GAPS AND PAUSES

Despite any evidence to the contrary, I've not been writing all that much for a couple of weeks or more. You may have been experiencing business as usual during your visits here, but, to tell the truth, that's mostly been because there have been enough dregs and scrapings that I can fall back upon to somehow put something out there, but it's been something of a struggle to even manage that.

However, this morning, I woke up early, after a weekend of literary inactivity, determined to get back into the old routine, re-establish the habit, and get back to business in constructing today's posting for you.

And then…

Well, I just lay there. My mind was empty of everything except a sudden wave of depression and anxiety that so overwhelmed me that I almost pledged there and then to jack it all in and go and find something else to do with my time. Even the post which did briefly appear, a rant about something inconsequential that poured out of me a few days ago, suddenly seemed stupidly inappropriate and was hastily withdrawn and put back into the drafts folder for more tinkering, leaving me with nothing at all prepared for today.

But that shouldn't surprise me. Not after what the voices in my mind were bellowing at me from out of the darkness this morning.

You see, I believe that "the voice" has gone.

Those internal whisperings which at least attempt to inspire me each day and give me something to rattle on about seem to have been silenced, and, whilst I've often struggled to find the motivation to persevere, somehow I've always been able to rely upon a whisper to ignite an ember, and light whatever fire is in my mind that day, and, so far, something has always turned up.

But now the whisper seems to have been swamped, buried beneath a thousand other screams, all of which are full of sound and fury, but none of which are saying anything other than reminding me how difficult it is to shut out the noise and focus upon the thoughts with which we have entertained each other during these past few years.

I don't know… Maybe I'm having a mid-life crisis…? Or panicking over the loss of something that I never really had anyway…? Maybe it's just that sense of time having slipped away and left me as this tired and empty husk, stuffed full of unpopular and grumpy old opinions that nobody should really be interested in hearing about…?

I really have been struggling to enthuse with my blogging recently, as other things have come along to distract me, even though those "other things" achieve little other than swallowing up time, time which ought to be spent on far more positive things.

I worry that I'm becoming "passive" again, or that the various traumas of the past few years are finally catching up with me and getting the better of me, or that this sense of exhaustion and pointlessness is now a permanent state of being and that, from now on, I'm always going to feel like this.

Still, after forty-five months of pretty much non-stop scribbling, I suppose that it's only to be expected.

Forty-five…!!!

I know…! I was checking through the numbers when I realised that we'd just completed that number...

It seems ridiculous even to me, especially since there was so very little to say in all of that nonsense that I've been pouring out. Forty-five months of babbling about nothing for no good reason other than it seemed to serve some kind of purpose and make some kind of sense at the time.

Anyway, I suppose that this is just my roundabout way of mentioning that I just wanted to warn those of you who care about such things that there may be more gaps and pauses in my output over the coming weeks whilst I'm pulling myself together.

There may not be, of course, because you all know that we've been here before, and that suddenly things can shift into gear and normal service gets resumed, but right now, today, I'm really still to be convinced…

Happy thoughts…!

