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.

ANOTHER YEAR SLIPS AWAY

As I look back on 2011, I can’t honestly say it’s been that great a year. I mean, it hasn’t exactly been a bad year, just one that was kind of nondescript. The only thing that I can say with any real certainty is that it most definitely actually happened, but, for me, it is only ever likely to be remembered as the thing that filled the gap between 2010 and 2012, not that I can make any guess as to what 2012 will be like as yet.

The year might very well end up being regarded as that insignificant blip that brought the relative delightfulness of 2011 into sharp relief. Mind you, with the rest of the nation possibly choosing to fall into a frenzy of sporting related activity, perhaps I should slink away and decide not to pay it much heed for the duration, after all I am slowly coming to terms with the sad fact that I seem to live in a society where having any kind of viewpoint that is considered to be other than the “norm” is something that it is better to keep quiet about rather than make a point of sharing.

There’s something to ponder on there, anyway, as we embark upon a year of potential sporting related hellishness in pretty much all of our media outlets. Ah, well… perhaps it will fly by and so won’t seem to hurt quite so much. Then again, we are also on the brink of what we hope will turn out to be another Jubilee year which reminds me, with the sudden horror that accompanies such realisations, that the year of “God Save the Queen (the fascist regime)” and the “summer of punk” was now THIRTY-FIVE years ago and all of those rebellious young things who have survived time’s crucible will be rapidly approaching what we used to think of as pensionable age now, with all the “youthful rebellion” now passed to the hands of yet another generation.

But, as the years stream by, it has become pretty amazing to me how quickly a single year can fly by. Sometimes it just feels as if we’re all hanging on by our fingertips to the surface of this spinning globe as our lives flit speedily away...

Recently I wrote a short piece about possibly a tiny fragment in the long life of Harry Morgan and one of my acquaintances pointed out that he’d had a good innings by reaching the grand old age of ninety-six, which, I suppose, as observations go, is pretty astute. The problem I have is that as I hurtle through what others might call “middle age” (although to me it still feels as if I’ve barely started), ninety-six really doesn’t seem so very far away and, not only that, I have to consider that such an age is rather the exception than the rule and someone with my eagerness to consume more than the odd bag of crisps whilst getting stressed about the most trivial of things is hardly likely to reach such a milestone.

The last decade, for example, seems to have vanished in the blink of an eye. The decade before that seems even shorter in my memories, and so, if a decade can merely be a blink, that great age of ninety-six can only be a matter of five short blinks away from the age I’ve currently reached, and, as my father only managed to live to be a mere one-and-a-half blinks older than I am now, in the normal natural order of things that avoids any unfortunate incidents involving buses or something, I can hardly expect many more than that for myself.

The abyss stretches out before me and I’ve barely got anything done. Heck, I’ve been putting off ringing up a builder for two years, so what hope have I got of actually achieving any of those great plans I once thought I had?

The celebration of the new year, coming as it does so shortly after the marking of the solstice, always brings out the worst in me, reminding me, as it does, how short a year can really seem. Each weekend seems to arrive now before the working week feels like it’s yet got going and fifty-two seems such a very small number to count up to. I’m pretty sure that any reasonably bright child could count up to that with minimal coaching in (ironically) a matter of moments, which, of course, in the end, is precisely what life is.

The year ticks by. January arrives and the February love hearts are already in the shops whilst our minds race ahead to long hot summer days. The hearts disappear and are restocked with Easter Eggs and gardening equipment. We get to the end of June and some of the plants we planted are in bloom, and I usually make the joke that the nights are drawing in (ha, ha), and, before you know it, September has come and gone and you’re already giving thought to the next year’s holiday or the coming Christmas. Fireworks appear and disappear in a puff of smoke and then it’s all sleigh bells and snowmen and sparkling white wine and another year has vanished into history.

It snowed a few mornings ago and my mind found it so very hard to believe that it was nearly a year since the snow last fell. I was sticking Christmas cards to the living room door and it seemed just a moment since I had last done it. I opened up a box of tinsel to garland the pictures on my walls and it seemed as if it was only last week that I had been doing the very same thing in the very same place, as if I’d merely paused in my endeavours, dozed off as I stood upon that chair, shaken myself awake again and carried on. But somewhere in that moment of déjà vu, a year had gone by in a terrifying, aging instant.

