. Ben is now 18 and Tom is 12. Both too young to have lost their mum. They keep me going. I mean to do them proud and to do Karen proud. But beyond that I have absolutely no fucking idea what to do or what I am doing.

Anyway, I won't bore you with that... whoever you are now. It's been quite a few years since I last updated this blog. At the time I had built up quite a good readership but like all things... nothing lasts forever. I doubt anyone will read this really but for the sake of completeness I needed to write this one last post. To say goodbye and to say thank you. I hope whoever stumbles across these posts takes some pleasure in them... even if it is only a small chuckle at my stupid jokes. I hope mostly though that a few of you are moved enough to go home today and give your loved ones a big hug. 

Because you always think you have enough time to do it later. To say all the important stuff later. 

But you don't.

Karen and I told each other we loved each other every single day - no word of a lie - and yet still, still, I regret not saying it more.

And I would gladly give up the entirety of the rest of my life just to have 10 more minutes with her. I would consider it a bloody good bargain.

I love you forever, gorgeous. I miss you.

Schrödinger's Cough

They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder so I have no doubt that over the last three months, although you have all been preoccupied with steering your loved ones away from the evils of extremism, trying to combat the attritional effects of ever-increasing austerity and washing your smalls with the cheapest but most eco-friendly washing powder to be found at Lidl you are now - upon discovering a new blog post from yours truly after a break of a quarter of a year - overcome with emotion so deep and so raw that you can barely read these words in front of you as the realization of how much you have missed me finally hits home.

Well, let it wash over you in great waves. Don't try and fight it. Let the deluge fill your teacup to the brim and then slowly but surely raise sea levels the world over.

For my part I am trying to think of a suitable celebrity couple with which to best represent my odd relationship with you all. Thelma & Louise? Not quite. Batman & Robin? Sorry, you don't have the legs for it. Closest I can find is Freddy and Stuart from Vicious. Of course I am Freddy, ever demanding and not really able to express the slight fondness I feel for you all though perfectly able to articulate my sneering contempt for any effort on your part to please me whilst you potter about the house (paid for by me) catering to my every whim and trying to kid yourself that you are utterly indispensable.

Yes. We are all entangled in a slightly clichéd gay relationship that exists only on the television.

But on the bright side, we can now get married.

"What have I been doing?" You clamour. "Where have I been?" Unlike the pussycat from childhood rhyme going to London and visiting the Queen has not featured on my itinerary at all.

Unfortunately, my father dying, trying to sort out stuff from Karen's mum's will, and trying to keep heart, body and soul together have featured large. And none of it has reached a stage that anybody could term "resolved".

As an aside - and thankfully it is only an aside - I had my own health scare last week when a persistent cough drove me to the doctors. Given my father's demise through lung cancer my doctor thought it best that I go for a chest X-ray immediately - to make sure there was "nothing nasty" causing me grief. Up until then I had gone for 8 weeks, coughing away without a second thought. As soon as the X-ray was booked in (and I realised my doctor was taking it all rather seriously) my mind kind of imploded with all of the unwelcome possibilities that exist in the world of disease and medicine. I had to wait a week for my results with my former casual cough now being the harbinger of chemotherapy at worst and the inaugurator of the iron lung at best.

It's appalling how one's mind can torment you and torture you. And it is totally self-defeating. Especially when you consider how some theorists posit the idea that thought and observation inform and create reality. As I waited for the 7 days to elapse before I could ring in for my results I found myself thinking of Schrödinger's cat quite often and realized that, in this uncertain interim, according to the laws of the Quantum universe, I both had and didn't have cancer at the same time. The answer lay in a closed box and would not settle into one of the two states until I opened it up and had a good look at it. Until then, to some degree, my behaviour in the universe would determine my fate.

Some believe that to get what we want from life we have to behave as if we already have it... and then the universe furnishes it to us accordingly. If we fill our hearts with yearning and desires that seem hopeless then the universe merely gifts us more of the same. The key is to live your life as if your desires are already met.

I have no idea whether that is true or not. I do not have empirical evidence that it works.

All I know is my results were clear and the doctor has put my cough down to either the onset of asthma or hay fever and since I have dispensed with subconscious fears about the Big C my cough seems to be getting better on its own.

And I am back. Back amongst you all.

So all is well that hasn't ended. See? Life can still be good.

Now put the kettle on and stop your embarrassingly high-pitched whimpering.

MeinKraft

I’m not saying my youngest boy has Teutonic tendencies but playing Minecraft with him – as I recently have made a point of doing as part of my ongoing fatherly duties – has uncovered a hitherto hidden seam of authoritarianism which is really very alarming.

I make a point of playing at least an hour with him on a weekend or holiday days to hopefully instil in him the finer qualities of fair play, altruism and good gamesmanship. I have never considered myself an optimist but in this endeavour I am beginning to understand the sheer cloud-cuckooness and refusal to accept grim reality required for such an undertaking.

I am also beginning to see that my boy has a fine appreciation for all forms of digital Schadenfreude. Although in gaming parlance this is commonly referred to as “trolling” or “griefing”.

For those of you not familiar with the concept of Minecraft, basically it is a computer game which allows you to both mine for resources and then build with them – build houses, palaces, cave systems; you name it, it can be built. Plus there are various autonomous characters (“mobs”) – some benign, some malignant – who you can interact with, everything from bartering with to being killed by.

Recently we (or rather I, as my son has yet to embrace the heady world of savings, stocks, bonds and shares) have invested in a Minecraft Realm. What this means is that we can inhabit and play the same Minecraft virtual world together, simultaneously in real time. The scope for cooperative play is increased a hundredfold.

Or so I thought.

In reality I find my son takes great delight in engineering the most elaborate traps and ruses with which to visit upon me the many woes of Job. He has enticed me with “treasure” only to poison me, lured me into unseen holes in the ground which, if I am lucky, deposit me into lava, if I am not then I find myself literally falling through the entire digital geology of the realm and beyond until I literally “fall out of the world”. This leads inevitably to death and the loss of all the hard won resources that I had previously amassed in my gaming inventory. Most of the time this amounts to nothing more than a diamond pickaxe, a sword and a couple of pork chops but, honestly, it is a labour of Hercules to acquire these objects within the game. Or, as is his favourite wont, he has beguiled me to enter some dark corner of the world only to spawn in hundreds of malignant mobs directly behind my back so that, yet again, death is the inevitable conclusion to my gaming foray.

Apparently in-game “experience points” are of tangible value in Minecraft and he insists that he is helping me to acquire as many of them as possible by these remarkably well-orchestrated set-pieces. He plainly has an answer for everything.