SUELAWLEY

This is one of those situations that sounds either too self-indulgent to be true or implies that I'm having some kind of a breakdown, so bear with me. There is, however, always the possibility that I am, in fact, actually having a breakdown, so we mustn't rule it out. Not yet, at any rate. All things are possible and, given that I'm sure that much of what follows is a direct result of not-so-recent events in my own little and inconsequential little life, I wouldn't want to rule it out. And furthermore, it will all sound so ungrateful, too, especially as there is a special someone in my life who is acting as a rock at the moment, and who, if she were too actually read this, would no doubt be very upset to find that my mind was working like this. That said, the wee small hours of the morning, those insomniac times when my brain prods me awake and starts buzzing, are the times when I feel it most, and there's nothing anybody can do about that. The problem is that, despite the fact that I do have someone with whom to share my life, and that I do actually spend most of my working days alongside m'colleagues, I've never felt more alone in all my born days. As the song by the Police goes: "Sue Lawley, Sue Lawley…" A long, long time ago, when I was a student, I used to keep a sketchbook into which I would scribble ideas for future projects that would never happen, or draw lousy drawings for artwork that wouldn't actually come about, and which would probably have turned out to be so lousy in execution that I'm suddenly quite embarrassed to be even thinking about it now. In many ways, it served for a time as a kind of daily "visual diary" and was, I suppose, a kind of precursor to this blogging life that I've found myself drawn into and wasting too many of the precious few hours of my life with during these past few years. Anyway, on one of the pages I remember there is a rough drawing of myself as I imagined that I might be seen from above, and I've drawn a black circle around me to represent a deep, dark hole, and underneath it I've written the caption "How is it possible to be surrounded by so many people and yet feel so alone?" which proves its vintage, at least. If I'd written it nowadays, there'd be at least one "utterly" in there, because my language has become more self-indulgent and flowery since then, and also very much in need of a darned good edit. I mean, it probably needed an edit back then, but now it needs one far more as my eloquence may have improved but my brevity - and therefore my wit - has not. I don't need to go and actually find this drawing, by the way, it's as clear as day in my memories this morning, and I'm not entirely sure quite why it's popped in today, but it has and, to be honest, it seemed really rather appropriate. I sometimes like to do these stream of consciousness things, by the way, just to see where they take me. It's usually to the darker covers of my mind, but there you go. If I block it all into one huge paragraph, there's a good chance nobody will find it easy enough to read anyway to be bothered getting this far and so my secrets will be safe. To be honest, I think that it's been all of this paperwork which has been getting to me again of late. Sometimes I just want to sit down with someone and ask some advice, and talk my way through it with someone who isn't going to be charging me three days salary for every hour it might take. Sometimes I really miss not having a father to chat about such things with. I mean, I know that he might not have understood it any more than me, but at least if you're rattling through these things together, you can bolster each others doubts with a quick "I'll put that then… Okay…?" and feel slightly more confident about it all. For similar reasons, I'm also missing mum. Going through paperwork with her might have stretched our patience with each other to breaking point, but at least the adrenaline kick of railing against her sense of my own inadequacies used to make me bloody-minded and stubborn enough to go "Right, well I'm putting that down, okay!!!" and things used to get done, even if I'd have to go away fuming and the recalcitrant phase would lead to the inevitable apologetic phone calls later. I also miss my sister being nearby. We've had our financial ups and downs throughout the years, but at least she's enough of a live wire to do something and wouldn't allow me to wallow in this ennui-fueled lake of apathy to mix my metaphors like a strained gearbox in a  stock-car race. There are my colleagues, of course, although I get the impression that they're getting heartily sick of listening to me drone on and on about my woes whilst taking precious little interest in theirs. Well, I remind myself, they have their own "circles" to support them, and I've got, well, them, but it seldom works out like that. I could, of course, just burble on about it in the blog… Oh look! I am! But that just tends to frighten everyone away, and then, of course, my "real-life" friendships seem to have diminished and dwindled away over the past few years to the point where I don't really feel as if there is anyone left that I could actually go and see and talk to about anything. They've all got full, active and interesting lives, it would appear, and if there ever was a "Martin shaped hole" in any off their lives, I can't really imagine that it would even give one single Polo mint a run for its money when it came to significance. So, instead, it's still the Beloved and I against the world, although I really feel that I ought not to be troubling her with this. She's done enough, really, to support me through this crisis, and I am sometimes so ungracious. We really need to start looking at that empty canvas that is life beyond the current situation, but somehow it just keeps dragging me down, holding me back like the huge weight it feels, and making it almost impossible to think beyond anything at all. Psychologically, I know that it's perfectly normal. On some level it's about trying to cling on to things, about not letting go, but… they need to be let go of. Life needs to move on. Things need to be put behind us, even if they appear at times to be dragging on and on ad nauseum. Meanwhile, there's the small matter of the fact that my online life seems so bereft, possibly because I can't fake any interest in the mundanities of others and yet feel disappointed when they fail to be interested in the mundanities of mine, and yet, at the same time, I appear to have become so obsessive about my virtual life that I'm beginning to neglect to make any engagement with my real one. I'm almost certain that my constant need to "tappity-tap" and "just check" things is doing damage to our relationship, just as I'm almost certain that I'm finding it difficult not to keep on doing it. And then there's the theatre. From time to time, in a vague effort to persuade myself that friendships might be resumed if I dragged myself back in part towards my old life, I toy with rejoining the world of the theatricals via the AmDram outfit that I once used to hang about on the fringes of. "Maybe" I reason "I could go back, but do it on my own terms so that the annoying bits wouldn't annoy me this time…" Alas, because the Beloved is not to be persuaded ever to return, resuming that would, in all likelihood, create a further schism which is just not worth the risk. I need to be at home but able not to be. It is a dilemma, as it shuts the world out, but keeps my world together. I'm burbling… I know that I'm burbling. I'm rattling on in an unwisely and all-too revealing personal way which possibly resembles the doom-stricken angst of a gloomy and self-indulgent teenager. Well, for some of us, we never really got out of that phase. Some people turn it into art and poetry and music, but the rest of us turn it into misanthropy and self-loathing and really, really, it's time that I grew up and stopped it now.

OTHER SIDE OF THE TRACKS

I don't often go to the end of the platform, but, well, you know, I did have a couple of hours to fill and so I found myself orbiting the entire station time and again. As I was waiting for the arrival of my own eventual train, as each twenty minutes passed, another batch of travellers would arrive, wait and leave. I began to run out of things of interest to look at and drifted further and further away from the busier areas of the platform rather than suffer those "odd" looks I would keep getting as I strolled past people for the third or fourth time.

Eventually, I reached the end of the platform and found a fence preventing any further progress and this rather poignant little sign which perhaps offered some hope in a sea of despair to the occasional troubled soul.

It stopped me short when I spotted it, with its implications of presumably fairly infrequent tragedy, hopelessness and utter despair, and I paused for a moment, considering the implications, and wondering about the wisdom of having the sign there at all, before drifting back to the waiting hordes hoping that they hadn't thought that I needed keeping an eye on just because I'd gone that far out beyond the norm...

I'm so stupid sometimes.

Because, whilst for a while I was wondering whether this was the best place for this notice to be, I was forgetting a whole host of other matters. After all, I unreasonably reasoned, there was a good quarter mile of platform behind me where someone so inclined could fling themselves in front of the next passing express if they so chose, (ruining the lives of the driver, the staff, and all of the other passengers and potential passengers in the process), and this particular point was so far away from the maddening crowd that I wondered whether someone in that particular frame of mind could or would even get that far.

Equally, given that I was standing on a platform, otherwise known as a "halt" or "designated stopping point", this is the one point where the trains are likely to be slowing down and, whilst I'm sure that in a straight fight between several tonnes of heavy engineering and one vulnerable human body, the train's going to suffer the least damage, so it didn't strike me as the most likely place for someone to choose to do the deed.

Later on (much later on, to be honest), I realised that I wasn't looking at the "bigger picture..."

At that point, it wasn't the railway that was likely to be the problem.

Looking beyond the fence there's a quick hop over it, followed by a short sprint and you would be at the huge viaduct which, I suddenly realised, offers a swift and very sheer vertical drop straight downwards to oblivion...

And that's what the little sign is for.

I'm amazed that it took me so long to realise this, and took off my metaphorical hat to those wise people at the Samaritans for trying to keep one step ahead of tragedy, even though I suspected that the thought must have been born out of bitter experiences.

