ARCTIC CHILL

The prospect of another quiet night in looms large. I arrived home whilst there was still light in the sky, a luxury that will soon slip away with the changing of the clocks and the shortening of the days as the final vestiges of summer fade into memory. Next door I hear the pounding of hammers and the screeching of electric drills as another day of apparent home improvement seems to come to its conclusion, but it is almost drowned out by the continued drumming of the raindrops on the slates.

Will this rain never stop? Will the endless thudding ever fade away? Obviously it will, eventually, I suppose, because it must, but not for some time it would seem. Instead it batters away, distracting the thoughts and stopping the restful sleep with its incessant chatter, ceaselessly tap-tap-tapping beyond the boundaries of my home, hopefully staying without and not finding a way to seep in and ruin everything.

Yet come the spring, there will still be tales of water shortages and hosepipe bans and reservoirs half full, reminding me of faraway days and Stuart Hall and acres of cracked baked mud. Torrents of water will pour and flood where they are not wanted, and streams will rush down roads and pathways and high streets and wash away our human constructs as if they had never been because the water is unstoppable, irresistible and totally unforgiving.

But sometime it will stop, as it must, to be replaced with the bitterest thickest ice to freeze locks and burst pipes and turn our pavements into ice rinks and lethal traps. Then the snow, loved and loathed in equal measure, will fall and fall and fall again, and the bitter coldness will cut us to the bone, shards of ice ripping flesh as the gales blow hard and sting our faces and turn our frozen fingers to burning pain as we toast ourselves in front of warm coals and glowing bars and much needed cups of soup and tea and coffee.

It never ceases to astonish me how quickly winter comes. They’d promised it, of course, those predictive wizards from the meteorological office, but in the absence of a suitable replacement for that much-missed lovely eccentrically enthusiastic figure of Mr. Dan Corbett telling me that I might need a warm coat or an extra jumper if I was going outdoors today, it kind of hadn’t sunk in and so it still came as a bit of a shock to stick my nose outside the door to see if the milk had arrived only to have it bitten by the first frost and instead of a comforting autumnal dawn of warm rain, to feel the first icy needles of that arctic chill, the first whispers of winter coming, rather ironically, so very so very hot on the heels of that last burst of unexpected late summer heat.

And so, once again, I am spending an evening alone as that other bitter chill called isolation also bites deep down to the bone. Not for me the dubious fun and frolics of professional engagements, celebrations of arrivals and departures, or any of the other social necessities that come from working in an environment crammed with so many people with so many places to go and people to see. In our little empire, we three chug away at our daily toils and then vanish like thieves into our various separate nights, with our own demands tugging at our free time. Instead, I wend my weary way back home to the prospect of “a bit of telly” and a ready meal that has reached its “use by” date, and await the call to rescue my beloved from the harsh grip of a thunderously atrocious filthy old night, and the dubious pleasures of traveling upon our late night rail network.

But, as ever, whenever I am alone it is the words that call to me and I find myself drawn once more towards the keyboard and my own incessant tap-tap-tapping, pouring out another deluge of words with no meaning, sentences with no structure and paragraphs with no purpose, all in the pursuit of some unfathomable truth or perhaps just to stave off a far deeper horror, the prospect of being alone with myself and wondering whether I’ll enjoy the company.

Would I be able to entertain myself and find enough things to do to make those prospective long hours be spent doing something worthwhile and fulfilling so that I can look back upon them and feel satisfied that I passed the time well…? Or, as is more likely, will they instead just have ticked away in idle pursuits of little achievement and fretting and worrying about how little I seem to actually get done and how much time I waste on doing nothing much at all…?

Otherwise, spend too much time on my own and the mind goes into overdrive and all of the suspicions, doubts and fears start to resurface again. Old memories, bad memories, of a time when it all went wrong and fell apart. Is it happening again? This time I have some trust, some belief, but then I remember it’s still the same old me with all the failings, all the lack of enthusiasm and drive remains after all these years. I drive people away, and everyone I touch ends up suffering somehow. The Judas kiss, the antithesis of the Midas touch…

Because there’s a longer, colder emptiness looming at the end of it all, truly the deepest of cold spells, and one with no prospect of warmth at the end of it, and whilst we all try to fend it off by whatever means we can, it still awaits us, and whilst I am aware of this, I still let the sand slip away and the relentless ticking of the clocks tick by and fritter my hours away doing not very much at all, and waiting for the bell to ring that marks the end of time and a summons to depart and battle my way out again into the whirling maelstrom once more and meet that train and greet my companion and return to whence I came and sleep once more.

Unless the bloody weather keeps me awake half the night again.