I sometimes feel as if I could stare into a mirror and actually see the decay and desiccation of myself as it happens, the spreading greyness and the increasingly interlocking network of lines, watch as all of those hopes and dreams and grand plans just fade away into nothingness and defeat, as the memory of yourself becomes as that of the memory of an illicit smile shared with a stranger on a hot summer’s day just fades into a fond memory of might-have-beens that you eventually convince yourself probably never really happened and sometimes you start to wonder whether you yourself ever really happened either as the days turn into months and years and decades and slip away like butterflies upon the breeze of a bright summer’s afternoon.

Happy New Year, and, if this one doesn’t work out for you, just remember that there’ll be another one along any minute…

IFFY NEW YEAR

I hope you all had a Happy New Year, I really do. Yesterday I had the great misfortune to spend a small chunk of the day out and about amongst the Great British Public as it went about its business preparing for “the party night of the year” and we all looked pretty miserable at the prospect, if the truth be told. Not being much of a reveller myself nowadays, I notice the amount of stress the whole idea of New Year’s Eve seems to put people under and I really wonder why most of us really bother.

The supermarkets I had to go in were chaotic and heaving as if the backlog from being closed for all of one day last week had finally slammed into the dam and we were all out chasing the last bottle of milk in the known universe. Actually, there seemed to be precious little milk being bought, given the mountains of “party food” and booze being heaped into shopping trolleys that had been similarly piled high a mere seven days earlier, and I did start to wonder where we were putting it all.

It feels like there’s a fear out there, a fear that the happiness of others that you’ve taken responsibility for by hosting a party might be less than perfect, and someone, someday soon, maybe even tomorrow, will say those socially damning words “Well, I didn’t enjoy that very much…”

It’s as if there’s a dreadful hatred of the prospect that, say if Uncle Jimmy doesn’t get the precise can of beer he wants, or Auntie Jean isn’t able to get a sausage roll on demand, then somehow the whole event will be a total disaster and their night will be ruined. We are striving towards an idea of perfection and a fear of other people’s expectations that we can never achieve because we’re all dealing with people here.

Annoying, aggravating, cynical, jealous, spiteful, sarcastic human beings, who are also capable of being wonderful, amazing, brilliant, supportive and forgiving human beings too, but all of whom have their own ideas and expectations of what their perfect New Year’s party is going to be, and all of whom likely in the end to be slightly disappointed when life fails to live up to those hopes and dreams.

If I’m being honest, it does all have an air of manic desperation about it, as if there is a general need to have “fun at any cost” because we feel that we’re supposed to. Somehow it’s expected. Of course if your idea of “fun” is drinking yourself into a coma, or pouncing on someone you find vaguely attractive and shoving a much resisted tongue in their mouth and expecting them to show some gratitude for the experience, there’s a good possibility that you had a good night, but for everyone else I imagine that, despite all the most hopeful of intentions for having a “happy” New Year, the reality of it was probably “iffy” at best.

In that sense, maybe a New Year’s party is a microcosm of our entire lives, and we’re all not just that terribly keen to look at ourselves in that light and find ourselves coming up short.

For myself I find it almost impossible to approach any New Year with a sense of hope or optimism, because it’s always got a strange undercurrent of fear lurking just beneath the surface. Such is the life of the terminally anxious. Will this be the year I finally stop getting away with it? Will this be the year when I finally balls everything up and everything falls apart? Will this be the year when I lose everything and everyone?

Obviously there’s always the possibility that things might just get better, but I imagine, for most of us, things will stay more or less the same. I look back on the year just passed and find it all a bit bland, more of a table wine than a vintage, but I suspect that I feel that about most years when I think about it.

The same grey and bleak landscape will greet me this morning as I saw at nightfall yesterday, although now it has the added gloominess of a lack of anything to look forward to added to its demeanour, as the time for merriment is now in the past and the need to pay for it all begins. The serious business of life and living is back on the agenda.

Maybe it’s time to book a holiday?

At least this New Year starts off being numerologically interesting with its opening day having the 1/1/11 label. All odd numbers of course, which is naturally suspicious, but the simplicity and symmetry of it is pretty enough to be encouraging.

You never know, it might just turn out to be okay…

HOPELESSLY NY-EVE

New Year’s Eve has, for many years, been an unusual night for me and despite the fact that an awful lot of people seem to find it an opportunity to have some “fun”, personally, pretty much since I left my teenage years, I’ve always found it a somewhat melancholy affair.

A memory of happier times

When I was very young it seemed a quite exciting time as the grown ups used to mysteriously stay up late (long after I’d fallen asleep) and in our house it was another opportunity for  (just a few) presents so soon after Christmas. I can’t remember any of them now except for the wonderful green Corgi Toy mini I got with the sliding sunroof, which I still have somewhere… (I think it might still be in better nick than some of the full sized cars I’ve owned.)