So, if you are feeling so inclined, please stop, take a moment, and ring the number.

You know it makes sense...

BLOGFORDSHIRE NOIR

Can it really be a week already since that last working day of the year...?

Where, as they say, did that go...?

And I'd been so looking forward to a "proper" break for so long and yet I seem to have squandered yet another one and am once again looking forward to another year starting in a state of utter exhaustion with nowhere else to go but even further down the slide...

Sigh...

Boxing day came and went again. The winds were howling, the wickets were falling, and the mood was grim.

Well... Mine was...

I had a bath mid-afternoon (Too much information...? Or just a mental image you'd rather not have to have...?) and, as I sat there contemplating life, the universe and everything, my mood just plummetted which, given that I've never been the jolliest of elves during this particular season of the year, took quite some doing.

Perhaps it was the result of the previous night's insomnia...? Or the sense of yet another defeat coming up from down under...? Or maybe the after effects of the TV on Christmas Day being more than a little disappointing...? Or the losses of the year catching up with me...? Or just that sense of another year slipping away without me quite managing to grasp the true meaning of happiness...?

Heck, it might just have been indigestion...

"There's more of the gravy than the grave about you..."

My mood had become so grim, in fact, that precisely what was needed was a great big slab of Nordic Noir to set the mood.

Three series of "Borgen" still sit unwatched on the rinky-dinky recording device, despite "everyone" who we mention it to telling us how great it is, and various shows like the new set of "Inspector Montalbano" and "Arne Dahl" are still sitting there taunting us, too...

Sometimes, it's just far too difficult to catch up with shows when it's TV that you have to read...

That borrowed second series of "Varg Veum" on shiny disc still lurks gathering dust on the shelf next to the TV, too, and those lovely "Wallander" bargains are still wrapped in their cellophane, as well.

That's Krister Henriksson "Wallander" by the way, not Fatwallander or Britwallander, just in case you were wondering... (because, for those in the know, and who care about such things, such details are rather important...)

But the option of choice very quickly became the final series of "The Killing" ("Forbrydelsen III") with the sublimely understated Sofie Gråbøl as the much put-upon Detective Sarah Lund in those last ten slow-burning episodes broadcast just before Christmas last year if the trailers running between the episodes are anything to go by.

I'm nothing if not at least a year behind the times...

Anyway, Boxing Day 2013 disappeared with an impressive count of eight entire episodes being devoured (with an early evening pause to set out a huge platter of cheese and crack open a bottle of Pinot...), and with the prospect of the final two this morning, it looks as if the 27th might turn out suitably melancholic, too...

Which is, of course, precisely as it should be... just so long as nobody spoils the ending in the next ninety minutes or so...

BORED WITH IT NOW

I have become so very bored of blogging in recent days... or, at least, bored with the idea of it.

No, that's not strictly true...

I'm not bored with the idea of blogging, more with the idea of me doing it.

It's a subtle distinction, I'll grant you, but at least I know what I mean, even if my mind seems far too befuddled again to actually get the point across. The interest remains, however slight it may be, but my ability to actually sit down and do it seems to have gone.

To be honest, though, I'm struggling to be interested in pretty much anything at the moment, which is probably a very dangerous place to be emotionally and professionally...

I've got books to read but I can't be bothered reading them.

I've got CDs to listen to, but I can't be bothered playing them.

I've got films I could watch, but I don't fancy watching any of them.

I've got TV shows to catch up on, but it's far, far too much effort to actually sit down and watch them.

I've got things I want to write, but can't be bothered writing them.

I've got other things that I should write but I don't want to write them.

I've got thoughts I should think but I don't seem able to think them.

I've got word games I could play, but I'm no longer interested in playing them.

I've got forms I should complete, but I can't be bothered filling them in.

I've got letters I should write, but I can't be bothered writing them.

I've got jobs I should do, but don't seem able to do them.

There are conversations that I ought to have but I don't want to have them.

There are calls I should make, but I can't bring myself to make them.

There's shopping I should do but I don't seem to want to do it.

There are people I should see, but I don't want to see them.

There are places I should go, but I don't want to go there.

There are things I should do, but I don't want to do them.

I had four days at home recently, right at the start of the month which ought to be the busiest of the year and I achieved almost nothing during those ninety-six hours and more.

I had finally made an appointment with the family solicitor to try and sort out the probate situation regarding my mum's estate and, because it was arranged for a Tuesday afternoon, it made sense to take a couple of those unused annual leave days which I'd so spectacularly failed to use this year and attach Tuesday afternoon to the nearest available weekend with a view to giving me a proper chance to have a break and "recharge" my massively drained batteries, but somehow my failure to get anything done has left me feeling hopeless and exhausted again and, as the saying goes, not in a good place.

So, if things do finally fizzle out in these parts for a while, as it sincerely looked as if it might when I was studiously avoiding my keyboard over that weekend, don't be at all surprised.

I'm sure things will perk up again soon, but I'm just not entirely sure quite when that might be...

BAD DAY

On Friday night, I was, quite simply not having a good evening.

The spirits fell, the mood crashed and I found myself feeling simply bereft for quite while, sleepwalking around the house and finding it very hard to engage with anything very much, show any interest in anything, or convince myself that anything I have ever achieved in my life had any merit or worth.

Everything, basically, just felt utterly and totally pointless, and I was beginning to think that absolutely anything I had ever tried to do ever had any actual value at all.

The timing was lousy.