Hence all my noble intentions of steering him onto the path of gaming righteousness and adopting a set of virtual Queensbury rules have gone out of the window. In all honesty all I am successfully teaching him at the moment is how to conduct non-violent protests and how to complain in a semi-reasonable but insistently demanding voice.

I am considering trying to wean him off virtual gameplay and teach him (real) chess instead but, given recent experiences, the thought of having an actual tactile object in my hands is probably not a good idea.

I think it was Bruce Lee who posited the theory that absolutely anything can be used as a weapon… Sadly intelligence does not seem to be working for me.

End Of Year Arse-Wipe

Like my natural propensity for forgiveness, blogging hasn’t come easy this year. I’ve struggled. Not so much with ideas or subject matter – there is always some kind of fat that my mind is chewing over – but with inclination; the desire to write and by writing, sharing. “I can’t be bothered,” are the 4 most common (non)spoken words that the little voice inside my soul has thrown out at me this year. Can’t be bothered. And if I did write something who would be bothered to read it? Is it worth my time and effort? Will anybody miss it if I don’t write about it. Will anyone miss me if I overdose on Yorkie bars right now and drive my metaphorical 18 wheeler off the petty minded cliff edge of social media?

This is a bit of a turn around. When I first started writing this blog back in the heady days of 2006 my answer to most of the above questions would have been, “of course no one will miss it if I don’t write about it; of course they won’t miss me, mad fools that they are; and no, no-one really will be bothered to read anything at all that I write BUT I don’t care, I want to write it so I shall – if nothing else it will entertain me.”

And therein lies the problem, I fear. I am no longer entertaining myself. But like a starving tramp scouring the floor for dropped popcorn I still feel a duty to turn up at the theatre just in case I find a hot dog.

To be honest the last half of 2014 has been so unremittingly crap I haven’t wanted to write. I haven’t wanted to engage with the stuff that has been happening. Couple that with an estranged relative who has quite viciously taken against me and this here blog and feels I have no right to write about things that directly affect me if they also happen to affect her and has basically condemned my outpourings here as a feeble minded attempt to garner sycophantic approval from a bunch of faceless, equally needy and nerdy peers and you have the recipe for a perfect storm. Or at least a very wet weekend which makes you not want to get out of bed or do anything very exciting at all.

If I was in any way consistent I would stop writing. I would stop this blog and disappear.

But I can’t. I can’t quite give in. Instead I fudge and mither. I seek a halfway house. I try and instigate a cotton-wool rebellion. Softly softly not quite catchy monkey. I throw a hand grenade but make sure nobody is around to get hurt before I pull out the pin. This is not the spirit in which this blog was bathed at its inauguration.

But there you go. Older and wiser and all that. Certainly a darn sight more tired.

And a darn sight more underhand. For a very brief rundown of current events do visit here (most of you who are regular readers will find you have the correct access rights)… the general hoi polloi, however, will be unable to follow.

Sorry for the cloak and dagger stuff but some of it is quite sensitive and I really don’t want to be dealing with the inevitable fall-out from Estranged Relative (who is like the Argentinian Government to my blog’s quite innocent car registration number*).

Not sure if that makes me Jeremy Clarkson or Richard Hammond. Probably more likely to be James May.

So, going into 2015 there is some major booty that needs kicking (or otherwise dealing with). In the midst of all that though there might be the off-chance of acquiring a flattering girdle which may offer an attractive backdrop to some of life’s more sombre moments. But, like helium, so much of it is up in the air at the moment that it’s just not worth buying the balloon until things become more definite.

I will, however, try and reinvest this blog with a little more spirit and vigour in 2015. I will try and reclaim it for myself and go hang the dissenters. Because, maybe, just maybe, life it too short not to.

*Or possibly even the Mel B to my chirpy Micky Flanagan...

Calling All Game Developers

It seems to me that the more the world goes to pot – WWIII threatening in Ukraine, another holocaust threatening in Iraq, Cloud storage going up in smoke – the more the masses are going to want to escape from the unending media misery by diving into digital worlds of their own making. And being an opportunist kind of chap I figure I could make a fast buck or two and thus escape the impending Western Armageddon for real by cashing in on this virtual life-hacking industry by coming up with my own digital games.

Having little or no hard programming skills I see myself more as the conceptual engine behind the venture and will be looking for a few code monkeys to actually copy and paste all the binary gubbins into a working software platform. Or whatever it is these Visual Basic nerds do when they’re not checking their emails on their Androids.

I’ve already come up with some amazing games concepts which I am convinced will effortlessly fly off the shelves at Steam or Game. Or even Argos.

Moancraft – people are randomly spawned into a world where they have to dig for the resources to survive by moaning and complaining themselves into ever deepening holes and pits of despair. The more they moan about their lives the deeper they drop until they either reach the Epiphany Layer or plough on through the bedrock of misery and drop completely out of the world to the sounds of cheers from the other inhabitants.

Grand Theft Otto – this is a World War II simulation game. Sort of. You play Otto, a blond despot who goes on a violent retail spree across Europe and much of the world (kind of shopping with menaces) and accrues as many of the world’s treasures and artefacts as possible. This is a sandbox game where you can drive the vehicle of your choice (a tank is a good option) and do pretty much whatever the hell you like, destroy what you like and kill whom you like. Imagine a pre-United Nations world unfettered by any kind of global moral compass. Or if you can’t imagine that read the newspapers and imagine it’s the real post-United Nations world. There is very little difference. On the bright side your tank is very shiny. With the blood of countless innocents. And you can give your avatar a very severe moustache. Older version of the game may also be available: Grand Theft Ottoman.

Skyeram – set on a sprawling but illogically tiny Scottish island you play a male sheep who battles dragons, runs around through vast underground burial cairns fighting the undead and who frequently dies by jumping off massive cliffs whose height you have totally miscalculated. You can either join the Blue Coat faction and fight for independence or join the Old Empire and fight to keep the masses under the unthinking yolk of traditional oppression. Or you could just kill everybody and mess up every quest contained within the game as you say no to life both real and virtual and submit yourself to solipsistic armchair autocracy.

Other games currently in mental development are:

Assassin’s Crud – an assassin with OCD cleans all his weapons daily and collects all the resultant smeg, blood and gristle and stores it in a jar that he keeps on permanent show on top of his highly desirable Venetian sideboard.

BO Shock – a man who hasn’t bathed for 17 years shuts down a chemical weapons plant by wandering through the front doors by accident and rubbing himself off against an air conditioning vent.

