Flying High - May 2017

Flying over Europe, a sudden shroud of calm and equilibrium spread across my entire skin- as if my being was a sponge. I adore flying. It resassitates my decaying veins.

I had an overwhelming urge to put this zen into words.

Flying high

As I look inside, knowing & seeing;

I ache & pine; a void in my being.

In this life, I stammer and mumble;

Trudging through, I falter and stumble.

Through strife or even a lack of fuss,
The sad veracity is so thus:

Inside my core - deficient of self worth;

As I walk & drudge, this baffling earth.

Yet amongst the clouds and sky so blue;

Nothing's wrong, there's nothing left to rue.

The glorious tall, sweet spot of flight,

A biting point, both flawless & right.

Only up high - at thousands of feet;

I finally feel: fully complete.

March 2017 - International Happiness Day

It’s like being placed in a glass tank and you can’t be heard. Trapped from the outside world, you hammer the sides with your fists until they are vermillion blurs, but no one can hear. No one can even see, as if the walls are somehow so translucent in their clarity, they morph into the surroundings like a prison cell of invisibility.

But that is where the old me is - cast away into purgatory, lost forever swirling in a black hole of despair.

The frustration is a smouldering volcano ready to erupt. Things feel so out of sync. Out of control.

And yet also strangely within grasp. It’s like the dropped catch in cricket - you almost had it all in your palm, but you messed up, lost your cool. Your eye was distracted, your mind maybe scanned a different thread for an atom of time, and the next thing you know the ball has slipped between your unresponsive fingers.

And its gone.

What do you do when you are a different person? Do you throw up the white flag? Or do you soldier on in the hope of some kind of miracle?

The odd sensation of no longer existing makes me feel like I am floating, and yet I feel weighed down in my very own special iron diving suit. The sparks that used to ignite my veins can no longer catch. Worse, the motor will no longer start because someone has thrown away the key.

Describing the loneliness is the blackest of ski runs; climbing an emotional Everest. It’s a hollowing out of your being; scooping yourself out like an avocado until all that remains is the hard skin shell. It’s frighteningly disconcerting. It’s standing at the extremest point of the edge... of the largest edge in the world.

And yet even then it doesn’t even come close to explaining it. How tragically pathetic it makes you feel, how articulating the sensation can make you feel the most gigantic loser.

Where to go? Where do all the broken things go. Things that cannot be fixed.

I have woken up with amnesia, only forgotten to lose my memory.

22 February - Storm Doris

When you feel as vacant as a dormant volcano crater; as lifeless as an extinct fossilised dinosaur bone, and invisible as world peace.

29 January - Music

This week is best left to the footnotes of history. I wish I could drag and drop days to the trash can icon, so that I never have to think about them again. Apart from, that is, having been to two excellent gigs the last few nights. Martha Wainwright and Gruff Rhys.

It sounds naff but I am a huge fan of both. I hate the word fan as a description of your admiration to someone or thing. It feels something flippant, or childish. It seems often synonymously used with the music industry, and I scold myself for using it here in lazy writing.

Martha was brilliant. She always is, in a way that almost diminishes how good she is. It seems so effortless and expected. Her brother Rufus is the same. And music is one of the few things feeding me successfully - it keeps me nourished, it makes me feel like my heart is finally beating. Live music especially.  

I find it odd sometimes listening to Martha and Rufus' music now. Their incredible music carried me through a particularly dark time a few years ago. An ambulance constructed of heartfelt crotchets and bridges. 

Listening to those songs now scoops me up in a large open topped fender and sends me flying back to that time. Its a tiny bit uncomfortable and yet also very comforting. It's like bumping into your ex. Hashtag awkward-but-kinda-nice. 

The worst part for me I guess, was the reminder that in someways, I have come full circle again. I've moved on so much and yet have somehow managed to end up back at the start line. 

And that is, singularly, the most heaviest weight to carry. If you had told me this during that time, that after all this that was the outcome, I'm not sure I would have been strong enough to have resisted the sirens of death drive.

23rd January - Oil

There's a mysterious cryptic squeak emitting from my bike, and I cannot uncover the source. I'm failing GCSE Sherlock Holmesing.

It's most infuriating, at first I thought I was imagining it. Then I thought I was being followed by a hoarse crow. A very persistent, repetitive and relentless bird.

Imagine being an endless squeak in a machine. Forever chirping away, desperate for a drink, but no one can be bothered to buy a round in. Everyone can hear you, but everyone pretends to ignore, despite the relentless bellowing of annoy.

I have flashbacks to that car advert from the 1980s, and it could well end up that actually, one of my earrings needs oiling.

18th January - Hospital

Things I have learnt about A&E:

- It's one of the coldest places you can visit; not literally in terms of temperature, but in experience and feeling. Seats are pointy, hard and angular; textures are decidedly frosty. I admire the staff there for braving it. It is the antithesis of cosy.