After all, it's not just about my writing, but this mood crash coincided with the day's announcement of the Bruntwood prize winners amongst whose number I was never going to feature, and, in the spirit of the times, we finally got around to watching the "National Theatre 50" programme which we'd recorded at the start of the month and two-and-a-half hours of watching actors actually looking as if they were acting (it's not their fault - dashing on and doing a "bit" can't really help with getting to the reality of the moment) whilst performing some of the very best writing ever written for the stage is never going to help me to feel any better about my own humble and pathetic efforts.

In the midst of all this, I was suddenly reminded of having my mum missing from my life.

And I felt just so very, very tired...

I can't... I can't... I just can't...

It's the kind of fatigue which feels not dissimilar to screaming depression followed by a total inability to function and that sense that you can't even be bothered to walk around because it takes far too much effort, which happens alongside everything else which also feels like far too much effort. Enthusiasm feels miles away, and beyond a mountain range which looks far too difficult to attempt to traverse.

So you simply decide not to bother.

What happened last month has, perhaps not surprisingly, made me think about my own life a lot, especially as I'm still rapidly skydiving towards fifty...

By this point in my life I feel that I ought to have added up to so much more, to be something that I've never managed to become, but so many opportunities have slipped away and I've got to a point where I'm no longer sure where the me in all of this is any more...

I do sometimes think that those long, wasted years of the decade of the 1990s did more damage than I realised.

So what are the solutions?

I wonder sometimes whether I ought to rejoin the theatre group which I once used to involve myself in the peripheries of...? After all, I had some little purpose for a time when I was there, but then, like most things I've ever involved myself with, it also conspired to annoy me so regularly that it still might not be a good idea. I suspect that I'd only be rejoining at all because I couldn't think of any better options, but then I've seldom been the sort of person who wants to join things, no matter how many Book Groups or Creative Writing Groups I feel that I might have missed out on over the years.

The fear of not being good enough is almost as crippling as the mind-shattering shyness has been.

I know that there are so many lapsed friendships to be worked on even though I also know that I've let things slide for far too long, although I need to accept that it wasn't all one-sided, because their priorities changed too...

Perhaps I'm just not very good at this living mularkey...?

Of course, I know that all of this recent excitement over the recent telly and shopping stuff which I've been blathering about in my recent posts is just a classic substitution for whatever the void I perceive as being in my life is... If you want to believe in that sort of homespun simplistic self-analytical psychology anyway.

And yet...

You see...

There's a thing about not wanting to anticipate stuff too much in case it turns out to be absolutely awful... and despite the fact that I can be trying my very best to remain non-committal and as pragmatic as possible about whatever the something of the moment happens to be, at the same time I so-o-o-o much don't want to actively dislike the thing which leads to an almost bipolar need to protect myself from disappointment.

I'm in a delicate place emotionally.

I'm really not very good at the moment at dealing with disappointments...

Or even potential disappointments...

And that's symptomatic of my relationship with the wider world.

Better to hide under a rock and not engage rather than finding out how disappointing the world, the people in it, and your own self can actually be.

After all, if the world was all that bothered by my continuing absence, surely it would have come looking for me by now, wouldn't it...?

Thought not.

BROKEN

I don't know how to properly explain this, but I am feeling more than a little broken at the moment... It's as if whatever made up "me" has been smashed into smithereens by a great big hammer and there are pieces of me lying around on the floor everywhere and not one of them can summon the energy to pull themselves together again.

Instead, each of the little bits wants to just lie there for as long as possible before whatever light there was simply fades out into darkness and peace and quiet.

This year so far has been a genuine slog to try and get through and I'm starting to believe that the very last strands of my tether were reached months ago, so that the end of it is now little more than a vaguely pleasant memory, dating from a time when things were merely bloody awful and there looked like there might actually be light at the end of the tunnel one day, rather than a series of oncoming steam trains each trying to squash me.

Rationally, of course, I know how lucky I am. I know that, in comparison to many, I've got it very easy, and somehow, that just makes it worse as I put myself through the meat grinder for even daring to think that I've got it bad when so many have it so much worse.

And yet it still goes on and on, and my ability to think properly is so scrambled that I have to force myself to remember even the most mundane of things that need to be done as flashbulbs of anxiety burst incessantly inside my head and prevent me from actually managing to do anything.

Whilst I hesitate to make the comparison, because to do so feels as if it is somehow belittling the far greater ordeal these people suffered, the only comparison that I've so far been able to make is to shell-shock, in that I've spent what seems like years now just waiting for the next mind-bomb to go off, and the next, and the next, so that my hopes and dreams and, dare I say it, compassion have been bludgeoned out of me, leaving this hollow shell who's just trying his best to survive the day, and sometimes feels as if he's not even going to quite manage that.

Somehow this broken husk seems to drag itself along, however, and the battles with decay and destiny and ingratitude and endless criticism keep on chipping away at the soul. I try to start my days trying (and mostly failing) to be "witty" on the internet (not here, obviously), because it's now the only moment or two that I can find where I can dig down deeply enough and try to mine what remains of what I think of as "me..."

I want to just run away and hide, cover my ears and shout "Lah! Lah! Lah!" as loudly as I can to block out the noise, the expectations, the responsibility, but it's always there, clawing away at me, demanding my attention and time that I'm no longer prepared to give away as my own life slides away down life's sewer.

I obsess upon my own mortality, on the brief span that is already flushing away. This weekend, assuming I reach it, I will reach an age older than another one of my writing idols ever managed to become, and whilst I ought to find some comfort in that, not only will I remain wretched at the loss, but I will beat myself up about how much  they achieved in their all-too-brief span, and how little I have despite having a pulse and, perhaps, another dozen years left to reach the same age my father did.

So I remain broken, shattered even by circumstances, and can see little hope of respite as the ongoing, never-ending saga meanders on, tearing at the remnants of my soul and leaving me despairing of ever escaping from this dark, charmless, hopeless maze into which I've somehow managed to put myself.

