WHAT ARE WE GOING TO TALK ABOUT…?

I’m coming to the conclusion that I’m really quite a dull person to be around. I rarely leave the house, I fail to be interested in many of the things that fascinate so many others, and get terribly focussed on a few things that nobody else cares about. Equally I am not able to extrapolate the big wide world from tiny moments or beautiful things. This morning, as I sit writing this on a beautiful looking summer’s day I have the window open but all it reveals is a rectangle of greyish blue sky, a telephone wire and the top of a leafy tree, none of which inspire me to  ponder at any length upon the world’s weather, the potential to have access international telecommunications from this little corner of the world or the interconnectedness of the whole biosphere.

I can sometimes hear the odd car or tractor going by on the back road, the occasional murmured greetings of some unseen neighbours and the neverending squawkings of the huge local Jackdaw population as they go about their business. Sometimes all I hear is footsteps, or the clank of the cement mixer and later on I may very well hear the chatter of family life drifting across from a nearby garden. I don’t think they ever realise how overheard they are, and I do try to zone out from it all, after all, you know how utterly fascinated I can be by ordinary family life, but sometimes these things are just unavoidable as I’m not prepared to shut the window and slowly cook, just to avoid a bit of unintentional eavesdropping, and it does get mighty hot in this room when the sun is shining, just as it gets equally cold in the depths of winter when there’s no heat to be had.

Oddly, last week when I was dripping with sweat as I toiled away up here (now there’s a delightful image for you to mull over…), it took me an entire day to notice the fan which has sat in the corner next to me all year on a day when it would have been more than useful. It just goes to show how much for granted you can take the things you see every day.

I did sit down today intending to write about my experiences with those Jackdaws. I was planning on hopefully making some insightful comparisons with their place in the great scheme of things or some such nonsense, but the words just wouldn’t come. Perhaps another day they will, or perhaps that line of thought is now lost forever. I then convinced myself that I felt much too weary to write anything at all today, but now I’ve found myself churning out this collection of purposeless musings, and so that mysterious power that draws me up here to just write something has worked its particular strange necromancy again. Not that it leaves much that is entertaining to actually read, of course, but it’ll probably give me something to look back upon and wonder about one day, and I can only humbly apologise for asking you to suffer along with me.

Some days I do wonder if I’ll ever be able to write another one of these little pieces ever again, in fact I do that almost as often as I wonder whether I should be writing them at all. But then, that kind of thinking is hardly restricted to these outpourings. Sometimes I’ll sit in the car of an evening wondering just what the heck I’m going to have to talk about that night. If I resist the urge to talk about work all the time, which is always the wiser path to take I generally find, there’s sometimes not a lot else left that is going on. To be perfectly honest, the work of a graphic designer at the blunt end of the business can’t be all that fascinating to outsiders, but because I work alone, there’s not much beyond work and the occasional annoying development to discuss at the end of the day apart from what to eat for dinner, what’s on TV, and whether there was any post.

Some days I actually try to compose a mental list (because I’m a mentalist – in the Alan Partridge sense, rather than the glamorous TV detective version, sadly) of things that I know that I can talk about later on, and then I will find myself struggling to remember each of the six or seven topics that have crossed my mind and find myself having to create bizarre memory tricks to keep it all in my head. I’ve already got to an age where a passing thought can escape my grasp at some point during the other person’s reply and I can find myself  floundering and mentally scrabbling around trying to remember what I meant to say rather than listening to the actual conversation I’m supposed to be having. Worse still is when the end of the sentence disappears from the mind even as I’m busily structuring the first part and… (Ah, you knew that one was coming, didn’t you?).

For example, travelling home the other evening, after the pleasantries of how our various days had gone were over, and the polite questions about our extended families that we’d both been visiting were dealt with, I found myself burbling on about one or two things I had in mind from my early morning adventures in WebWideWorld. Sometimes such topics are best avoided as they are just not the wisest of choices. I try not to talk about the Tweeps and the FizzBokers because they’re not the best of areas to consider talking about with those who do not venture there. However, being able to expound upon the potential horrors therein is always a healthier way to go and, because of one development, I went barging right on in there and talked about it anyway…

I had, you see, made a discovery about one of the people I don’t know having a false identity which was mildly interesting I suppose (You know who you are… Sadly, I don’t…). It came as a bit of a surprise really to discover that there was a mask being hidden behind. I understand why people do these things of course, but it did make me slightly have to reassess certain comments I had made in reply. It truly is a bloomin’ minefield…

Then there was another development in my ongoing theatre publicity saga to natter about, about which I’m not going to trouble you with any further, but I hope it’s nice for you to know, if you’ve been following these matters, that they still resurface from time to time. We also got the chance to mull over the things we meant to do and forgot, like paying the bills or whether a particular possible gift that was being considered had turned out to be an appropriate option. All of this, I’m sure, is pretty dull stuff to people not really involved in these things, but it’s those little bits of chat that make all of our own little worlds keep on turning.

So, here we are again with yet another little piece of writing about nothing in particular. Once again I wonder why it is that I bother, but, you see, some days I do get an idea about what to say but it’s not a ‘big’ enough idea to stretch to a full length observation, and sometimes I just need to let it brew up for a few days, or weeks, or months, leaving me with a gaping hole to fill on a particular morning. For example, I noticed Paris Hilton’s “over-made-up-tarty” range of “beauty” products (presumably aimed at teenagers or adults who really should know better) in Tesco one recent weekend, but I haven’t quite managed to shuffle my thoughts around about how I really feel about that yet. Nor have I quite got to grips with the startling revelation that one of the 25 parts of my innocent little advent tale keeps getting linked into from a Russian website called “xxx-porn”, which is both slightly bewildering and, I imagine, a huge disappointment to everyone concerned in that little venture…

Strangely I’ve prattled on once again for no good reason and, in the process, thrown away about fifteen perfectly good (or at least adequate) topics there, any one of which could have been stretched out into an individual potential posting on another less mind-numbed morning, and probably will be one day.

I bet you’re looking forward to that already…?

No? Oh, please yourselves...