AMONG THIS CLAN

Not that I really expect anyone to give all that much of a toss, but…

Well, like on several previous years, perhaps now numbering in the scores, the so-called “Festive Season” was all pretty grim around at Blogfordshire HQ again this year.

The Beloved came down with her annual bout of holiday disease which, whilst it was terribly unpleasant for her, for me, meant several nights of sleeplessness as I listened to the endless coughing, and several days of zombie-ing around brewing kettles and whipping up the odd meal or two, or sitting in an armchair catching up on my increasingly poor choices of movies on disc to fill in the time between.

And when you’ve become as isolated as I have in recent years, in terms of friends and acquaintances, this is never a healthy situation, especially if you start to believe that the rest of the world is doing its level best to have as much fun as possible, and seems to manage that very well without you.

Some of us do fall through the cracks, you know, and I’ve become increasingly aware in recent years that, other than my Beloved, I don’t have anyone at all that I can call in on, or ring for a bit of a chat, because all the people who I might once have been able to call upon have either faded from my life, or arte simply far too wrapped up in their own busy lives to have any space left in it for their now long-forgotten former lives.

Of course, I know that I’ve got nobody else to blame, and the bed I’ve made is the one I now have to lie in, but that doesn’t help when the bleakness overwhelms you as the rest of the world seem intent upon reminding you what a swell time they’re all having without, it seems, once stopping to wonder about those of us who, quite simply, aren’t, and don’t, and, in all honesty, probably wouldn’t turn up anyway even in the unlikely event that we got any actual invitations to go anywhere.

Which we don’t.

The darkest hour came just before the dawn on the twenty-fifth, when, lying awake in the darkness after a particularly restless night, a wall of bleakness, self-loathing and  melancholy just slammed into me like I was a brick wall, making me believe that this might very well turn out to be the last one, and this mood pretty much hung around, bubbling under the surface, for the next two or three days.

Oh, I was able to meander cheerily enough through our gift-giving, and the day over at the Beloved’s parents’ house was pleasant enough, and was actually a far happier day than I had persuaded myself that it would be, and I’m very grateful to them for that, but, on the inside, my melancholia was there all of the time, just bubbling and boiling away under the cooling pillows of lava, and I was constantly fighting to keep it at bay.

Of course it doesn’t help when you know that you’re not anything like as badly off as some at this time of year, and are constantly reminding yourself that it’s pretty self-indulgent to complain when you have so much and so many people have so little, or have suffered such catastrophic losses in the few days leading up to this most “special” of days (like those poor souls in Glasgow) that you can’t imagine that you can dare to complain, even though the chemicals that control these thoughts in your brain never do it with all that much in the way of rationality and logic.

Anyway, after two or three days of this, I was feeling fairly bitter about pretty much everything and have come to the conclusion that, whilst my real life is no great shakes, my online life is fairly meaningless, and so I’ve decided that, in the light of such indifference, I need to disappear from TwitWorld for a while (not that anyone there will notice or realise when you’re no longer there), slam down the window shutters on FizzBok (because it no longer seems like the kind of world for the likes of me), and that Lesser Blogfordshire is in need of a good rest.

This might last an hour, or a day, or a week, or a month, or, perhaps, forever. After all, I’m aware that I always start to feel this irrelevant at about this time of the year, and it usually manifests itself with me throwing all of my toys out of the pram, but this time the bitterness I’m feeling feels very, very different, and I’m not sure yet whether I’ll ever find my way back.

Get this message to Gordon:

“Lesser Blogfordshire is in the Black Lodge, and can’t get out.”

Happy New Year.