In later, teenage years, thanks to the parents in two long suffering alternating households, New Years Eve seemed to mean parties and drinking too much too young. I would always head to these places full of hope that the Fionas, Julias, Patricias or Victorias (why did all the names of the girls I liked always seem to end in “a” back then?) would finally go against all their better instincts and see something admirable behind my potato-faced countenance. That they never did is what probably led to the excessive drinking in the first place, and I would stagger home with the future Insurance Broker who remains my best and only real friend (one of the two people I trust absolutely) and watch the future Airline Pilot dance with lamp-posts.

Later on as I grew slightly taller and took – principally due to the lack of interest from all those Fionas, Julias, Patricias or Victorias I imagine – to dressing in black, I became the person who was shoved out of the door just before midnight in order to “let in the new year”. Standing outside in the freezing cold listening to everyone else counting down to midnight and bellowing their various “Happy New Years” to each other, and getting their snogs in with the Fionas, Julias, Patricias or Victorias has, I think, shaped my cynicism towards the night dramatically.

My college years did little to improve things. Couple the insane notion that you “must find a party to go to” with the slight sense of detachment and awkwardness that comes from living most of your life with a different group of people in a different part of the world and you’re in for a horrific time. I well remember the year when I was only convinced anyone had bothered to include me in their plans because I had a car and was willing to drive it. I recall that evening being so ghastly that I went outside to sit in the car rather than put up with the wretched party any longer, and yet waited hours out there alone in the dark because I’d promised the rest of them a lift home. I think I spent much of the time reading the newspaper my fish and chips had been wrapped in as there was nothing else to read in the car. Loyalty, you see? Loyalty and stupidity, all in one pathetic package.

Another year, no-one was prepared to organise a party, and so the nuclear option was taken of booking an overpriced restaurant in the city, which meant an okay time all-in-all, but being kicked out just before midnight as they were closing rather took the sheen off it, and the food was so slight on their “special menu” that we had to track down a fish and chip shop during the long walk back out of the city and home.

After college I was “in a relationship” for a while, and New Year’s Eve actually was our “sort of” Anniversary for a few years. You might have thought company and the opportunity to celebrate might have made the night more bearable but it never did, not really. Sadly she was the kind of girl who was quite happy to find someone else to do on New Year’s Eve (which I imagine was what she was doing when we first got together) leading to the inevitable recriminations and apologies in the New Year itself which I (unbelievably) put up with for five bloomin’ years, such, I think, was the fear of being alone again. The decade of actual loneliness that followed the inevitable break-up did make me more self-sufficient, I suppose, but always managed to tinge that evening with an air of desperation and melancholy, so I was always likely to find it a tough night.

The last time I went to a New Year party was Millennium night. If I remember rightly, I actually attended two parties that year having been invited to both and feeling unable to let either group of them down. The first I arrived at way, way too early as they were still preparing for the festivities ahead – I watched some more worldwide fireworks on the telly - and then left about 10.30 before it got truly and properly started. The second I arrived at about half an hour later as it was in full swing and I was so intimidated by the whole house full of strangers that I hung on for about half an hour before scarpering back to my empty hovel with the excuse that I planned to climb the hill at the back of the house next morning and watch the dawn rise on the new Millennium, which I actually did do. The number of people also there was a surprise, but they all ignored me and I trudged back down the hill to bed, only to be woken by some neighbours still finding the energy to Conga the morning after.

Thankfully, shortly after that I met the beloved and I now spend New Year’s Eve in her company and without all the madness and the desperate need to be seen to have “fun” that the rest of the world seems to require. Nowadays the beloved and I, both being non-fans of this night where organised expectations – and it’s the expectation followed by the inevitable disappointments that did for me -  of “fun” are so much on everyone else’s agenda, are more likely to toddle off to bed before ten and be woken by the sound of fireworks from the pub. We’ll mutter a sleepy “Happy New Year” to each other and doze off again, hopefully having remembered to pull the plug on the phone.

It’s the way we like it.

So, if you are heading out tonight, or hosting a party, it only remains for me to hope you have a lovely time, but we won’t be joining you. You might think this makes us a pair of grumpy old so-and-sos, but it really is what works best for us. At least we are not alone for long in our sense of despair as the rest of the nation seems to join in being full of general misery and  angst (as well as being mightily hung-over) as the New Year itself actually dawns (or in many cases dusks…).

Happy New Year to one and all.