8am.
It is Soph’s birthday today.
Thirty-one.
31.
We’re sitting on the couch, Soph’s opening her cards and presents and I’m enjoying watching her facial expressions.
It’s like watching a child at Christmas.
With every card opened or present unwrapped, her expression lights up as if the best thing in the world *ever* is happening in front of her.
Thirty-one.
Going on ten.
8am.
It is Soph’s birthday today.
Thirty-one.
31.
We’re sitting on the couch, Soph’s opening her cards and presents and I’m enjoying watching her facial expressions.
It’s like watching a child at Christmas.
With every card opened or present unwrapped, her expression lights up as if the best thing in the world *ever* is happening in front of her.
Thirty-one.
Going on ten.
Last night, the first time since Friday, I slept.
Sophie came home yesterday afternoon. There was talking and tears and frankness and questions and answers.
And we went to bed and cuddled and I slept because my mate was back.
We know the crisis isn’t over, but at least we have a way forward.
Thanks.
It seems so pathetic, that one word, but this weekend has been difficult and your words, my friends, have been wonderful.
Thanks.
Sophie has gone to her parents. Maybe for the weekend, maybe for longer.
Her words, that she needed to spend time alone to sort out her ‘fucked head’, really didn’t sound ironic when she said them, yesterday evening.
And yet no sooner was she heading towards the family who dote on her and love her and will treat her as if everything is all right and who won’t once ask her to consider what she’s doing to me, because she is the centre of their universe, not me, only when she was on her way did it dawn on me that I’m the one who is alone now.
But I’m not the one who needs to sort out his head.
I thought we’d pulled things together; there is no doubt that over the last year we have worked on our marriage and have drawn ourselves even closer to each other than we were before we hit troubled waters.
I thought we were good, that we were strong, that we were comfortable and comforting and, well, that we were a couple.
But yesterday evening, when she came home from work in tears and out of the blue she hit me with those words, my world tilted upside-down for the second time in a year.
So I’m in the house, alone, while she nestles in the bosom of her loving family.
Sleepless in Oxfordshire, for sleep, like a calm head, successfully evaded me all night long.
This hiatus might be for the weekend but I don’t know.
I don’t know what’s in her head.
I don’t know how, within the space of hours, we can go from a platform of love and laughter, conversation, companionship and easy comfort, to her walking out.
And wiping her feet on me, on the way.
Yes, I do feel like a doormat; I feel used and abused.
None of this is of my making.
But I’ve tried – oh God I’ve tried so hard – to deal with this and repair this, I’ve given so much to this relationship, and tried to restore the old qualities that were so brutally torn away.
But now.
Now I’m not sure how much more I can take.
The only thing that’s keeping me going is the horses, but I feel as if the heart has been ripped out of me.
‘Devastated’ doesn’t come close to describe the feeling of abandonment that surrounds me.
There’s a lovely track by American singer/songwriter James Casto called ‘Perfect Day’, in which James, an excellent lyricist, describes his charming ‘perfect day’ which, inevitably, revolves around the love of his life [1].
You might also remember a better-known song with the same title, ‘Perfect Day’, by Lou Reed, taken from his 1972 album Transformer.
Whilst the latter work highlights and romanticises Reed’s relationship with heroin, the former describes the writer’s depth of feeling for another person. So they’re both about a thing, an object of affection.
So I’ve been wondering why no-one has written a song called Perfect Day that describes a solo, self-contained day of self-indulgence?
Is it because companionship is our default position? Even the most miserable, curmudgeonly members of society (and no, I wasn’t thinking of the King of Curmudgeonism – yes, it is a word. I said so! – Van Morrison) have a thing, a person that we love; that we can’t imagine living our lives without.
Music, naturally, has always been a love of mine. And horses (though Tom is temporarily relegated from the top spot in my equine affections. But I’ve decided that I’m going to switch him back to the Bit I was using up until last week, to see if that gets things back to normal).
Anyway.
It is Sunday, but it also 31st January 2010.
On 31st January not that many years ago, Sophie and I drove from this place to Heathrow Airport and, via a series of links, were transported to this place.
It was, not wishing to use a cliché, the start of a journey for both of us, and in more ways than one. Not always an easy journey, sometimes with bumps and potholes, but an enjoyable journey nevertheless.
Happy anniversary Soph.