Unreal Tourniquet – you have to invent the most unlikely and useless bandages possible. The player with the most resultant deaths (frags) wins. Ingredients will include Blue-tack, a fax machine, a nude photo of Jennifer Lawrence and a Muller Crunch Corner.

Super Mario Bros (Real Life Edition) – 2 normal plumbers come round to your house, overcharge you for fixing your blocked pipes and then freak out when you show them your pet terrapin.

Now don’t worry guys, there’s plenty more where they came from – I’ve hit a rich seam – there’s more than enough to go round. If anyone is interested in coding these up just PM me on Facebook. Or Pinterest. Or Twitter. Or some other social networking platform that I am currently not allowing to connect me to the outside world.

End Of Holiday Disbelief

The best part of a holiday is the few days right before it all begins. When you feel invincible at work. When you feel shielded from the vagaries of life and the arsedom of other people because, you know, in a few day's time they are not going to matter. Because you will have removed yourself completely from their mundane sphere of influence and you will be in a country far cleaner, freer and greener. And life will be full of possibility again and the business of living. As life should be.

Which isn't to say that the holiday itself isn't magnificent. The gadding about, the sightseeing, the being somewhere new with other people who are also only passing through. All of us unwitting but good natured passengers on each other's journeys. Most of us will only pass this way but once. And that makes it more special.

But all too soon you get to the last day. And work looms. And you wonder how 2 whole weeks can possibly have flown by so quickly. You even made an effort to savour every day. To grab hold and will time to slow. To be conscious of every passing hour. But you only keep that up for the first few days. When the novelty of being outside normal routine impinges itself upon you without any effort required on your part to embrace it. But even being free becomes a habit. And a few days in you let go of the time-brake and the holiday freewheels down the hill of your life and as it picks up speed you just laugh the louder, despite knowing that when it reaches the bottom of the hill you will grieve the fact the ride is over far too soon.

And then you reflect back to those days before the holiday and realise you were right. You were absolutely right. Those few days before the holiday were indeed the best. Because you had all this wonderfulness ahead of you. It was all waiting there. A gift you kind of knew you were going to get but you had no idea how big it was going to be or quite how it would affect you. Good memories are huge and affect you the longest.

The last 2 weeks have been brilliant. We have enjoyed a stay in the Peak District, visited good friends in Weston-Super-Mare and had a fantastic day in Legoland. We have eaten well and indulged a little. We have enjoyed ourselves as a family immensely. Perhaps more so because of the stress of the time leading up to it. Being happy and carefree on holiday seemed a distinct impossibility when the dark hours bit. But in life you take the good times when you can. It's a good survival technique.

I took a break from blogging too. It wasn't a conscious decision. It just happened. So plainly was the right thing to do.

But tomorrow I am back to work. And I am standing in front of that cliff looking up at it knowing that as soon as I start climbing it will be fine. Muscle memory will kick in and it will all seem effortless and right and even, to a degree, OK.

But right now I wish I was still in the middle of the green field at my back with the edges indistinct blurs at the very periphery of my vision.

I can't quite believe that the freewheeling is over for another summer.

The Hard Road Still Takes You Somewhere Beautiful

Karen's mum's funeral took place in Amersham on Wednesday - a rather beautiful part of the UK and evidently affluent. It went as well as funeral's go. I think we did her proud. The general feeling from most people was that her death was a blessed relief. Her strength of spirit and ferocious will was acknowledged by all. Funerals are always a paradox. An acknowledgement of loss accompanied often by personal gains. I think Karen's gains are a slow reconnection with other members of her family who, for various reasons (all tied up with Karen's mother) have been distant up till now. We came away with about three invitations to come and stay with people in places that ranged from Shrewsbury to Skye. I hope we'll soon be a position to take advantage of those.

Of course, now the admin of the funeral is done and dusted the grief starts properly. It is a slow process, not always "in your face". Often it works quietly at the back of your mind and heart and rears its head at the smallest, often seemingly inconsequential moments. To say I feel protective of Karen and my boys is an understatement.

The real heart of this post though is this: the last few weeks have been difficult and traumatic. Karen, the boys and I have had to gad about quite a bit, trying to sort things out and jump through all the correct legal hoops that death, without ever meaning to, throws up. Society likes its forms to be filled in and good form to be followed. On the surface it's been stressful. But underneath I cannot deny that I have enjoyed being with Karen and my boys. Maybe it's the sense of adversity, the way a shared grief bonds people but I can almost see myself in years to come looking back on the adventure of the last few weeks with a curious sense of joy. Almost a sense of stolen holiday. Does that sound wrong?

We were together. We doing stuff that was out of the ordinary. And even through all the heart heavy sorrow and stress there were most definitely good times and good moments.

Almost as if in the midst of death life was determined to be loudly affirmed.

It is a strange, almost guilty, comfort.

Stagecoach

The older I get the more I realize how easy it is to drop the reins of one’s life. To just let them go and allow them to drop to the floor where they can be picked up by absolutely anybody or even nobody at all. Suddenly the stagecoach on which you are riding – the stagecoach which is you – is not heading in the direction you had thought it was or the direction in which you had intended. Worse, you realize you had no real sense of direction at all and now you are looking around wondering where the hell you are. You just know you are not in the place – the vision of Utopia – that you were holding in your mind as your ultimate destination and you have no idea of how to get there.

I’m starting to see that a passive nature often leads to a passive act of self-betrayal.

When I was a kid I had a very definite vision of what I was going to do when I grew up; of what I wanted to be. Initially it was a crimefighter. A superhero. The world can’t have too many of those and fighting evil seemed a perfectly legitimate way to spend one’s time. Note I say “spend one’s time” and not “earn a living”. Receiving monetary recompense for my future acts of derring-do didn’t ever occur to me. My motives were pure. This was just something I wanted to do and my vision was completely unsullied by any transactions of filthy lucre. Dosh wasn’t the important thing. What I wanted to do was.

Such wisdom in one so young.

As I got older I had a Father Christmas moment. That horrible epiphany that you get when you realize something you have long believed in and held dear is, in fact, an abject impossibility and not a little stupid for all its inherent idealism.

Crimefighting wasn’t going to work. Han Solo was unlikely to want to join my crimefighting gang and the government were unlikely to allow me unfettered access to an unlicensed lightsaber even if the science bods had been able to create one.

So I settled on writing. Being an author; a novelist. Through my teens and twenties this was transmuted into poet and now, later, older, it has reverted back to author.

Don’t get me wrong. I do consider myself a writer. I’ve written novels, scripts, articles, poetry, radio plays and joke letters. I suppose I am an author.

