Let the train engender strain

It's the final day of 2014.  Tonight the missus and I head to Cornwall.  We're taking the train this year.  Usually we drive, but as we're both at work today anyways, we thought South West Trains (peace be upon it) could carry us yon.  It's always a stressful endeavour, train travel.  With all due deference to Network Rail, it goes to cock more often than it doesn't.  I can't think of the last time I took a train journey in this country when all the constituent elements worked according to a preordained plan.  I must have been an infant of sorts.  Going somewhere with my parents, I dare say.  Probably in the way to my christening.

As matters stand, the service appears to be running smoothly.  But that worries me.  It could be a trick of the fates.  To offset this concern I've raided my local Waitrose and procured wine and nibbles to Caligulian excess.  So if the shit does hit the fan in any way, at least we'll be fed and watered.  For 'watered' read 'drunk'.

Happy New Year.  Or if you're an American, happy NEW year.

Puppies for sale

I bought a radiator fan the other week.  What's that?  Oh, the name pretty much nails it, to be honest.  It's a fan that sits atop a central heating radiator.  The logic is that instead of drifting slowly ceiling-wards, the heat is coerced into the middle of the room.  This heats the room up quicker, and for virtually no additional power consumption.

I haven't published any peer-reviewed findings on the matter, but anecdotally at least, I'm not sure it's doing any good.  In fact, it might be cooling the room slightly.  I know this makes no sense; the physics just doesn't stack up.  The one thing I can say is that the air coming out the front of the fan is less warm than the air emanating from the rest of the radiator.  The reason for this is unclear at this stage.  Clearly the plastic body of the fan itself is taking some of the precious.heat; perhaps it's in there?  Oh, fuck, I don't know.  My physics is about as good as Russell Brand's acting, comedy and/or thinking.  Don't get started on that twat.

Anyway, my point is I may have been the victim of marketing brouhaha, which is spectacularly annoying for one so usually canny as me.

Vigilance.  At all times, vigilance.

That was the year that was

Right, Christmas is done.  It's over.  Let it go.  It really didn't touch the sides, Christmas, this year.  Not a festive thought scudded across my brain the entire time.  We didn't watch a Bourne film, or Bad Santa - not nothing.  I used to love Christmas so much.  I really did.  Now that's gone.  Is this inevitable?  Perhaps.

I think I may have fallen for that idiotic trope of reviewing myself that people tend to do at year's end.  I'll be honest with you: I didn't like what I saw.  I have a boring, alienating job.  I don't work nearly hard enough at my interests.  I'm not thoughtful and/or dutiful.  And I drink far too much.  So, what to do?  Well, the drinking is easy to remedy.  The trouble is it then leaves a big old hole in my schedule, which is likely then to be filled with boredom.  I dread boredom, really really fear and dread it.  I've always run from its shadow.  This no doubt explains the drinking.  But I know I can't carry on as I am, so I'll just have to suck it up a bit, as they say.

Why am I bored the whole time?  Anyone?  What is boredom anyhoo?  I'll look it up.

This is interesting:

"To be bored, some scientists reasoned, 'is to be in a state of longing for activity but unaware of what it is that one desires and to look to the world to solve the impasse,'" - http://www.livescience.com/23493-why-we-get-bored.html

That's it in a nutshell.  But what to do?  It appears I have to pay attention to my thoughts and outside stimuli more.  It doesn't say how one is to do this though.  Should I take up meditation again?  I did a bit of this during the summer but packed it in as a bad job.  You guessed it: it was boring.

Shit.

 

The afternoon before Christmas...

I'm at work.  It's Christmas Eve, and, as you'd expect, the office is vee quiet.  I work for a newspaper, and Xmas Day is the one day of the year that our industry traditionally draws breath.  I'm alone in my department too.  It's an odd experience, working on days like this.  It's sort of fun, in that it's different and certainly less pressured than proper works days.  But there's also that strange feeling of missing out.  You can't help thinking that the rest of humanity is having a rare old time, necking sherry in front of a roaring open fire while Bing Crosby croons from the mantelpiece.  I'm sure the truth is catastrophically more prosaic than that.  They're all probably watching shit telly and eating Jaffa Cakes.

