290212

Happy fifth Wednesday in February! We haven't had one of those in twenty-eight years, in case anyone was wondering. On Wednesday 29th February 1984 I was deep into a my second term at junior school, in the class of a delightfully old-school, cardigan-wearing, blackboard rubber-throwing, quiffy-haired teacher who has long since departed this world. I had a full complement of grandparents (now none), a new-found love of the most wonderful sport known to man (still have that), not a care in the world (no comment), and no idea why I had no desire to join in the games of kiss chase that took place in the playground most lunchtimes (worked that one out now). I occasionally wore jeans.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17101768

I haven't worn jeans since I was eleven years old. I had never liked them, a fact which I had made very clear to my parents on a number of occasions. But one day the following leap year, 1988, I was presented with a new pair of jeans. I was annoyed - upset even, and decided to draw a line. Over a period of a couple of weeks my protests about the jeans became repetitive and ferocious; both qualities I rarely exhibited. One day the conflict came to a head and I was forced to wear the new jeans. Exhausted, exasperated, but not defeated, I played my trump card - I cried. This was partly calculated I suppose, but the tears were borne of genuine frustration and anguish. This was an event so rare that it shocked my parents, who, realising they had underestimated the strength of my feelings, never asked me to wear jeans again. I think the offending garment made its way to a charity shop some time later.

The thing is, I'm not sure why I don't like jeans. I think other people can look fine in them - attractive, even, but the idea of wearing them myself has alarmed me for as long as I remember. Other clothing aversions (shorts, certain types of shirt) have come and gone over the years, but this one persists. In recent years I have worn trousers which are not dissimilar to the jean in style, yet crucially, nothing resembling denim. I can, I think, categorically state that I will never again wear jeans. I don't think it was ever a stylistic objection, and it certainly isn't a phobia. My family and friends wear jeans and always have done, so there was no apparent reason for me to develop such a strong aversion to them. Perhaps it was merely an extravagant way for the eleven-year-old me to prove a point to my parents, which has grown into a lifelong habit. Either way, I'm jeans free since 1988, and staying that way.

231211

It's always the same with Christmas. I'm a child at heart, and my energy levels noticeably rise in the days leading up to the holiday period. This year the build-up seems to have been longer than normal, so I've gradually whipped myself up into my own version of a festive frenzy. That sounds more impressive than it is, and really only comprises of talking to people I wouldn't ordinarily talk to, whistling slightly more than usual, and tuning the kitchen radio to a station that only plays Christmas tunes. Even so, by my own standards I've been lively, playful and, goddammit I'll say it, happy. Despite a succession of late nights I've comfortably maintained a regimen of early morning rising, have so far maintained admirable dietary discipline, and even remain motivated to exercise each day.

Yet I can feel it upon me. The slump is approaching. Of course Christmas day itself is an anticlimax for many, consisting as it typically does of an initial whirlwind of gift exchange and food preparation and consumption, followed by a slow descent into dull games, generic TV, and more food, interspersed with snoozing. But I'm okay with all that. I can cope with seeing the uncle I don't like, pretending to be grateful for the third packet of Licquorice Allsorts, and watching Oliver! for the fifty-seventh time. What I struggle with, and always fail at, is keeping myself from slipping into introspective mode. All celebrations do this to me. I find myself withdrawing to a corner, watching, reflecting, sometimes brooding. I suppose sobriety doesn't help matters, but there's something about witnessing key moments in people's lives; in my own life, that breaks my heart. Perhaps it's the knowledge that the moment is about to be lost forever. Perhaps it's some kind of response to the desperate futility of it all. It could be that I am touched by the ability of my family and friends to cast aside all the hostility and cruelty in the world and concentrate for a few precious moments on the love they share.

Or maybe I'm just a miserable bastard. I don't know, but either way I inevitably reach this state of Christmas paralysis. I become a rather sad-looking and distant observer. And that's not me. It's not me at all, though I think many people believe it is.