However, not wishing to plunge in to a dark pool of emotion, let’s take a sidestep over to today’s Independent On Sunday where this newspaper exposes the comedic underbelly of the world of Football Chanting, that strange method of communication that the people on the terraces use when they have something to say.
When goalkeeper Andy Gorams was diagnosed with schizophrenia, Celtic fans chanted ‘Two Andy Gorams, there’s only two Andy Gorams’ to the tune of Guantanamera.
You have to laugh at both the jibbing and the use of music.
When Newcastle FC scored an away goal against FC Zurich, the geordies used Welsh hymn tune Cwm Rhondda to deliver the words ‘You’re not yodelling, You’re not yodelling any more’.
More clever use of music to deliver good humour.
Meanwhile in other news, it has been decided (not by me!) that it is now time for us to get up. We’re going out for lunch. That bit was my decision.
So it’s time to shut down, hit the bathroom, get dressed and get out there.
Woo yeah baby, we’re so rock’n’roll.
[1]: You can listen to James’ work on his MySpace page, but how wonderfully self-effacing is the bio on his personal website which says ‘James plays piano like a drummer. And he sings like a drummer. Because he is a drummer’?
James Casto is a lovely guy. If you like what you hear and you drop him an email, he’ll probably write back to you.
Crash 1:
This morning my 18-month old Dell laptop refused to get out of bed and boot up. Again. You may remember it went tits up (to use the technical phrase) in October. This morning the bios started up but before it could draw breath it told me it was giving up what it was supposed to do because of a major shit problem. That’s not the precise error message but you get the picture. There was no Windows splash message, no nothing, just a screenful of 8-bit fatal error message. When I got in to the office I called Dell and explained, in words of one syllable, that I am a corporate account and that two such fatal failures on a mission-critical piece of hardware in less than 24 months are way beyond completely fucking unacceptable. The bottom line is that Dell are sending an engineer out to me tomorrow.
Crash 2:
On the way home this evening I saw an interesting accident just here. You see where the car is approaching the Give Way sign painted on the road junction? Well just there was a car transporter, one of those lorries that carry 8 cars, 4 on a lower deck and 4 on an upper deck. The lorry had been fully laden. It had evidently come banging down the road towards the junction much too quickly (the map doesn’t show it very well, it’s quite a steep downwards hill), realised he had to stop or slow, slammed his brakes on and the car at the front of the top deck slid half off, smashed backwards in to the cab of the lorry then crashed on its nose in to the road, then the lorry squashed it and ran over it. Messy. There were no other vehicles involved and the driver was shocked, but unhurt. But oh boy, the road was a total mess. It was all the more dramatic being dark, orange flashing lights on the recovery vehicles, blue flashing lights on the police car.
Crash 3:
As a result of Crash 1, I was running around the house like a headless chicken, before I left for work, trying to find my Windows and Office installation CDs. I failed in the finding. And I took it out on Sophie, in a snarling kind of way. Totally inexcusable. I spent the rest of the day feeling like shit because of my behaviour. The reason – look, I know that this is pathetic – is because Sophie is a manic OCD-er. Things vanish which is a two-way euphemism for being tidied. There’s no excuse for my behaviour, though. Completely unacceptable. Anyway, this evening I found the CDs so I’m prepared for Mr Dell to arrive and replace the motherboard and whatever else needs replacing. Yes the CDs had been tidied but I think the wider point is that I need to be far more organised in how and where I put things in the first place. So I’m going to work on that and I’m going to work on it with maximum effort. Because putting things somewhere and expecting them to be there a couple of months later might work for me, but it’s potentially unacceptable for the person I live with.
Still growing up, see?
In a moment of decision-making lunacy we went to the seaside yesterday.
While we were there we ate, we looked at the views, we were braced by the erm bracing weather, we walked around the towny-bit and the sea-sidey-bit and we shopped a little.
Here’s a short clip of the sun going down (oo-er) over the receding sea and a view of the Welsh coast in the background:
And here’s a quick look at a crazy lady I found on the seafront:
It’s that time of the year when my mind slips itself off the lead and bounds along the snow-covered, hedgerow-lined fields of memories, like a mental three-year-old Dalmatian.
It pokes its nose in little tumps of snow; sniffing, sneezing and snorting, it teases and playfully worries things that aren’t there.
And things that are.
At the moment my mind is playing around in the field that I like to call 2009.
How’s it been for you?
I don’t know if I’m deluding myself but I think I’d classify 2009 as ‘Not Too Bad Really’.