But I don’t consider myself to be leading an author’s life. Whatever that is.

When I was younger the vision I had of this author’s life didn’t entail daily battles against exhaustion, futility, frustration, despair, ennui or the many other vagaries of a 9 to 5 job. The vagaries of making a living that get in the way of the life we are trying to lead.

I daresay the life I have now is most definitely a real, genuine author’s life. My teenage vision was well wide of the true mark. That Father Christmas moment is damned necessary if any of us are to engage with reality and function properly as adults.

But I can’t help thinking that my younger, purer, infant vision was infinitely wiser: it is the choice of doing that is the most important thing, not the remuneration and how you achieve it.

Because it is the moment you reach out for that tightly bundled fistful of dollars that you drop the reins and the stagecoach that is you takes a lurch for the worst and, terrifyingly, speeds up.

It is the moment you pocket that cash that you find you have lost your way.

If Music Be The Food

I was woken up this morning by my youngest boy strumming the fret-board of my acoustic guitar and loudly intoning his ABC (he only got as far as G which musically is rather apt). I'm ashamed to say there isn't much of a story behind that guitar.

It hasn't accompanied me on the road in my teens as a I travelled across America on a Dylan-esque pilgrimage of self discovery. It wasn't used as a shield to fend off piss filled beer bottles as I belted out anti-establishment tunes in some punk dive in East London. It has never been strapped to my back like a samurai sword as I rode my hog to some Hell's Angel's meet out in the back of nowhere.

I bought it in Birmingham, brought it home to Leamington Spa and that's pretty much about it.

In my teens me and my best mate, Dave, decided we were going to learn to play the guitar. Just like that we were going to acquire the skill, form a band, make world changing music and overnight improve our chances of getting laid more regularly. Or, in my case, just getting laid.

Such optimism.

I was a complete failure. My excuse has always been that I was more into my writing than anything else and it is not possible to truly commit yourself to more than one discipline; music was always going to take second place. The truth is I was just lazy. I was unrealistic. I didn't put in the time so therefore didn't get anything out of it other than 3 clumsy chords and blistered fingers. Because I wasn't instantly and instinctively playing like a rock axe-man I got demoralized and invested less and less of my time and effort. I would rather dream the dream than live it.

Dave faired slightly better. At the time I just thought he had more natural ability (he could sing pretty well too where my efforts were, at best, suited to comedy) but I can see now that that dismissal was an insult to Dave. He put in more effort, more time. He worked harder. He stuck with it despite the blisters and pushed on until his fingertips hardened. He learnt to play songs. He learnt to play and sing at the same time. For a while his guitar became an extension of himself.

And yet ultimately we both failed to do anything with the dream. We didn't join a band. We didn't even think to form our own. I bought a cheap 4 track recording device and, sure, we laid down a few tracks but mostly we messed around, ad libbed and felt we were unsung (unsinging) comedy heroes. Ultimately we did nothing with that dream too.

We both got older. Settled down. Had kids. Got sucked into the rat race. Our guitars were put down, lay still and attracted dust. In fact I have no idea if Dave even still has his guitar. I'm not sure why I even kept mine. Certainly not as a permanent accusation; I've long reconciled myself to the fact that I am not a rock god. I think mostly I keep it as a memento to those wild, crazy days of my youth when I dared to dream an impossible dream.

I'm glad I've kept it. I'm glad my boys have passive access to a musical instrument - even if they never pick it up and ask to learn how to play it properly. If nothing else it will save them wasting money buying their own when they hit their teens. And there is a slim chance - a very slim chance - that maybe, just maybe, they will find a virtuoso talent lying dormant within their genes and then that train ticket to Birmingham all those years ago will finally have been money well spent.

Proof I’m Not An Axe Murderer

Over the long years of writing this blog some of you have, on occasion, thrown yourselves shamelessly at me. Showered me with invitations to hook up and meet. Quick but passionate rendezvous in love hotels and back streets where the bins are secluded and not too dirty.

I have as a rule refused to acquiesce to your requests (means I said no).

This decision has been driven by two things: (1) a desire not to render the rest of your existence flat, drab and unappealing by comparison to the glorious sunburst of life that a meeting with me would engender and (2) I’m rather skittish about meeting new people and despite the fake protestation of (1) above I am actually quite paranoid that I myself would come across as flat, drab and unappealing compared to the literary personality that inhabits this blog. I fear I would not live up to the easily obtainable personality goals I have set myself because no matter how low I set the bar I can almost always be relied upon to not quite reach it.

I live in fear of personality fail.

So this has meant a lot of flattering requests over the years (well, 2 that I can actually recall) and the same number of disappointing responses.

August of this year changed all that when quite out of the blue a fellow blogger turned up at my place of work having journeyed all the way from New Zealand. I must point out that an interview with me wasn’t the purpose of the trip, just an aside, as the blogger in question – Lady Mondegreen – had family and friends over here in the UK whom she’d long been planning to visit.

She’d written to me a few times asking how I would feel if she happened to drop in and see me. I did that English thing of responding positively because I harboured the suspicion that it was just never going to happen.

Well, suddenly it had and it was. And actually I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. And unless Lady Mondegreen says different I don’t think I performed too badly. I think I met and perhaps even exceeded the bar. We had a pub lunch and a damned good chat and it genuinely was like meeting an old friend. All very relaxed and easy and wonderfully life affirming. It proved that being open to new experiences and opportunities can be an enlivening philosophy and is to be recommended. Though I must here point out that all thoughts of love hotels and passionate bins were eschewed.

Lady Mondegreen is now back in New Zealand and neither of us appears to have been permanently scarred by our encounter. And so, heady with the bravado of success I feel the urge to extend an open invitation to all my regular readers. If you’re ever in the area and want to say hello – a quick coffee and a bite to eat, whatever’s your poison – then do feel free to drop me a line and make it a date.

I don’t bite. I make some effort toward entertaining conversation. I will try to be urbane and debonair. And I promise to keep my animal magnetism under control (but do keep me away from the pub bins just in case).

Quick On The Draw

It’s too easy to make snide comments these days. To throw a disparaging remark into someone’s path. To toss a hand grenade of insult over the shield wall of “constructive criticism” and watch it explode from a safe distance.

 

The people that sow such barbs with impunity rarely seem to fear reprisals or even the possibility of being taken out by their own shrapnel. Of course, cowards that they are, they stand too far back. They stand fully enveloped in their Kevlar suits of “only being helpful”.

 

Don’t get me wrong. This post hasn’t been inspired by anyone or anything specific. People have taken so many pops at me and this blog recently I have got completely used to the detonations.