The moroseness has been hastened a little this year by a comment one of my ex football team mates made at the pub the other night. We were being told that another chap from the team had been busy lately decorating his new house, and the first chap made a mischievous enquiry about whether he lived alone, or with a 'friend'. There was a moment of awkwardness, then someone else told him to 'behave', and the conversation moved on. I can't be certain, but I'm fairly sure the comment was directed at me.

To clarify, I don't really regard myself as closeted, but neither have I made any explicit statement about my sexuality to this particular group of friends. For some time I have been working on the assumption that they all know I'm gay, and whilst none of them were invited to the civil partnership ceremony earlier in the year (see how I subtly revealed that?), several of them have seen me around town with my partner, so I assumed that any speculation or gossip that may have taken place in the past had long since ceased.

I'm surprised and annoyed to discover that this should still be a subject of interest for any of them. The individual who made the comment is someone who I like, and having mulled it over for a couple of days, I don't think my opinion of him has changed as a result of this. I suppose I resent being reminded of my embarrassment about those times in the now distant past when I was evasive about my sexuality. I wonder if I continue to avoid making certain proclamations because, deep down, I fear some of the prejudices it might unleash. It's possible that I am ashamed to admit to myself that perhaps I even share some of those prejudices.

Christmas specific bi-polarism, that's what I've got. Ho ho... oh!

Until 2012, over and out. Merry Christmas all.

161111

Now that I've had the birthday, which sped by despite being awake for twenty hours of it (it was the only birthday I am ever likely to spend in three different countries), I am thirty-five years old. A little less young than before, but as I've already pointed out, none the worse for that.

A confession: I am highly prone to sentimentality. Endings cause me difficulty. It's not that I fear or habitually reject change; in fact I can sometimes embrace it. But I do cling to the past in lots of ways, and one thing that horrifies me about having somehow let thirty-five precious years slip through my fingers in the blink of an eye (fingers and eyes in one sentence - how 'bout that?), is the feeling that of all the great stuff I've done, a large percentage has overflowed my memory bank and been washed away in the murky waters of time.

Like everyone, I am an amalgam of the various influences I've been exposed to over time: phrases I've borrowed, styles I've co-opted, beliefs I've acquired. Some consciously, but, I suspect, the great majority without very much thought. The only original thing about me is the precise recipe in which all the exact measurements of the constituent parts are blended together. So in that respect at least, nothing I ever did or knew is lost. In some imperceptibly small way, everything I have ever experienced is retained and used every day just by being me, by reacting to and interacting with my current life in my own unique way. But this isn't the same as being able to recall details of people and places from years past. I dread endings not because of the upheaval itself, but because they mark the start of a long process of erosion, of sharp and highly specific memories being degraded, dismantled, blurred and eventually either lost completely, or, perhaps even worse, distorted and lumped together into generic and vague representations of those original memories.

There are those who keep diaries. Diaries which record notable events from each day or week. Whilst I accept that it might be a good thing to have volumes of memories on a shelf somewhere, this is something I don't seem to have done up to this point, suggesting that I lack the discipline to maintain such a record. Some bloggers use spaces such as this one to document notable events in their lives, but I've so far shied away from anything quite so uninhibited. Whilst that kind of blog is, in my opinion, quite the best kind, for nothing is so interesting to people as other people, my reason for being here is not to record, but merely to reflect. Besides, even a detailed written record can never recreate a feeling or an experience. It might jog the memory, paint something of a picture, and take the reader to the same psychological avenue as the original event, but the event itself is gone. For that reason I'm not sure I would even bother to re-read old diaries had I ever made the decision to keep them.