And yet straight away I’m on the back foot, defending my performance with a concession that the planned 2009 Eventing season didn’t occur; Vin developed headshaking and that immediately killed off all prospects of competing.
And I’ll defend again with the statement that after six months of looking, I found Tom and he seems to be Perfect In Every Way (to quote Mary Poppins).
Except he isn’t, because I’m paying £1,000 to have an 8′-fenced paddock built for him.
But that’s horses, eh? Except this puts the balance in to the debit side of things.
But on the plus side of the overall balance sheet, I’ve been very busy, both in my ‘day’ job and in the world of my various writing projects (reviewer, feature-writer, novelist and short-storyist).
And yes, I know being very busy is brilliant, but there exists, in my head at least, a general air of dissatisfaction in this field. There’s a feeling that I could have done everything so much better, with a more qualitative attention to detail, if only I’d tried.
Or had the time. And thus begins the vicious circle…
[pause]
The music side of things has gone brilliantly.
I almost grudgingly concede this, as if I am reluctant to set the thought free because the counterbalancing thought might be too much in the negative.
But really, there isn’t a counterbalancing thought. My own guitar playing has been scant, but that was never really on the radar anyway.
And all things Podcasting have been excellent, the growth of our audience has been tremendous.
And the web statistics indicate that the redesigned website is popular with feed-readers and googlers, and besides – and indeed over-ridingly – the Podcast is fun to produce.
Recording it is never a chore and I usually start feeling a growing sense of anticipation about three days before Studio Day. It’s fun, it’s a regular weekly event and I love doing it.
And, of course, as a result of producing the Podcast we have been fortunate enough to listen to some excellent musicians – and doubly fortunate to be able to go on and number some of these very talented individuals as friends.
No, there’s nothing in the debit column on this one.
So that’s music and horses and work and writing.
[another pause]
Family, at first glance, looks like it might be all debit and no credit, but that isn’t how I see it.
There have been two cataclysmic events in this aspect of my life this year. Each shook my self-confidence and erased the ability to believe in myself to the point where, for a while, I didn’t really have a life, I was just going through a series of daily processes and trying to come out the other end unscathed.
The earth-shattering nature of these events isn’t for public discussion, but there was a while, back in 2009, when I lost my rudder and just drifted along, buffeted by the big stormy waves.
But now the rudder is back on and the big stormy waves have abated and although things are a little more choppy than they used to be, at least the water now more closely resembles a boating pond and not a Force 9 in the South Atlantic.
Generally I feel positive about family; the dysfunctional relationship that separates my siblings and me is a source of amusement and not a concern. I was surprised that one of my brothers popped up and left a comment, but when I pinged the email address he’d left and found it to be a dead one, my surprise turned to much laughing out loud.
The Soph and me family feels good and I am optimistic for the future.
And I’m comfortable with my relationship with Soph’s family, though heaven knows what they reckon to me.
So if I had to sum up the whole family thing under one heading it would probably be on the positive side of ‘Meh’.
Which makes me wonder why I’ve spent so much time, this morning, thinking about the past. The deep distant past.
I blame Christmas.
There’s something about this ‘festive’ season that seems to encourage this free-ranging introverted retrospective; the bonkers Dalmatian looning around snowy fields metaphor is a good one. Hang on to it.
I might use it again next year.
2010 promises so much potential; horses, music, writing, family. But I’ve stopped banking on future events. What will be will be.
And other clichés.
I’m trying to stay away from whining like a horrid whining thing.
But sometimes it’s difficult, you know?
Today’s been a crap day. Not the crappiest of crap days, but the readout on the crapometer is currently displaying 7.2 out of 10.
I sometimes wonder if I’m cut out to be a family guy.
You know there are some people (men and women; this is an equal ops moaning zone) who are not cut out to have a relationship – and, indeed, can’t handle them?
I’m starting to ask myself if I’m in the same boat – but instead of relationships, read ‘families’.
Anyway, as I said, I’m trying to stay away from whining.
So Vin came in lame from the field today. No cuts, puncture wounds or obvious hot spots and the trouble with displaying lameness but not showing how what or where is that without knowing what’s up, there’s nothing to treat!
I’ll have a good look at him tomorrow, whilst cursing him for doing whatever the hell it is that he’s done that will probably cause me to have to get the vet out on a Sunday, with Sunday call-out charges being so large that they’re measured on an interplanetary scale.
I hate kids; have I mentioned this?