- There are more office PC self-printed-from-Microsoft-Word-makeshift posters in polly pockets in A&E than anywhere else in the world. FACT.

- It's very faded, like someone has applied a rubbishy instagram filter onto the hospital.

- You can pretty much witness every flavour of human being from the entire spectrum of life pass through before your eyes whilst you wait; from old to young; from drunk down and outs to suited yuppies.

- Waiting for hours at A&E makes waiting hours at airports seem like a the greatest party you've ever been to.

- A&E & NHS staff in general, are heroes.

- Its a lonely and isolating experience, even though you can be surrounded by people.

- I can't think of another place where you will see so many people wearing entire outfits in one colour (either boiler suits or scrubs).

- No matter how awful it is waiting in A&E, no matter how much you're in tears the whole time, you always suffer from a form of immediate amnesia the second you leave the building and marvel at the fact the NHS is amazing.

- Life is cruel. Very very cruel.

12 January

Brain cataracts have been particularly troublesome the past couple of days. There are probably one or two particular causes for this, of which I will not diverge here.

When this happens in winter months, as now, the worst part is that I can't hide behind my sunglasses. Those glorious cheap H&M soul protectors of mine, shielding my raw self from the outside world. Conversely I do wear at least three snoods or scarves so can mummify my face as much as I can, it just steams up my glasses. First world problems.

Sometimes I wish I was the web browser chrome, and had an incognito mode I could switch on. And that's probably one of the most geekiest things I've written in a while.

It annoys me inherently that I am not some sort of robot or software. Why can't I just re-programme my brain and body to behave like it used to. Or go to Maplin and buy a new part to replace the crappo broken version. Other stores available.

Each trough seems more and more difficult to climb out of.

A Loon's Diary

I don't really believe in new year's resolutions, but as I am a hot, steaming pile of hypocrite, my new year's resolution is going to be to write more. I found writing about my brain misbehaving the last 18 months helped. So I have decided to start a diary/blog on this shiny new sister blog to my other ramblings.

I was reading some of the wonderful Alan Bennett's diaries over Christmas, and rather like the idea of writing a diary again (something I haven't done since I left high school, mostly ramblings about how miserable and misunderstood I was - so no change from now really). Rather than write every day, Alan Bennett will write when he chooses on topics he finds instigates inspiration - and that is what I am going to attempt. Therein ends the only comparison I would ever dream to make with the legendary national treasure of uber treasures that is His Royal Highness Sir Alan of Bennett (he really should have those titles). And then reader, we began.

January 2nd

Today was a gorgeously blue, bright January performance - one that would razzle and dazzle even the most Scroogey of couch potatoes. I love crisp sunny winter days, and especially as its the last day of the holidays before we go back to 'school',  I headed early to the countryside to get muddy on the bike trails. I am happiest outdoors and amongst the trees and mountains. It is the only thing that effectively fights back at my self diagnosed brain cataracts. I picked a random and obscure trail deliberately in the hope it would be devoid of humans. And it mostly was.

I usually call these hikes, trails, runs or outdoor explores etc. my '999 routes', as when we or I set off, I can always hear in the back of my head Michael Burke narrating the reconstruction of a hugely catastrophic random accident involving maiming by a lost javelin. "It started off....just a fun afternoon hike, but little did they know the horror that was awaiting...". Now I tend call them my 'Murder Podcast' trails. Having been obsessed with true crime podcasts the last 18 months, all I can think about in these desolate and barren areas is how many dead bodies are buried underneath my feet. All that runs through my mind is how easy it would be to knock someone over the head with a hiking stove, stuff them in a biffie bag weighted down with kendal mint cake, and toss into the lake before you can say 'north face jacket sale'. So as I set out on my routes, I now start filling my head with how the podcast about my untimely disappearance would narrate the theories on how I might have disappeared. It's enough to make me leave breadcrumb trails (or the modern day version - squillions of instagram photos if we're lucky to get signals).

Luckily none of that happened today. And it was jolly good. Instead, I got a lot of mud in my eye and kept thinking I was going to die on the ice.
It is remarkable how much ice resembles cling film; until I did disappointingly keep just finding abandoned cling film. Usually next to the bags of dog poop that dog owners think in their infinite wisdom [sic] that its somehow ok to just leave on the side of a trail. There are, of course, many good dog owners. I saw some today towards the end, a middle-aged couple - the gillet-clad lady stood in a field whilst the man barked directions to her from the side where he thought their poochie off lead had left his present. It was a bit like the retro kids show Knightmare, only searching for doggie doodoos. Their determination in discovering the dog dirt amongst the boggy mass was heart warming, but I can't help feel they're still there looking for a poopy needle in a haystack when it probably didn't even exist in the first place. I just hope the dog was called Schrödinger.