To re-plot the course of this blog entry back toward endings, here's an example of my behaviour in response to them: earlier this year I moved offices, from a place which had been my location of work for a little over two years, to a new office. Sadly, I'm not generally able to derive a great deal of pleasure from my work, and most days I'd certainly much rather be doing something else. My office was a scruffy one, in a shabby 70-year-old building that was widely considered ugly even when it was newly-constructed. I had a ripped chair and a desk adorned with antique IT hardware adjacent to a window which had a dusty ledge and from which there was no view save for the identical office not ten yards away. The carpet was worn and stained (not by me, I hasten to add), the overhead strip light occasionally flickered, and the room could be either very hot or very cold, but never anything in between. It was a place for which it was all but impossible to have affection - a place I went to in order to do something I didn't want to do in surroundings I wouldn't have chosen. Yet in the closing days of my time there I collected a few souvenirs, and took some photographs of that same desk, that same office, and the view from that same window. From somewhere I manufactured a sadness of sorts, not motivated by the loss of those things I have described, but by sentimentality, by the ending itself, and by the passing of the time I spent there.

Given my reaction to the end of something I didn't even much like, you might imagine the magnitude of my reaction to the still relatively recent news of the state of my knee, meaning that I am unable any longer to actively participate in the sport I love. I can state without trace of exaggeration that the end of my time as a football player has been the single biggest threat I have ever faced to my psychological wellbeing. Apart from demonstrating that I have led an ultra-sheltered life, I think it also shows just how bad I am at endings, less still premature ones.

I have a third example of my sentimentality with regard to endings. Whilst it goes against my professed reluctance to recount events from my personal life, it is certainly the best example, so clearly merits inclusion here. It's actually something I'm a little embarrassed about, and something I have only ever told one person, so let us also consider it a reward for anyone who has read this far. In the early stages of our relationship, I visited my partner's home town for a week. We stayed at his mother's house, went to some local tourist attractions together, visited places he used to live, went to see his old schools, and viewed a few other places of significance to him. When the week was over, I drove home while he stayed on to spend some time with his family. I sobbed like a baby for ten solid minutes as I drove away. Not out of happiness at having found someone so wonderful with whom to spend my life. Not even out of sadness at being temporarily separated from him. I cried because the week was over, and because the special memories of the most fantastic week of my life would soon start to dissipate. I wanted that week never to end.

I know that my best ever family holiday as a child was in 1991. I know who was there. I know where we went. I am able to access one or two fuzzy pictures in my mind of the places we went, what the weather was like, and how those twelve days made me feel. I can even look at the photos, and reminisce with my family. It pleases me that we were able to share those times together. But I still feel troubled that I can't picture the hotel room in my mind, or remember the expressions on faces, or recall conversations at the end of each day where we reflected on what we had done. The sum total of possibly the best two weeks of my childhood is "that was a great holiday". That feels less than adequate, somehow.

051011

Here's an interesting mental exercise:

Think of someone you love. A partner, or close family member. Picture them in an uncomfortable situation. A time when they were in a job they hated, or a situation when they felt out of their depth. Perhaps an occasion where they were humiliated or made a fool of themself. Don't you feel an overwhelming urge to rescue them? To hug them and take them away and make them feel safe? I know I do.

Now picture yourself in a similar circumstance. What are your thoughts now?

Mine are something along the lines of: "You IDIOT! How could you be so stupid? For pity's sake stand up for yourself!"

Self-loathing? Being one's own harshest critic? Perfectly natural self-defence mechanism? I don't know.

151110

I was six years old. The walk to school from the house which remains my parents' home is half a mile at most, but in those days it seemed far longer. First came the short walk along the front of the terrace where we lived. Then around the corner to the busy main road, which had to be negotiated with the assistance of a pedestrian crossing. My parents always warned me then, just as I warn them now, that some drivers are too sleepy, or too distracted, or too stupid, to take heed of the red light. All too often one lane of traffic would obey, only for a vehicle to hurtle past on the outside. It was, and is, a dangerous road.