 

And it is that which has inspired this post.

 

You see, it’s too easy to take pot-shots these days. We all do it without thinking. We all do it as natural as breathing. Open our mouths, type something, and let the sting fly to its target. Bang. Gotcha. Onto the next one.

 

Why has abuse become such common currency?

 

The internet, the workplace, the press are all rife with it. Comedians take cheap shots at anyone who has fallen foul of the law or public morality just to get a laugh – people they have probably never met or had any personal dealings with. Our colleagues assassinate each other in whispering huddles that may or may not include you… and you are damned either way.

 

And this is just the way it is.

 

I find myself wondering if people were politer in (paradoxically) less enlightened times and places? In the Dark Ages, say? Or Mediaeval Europe? The Wild Wild West? Times when the common man went about armed and tooled up and ready to answer even the slightest insult with a red smile or an invasion of steel to the gut?

 

Did people watch their P’s and Q’s more? Dot their I’s and cross their T’s? Save their insults and barbs for under the breath mutterings that harmed no one and kept the water source from which we all drink free from poison and contagion?

 

Or did that length of steel at their side or that iron strapped round their waist make them feel they had the right to sneer even more? Make them feel they could say what the hell they liked and if the target didn’t like it, well, they could choose between swallowing it or sleeping the sleep you never wake from?

 

I suspect weaponry merely separated the truly arrogant from those who only pose. The true bastards from those merely trying to be. And at the end of the day too, there would have been polite, peacable men who kept their mastery of the martial arts under their hats until pushed to extremis. Maybe, sometimes, justice was done? Maybe for every insult made grosser with violence there was an insult met with a righteous meting out of pain that made some cocky loudmouth think twice before opening his mouth again?

 

I can’t work out which is better or which is worse.

 

Only that while sticks and stones may break my bones, a bullet to someone’s crust is going to shut them up forever. In which case, insults suddenly become completely unnecessary.

 

 

It’s Quite An Experience To Live In Fear

It’s not like the Stasi have been after me. Or the SS. Or that I have felt myself harassed by the CIA.

But emotionally perhaps I have let their shades stalk my mind and my thoughts.

It takes a lot to stop me from writing. And sometimes it takes nothing very much at all. Most of the time it is simply writer’s block and I have been through enough of those kinds of episodes not to be overly concerned when they strike. It’s best not to fight them but to just ride them through. Take a holiday. Take a break. Recharge those batteries. Sometimes they last years but if that is the timescale that is dictated so be it. Sometimes it’s nourishing to catch up on other stuff and live a little bit. Ultimately writer’s block is usually a good thing.

Sometimes, though, I am stopped from writing by the actions or opinions of others.

And I hate myself when that happens. For allowing it to happen.

Because most of the time when I write I feel big and bold and will fight my right to write freely with every tiny flourish of my penmanship. But sometimes stuff sneaks in under the fence. Scores a hit under the radar. The attack gets personal.

As is often the case these attacks always occur when you are a low ebb anyway or when life dictates that now should be a time of trial and tribulation and you find your back breaking under a rain of “final” straws.

In such times I do not so much as stop writing but feel myself to have been stopped.

And as I said, I hate myself for succumbing to that. For feeling that suddenly it is simply not worth the waves of negativity that some people are intent on unleashing. Worse, the waves of misunderstanding, presumption and arrogant conjecture that some people dredge up in themselves which leads them to believe they know enough about you and your life from the little you choose to write about to be able to judge and condemn you and your life as a whole.

And worse still. They condemn the very need to write. They belittle and besmirch it. They don’t entertain that it is a freedom and a right or an aspiration in itself. They condemn it as some kind of pathetic, ego-driven, desperate need for self-validation and sycophantic approval from others. They make it into a pewling inconsequential whine for attention; an inflation of the trivial and mediocre; a caterwauling of personal opinion and emotion that for some reason the writer himself is suddenly not entitled to as a human being even as the complainant stamps their own ill-founded opinion and emotion over every available surface.

Suddenly your find your throat stoppered and your voice silenced. You don’t so much edit yourself as perform a murderous hatchet job on every idea and possible source of inspiration before your mind can even get them through the foetal stage.

And that part of you that since you were a child has burned with the need to write suddenly finds itself caught up in a sealed vacuum and the flame has no choice but to go out.

Or so you’d think.

John Lydon once sang “anger is an energy”.

Well, in the absence of oxygen it is also a fuel.

I’ll write what I like, about who I like and whenever I like.

This blog is an ego thing. That much is correct. It is about me and my thoughts, my feelings, my memories and my opinions. But they are not the complete sum of me. This blog will never be the full picture and you will never know the whole of me or my life from what I write here. You will simply know what I write here. And I do that because I want to and because I have a right to.

The picture below has done the rounds on Facebook a couple of times now but each time I see it I republish it on my own Facebook page. It is very apt. And very true. And, ideologically, is currently where I stand.

If you have a problem with that then you need to deal with it. Write about it yourself, sound off to those closest to you or just shut up and suck it up and wallow in your own negativity. But don’t dump it on my blog, or my family, or me or my right to write.

Because, aside from a momentary pause, I shall just carry on writing even more.

Halo

So Prince Harry’s in trouble again.

He kept his butt-cheeks under wraps but was a might loose with an insensitive tongue. I haven’t read any of the offended write-ups or seen any of the worthy TV interviews with the usual round of for-hire-experts. I’ve caught a few newspaper headlines, caught the odd sound-bite and therefore deem myself as well equipped to offer an opinion as any UK tabloid journalist (with the advantage that I won’t hack your mobile phone – Lord knows I can barely get into my own).

From what I can glean Harry’s been taken to task for talking about how he, along with his army chums, have taken a few Taliban fighters “out of the game” and even compared the action he’d seen to playing video games.

Right-on righteous people the world over are up in arms (ironic) over his gross insensitivity and callous, off-hand dismissal of taking another human being’s life.

And they’re right. Of course they are. I can remember feeling outraged at hearing stories of American helicopter crews listening to loud rock music as they shot at insurgents and again, made comparisons to playing computer games. It was as if they were treating modern warfare as some kind of leisure pursuit which totally devalued human life until the people they were fighting impinged on their consciences no more than a pixellated sprite on a computer screen.

That is plainly wrong. Dreadfully wrong.

But who is at fault here?

