170216

And like so many pheonixes... Um, hi. On the basis that I'm now entombed here and speaking entirely to myself, which frankly was my suspicion all along, there probably isn't too much point embarking on some elaborate explanation or update. But I think I might be back, and more or less intact at that - physically certainly; mentally and emotionally perhaps a tad less so, but writing here can be my self-prescribed therapy. Since Decade 4 is drawing to close for me later this year, I daresay I'll take an even more reflective tone than I did before. I'd like to unearth some creativity if I can, as well as waffle, talk about myself, and philosophise really badly. Same old same old. And yes I did have to google the plural of 'pheonix'. I won't invite anyone to say hi, as there's clearly no-one there.

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.

200212

I don’t know why I haven’t posted for a while. I’d like to say I’m lacking in inspiration, but that’s something of a default state for me, so can hardly be used as an excuse. If anything I’ve felt lately as though I ought to be coming out with something weighty, something profound, maybe even something worthwhile. I’d like to move or inspire people rather than provoking a half-smile and another whimsical exchange (that’s not to say that I don’t value the whimsical exchanges – they are frequently the highlight of an otherwise uneventful day).

It’s very chicken and egg, this whole civil service business. Does the nature of the work and the reputation civil servants have attract dull, lifeless individuals who can not imagine any life other than forty years behind a desk; or does the grinding repetition and endless procession of bland days, trips to the photocopier and cups of tea chisel away at the will, the individuality, the very soul of those who strayed too close to the flypaper and became stuck?

I’m about ninety-three per cent certain I would have been more fulfilled doing something else, yet I have very consciously decided every day for sixteen years (the anniversary is this week) not to do something else. It’s difficult to say whether my creative faculties would have calcified in this way had I sought employment in a different field. I’m sure I was brighter twenty years ago than I am now. I can see that it’s alarming, yet I am totally relaxed about it. It only occasionally annoys me very slightly, and even then only because I am aware that other people think I ought to be annoyed by it. In truth it feels natural, and comfortable. A kind of self-medication, if you will. And I don’t think I’m settling for what I have because of the effort that would be involved in changing course (although I concede I wouldn’t relish it). Neither do I think I’m scared of failing in any attempt to start afresh (although now there’s a high probability I would). Neither do I categorise my attitude as defeatist, or as being resigned to my fate (no caveat needed for this one – I’m really not). No, not any of those. In the end it always boils down to where I assign importance in my life. Up to this point the answer to the subconscious question “am I happy enough?” has always been “just about”.

There’s certainly no shortage of people here who claim to have joined ‘as a temp for the summer’, only to remain a decade or three later. I am here because I’m from a time and place where that was what people did when they didn’t know what they wanted to do. That time is gone, and it no longer applies in that place, but thousands of us remain – relics of a time when you could wander into employment, dull as it was, without so much as a decent A Level to your name, let alone any kind of higher education. And yet even in these austere times, relatively few of my colleagues seem to value their career here. Applications for recent voluntary redundancy schemes have been massively oversubscribed, and not entirely due to the ageing workforce. These peoples’ experiences here are very similar to mine, but their tolerance levels obviously differ from mine. They have decided to leave in search of something different, something better than the life I continually choose to endure.

There was a stat doing the rounds a while back claiming that civil servants ‘enjoyed’ the lowest average post-retirement lifespan of any profession, at roughly eighteen months. I have no idea if this is true, but I suspect some jealous pensionless individual in the private sector made it up. Nevertheless, that didn’t stop me from writing ‘have a good eighteen months’ in one or two retirement cards. It’s in my nature to trivialise. That’s my defence mechanism. I convince myself the things which matter to other people don’t matter to me. I’m brilliant at it. I whistle so that people think I’m cheerful. I am always on hand with a flippant remark, laced with just the right amount of black humour. If I were to release a fragrance, it would be called ‘Futility’ ™.

Despite dismantling and restructuring this post more than once (okay, twice), it still flows not. Fairly apt, I suppose.

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.