PORRIDGE

It's just one of those mornings where the air is like porridge, and not the hot, sweet kind, either. No, I’m referring to the cold, thick, grey kind of morning where everything feels like it’s going to be far too much bother, and the sense of fatigue feels almost enough to suffocate you.

Hmm…

Sometimes I think that I pile into these metaphors and not one person is going to understand the faintest part of it, but that’s how it goes when you’re sitting in the still centre that’s in the middle of your own particular hurricane of misery and you think that nobody else “gets” it.

Which, of course, they don’t.

After all, whilst it’s true that everyone else gets a bit down from time-to-time, none of us feel it in quite the same way, and whilst each of us suffers our own little difficulties and torments, we’re all very well aware that all of them pale into insignificance in relation to massive earthquakes, or ferries sinking fully-laden, or just dying alone in your own study a month after the most public of  rejections.

But inside this tiny, pointless head of mine (for I am not a conehead…), things, as they say, have been rather a struggle of late, and the constant sense of bitterness and despair is not helped by an overwhelming feeling of fatigue that seems to be with me all of the time.

I don’t know whether it’s the horrible realization that I’m getting older, or the loneliness of coming to terms with the fact that I lack any true friendships, or just the nagging, constant pain of this flippin’ shoulder, or maybe just the sense of tiredness that comes from achieving nothing at all evening after evening, and weekend after weekend, despite having “much to do” as they say, and constantly feeling like the “odd one out” in my professional environment.

Sometimes I can be quite “pally”, although this is usually only with the newsagent or the person taking the money at the petrol station. The rest of the time I tend towards the surly, because, perhaps, it’s easier to be cheery and full of outgoing jollity when you don’t really know the people that you’re chatting to and, more importantly, they don’t know you.

The level of expectation is reduced.

The amount of interest that you need to feign is smaller.

There have been small disappointments lately, and most of them have been of my own making. I have failed to do things, and failed to be places, and, oh, just failed to engage with so many people and places that you wouldn’t believe.

Sometimes my mind goes wild with possibilities, options, and, worst of all, blind (and stupid!) hopes, but then the crashing, crushing reality of day-to-day life creeps back in and the cold, grey porridge of life has to be faced again and dived – or at least lowered slowly and ever so carefully descended - into.

So, when the a summer’s day dawns and the air is thick with curtains of rain, and the sky is as grey as a bowl of yesterday’s unsweetened porridge, setting concrete-like at the side of the sink where you’ve neglected once again to scrape it out, it’s hard to get the spirits up.

Once upon a time, these words were going to be a poem, or, at least, the doggerel I churn out that pretends to be poetic, but somehow the creative spark that required got turned into this self-indulgent fug instead.

Feel free, however, to split the lines up into suitable stanzas, or set it to a merry little tune. Who knows, maybe we’ll end up with a “hit” on our hands.

But I doubt it, he muttered darkly, descending once more into the pit of obscurity and irrelevance.