That day, as we rounded the corner, the road was uniquely, eerily quiet. The memory tends to exaggerate, but I don't recall a single car, van, lorry or motorcycle passing us as we walked to the crossing. It was one of the few occasions we were able to cross the road without the aid of the little green man. We continued away from the road and made our way up to the school via the village square.

The next day we discovered that one of my classmates, a girl who had recently moved to the area with her mother, had been hit and killed by a lorry, not two hundred yards up the road. She and her mother had been walking along the pavement, at the bottom of a hill. The lorry's brakes had failed. The girl, her mother and the lorry left the road, smashing through a wall, down a short but steep drop into a shallow stream below. It must have happened moments before my mother and I emerged into silence a little further along the road.

Amazingly, the girl's mother survived. After a long rehabilitation, she left the area, without the daughter who had arrived with her some months before. The wall by the side of the road was soon rebuilt, and for a few years the patch of clean bricks set against their dirty, eroded neighbours made for a silent memorial to a little girl who died suddenly, violently, in a strange place. More than a quarter of a century later those bricks can barely be discerned as any newer than the rest. There is no plaque, no bench, no tree.

I've been to many funerals. I've visited people in hospitals and nursing homes when they and I have both known we would never see one another again; when it's been obvious that they would not last another night; when they have taken on that grey hollowness that indicates that no matter how much they might want to carry on living, their body has given up. Yet I don't think I have ever felt closer to death than I did that morning in 1983.

041110

'Live for the moment'. Interesting concept, isn't it?

I know it's basically meant to mean you should take every opportunity you have to experience and enjoy whatever life throws at you. Squeeze every last drop from every last moment, because it might be your only chance. Taken to extremes, this maxim advocates the abandonment of consideration for both the past, and the future. There's obviously room for interpretation though, and the extent to which we remember and learn from past experiences is up to us. Likewise, most people would think it wise to remain cognisant of any implications our actions today, may have on tomorrow.

Nonetheless, living in the moment is something I've always practised, it seems to me, more literally than most. As a child I would always put off chores or schoolwork until the last possible day, even the last possible moment, favouring instead a walk, the TV, or that game I invented which involved trying to fling those little sachets of soy sauce or ketchup you get in Pot Noodles, into the small oval-shaped opening in an empty tissue box positioned against a door on the other side of the room. The thought that I was better than anyone in the world at propelling a 5x4cm condiment-filled plastic envelope with devastating accuracy some ten feet across my bedroom, seemed vastly more important than anything Mr Whatsisname might have set me for homework.

I'd still do the homework, most of the time at least. Getting into trouble was drawing unnecessary attention to oneself. There was the occasional calcuated gamble that a deadline would be extended that didn't pay off, but I could always talk my way around any punishment. I had one detention during my entire school career, and that was for the ridiculous misdemeanour of forgetting to bring in my Bible one day. No, the homework would get done. But it would be rushed, and vastly inferior to that of which I was capable. None of which mattered to me. I limited the amount I did to the bare minimum which was permissable, boxes were ticked, the years passed.

This wasn't laziness, you understand. It wasn't the mere rebellion of a young boy who thinks he knows better. I could see the viewpoint of my teachers, of my parents. Good education = good job = successful life = happiness. It was just that I never agreed with any of it. Can't remember a time when I did. I don't remember any kind of epiphany or realisation that it was all bullshit. I just always knew that it was. People lived for a while, then they died. What happened in between was really neither here nor there. Just get from one end of the piece of the string to the other without encountering too much resistence. That was my philosophy as a five-year-old just as much as it is now.

On occasion, I recall chuckling to myself at the huge amount of work I was going to have fit in next week in just a single evening as a result of my indifference, as if that person who would be struggling to do the work next week was someone other than myself. When the time finally came to do the work, neither would I curse my selfish, work-shy, good-for-nothing self of a week ago for making hay while the sun shone, at my expense. He was my kind of guy, you see. If anything I admired his devil-may-care attitude.