DARK PLACE

HERON AID

Today I’ve got nothing I can think of to write about.

Either that, or I’m so crippled by jealousy, or rage, or frustration, or fatigue, that I can no longer think at all.

Granted, I could probably have written that sentence on any morning in the past six months, asking you to “delete as applicable” the choices that you think might not apply, and you would probably have believed me every single time.

However, today feels different… Today I really do feel hog-tied by jealousy, rage, frustration, or fatigue (at least one of them anyway) to know that I can’t think of anything for a very good reason, even if I’m not quite certain yet as to which of them the reason is going to turn out to be.

It’s difficult to tell…

I know that I’m angry with myself for not making more effort to promote myself, and that certain deadlines have now passed, and the fact that successes and plaudits are going to now be going to others instead of me is somehow not giving me any joy…

Other people are about to be finding well-deserved success and meanwhile, I’m not, and, it seems, am never likely to, and that’s grinding away at me and throwing me into a selfish pit of despair so deep that I believe that I’m unlikely to ever emerge from it…

Well, not for a while, anyway…

Perhaps it’s not been helped by the fact that some days recently have been “difficult” for me, and the fallout from the fallout has turned out to have its own kind of fallout…

So this morning, instead of writing, I found myself drawn to the “Springwatch” Red Button coverage of the bird sanctuary webcams and became fascinated by the images of a heron preening itself in the early morning light… (Followers of @MAW_H on Twitter will now be able to work out almost precisely when this post was being composed… and so our deepest, innermost secrets are ultimately revealed…) 

The Red Button “Springwatch” stuff is actually very therapeutic and relaxing, and I can’t recommend it highly enough for getting rid of the stresses and strains of the early morning angst, and it is, essentially, bird-watching from the comfort of your own sofa. Sometimes if feels a little like the old overnight “Big Brother” images (not that I watched those…) only with birds. In the early morning hours, it’s still far better entertainment than BBC Breakfast, though, even if there is the occasional “fecal sack moment” to put me right off my Fruit & Fibre...

Just what I needed... but still preferable to watching Bill and Susannah... No that’s not really fair. I used to like Bill. He is, after all, a bee-keeper and therefore can’t be all bad, although the “It’s all about me, really…” smugness of his various colleagues has never really appealed.

Anyway, back to the heron…

Uh-oh... I think he’s spotted us...

LOSING BATTLES

“Sometimes I just wish that it would all be over and I could relax and have a good rest”

Of course you should be careful what you wish for and merely writing that down has given fate a big ol’ temptation to drop me right in it, look down upon me from that circle of daylight at the top of the pit, taunt me with some platitudes along the lines of “Now you’ve got what you wanted, how do you like it…?” and then slam down the lid and leave me festering alone in the darkness.

I’ve rarely wondered what my own personal “Room 101” might be because I’ve never really thought about it seriously before, but I’m wondering about it now…

After all, when you’ve spent getting on for half a century pretty much terrified of everything life has thrown at you, which is the one thing you could pick out and say that it is absolutely, definitely the most terrifying thing of all…?

I do sometimes wonder whether fate merely shuffles the pack, has a quick chat with his friend Karma and then zaps you with the thing you’ve always secretly feared the most.

A loss of dignity, perhaps…?

A loss of the sense of self…?

The mind going…?

The anti-whatever-I’m-fors kicking down the door and dragging me outside to their killing fields…?

Prolonged torment and torture (because I know I would crack)…?

Excruciating and endless pain…?

A lifetime of Sunday afternoons spent with your family…?

A disfiguring illness…?

I remember once that a rather shocking image was put into my mind about a relative of a friend and it bothered me a lot. That image - it involved carving off a forest of mushroom-like growths from a face - kept me awake at nights for years (sometimes it still does) and would sometimes cause the bile to rise if I thought about it for too long, or it would unexpectedly spring to mind at the most inopportune moments and quite ruin my morning. Like, well... Right now, actually...

When similar disfigurements began to appear upon me as I got to that sort of age when they naturally start to, I did wonder whether she had indeed, simply by telling me, cursed me that day to suffer precisely the same fate simply by the fact of putting that image into my mind so many years ago…

Then, recently, I saw a man in a shop who’s nose had so many Rhinophymic growths bursting from it that I couldn’t help but notice it. But was it fascination or fear that drew my eyes towards it time and again? Was I really just wondering whether my own nose would one day look like that? Did it worry me that people would start to stare in much the same way in which I was as they strolled around the fruit and vegetables…?

Or was I just being horrible to keep on glancing at the poor man?

There is, of course, always lurking inside me the person that I really wish I could be, the sort of person who would never have noticed that, been “blind” to it and just accepted it as part of the great diversity of human life and circumstances.

The better person who hadn’t spent far too many years in a wretched state of fear and loathing, rather than this one who’s permanently disappointed, despairing, defeated or terrified.

The one who could enthuse about things, or be enthusiastic about something that other people might just consider to be “cool”. The bloke who could actually be considered to be good at something or not feel as if his life were always about to be torn apart…

Sometimes it’s as if all the fight has finally been knocked out of me, almost as if the battle’s been won and I don’t feel like carrying on.

Of course, sometimes it’s not the battle (or the war) that’s significant, but the opponent, and once the opponent has been removed from the battlefield, then you realise that you actually start to miss them in some small way, as if all of the fighting gave you some sort of purpose that you’re now lacking.

