INTO THE DARK

And so the year ticks around and, with the inevitability that the clockwork universe brings to our tiny and insignificant human cycles, we are swiftly plunged into the darkness again with a summer fading fast and only the hope of another spring to drive us onwards. Sadly we are already probably well aware that the next time we step out of the dark, things will probably remain just as drab as they seemed to this year, and so it goes and so it goes.

I’m always amazed at how swiftly the dark mornings follow on the heels of the last cough and spit of August. It’s really like someone’s just switched the lights off and turned down the thermostat, and all on such an arbitrary thing as a date in the calendar. Sadly, this time of year brings with it a sombre and melancholy feeling in those of us who suspect that we might be SAD or possibly just far too overtired, and I find that, instead of bright reds and golds, the autumnal blues are upon me and all my thoughts turn to ash in my mind.

I have a number of pieces already formed and ready to share with the world, but I looked at them this morning and, inside my head, whilst they once might have seemed sparkling or witty or mildly interesting, they were now all worthless and dull and without the remotest speck of merit. It all suddenly looks as tedious as hell and yet I know fully well that, in the absence of anything brighter, any shiny nuggets of hope amidst all the greyness, eventually I will still present them simply because I have nothing better, and they will be seen and judged to be the pointlessnesses I believe them to be already.

Confirmation, affirmation. They’re all the same to me.

The brain is fogged by a sense of ennui and fatigue. The sense of illness persists and turns into doubt and the doubt turns into fear and so on and so on, ad nauseum.

I truly dislike it when the “real world” intrudes into my carefully laid plans. It makes me tetchy and rude and can generally leave me wishing that I could pull the curtains and tell the rest of the world to just go away and leave me alone but, because the world is the world and it forces me to engage with it whether I like it or not, instead I end up grumping around and managing to piss everybody else off instead.

It must be the time of year. The bizarro world of roadworks comes to haunt me as they pop up seemingly from nowhere. Where there once was none, suddenly they’re everywhere and in the most helpless and hopeless of places. When the roads were quiet, they were all clear of such things, but as they begin to get busier as the holidaymakers return and begin the slow process of paying for it and forgetting they had ever been away, suddenly the roads have all collapsed, or that new cabling needs to be laid or that gas main springs a leak and the red and white safety barriers and orange blinking lights leap into life like it is almost the anti-spring and my eyes behold a host of orange traffic cones. A short pop to the station now becomes a minefield of contraflows and temporary traffic lights and awkwardly formed queues where it hasn’t been quite thought through, and suddenly a simple task becomes a battle for survival and the spirits plummet in reply.

My mind turns to thoughts of the consequences of thinktankery and how those wise and foolish old heads of the work-wizards will conjure up their plans and schemes and pat themselves on the back for a thought well thunk, but never take into account the people who actually try to do the work and how they might already have enough to do without taking their bright new idea aboard and proving how hopeless it might be. Similarly the prestidigitators of the highways see a hole that needs to be dug and wave their wands and so mote it be indeed dug and, as if by magic, the traffic grinds to a halt and a million blood pressure levels soar towards the top end of the safety limits.

I finally make it back to my desk and discover more tales of magic and wonder from the bigger, wider, darker world. An 86 year old man impaled upon his garden shears becomes a headline for a while and I just wonder whether it intrudes upon his civil liberties for his x-ray pictures to be posted all over the internet. Is that not an infringement of the Hippocratic oath? Shouldn’t patient confidentiality forbid such things? Or did the poor old man sign a release form so that his tale could be sold to the news otherwise the shears were staying right where they were. Are we all to be bought and sold for the entertainment of others? If I am to believe what the giddy fools show me in today’s headlines on my television, then I can only conclude that we are indeed, and the darkness that falls outside is only matching the darkness I feel within.

Welcome to the dark. Somehow it suddenly seems the best place to be.