via A Working Class Kid | Wayne Waterson’s Unseen Images of Hackney during the 1970s & 80s.
A Post
I thought I might write post.
It’s been a long time.
Since I started this blog (in the hope that ‘blogging will be a good habit’) much has happened.
I wrote a book. I got shortlisted for a few prizes and didn’t win any. I had an agent. I lost an agent because the agency closed. I still need to try and get the book published.
I have had two more jobs and start a new one the week after next.
I got a fellowship. I got a degree. The two aren’t linked.
I did some research.
I write content. I get paid a bit.
I had the fake heart attack which led to another diagnosis.
I managed my mental health. I hope I helped some other people manage theirs.
Well you know… life.
I can feel the creative writing sap rising again. It’s funny how teaching and mental health and writing about finite element analysis can knock the interest out of you. 2020 needs to mean something in that regard. I just don’t know what yet.
Oh yes, and eff Brexit.
Snow Days
My mind looked a little like this at the start of the week. And then came the snow, muffling and slowing everything down… saving the tangle of neurons and synapses inside my bleached out skull from sparking and shorting into an electric bonfire.
So, snow, thanks.
Swimming (1)
I went swimming this week and had a whole blog I wanted to write, which I was going to illustrate with this detail from an oil painting in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. I have spent far too long this morning trawling through the museum’s online catalogue in order to attribute the painting correctly and time marches on, so the whole swimming thing will have to wait until the next blog.
As well as failing to write the intended blog, I have also failed to attribute the picture. Winning at life…
I seem to remember asking at the time of the visit what the painting was titled and by which artist and no-one could answer. The mystery lives on, but look at that sea boil.
Back to earth (and beneath)
I’ve been pot-holing this week. Exploring the cracks, crevices, fissures and trenches where glaciers, rivers and oceans pulse, slowly.
If I’ve been spinning with my head in infinity for the last while, this is the week where I came back to reality with both a bump and then, for one alarming dreamsleep moment, a slipslide beneath the tide encased in a sealed train carriage.
Dreams tell me things. How I am doing now. How I did in the past. What I need to watch for in the future.
Trouble is, I don’t often know what they were telling me, except in the thin shadow of a very long and highly blurry hindsight.
Yoga
Turns out that, far from making you fart and look like an idiot, an hour of yoga helps you ping out of bed the next morning without the stiff back (and associated grunting and groaning) you’ve been putting up with for the whole of 2017.
Here’s a free course of yoga recommended to me by a good tweep and blogger whom I would warrant is a far bendier specimen than me (although I am working on that now obv).
Not me, not in my front room
Extreme Commuting: Unfolding Myself
“According to the ONS, no form of commuting enhances overall levels of satisfaction and self-esteem. Worse, its study of 60,000 travellers found that each 10-minute increase in journey time has a significant impact on the well-being of the commuter. On the other hand, once the trip to work exceeded 90 minutes, the harmful effects began to disappear.”
So @djtaylorwriter said in the Independent in 2014.
Having just spent half a year trying to avoid driving more than an hour and a half one way to Colchester, and another hour and a half back, I cannot agree with this survey at all. Two hours spent in the car in total was tolerable, three hours was seriously pushing it, tipping over that golden ninety minutes each way sent me steering wheel gnawingly insane.
In my case, exceeding a commute of 90 minutes had a number of ill effects ranging from fatigue, deep grumpiness, migraine, travel sickness and what felt like incipient night blindness. In short, I quickly realised that over 90 minutes spent commuting in the car bent me out of shape. Mentally. I was seriously close to buying a BMW 5 series, that’s how deranged I had gotten before Christmas. Fortunately I was pulled back from the German automobile brink, but physically I have been altered, perhaps for ever…
I finished with the super commute last week, so this week I started as I mean to go on, and went to a yoga class. My hastily assembled outfit caused some merriment in the children when they came home from school (now teenagers, they judge their mother harsh sartorially and often with, it has to be said, good reason). Little do they know that what I looked like in the actual yoga studio was the least of my worries.
Even a few short minutes of sitting cross-legged on the floor (or whatever the usual yoga seated pose is called) had me thinking I would never make it through a whole hour. Fortunately we moved through a few poses, which I cobbled together as best I could, with my back and right hip complaining more or less throughout. Additionally, and somewhat unexpectedly, for the class duration I seemed to be dealing with a whole small gibbon wrapped round my frontage. This beast clung on tight throughout, impeding any movements that involved bending forward; threatening to suffocate me on occasion.
This week I have learned that spending a thousand hours in a car is not a recipe for yoga success. I have also learned that one’s best efforts to get all ironed out in the body department will be considerably hindered by wearing a small gibbon, as if in an invisible baby sling. Still, I’ve signed up to go again, because at the very least something must be done about the gibbon.
First day: rest of my life
I am between jobs. I finished one job yesterday and will start the next in February.
I celebrated with 10mg of valium and a trip to the dentist. The fact that I did not have to be put more under than that with chemical coshes is what I am going to call progress. Further evidence that might be considered change of sorts include:
I have ditched the world of Apple and Microsoft and migrated myself to cloud-based computing.
I am lying on a bed that does not need changing, with a silk pillow and net curtains that are clean.
The dog has developed agoraphobia, so rather than taking him on a nice walk, I might have to walk myself.
I have ditched eating meat.
I have stopped wishing I still lived in London.
I have decided to let some stuff go. That happened yesterday. Today is a new day.
Where I used to work: office view
On Falling Silent
Despite appearances to the contrary on this blog, I haven’t actually stopped writing. I write all the time, in my head. I write a lot for work. I write a fair amount for study. I tweet a little and I write down the odd thought on scraps of paper in various notebooks from time to time. All that is pretty similar, apart from the tweeting, to the state of play when I started this blog over 10 years ago. I was a writer, mainly in my head.
One problem with accumulating extended periods of silence on the page, is that when wanting to start up with the writing again, there are too many places from which to start. Which makes me tend to stop before I’ve started.
The other problem is readers desert you. And, sure, why wouldn’t they!
I mean, who is going to hang around to read someone who no longer writes? That makes no sense at all.
Things have changed so much since I started writing this blog. The world has changed. I’ve changed. Other writers have changed too. Some of them no longer write blogs either. Others have shifted their online output onto Facebook and Twitter and Insta and GodKnowsWhataChat. Apart from Twitter, I have mainly kept my own counsel. Writers are told to build their platform, to maintain an online presence which is probably a good thing, but it’s not just writers who are doing that, is it? It’s just about everyone, including their dogs (and cats). I follow rescue goat kids in knitted outfits in Chile for chrissakes.
So, yeah, this platform building is everywhere. People broadcast to others all over the place at all hours of the day and night, and the rest of us lap it up. I love the internet still, I promise, but just like the deep underwater ocean, it’s become a very noisy place. Why add to that, I think? Why would anyone be interested in what I had to say about anything anyway. Now, if I’d typed that sentence as a status in Facebook (I wouldn’t, but if I had) what an earth would be the upshot? People leaping to reassure me, perhaps, that not at all they really have nothing better to do than scroll through my weepings and wailings about life, liking and hearting and shedding tears of online empathy on the way.
And who wants that?
Not me.
But.
I still have things to say and I am going to practice them a little on here and see how it goes, but in a way it would be good to return to the anonymity I started this blog with, when I wrote under a pseudonym and didn’t do platforms or presence or tweeting and Facebook was barely a thing. There’s nothing stopping me doing that of course, from slipping back under the radar and writing what I really want to. And maybe I will.
On wishes and horses 