I don’t think that I’m explaining this very well, which is odd because I woke up this morning with this argument fully formed and now I’m groping around in the fog trying to grasp at the vaguest of recollections of what it was I meant, and I’m starting to suspect that I didn’t really understand what it was I was thinking about at all…

Another battle I’m losing…

DEPRESSION WAVE

It’s difficult to describe to anyone who doesn’t get them how a depression wave feels when it hits you. It’s like suddenly everything you do is either far too much to deal with and you feel constantly like you are teetering on the brink of some sort of abyss where you’re blinking away the tears, gulping down the screams, and living in constant fear of a sudden and frightfully embarrassing meltdown that nobody around you is likely to either understand or know quite how to deal with.

Unlike a tsunami, which is usually born out of a short, sharp geological shock, the rather more personal storm that is a bout of depression can start very peacefully, like a slightly more potent wave lapping up onto the shoreline. You can be quite contentedly listening to the calm lapping of the waves of events that make up your days as they come one after another and then another, different, darker wave seems to pass over you as if somebody just walked over your grave and you feel a change in the air, like the sudden onset of a dark season that comes out of nowhere.

And yet instantly, you feel it pass over you and things, which may have been going along swimmingly for quite some considerable amount of time, can immediately feel different, as if your outlook, your whole perspective has quite suddenly altered somehow and everything seems different, darker and far, far worse than it did even seconds ago.

Things that you usually quite enjoy, like, for example, writing a bit of nonsense each morning, can immediately feel utterly pointless somehow, and everything you do, driving your car, eating your breakfast or just listening to a song on the radio can fill you with a feeling of utter hopelessness, misery and sense of the melancholic that makes it almost impossible for you to function, with a sense of deadness all around you and the taste of ashes in your mouth every time to try to speak or eat or interact with anything in the world about you.

For those of us that can, somehow we drag ourselves onwards, despite running the risk of alienating those who have to work closest with us by our “strange” or “introspective” or simply “odd” behavior. For those who get it far worse that that, even the most simple-sounding of tasks can immediately become a struggle or a burden and be far too difficult to cope with.

From a personal point of view, I sometimes am very aware of the change in my mood and I try to compensate in a quite pathetic manner, which can lead to some rather embarrassing attempts at bonhomie to try and hide the bleakness I feel, and which usually ends up with me feeling far, far worse about things and wishing that I could just shut the hell up.

But shutting up can be just as difficult for those around you to have to deal with too. Those icy silences or the frosty retorts to all of the tales of their “normal” sounding lives can be just as alarming or upsetting as some ridiculous artificial notion of joviality. As with most things, there is no “right” way of dealing with these things, you just have to blunder along as best you can and hope against all hope that you don’t upset too many people along the way as you poke around trying to find your own lost pathway back towards the light.

Shortly after that, especially if you are left feeling “bad” about any of your behaviour, you can really start to believe that there has never been anything likeable about you at all, and you start to look at the evidence that you see all around you as only you can perceive it and from your own, admittedly slightly skewed point of view, and you will have all of your worst fears about this utterly confirmed, and that nothing you can say or do can ever have any value at all to anyone, ever. It’s strange during those periods how many of the things you can most value about yourself and which seem the most important things in the world to you can seem to be so utterly irrelevant to the world at large...

Or maybe that really is just me...

I do sometimes wonder whether a lot of this is due to the lack of sunshine in my life. The link between the sun and the chemicals in the brain that keep us all feeling “ship-shape” and “tickety-boo” has been long established and, apart from during the weekends, for large chunks of the year I can find myself getting up in the dark, driving in the dark, arriving at work in the dark, not emerging all day and then leaving and going home in the dark, and the only glimpses of daylight that I see are through the blinds of the office as the world goes about its business beyond them.

But I guess that I’m not the only one who lives like that. Perhaps that’s why the image that comes to me when I start to ponder upon things like depression is a wave. Deep down inside, I’m obviously just a frustrated “surf-dude” who’d much rather spend his life on the beach, even though the idea of having a “beach holiday” has always been an anathema to me, and anyway, how would I earn enough from doing that to pay all of these bills...?

It’s a constant worry and probably explains why I’m such a “complex” kind of a guy.

Or at least why I have one... J

MEMORY SLUM

I had a lousy night’s sleep. I woke up about half past midnight and, for hour after hour after that, my mind was bombarded by random images and memories, which bludgeoned me into full consciousness. It’s almost as if, having opened up the “memory palace”, someone had decided to upturn the box and drop the whole lot on my head.

I suppose that I could have got up and tried to write it all down, a tried and trusted technique of getting it out of my head and onto paper so I stop worrying about forgetting it, but there was so much of it, I suspect that I’d have been up all night anyway.

Let me try to explain how I got myself into this predicament.

A couple of morning’s back, the Breakfast news people decided to take a fatuous and shallow look at the matter of memory. Oh, how they patronised, oh, how they implied that somehow, if we listened to their wise words for about three minutes, we too would never, ever lose our car keys ever again. The ironic thing, of course, is that with morning breakfast news broadcasts, they tend to repeat the same stories for three consecutive hours to cover the various times that people choose to greet their day, and so each time around it was almost as if they’d forgotten that they’d already told this tale.

Luckily, I only saw it the once.

Of the three minutes making up this particular segment, about a minute and a half of their allotted time was devoured by showing a long clip from a “Sherlock” episode to try and make it seem relevant to the telly-devouring zombies that they seem to imply we all are, using a plug for one of their own dramas to explain the blindingly obvious topic which they were talking about, just in case we moronic viewers didn’t manage to understand the concept of what a “memory” is I suppose.

The “memory expert” they then briefly interviewed had much to say in a very short time about the memory techniques that he himself had mastered to championship level, and was then cut off to go to some other item on geese or something. I don’t actually know. This is  not from a lack of memory, but because I left the room to go and do something more interesting instead.

Actually, it wasn’t all that interesting, because it was to go and put the empty tea mugs next to the sink, and, although in comparison I might be suggesting that this was actually a more interesting thing to do, it wasn’t really. I only thought I’d better mention it to prove that I did actually remember what I did.