Let’s look at it another way. We train our armed forces to do many different tasks – but no matter how you dress these tasks up politically, they are trained to kill. Their goal is always to kill more of the enemy than the enemy kills of them. They are trained to do it without thinking. Without breaking down and needing counselling five minutes into a fire fight or even five weeks. As horrible as it sounds conscience doesn’t come into it. And yes it is desensitizing. I imagine when you’re in a battle zone the last thing you want is to be feeling a bit sensitive. You would not be able to function and as such would be liable to get yourself and your colleagues killed.

We expect our soldiers to go out and kill. To kill with honour, yes. To kill “viable targets” (what a horrid expression), yes. To not kill children or innocents. To not kill for pleasure or needlessly. But ultimately, when the need calls for it, to kill. It’s a big part of soldiering in the modern world, alas.

I daresay the soul searching, the emotional breakdowns and psychological payback comes later. But at the time, when you’re in the theatre of war, you keep all that touchy-feely stuff as far away from you as possible and by using whatever means necessary.

That’s what I imagine Prince Harry is doing.

And then we have the video game thing. Heaven knows I have complained myself about computer games which purport to replicate the “real war experience”. My granddad fought in WWII, I don’t imagine he’d have thought much of his experiences being the basis for a living room based computer game which involves the participant sitting on their backside twiddling a few buttons on a handheld controller and staring at a TV screen.

But these games are out there and proliferating in huge numbers. Our kids, siblings, partners are playing them. They play them for entertainment. They play them for fun. The realism element is a selling point, a way of benchmarking the quality of the game.

This is highly questionable.

This desensitizes us all. Cheapens us all.

As a society we condemn warfare while at the same time making it a significant element of most of our entertainment choices – computer games, movies, literature. It has become enmeshed with fashion, rock music soundtracks and the way we gauge our own status.

Not all of us, I know. But enough that in any high street in any town you can go into a Game store (for example) and immerse yourself in the war of your choice.

Who is at fault here? The individual soldier or the society that equates war with play and then sends that soldier out to play for real?

Just think for a minute of all those people who help design and create those ultra-realistic computer war games... how much blood is on their hands?

Real, not salaciously imagined.

Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

I Believed In Father Christmas

I can’t remember the exact age I was when I stopped believing in Father Christmas. About 6 or 7 maybe. By modern standards that’s possibly a good innings.

I do know that nobody told me. Nobody let the cat out of the bag or suddenly decided that I needed to “man up” about Christmas.

I worked it out. A slow dawning realization that the logistics, the physics... they just didn’t add up. My parents didn’t help by declaring certain cupboards off limits during the run up to Christmas. That aroused my suspicions. Plus relatives got sloppy about bringing presents to the house. They did it in full view of us. When you’re a kid you remember even the smallest glimpse of wrapping paper. When Christmas morning arrived and that same paper appeared again... well, 2 add 2 inevitably makes 4.

I remember feeling gutted. An excoriating disappointment that left me completely deflated and flat. The world seemed greyer, drabber and smaller once the truth was upon me. No magic. No flying sleigh. No Father Christmas coming down the chimney. No toy factory at the North Pole with a happy workforce of elves making toys.

Just mum and dad. Just Nan and Bampap. Just Auntie Edie and Uncle Harry. Auntie Maude. Auntie June and Uncle Bill. And all the rest.

It is only now that I can look back and see that there was magic in the truth after all. All those aunts and uncles. My grandparents. All those jolly smiles – the jollier I suspect for having lived through WWII and thereafter counting their blessings for being alive every single day.

Mum and dad thankfully excepted, all those names that meant so much to me are now all gone from the world. Dead. Vanished. I have memories of their voices that I cannot pass onto my own kids.

Instead, we have Father Christmas still. And though my 11 year old sussed it out some years ago we persist in the ruse for the sake of my 5 year old. I think that small temporary belief in magic is the most precious gift of all. It creates, if nothing else, a capacity to find and cherish the real magic of life when you’re older... for all you have to battle through that initial disappointment. Sometimes lies and sham merely disguise other truths.

I do remember one year though, when I was about 25. It was Christmas Eve and I’d come back home late from a mate’s house. I hadn’t drunk too much; just enough to be warm and merry. I tucked myself into bed – it had gone midnight so technically was already Christmas Day. I remember wishing the world a very Merry Christmas as I settled down to go to sleep.

And I heard – just once – the sound of sleigh bells. Very distinctive. Very clear. Somewhere close in the crisp midnight air.

I know, I know. Some drunk marlarkying about on his way home. Or some parent going the extra mile for his/her kids.

A logical explanation is out there somewhere, I am sure, and probably not very hard to find.

But just for a second... I did wonder.

And every year since... just for a second... I still do.

Funny thing, magic.

Merry Christmas to you all.

Gag

Blogs. I wrote a few. But then again, too few to mention...

Well. That’s not factually true.

Since I began this on-line journey into the egotistical sublime back in the heady days of 2006 I’ve managed to rack up a mind-numbing 920 posts. I’ve been pretty darn consistent too. 3 posts a week for much of it, covering a wealth of subjects that have ranged from TV shows, politics, news events, social issues, home life and whatever doe-eyed beauty off the telly that I happened to fancy in any given moment.

But most of you won’t have failed to have noticed a gradual tailing off of productive output. A creative brewer’s droop. A distinct lessening of literal vitality.

My Bloggertropolis mojo is all but spent.

It’s time to draw a line beneath, put an end to and snuff out the guttering candle that is Bloggertropolis.

Oh hush your wailing. The end has been nigh for months now and the writing has been on the wall for longer than that.

The rot for me began when my blog was outed and touted by those who know me in real life (as opposed to just virtually). Without going over old wounds it caused upset and strife and made life difficult. Mostly for me (and I have to say my life is the one that I’m most concerned about). Certain subjects became taboo. Certain emotional chakras were suddenly blocked. Despite my best efforts I found myself gelded and my teeth pulled and a whacking great gag shoved into my mouth. Sure I kept going. Kept the writing production line rolling. Desperately tried to search out loopholes and ways round the restrictions... but euphemism and metaphor can only express so much.

Suddenly I woke up and found that Bloggertropolis had lost its bite, its bile and its balls (though thankfully not its alliteration).

I had become the blogging eunuch.

As much as it has tickled me to be a thorn in the side of so many for so long I have to admit to myself that the pale reflection this blog has become is now more of a thorn in my side than anybody else’s. Simply because it is not doing what I want it to do nor allowing me to express myself in the way that I would wish.

So, my old muckers, mateys and fellamelads, ‘tis time to say goodbye. Time to sign off and let the blogging underwriters evaluate my creative credit. I have other projects planned. Some of them not involving world domination or getting into Professor Alice Robert’s handsomely scientific knickers. Some lucky few of you will receive an email from me soon describing ways in which we might stay in touch.