Using the sauce sachet and tissue box game as an example, the fact is that I have always taken a perverse pleasure in spending disproportionate amounts of time on obscure tasks I know full well to be completely pointless. It's my own little way of thumbing my nose at a life which, if I am honest, I believe to be pointless in its entirety. I can't identify with people who work hard, who pursue ambitions, who set goals and spend months, years and even lifetimes in their quest for some perceived state of perfection. So long as there is nothing wrong NOW, at this very point in time, I'm satisfied. Even if there is something ominous on the horizon, even if it is around the corner, so long as it is not HERE, NOW, I remain serenely unaffected.

Often, the ominous will recede, or turn out not to be so bad after all. On the rare occasions that something that looks bad turns out to be every bit as bad, or even worse, I either pedal like hell to remove myself from the situation, to find as direct and trouble-free a route as possible to my default position as a bemused and uninterested spectator-cum-semi-participant in the world; or I carry on regardless, oblivious to any threat.

Here's an example for you. A few years back, they found a growth on one of my mother's kidneys. They had become intertwined in such a way that the only thing to do was remove them both. That's a reasonably major surgical procedure, all with the spectre of cancer hanging over her at the same time. She is not a healthy woman - overweight, a heavy smoker who gets next to no exercise - not high on the list of suitable candidates for organ removal. It was not a pleasant time for my mother, or any of my family. Except for me. It slightly embarrasses me even now, but my behaviour did not deviate in the slightest, not for a single moment, from what could be described as normal for me. Not from the point of diagnosis, right through her admission to hospital, the procedure itself, and the recovery period thereafter. I wasn't sad or worried for a single moment. I love my mother a great deal. We have always been close, and even now speak every day. I will be upset when that time does come, and will miss her very much. But the me who's going to have to deal with that isn't the me of today. As it happens, I think my consistency and apparent stoicism was actually a source of comfort to her back then. But I wasn't putting on a front. I wasn't concealing inner turmoil, and fighting back the urge to shower her with sympathy and affection lest it be the last chance I got. I had no such urge.

This isn't a coping mechanism. It may have been a subconscious decision at first, but for a long time I've been very well aware that now is all that matters to me. It seems illogical to me to react to something before it takes place. Not only because it might not happen, but also, and more importantly, because allowing the possibility of something bad in the future to pollute a perfectly harmless and agreeable now, would be a crime, pure and simple. Now is all that we have, and the purity of now is fundamental to any happiness we might be able to achieve. If I feel strongly about anything (and I don't), then it's that.

More evenings than not, upon going to bed, one of my final thoughts before sleep is something along the lines of "Right here, right now, there is only me. It is dark. I am warm and safe. Nothing matters." That comforts me like nothing else.

250510

Second funeral of the month coming up this Friday. It's difficult to remember them all, but I think this will be the tenth funeral I've attended - is this a fairly high number for someone of my age? I'm not sure. Most have been for family members, thankfully none more immediate than grandparents, of which I have been bereft for almost twenty years now. Some of the more recent funerals have been those of people who I've regarded as of the same generation as my parents, which sets in train all sorts of uncomfortable thoughts. The funeral I went to earlier in the month was that of my uncle, who was younger than either of my parents. I'm hardly world empathy champion at the best of times, but it was quite disturbing to sit behind his wife, children and grandchildren in the service, as they sobbed pretty much uncontrollably at various points throughout. I had to tell them to shut up at one point.

Joking.

On the other hand, it was heartening to see my great-uncle, younger brother of my grandmother, looking ridiculously sprightly, and almost younger than when I last saw him more than ten years ago. If my back is that straight in my late eighties I'll be very happy. Yet even the pleasure of seeing him again, and the couple of interesting chats I had with two of my father's cousins who I haven't seen for a similar number of years, is tempered by the knowledge that I may never see any of them again, and even if I do it will be on account of another death in the family.

Not drawing any particular conclusions - just remarking.