People in glass houses and all that…

Before I went off and did that, however, the “memory expert” (he had a book to plug) touched upon the topic of “memory palaces” which seems to be a topic much in vogue at the moment, appearing as it does in quite a few books and dramas lately, of which “Sherlock” was merely only the most recent example, although it is a far older technique. It’s actually mentioned, for example, in the Thomas Harris “Hannibal Lector” book “Hannibal”, and I just used that very same method to remember the author’s name instead of looking it up on the internet like I would normally do. Visualise the bookshelf… move along to “Silence of the Lambs”… Top shelf… Right hand side… Ah! There you go: Thomas Harris!

Mine’s obviously more of a “memory library” but never mind…

However, one thing that he did suggest as being a good way of remembering the small things like where it is you’ve put things down, was the making of trivial moments memorable (and, of course, remembering to do this as you’re doing so…). So, for example, you might think of a firework exploding, or something equally bizarre or incongruous, to make the moment itself memorable when you, for example, put down your glasses or your car keys. As the man said, if you walked into your living room one day and found an unexpected clown juggling there you’d never forget it (and you’d probably run like hell), so you’re just using the same idea to help you remember more trivial things.

We are, after all, becoming a society that doesn’t have to remember stuff because we carry devices with us everywhere so that we can look things up. We no longer feel the need to retain knowledge and it has become something that is regarded as being unusual, which is why, I suppose, when “clever” people manage such feats on our televisions we can be extremely impressed, and why quiz champions sometimes really do seem to be quite extraordinary.

“How do you remember this stuff?” is a phrase that has haunted me over the years. I do because I do, and because I take the trouble to. In one job, it made my life easier to remember just where certain reference images were in the filing system, and so I became a useful resource for some of my colleagues who, it seemed, couldn’t retain that sort of stuff, or perhaps they just couldn’t be bothered to do something so banal. I still think that I have a lousy memory, but that seemed to be a useful thing to do precisely because it made the job a lot easier and I could never really fathom why other people didn’t do it. It was them choosing not to do it that seemed the more unusual choice to me.

I can still dredge up the most bizarre things despite never, ever having got the knack of absorbing and remembering names. That’s a huge flaw I have and people sometimes suggest that it displays a lack of interest in people, but, no matter what I do, names just don’t seem to sink in. Neither do happy moments unless I really take a moment and force myself to try and remember. Some holidays I have almost completely forgotten and I swear that if it wasn’t for certain photograph albums I have, most of my precious memories would be just so many melted icebergs. These days I have to truly try and force myself to try and remember a specific moment whilst it is happening, or else I can come away from somewhere like the Pyramids for example, without ever really feeling like I was ever really there.

Nevertheless, now that the rather fascinating topic of memory technique had been broached, however slightly, my mind was fully committed to finding out more, and what interesting stuff it is. Sometimes the seemingly chaotic layout of a “memory palace” seems arbitrary and random, but it does make some kind of sense to the owner, a bit like the madness that is our little house does. Although when you look around our tiny and chaotic hovel it resembles something more like a memory slum than a palace, but that’s just the way I seem to live. I like to occasionally claim that it’s because I know where everything is and “I have a system” which means that the status quo of clutter needs to be maintained, but I don’t think I’m fooling anyone with that one, am I?

Anyway, having been reminded of the notion of a “memory palace” and learned a few tips on improving memory, I decided to put it to the test and promptly visualised my fireworks and explosions as I went about my evening. I wonder quite what you do if you attach a firework image to absolutely everything that you want to remember, of course, but the three minutes I saw didn’t really cover that.

So off I toddled to jolly old Bedfordshire only to wake at midnight with my brain bursting with all sorts of long-forgotten memories to keep me awake through the long dark hours.

One of the things that I think we all dread is the loss of our memories and our faculties, but that night I could have quite happily forgotten everything if it meant a few decent hours sleep.

DEAR ME…

Dear Me,

I decided to write you this letter to let you know that I understand how you are feeling. I know how tough you think that it is simply being you and, whilst I also understand how very few people are ever likely to take the time or make the effort to understand that, I feel that you should be made aware of the fact that there always will be one person who will be fully aware of it and will be there if you should ever need them to be.

I know that you approach your life with a growing sense of disappointment, that the life you lead is perhaps not the life you once saw yourself leading. I know all about the general feeling that is gnawing away at your soul, that you are becoming ever more aware that most of the great swathe of people sharing this world with you seem to be fundamentally ignorant in so many ways, but not only that, nowadays seem terribly proud to show off that ignorance like it is some kind of badge of excellence. You, however, already know how big an idiot you are, because we all are really when it comes down to it, and you’re living a life that proves it. It has taken you a very long time to learn the one basic and undeniable truth that you now know only too well, that you basically know nothing, and that equally, nobody else does either. It’s a hard learned lesson: “Nobody knows anything”, but some of them are better at hiding it than others.

You have tried and failed to make something more of yourself and attached grandiose and ridiculous importance to things that basically do not matter at all. Things like the words that you continue to write that mean so much to you, somehow have come to mean so little to almost everyone else. I know that you want to write messages of encouragement to other people but the courage required constantly escapes you and the right words just will not come and then you slink away feeling like an even bigger idiot for not feeling able to do so. After all, interaction is what makes the world go round. Most of the people you might choose to interact with already know what an idiot you can be, so what harm’s one more tiny crumb of evidence confirming it really going to do? But still you procrastinate, dither and fret about what is the right thing to do or say.