The unlucky few can kiss my blogging ass.

This is how my blog ends.

Not with a bang (alas). But with you whimpering.

Blackheads Revisited

Secondary school is a world unto itself.

Inhabited by creatures whose brains are being rewired to such an extent that they no longer resemble other human beings on the planet. Fizzing human bombs (© Danielle Dax) whose hormone levels explode like weapons grade plutonium within the space of a few months and then pulse with a seedy half life that lasts for the next 30 years (if they’re lucky).

I remember it as a callous no-man’s land that delighted in alienating the weak or the different or (rarest of all) those who retained a modicum of human compassion. I felt alone and “outside” for most of my secondary school career. Hey. Why pull the punch? I felt dis-included for ALL of my secondary school career.

It could not be changed. It had to be borne. It had to be endured. And it was a horrifically lonely journey.

My eldest boy has suddenly found himself immersed in that same world. Curriculums might change. Teaching methods might be revolutionized. But the world of the geeky teenager remains essentially the same. The rites of passage that you largely walk alone.

He doesn’t make friends easily. He has trouble “getting” other people. He doesn’t connect well. He swings from ultra negative to overpowering positive without touching the middle ground in an instant; switches from totally controlling teen-god one minute to uber-victim the next who is unable to take responsibility for anyone or anything and thus finds himself always hopelessly disempowered.

Karen and I are at a loss as to how to help him beyond giving advice, helpful practical hints and trying to keep home life as secure as possible.

Because the simple truth is, unless you are one of the lucky ones, secondary school life starts off being diabolically damaging and only gets marginally better with each passing year. End of story.

How do you deal with the sniping comments of others? How do you deal with the bullying tactics of the playground – both overt and secretly snide? How do you deal with people who you once thought of as friends but now decide to ostracise you and leave you out in the cold at every opportunity?

What possible advice can I give to an 11 year old to combat all these issues when they are problems that, 28 years after leaving secondary school and now in full time employment, I still come up against and struggle with every week if not every day?

Because the sad fact is, although Secondary school is a world unto itself that isn’t meant to last forever, for some people (both good and ill), it bloody does.

Kissin’ Don’t Last, Cookin’ Do

I have lots of memories of my Nan’s kitchen from when I was a child. Despite the utility furniture it always seems a luxurious kind of place. Mostly because my Nan would allow my sister and I to help ourselves to the sugar bowl, to lick the icing spoon and, if we had been particularly good, she would allow us to stir the hot milk into the Bird’s custard. This was an especial duty indeed and always led to low level rivalry between my sister and I as to who’s turn it was that week.

The kitchen, of course, is a dangerous place for a small child but my Nan always managed to keep us out of danger without raising a sweat. The only real fear she ever expressed was on wash days when the old mangle would be in use to squeeze the water out of the clothes. She would always extol us not to put our fingers into the mangle and there would be something in her eyes other than a mere warning to use our good sense.

I have no idea if she’d ever witnessed a real mangle based accident; she never said. And now whenever I hear talk of mangles all that really comes to mind for me is Dudley Moore singing snidely of “not laughing so hard since Aunty Mabel got her left tit caught in the mangle”. Thankfully such incidents were a world away from my Nan’s kitchen.

What  sticks in my mind most about my Nan’s kitchen is the little mounted egg timer she always kept hung on the wall above the work surface. Engraved into the top of it were the words: Kissin’ Don’t Last, Cookin’ Do. I’m sure she said it used to belong to her own mother but I can’t swear to the veracity of that now. She never used it to time anything that I know of – her cooking was like that; instinctive, nothing written down, no reference to cook books. Ingredients and timings were all in her head.

She was a great cook. I know this because I was an incredibly fussy eater as a child but there was no food cooked by my Nan that I would not eat. Her stew was to die for and her Yorkshire Puddings were incredible. It is to my eternal chagrin that I never asked her for the recipes and instructions of how to make them. Lord knows I have tried and Karen has tried. But we can never manage to get them quite right. Never the way my Nan used to do it. I fear that all those childhood smells and tastes are lost to me forever.

Not that my Nan was always an expert in the kitchen. She was fond of telling us that in the first week of being married to my granddad every meal she attempted to cook on their new Rangemaster stove came out wrong. By the seventh day she told him that if today’s meal didn’t turn out right she’d be off for good.

She’d pause as the sense of shock sank into my sister and I and washed over our faces.

And then she’d smile and say, “But I’m still here so it must have turned out alright.”

I have the egg timer now. It was one of the things I rescued from my grandparents house before it was sold a few years ago after the death of them both.

I keep it safe in an archive box with other stuff from the house. It is much too fragile to hang back on a wall. Too old and delicate and far too precious to measure out petty three minute intervals of time.

The sands have stopped and are forever still, exactly as they were after the last grain ran through. Despite their immobility they measure years of time that are far more significant now.

Even cookin’ don’t last forever.

No More Holidays Ever

I have come to the conclusion that it will be more conducive to my sanity and overall sense of contentment if I never ever take a holiday again.

No more days off. No more long weekends. No more weeks luxuriating in the otherworldliness of not being at work.

No more day trips, no more travelling abroad, no more completing lengthy DIY projects at home.

Just work work work from now on and forever. Ad infinitum without a break, pause or cessation.

I realize this new ethos of mine will be hard on the wife and kids but for the sake of my fragile mental health it must be so.

My reasons are thus:

I am back on an even keel. I’ve re-established that balance of ambivalence, insensitivity and self-delusion that enables one to get up every day and go to work and kid yourself that life is fine and dandy and you can keep this up forever and ever amen.

It wasn’t easy. I had a wobble. I teetered on the slippery edge of the pit of depression. I felt it’s cold, merciless maw sucking at my feet on Tuesday.

Why?

I had a lovely day off with my wife on Monday to celebrate our 7th wedding anniversary. We spent the day in Stow. We pottered about without the kids. We had a gorgeous meal at a fabulous eatery (The Talbot for those of you close enough to investigate for yourselves). We found a terrific vintage / antique shop wherein I bought a classic leather jacket that fit me perfectly (I am now waiting for the temperatures to cool again so that I can wear it). The sun shined. We were happy and at peace. We got to thinking that this is how life should be always. It was perfect.

And then I returned to work and the whole happy-shiny facade came tumbling down around me. Reality bit. I tasted dust and ash. I had to turn my face away from the sunshine of freedom and press it back against the iron-pocked grindstone of earning-a-crust.

It nearly destroyed me.

It’s the drop, you see?

