A STICKY LITTLE DAY

I guess I’m a backwards looking kind of a guy. I’m never convinced that this is the healthiest way to be, but I struggle so much with coping with the ‘here and now’ that it’s almost impossible for me to look forward to something until I’ve got the stuff I’ve got to do now dealt with and cleared away. This means that, despite the fact I know that I’ve got the holiday actually booked, it can still surprise me when I realise that it’s actually tomorrow that its booked for.

Not this year, of course, there’s nothing at all planned for this year. This year so far, it’s been impossible to commit to the slightest thing ‘just in case’. This year it’s been unwise to even buy green bananas. This year, even removing something from the freezer for that evening’s meal has proved to be something of a lottery with soggy boxes having to be thrown for the landfill and a quick bedtime slice of toast keeping the calorie intake level up.

Which brings us to March the 7th, which has crept up on me with a suddenness that is truly shocking. Where on Earth has this year been vanishing off to so very, very quickly? I’m barely prepared for last Christmas and I’m freefalling towards Easter…? How did that happen? March the 7th seems to have become one of those dates in my calendar, one of those tricky, sticky little days that accumulates a lot of significance without being a particularly ‘special’ day in itself. I start to wonder about it? Maybe the fates are flagging it up for me as a day to keep a weather eye on, a date to be cautious around, a date to be wary of. Maybe, one year, all my destinies will come to fruition on this very date and so the subconscious is telling me to keep a look out and be on my guard. Or maybe it’s just a coincidence (“I don’t believe in coincidences…” The Gospel according to Gil Grissom or maybe it was Buffy the Vampire Slayer…?) and dates are just random numbers based on a human construct.

Most importantly, it is one of only four birthdays in the year that I actually mark by remembering (when I can) to send an actual card to someone. Given that two of these are my mother and t’beloved, you can hopefully realise why I give myself such a hard time in making sure I remember to get the card and actually send it off in time each and every year.

Today is also the third anniversary of my departure from the building of my previous job for the very last time to begin my exile from the world. Is it three years already? It seems like only yesterday when I was having the kind of emotional outburstings that a stiff-upper-lipped kind of a chap would have frowned upon.

I knew I should have grown that moustache. That would have helped me to keep things in check, I’m sure. If only it didn’t make me look like a car salesman, the really rubbish sort of stick-up guy in American crime dramas, or that kind of rat-faced bloke that hangs around betting shops wearing sportswear that has seen better days.

I did actually have a moustache once, for literally one night. It was a cocktail party and I shaved off my various other sproutings and slicked back my then copious hair to acquire a kind of cheap “Ronald Coleman” look for the evening. When I eventually surfaced the next morning, I staggered off to the newsagents for reviving fizzy drinks whilst wearing my scruffiest clothes and with a baseball cap holding the greasy strands of hair under some sort of control. I returned home, only then glancing at the mirror in the hallway, realised why the newsagent had been looking at me so nervously, and climbed the stairs two at a time in order to hit the bathroom, find my razor and consign the thing to history.

Fifteen years ago on this very morning, the aircraft wheels touched down on the tarmac ending my first ever solo holiday having finally decided that it was time that I saw a little more of the world and, after spending half a decade alone at that point, it really wasn’t worth waiting any longer for someone to come along and share the adventure with me (although when I think about the look I was sporting back then an awful lot becomes clear...). That morning, a decade and a half ago now, I’d just spent three weeks travelling alone (mostly) up and down the west coast of the USA, my first ever visit to that beautiful and spectacular country. At the time I made copious notes about it I meant to write about it at the time but never quite got around to it, and what would I have done with it even if I had? These kinds of writing outlets just didn’t exist back then for people like me to burble on about our ‘cool’ experiences to anyone who’d listen. That particular joy fell upon the ears of my colleagues when I got back home, which is one of the reasons, I imagine, that I’m writing these various musings nowadays. I’ve no immediate colleagues to harangue with my latest thoughts and notions on just about everything. I do so miss some of our little chats.

But I still have fond, fond memories of nudging into Seattle traffic in a brand new Mustang after having flown for eighteen hours, then, after a tour of Seattle provided by some friends of my mother whom she’d met on a cruise, a mere thirty six hours later roaring along the icy roads to Mount St Helens in that very same Mustang. So many memories; the horrors of Portland traffic and the rainstorm from hell that found me bursting through the doors of an Oregon McDonalds in frustration at the public phone that had just swallowed the last of my change, then feeling very fortunate that no-one decided to shoot me. There are even some good ones: My first view of the Pacific Ocean… Writing a stack of postcards as the sun sank behind the statue of a fisherman at Eureka… The hospitality of my friend Lynn’s mother Nancy and her husband George… Mendocino Whale Festival… Beautiful San Francisco… The Monterey aquarium… The magnificent and spectacular scenery of Yosemite in winter… and a splendid sunset catching the water sprinkling over the vineyards of Napa valley… I’m feeling wistful now. Maybe I will write about all that another day after all. I guess I do look backwards. It seems I'm a "looking backwards" kind of a guy...

Last year, I was also on holiday on March the 7th and it turned out to be the anniversary of a rather fabulous couple who were among those we were sharing our table with at dinner, and a rather lovely evening was enjoyed by us all. Like I said, March 7th. It’s a ‘sticky’ kind of a day for me.

I wonder what will happen this year?