I also know that you remain jealous of the way some of the people you interact with are able to see the world. You envy them their broad intelligence and wide experience over your own narrow spectrum of interest and knowledge. You envy them their way of seeing abstract beauty and excitement in the most unpromising of things whilst your own worldview remains parochial and mundane at best. I know that it troubles you that you are no longer able to see the world in such a wondrous way but instead remain obsessed by things that are dull and drab and artificial, instead of being to grasp hold tightly onto the world and all of its wonders and see them for the bright and beautiful things that they are and share that sense of wonderment with your fellow human beings instead of just seeing life as hanging on with terror to the surface of this spinning ball of rock as it transports us all towards oblivion.

You envy these people their easy friendships and the fact that people, a lot of people, genuinely seem to care about them and hope that they will succeed in their endeavours, whilst your own flickering and diminishing list of acquaintances seem ever more disinterested in your own fate, circumstances and opinions. The basic mystery of taking an interest in the lives of others remains a source of much confusion in your mind, even though you know that if you made more of an effort to do so, so would they. You understand that you really do get what you give, although that should never, ever be the reason for doing the actual giving, and yet you still find it increasingly difficult to actually do anything about it, and then loathe yourself for not feeling able to.

But then you seem too frightened to engage with the world any more. It remains a fearful and dreadful place that you’d rather not have to deal with at all, full of scary possibilities, great unknowns, and things that are far too much out of your control for you to feel you can safely deal with them. The boundaries of your comfort zone seem to shrink each and every day and leave you sitting cold and alone upon a tiny desert island of your own making, and sometimes even that small oasis of relative sanity seems to be crumbling around you.

You see the very same diminishment and decay in members of your own family and it terrifies you how much DNA you share, and you fear suffering a similar fate as you watch them crumble, and occasionally consider that any alternative would be preferable to that, and you find it harder and harder to watch it happening, even as the symptoms and alterations in the crumbling edifice of your own body seem to be starting to collapse in precisely the same ways and these echoes of your own future are horrifyingly visible to you and terrifying you.

You know what a hypocrite you can be, and how utterly pompous you are. You claim to seek out knowledge but fail to actually learn anything from the process. You will, for example, make the occasional claim to love the wonders of the night skies and you will still become as excited as a schoolboy at taking a glimpse at the night sky and seeing the plough shining brightly on a crisp night as you look to the north, but only because it was the TV that prompted you. That blessed goggle box, your life long friend, that safe little window on the world that means that you can see into it and explore it, but only in a totally passive way. Otherwise, despite all the information in the books you keep constantly around you as some kind of security blanket, you would probably not otherwise have bothered. All of your knowledge is, therefore, you believe, a total sham. Everything you do and experience is fundamentally second-hand and it is other, brighter, more enquiring minds which are taking the time and trouble to put the real effort in, and you just sit in your web like a parasitic spider and feed off their efforts.

Occasionally, your pulse may quicken upon seeing a personal hero of yours, like the last man on the moon, Gene Cernan, chatting away, but you’re still too shy, or too arrogant to admit to being impressed, or accept that they are impressive because they have actually achieved something, done something, in a way that you could once only dream of and now know that you never will.

Then something like “Sherlock” comes along which you claim to have enjoyed and that you know that you thought was so brilliant, and yet you still allowed it to suck any of the joy you might have got from it out of you and let it somehow still manage to kill you a little bit inside when you realise that you have nothing of the skills required to create anything even remotely as brilliant of your own. At the same time, you started to resent it even more because of its sudden popularity making every one else consider themselves an expert on the subject now after all those years of feeling like you were keeping the flame all alone. Even the joy of trying to work out your own theories and solutions to the conundrums created started to seem tired and lame to you in comparison to the others you read from these bright new interlopers upon what you erroneously considered to be your patch, when you realised how many of the details of the story you had failed to take in. Finally you found yourself falling into the realms of despondency and despair at the sheer brilliance of the geniuses behind it all, knowing that you are not worthy to even involve yourself in the gentle art of verbal badinage in their presence, such is your own sense of inadequacy in comparison.

I am fully aware that six hours sleep a night is not nearly enough and that you sleepwalk through too many days in a perpetual state of near exhaustion which, perhaps, causes the deeper recesses of your subconscious mind to leap out into the daylight where they don’t really deserve to be, and that these thoughts are fully capable of skewing your whole viewpoint and screwing up your day. These dark thoughts can permeate everything and seep and trickle into even the most optimistic of thoughts and cause them to turn to ashes in your mind.

I think you should try to accept that perhaps the time has come to maybe try and give yourself a break, and not just in the physical sense of having some time off from some of the things you do, but also to give yourself a little slack and stop being quite so hard on yourself. Despite what you may have been led to believe, you’re really not the worst person in the world, even if you are occasionally capable of acting in ways that might appear otherwise. Certainly, from all the pressure to succeed that you are continually piling upon yourself, and that nobody else really expects of you, it becomes hard to accept something very simple, like the fact that you can walk away from the keyboard and that it really doesn’t matter if you do. I know that you think that you’ll be letting yourself down and you will start to imagine that if you actually stop writing you might as well stop existing, but there’s more to you than that, and it doesn’t define you any more than anything else you do does. You are not just your job. You are not just your words. You are far more important to you than what you do is.

From this sense that you aren’t the person that you think that you ought to be you have managed to convince yourself that you are somehow unworthy and have no redeeming features and can do nothing of any merit at all, but you need to remind yourself that this is simply not the case, and you must learn to hang on to the positives, few though they might appear to be. You might live in a crumbling pile but at least you have somewhere to live, and you have, most importantly, someone who loves you to share it with. Sometimes such simple truths might not seem all that significant, and perhaps on occasion you have a tendency to take these basic fundamentals that are around you every single day far too much for granted, but you should always try to remember that it is having these things in your life that are perhaps the most important of all.

Sincerely

M.