The screaming descent from that wonderful carefree high to the brimstone earth’s-core low of back-to-workness.

It’s one hell of a mood swing. And I just don’t think I can cope with them anymore.

If one day can do that to me, imagine what a more lengthy period of holiday will do?

I’ve got 2 weeks off in August! It might just kill me!

So I’ve decided. No more putting myself through that cold hard climb to recovery. No more dragging the comatose corpse of my vital mind back out of the darkness of post-holiday-induced depression.

I’m on a even keel right now. I’ve hauled myself out of the bottomless waters of the ocean onto my fragile little raft. I’m nicely afloat. I’m flat-lining; avoiding the peaks and troughs of fortune and misfortune. I want neither too much wind nor none at all. An eternity of white skies with just a touch of breeze is fine.

No more holidays. No more living life the way it ought to be lived.

It’s a matter of survival.

It’s a matter of staying alive.

Wish me well. Maybe when I retire we could risk a visit to the pub for a celebratory drink?

However, I’m not promising.

My New Career

I have prevaricated. I have delayed. I have walked the tightrope of indecision strung a mere inch above the mile-wide safety net of inaction.

I have moaned but done nothing.

I have abided with a great pain but refused to throw the one ring into the fiery chasm of Mount Doom.

I have complained about the weeds but refused to grasp the nettle.

Well, enough!

Something has snapped inside. My sanity chip has toggled back and forth so many times over the last few years that I no longer know which mode I am operating on and, to tell the truth, I don’t think it matters anymore.

I am bending my will towards finding a new job. The time has come. The sea-change in my soul might have been a long time coming but it is here at last and I am hoping that, by announcing it here so publically, it will give me some steel in my spine to see the plans through to the end.

I am considering literally anything at the moment.

Top of the list currently is Community Beat Officer for the local police force. Something outdoors and community based with the emphasis on building up a good rapport with the locals (as opposed to getting them banged to rights for a heist that they swear they didn’t do). I know. You are laughing. What the hell do I know about mixing it with a sneering bunch of fraudsters, scheisters and ne’er-do-wells? Well, weirdly enough, on my CV where I fill in my “relevant other experience” I am already onto the fifth page. I've had some pretty interesting experiences over the last 25 odd years during my time in full-time employment; I've seen a few things, I can tell you. I’m bloody made for the job.

But in all seriousness the idea of the job appeals. It’s outdoors rather than being office based and this is definitely a mode of working that is more me. The only fly in the ointment at the moment is that the local police force are not currently recruiting for such posts... but I am keeping a hawk-eye out ready for when they do.

Another idea has been nursing. Again, before you laugh, I would point out that I worked 10 years in a nursing home before my current job and enjoyed the environment greatly (though I acknowledge this was largely down to the great people I worked with). Training can be done on the job and it is a profession that is recognized internationally and has merit as such.

Other than that it really is just a case of polishing the old CV and getting it out to an employment agency. I’ve been told that the job market locally is “buoyant”. Maybe it’s time to float my boat on the seas of fate and see what I snare in my net?

Whatever, I can feel a yen to move pressing itself hard upon my neck and shoulders and driving a spear point into my kidneys. I’m 43 this year. Given the current pension climate I probably have a good 40 years employment left in me, maybe even 50.

43 could well be the new 18 and time to get a toe-hold on a new career...

Red Feathers

The thing about pigeons is, when they get run over by motor vehicles, they tend to pop.

And not a nice dry, party balloon type pop either.

But a horrible, muffled, wet kind of pop.

I know this for a fact because last Thursday I saw it happen up close and personal right in front of me.

I was on my way home after a shitstorm of a day at work and, quite frankly, the last thing I wanted to see was a pigeon playing chicken on the main road that runs through the south part of town. But there he was (I'm assuming he was male, as females tend to have more sense). Strutting his stuff in the middle of the road. Damned stupid when nature had provided him with the means to make an instant airborne means of escape.

But no. He seemed determined to walk his way out of trouble.

I put it to you, my learned friends, that it is nigh on impossible to walk your way out of trouble when a double decker bus is turning 45 degrees and heading right on top of you at 25mph. The first wheel missed and the turn of the bus took the pigeon well underneath the undercarriage. When he emerged again into the light it was plain that the back wheel of the bus had crushed the pigeon's left wing.

The pathetic crawl-flap-crawl-flap commenced.

I felt decidedly green at this point and wanted to rush out and pick the pigeon up. Unfortunately the lights had changed and the through traffic was now starting to come the other way. Not one of them seemed intent on stopping or slowing down. And I confess a little voice in the back of my head was asking what difference any intervention I could possible make would ultimately have. Even if I got him to the vet did I really think they'd waste good money saving one pigeon out of the millions that were already lined up to take his place? The chances are they'd nod sadly and administer a lethal injection as soon as I was out of the door (electric chairs being so costly to run these days) and Mr Pigeon would be off to the incinerator. And all that would cost money too.

As it was there was no time to act anyway. The fourth car along completed the job the bus had started. I had to turn away before impact but could hear the moment of death plainly enough. When I turned back around there was a mass of mangled feathers and raw spaghetti spread all over the road. I felt sick. And I felt sad. And cross with myself for not leaping into the path of the oncoming traffic to save this poor suicidal pigeon. Ridiculous, I know.

Next day only a few feathers and a stain on the macadam remained. I'd like to say we will not see his like again but it just wouldn't be true.

To end then, I'd like to present you with a poem I wrote in my twenties (back in '92) about just this kind of pigeon centred demise. I no longer think the glib tone of the poem is at all fitting but it is all I have. Enjoy.

PIGEON PIE

Oh blue plumed and portly blown pilot,

A tyre has done for you.

Popped like a paper bag obese with

Breath between a clap sandwich.

Macabre children, passing, coo for

You, enquire after your

Two-dimensional demise, your brave

Unbirdlike stand against a

Post office van.

Stubborn pigeon,

If God had meant you to

Strut the road's white hyphens a gunless

Gunfighter, he would have cursed

You human and alcoholic!

You should have known: the mail

Always gets through. You're a sober sight

Now, a sheriff’s badge on a

Black macadam breast, a toe level

Monument to avian

Derring-do or die.

Chiselled by chance

Yet as if by a maestro.

You're almost symmetrical, arranged

Like a vain martyr. Could

Your corpse have been beautified by hand?

Havoc has no such aesthetics.

For a humble pot of a bird, a

Miscalculation of

Strategy has left you ready made

For the Tate; a model of

Impressionism, a

Dis-assemblage on asphalt.

Pop art.