No, I really really hate them.
Not all children, of course; that would just be awful of me.
I hate the little runts that don’t know how to behave and who blatantly ignore the ineffectual parenting of their ineffectual parents.
I guess I’m not terribly keen on the parents of said children either. Selfish bastards. Quite content to let little Tarquin or whatever run riot in a public place because they – the ineffectual parents – have learned to tune Tarquin’s misdemeanours out of sight (and therefore out of mind), whilst the rest of us poor saps have to endure the little shits ever-increasing boundary-pushing until things get so bad that we reach the point where we, the innocent victim of Tarquin’s behaviour, actually pick the little runt up and give it such a slap that it’s self-determined/built boundaries all collapse because one – one – person stood up to the little thug.
Except we don’t, do we? Because we’re nice people and we have boundaries of our own and we know what is acceptable even if Tarquin and his ineffective parents apparently don’t.
This, in case you missed the sponsor’s message which was briefly flashed up in a subliminal way earlier in the text, is a general outpouring.
It’s not a rant about any one thing, it’s just the final resting place for the large puddle of bile that has settled in my heart today because, I seem to have found, I am a generally bile-filled, and pretty horrible kind of person these days.
I’m tired.
I have no idea why but I seem to be hopping between states of barely awake to fast asleep and back again.
Apart from riding two horses a day, six days a week I’m not doing any other demanding physical activities. I’m writing loads but that’s barely physical, is it?
And yet I’m tired.
But not mentally, just physically.
Even when I’m falling asleep I can sit here and watch an episode of 24 and kill the horribly lazy writers to death for making so many shockingly awful – yet childish – mistakes.
So I’m up to par mentally – but I will concede that 24 is a particularly easy target (also a very rewarding one!) – and feel close to the top of my thinking/writing game.
My writing time – and indeed riding time – is going to get hammered from next week, as I slip back in to a piece of (my other kind of) work which will detain me five days a week in west London.
And I’m beginning to wonder if I get some kind of SAD. Or maybe I’m just a miserable bugger.
Which would be best, I wonder? To be diagnosed as suffering from SAD or to be SAD-free but to be forever labelled as a cantankerous git?
See?
And yes I am aware that SAD-sufferers aren’t necessarily grumpy, but that seems to be the only options on my choices list right now.
Bollocks, just realised that this has become the whiny post I didn’t want it to be. What an arse.
Speaking of arses.
Is there anyone else out there who was made ill to the point of almost actually vomiting, by Tony Blair’s statement that he would have made up other reasons (sorry, ‘pursued other arguments’) to invade Iraq if his tissue of lies about WMD hadn’t motivated the brainless/spineless frogspawn in the House of Commons to side with him and vote to kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and over a hundred British servicemen?
Physically ill.
And disgusted to be a member of the same species as the God-Complex-Wearer-In-Chief.
Now there’s a man who understands the true nature of democracy.
Oh. But wait. No he doesn’t.
I’m all for sending the little shit straight over to The Hague for his War Crimes trial right now, anyone else of the same position?
So.
This bright and breezy bonk bank holiday weekend I am away to sunny Spain to spend some quality time with Daughter. Or perhaps I should say Niña? Or even Hija?
Anyway.
I’m sure she’ll find many ways of keeping me occupied – after all, I know nothing apparently, whilst she knows everything there is to know in the universe.
It must be a large cross for her to bear, being so young and so knowledgeable. I feel quite sorry for her; having to lug her know-nothing Padre around the distrito de Granada whilst taking the pee out of him and loving him in equal measures must be quite a task!
Note to self: don’t mention the Go-Karting we did a few months ago
I am, it must be said, really looking forward to seeing her but at the same time, to be honest, less than enthusiastic about going. Now there’s a tricky situation!
For strictly personal, non-daughter-related reasons, obv. I’ll get over it, I guess. Probably.
In other news…
I’m quite excited about all of these things, but the new novel prospect sets my pulse racing and makes me breathe a little quicker. It’s amazing what travelling on the Underground does to the imagination.
I’m really not sure that I’m capable of carrying it off, I think it’s too big and a much too mature and intricate piece of writing for me to deliver but it’s my bloody idea so I’m going to give it a go.
So you see, although I’ve been very quiet lately, there are things going on.
Now then, I need to plan the playlist for this weekend’s podcast. It’s going to be radical, man. And no, that’s not a euphemism for ‘I haven’t done it yet’.
Honest!
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