MANIC MONDAY

Monday was just one of those wretched days which leaves you feeling exhausted and just too damned miserable, and at the end of your rope and just hoping that something good might just occur before the end of the day to mean that it doesn’t feel; like a total write-off…

It didn’t…

In many ways it was just one of those occasional emotional “perfect storm” days when everything that can go wrong seems to do so, and all at the same time, and yet each of the little pieces in itself doesn’t seem so bad, but somehow they add up to the kind of catastrophic whole that can leave a sensitive soul crying in the dark and wondering quite where it all began to fall apart.

I worked from home on Monday so that I’d be in. We’d decided, you see, to donate the old bedroom furniture and a few other bits and pieces of furniture to charity. The van could only collect on Monday afternoons, so I brought home the equipment from work and set up in my old office and did what I could whilst listening out for that knock on the back door.

Anyway, because of the fundamental rule of the universe that “no good deed goes unpunished” this turned into a major cock-up as, when I staggered downstairs after the telephone call which essentially told me that most of the things I’d been working on over the past couple of months had been trashed (I told you it was that sort of a day…), I found a telephone message informing me that they had called at the front door whilst I was on the phone, assumed I was out, and gone away again.

I rang them to tell them that I was, in fact, in, and that I had especially arranged to be so, but was told that I had “missed my window” but that it could be arranged for next Monday if I wanted…? Oh, and by the way, the back door isn’t accessible, so they’ll need to take it all through the front.

Yeah… Good luck with that…!

Meanwhile, “Do these people not have jobs?” I mused, as I pondered asking very special permission to drag my equipment home with me again next week, although, to be perfectly honest, the professional earthquake that was set off by that telephone conversation had me wondering if I’d be better off keeping out of the way for a while anyway.

Still, they didn’t have to make it that difficult for us, did they? After all, we were only trying to give something away to people whose need might be greater than our own, and it’s not as if we need to free up the space for the impending arrival of the bilders or anything like that, is it…?

Actually, come to think of it, I was supposed to ring them, too…

There was also another message which was from my mother and which basically confirmed that her hospitalisation was ongoing and that I’m going to be rattling back and forth on various visits until the end of time, all of which is stretching me towards breaking point.

Meanwhile I got an invitation to “relive the old times” from an old friend of mine, to go away en masse to a Lakeland cottage for the weekend like we used to do once upon a long ago.

The problem is that revisiting those particular old times tends to churn up a lot of bitterness and anger that I have spent much of a miserable decade or two trying to forget, and so my spirits crashed still further.

You see, two decades or so ago, I had what I thought was a “life” and, perhaps, a “life plan” until somebody stuck their big fat - let’s be kind and say “nose” - in where it was obviously wanted. This meant that during the decade when my friends were all making their lives, I spent it broken with my confidence in tatters, financially stretched, and whatever it was that I thought was going to be my life ended up being lived by someone else.

Now I know that other people would have picked themselves up, dusted themselves off and got on with it, but I was never really built like that (I was quite obviously never cut out to be one of “Thatcher’s children...”), and instead took the best part of ten years to put myself into a position where I was prepared to trust anyone again and, to be honest, I still suffer from the fallout from that time of my life even now, which is why I try not to think about it too often if I can help it.

Happily, I managed, eventually, to find a genuine soul-mate and rebuild something new on those shattered foundations, something which I think is far better and far stronger, but which I perhaps found far too late for us to be able to have some of the more conventional things of life.

So, you see, the last thing I would want to do is revisit a time that would resurrect all of that darkness and remind me of that particular horror story which, even now, in the cold light of the morning after the sleepless night before, is still causing my stomach to churn.

But then, as I decided to give up on the whole day and head to bed, whilst just accepting that the “something good” just wasn’t going to happen... It got worse; The first news reports started coming in from Boston and it seemed that other people’s Mondays were turning out to be far more dreadful than mine had been.

Not, in all fairness, that it helps, but it does, I suppose, help me to regain a little of some sense of perspective, and it didn’t make a bad day feel any better, either...

I’m sorry but I’m feeling just too damned miserable to carry on with this for the moment, although I’m sure that this blog shall return, today it just feels like far too much work…