The plan is to leave very shortly.  I don't know what I'm planning to do with the rest of the afternoon though.  I can't go shopping without having to be restrained by by armed officers and a Taser.  And I hate watching television in the afternoons.  I find it disspiriting...and common.

I might clean the oven.  Merry Christmas.

A free window

A very short entry today (insert own joke here).  I'm off to the pictures with the missus.  Some overlooked classic from the yesteryear with Maggie Smith and Peter Ustinov.  How did that one slip by unnoticed?  Let's hope it's not a turkey.  I know it's Christmas, but the tickets weren't cheap.  It's at the NFT, which is super-jolly, so if it is a howler, at least the seats will be comfy.

Smiley High Culture

Mrs O and I went to see The Nutcracker yesterday afternoon.  Great Scot! it was fine.  Really wonderful.  Old Chai Kovski knew how to set down a choon, didn't he?  The second act in particular is an absolutely smörgåsbord of hits.

We didn't actually see it in the flesh, as t'were.  It was a live, high-definition broadcast from the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow and was screened at the Greenwich Picturehouse.  The Bolshoi Ballet are renowned for their lavish and traditional productions of ballets like this one.  No searing social commentary or transposition of the action from 19th century bourgeois Russia to a housing estate in 1960s Bradford for them.  And thank God for it.  The Nutcracker is a festive treat for classical lightweights, like myself.  It's the equivalent of The Wizard Of Oz - beautifully done and timeless, but not there to challenge and/or upset the prevailing social order.  It doesn't do to fcuk about with it.  And I believe I speak for the cognoscenti there.

Yul Brynner-tide

At last!  The office has that odd festive feel.  Everyone has been champing at the bit since about 1.30pm, desperate to make an early segue without damaging his or her career prospects at the same time.  I've been trying manfully to concentrate, but who am I kidding? it's not a day for intellectual endeavour.

I'm going to scoot off in a moment and meat Mrs O for a brace of sharpeners.  Thence home to fire up the central heating.  It getting cold in London, which is annoying as it was a mild morning.  This means I've been left high and dry as regards warm clothing.  I've had to grab one of the bastard Xmas jumpers that they were handing out at work.  That should go down a storm with the trunks on the train home later.  Still, needs must...

The path of least resistance

If I'm honest with myself, then I've settled into an early middle-aged, petty-bourgeois rut.  I earn a comfortable living, live in a nice house, go on holiday six-dozen times a year and have savings in the bank.  And yet...and yet I'm bored, literally to tears on occasion.

The idea of making a major lifestyle change is hatefully discombobulating, but I don't feel I can continue in this slough of...well, despond is overstating it; it's more of a dangerous world-weariness.  Even cycling, my go-to passion and distraction from all life's ills for the last 25 years or so, leaves me cold.  I'm jaded.

I remember Hugh Laurie talking about something like this in an interview a few years ago.  He said he only realised he was depressed when taking part in a car race.  He used to be quite into motor sport.  He said he didn't feel anything as he raced around - no adrenaline, no fear, no joy, no angst...nothing.  And that is what depression is - a total disconnect from the world of human interaction and emotion.  It's not the presence of despair, so much as the absence of joy.  After a while, this lack of simple pleasure eats away at you.  It's difficult to countenance 40 years or so of that.  That's when the problems begin I guess.

So, what to do?  My usual mantra (to others at least) at moments of indecision like this is "the prospect is always worse than the reality".  I do believe this to be true.  But I'm much more compelling when you're not privy to the neuroses and manias that habitually fly around the inside of my skull.  I all too familiar with them, which means I take my own advice with a pinch of Saxo.

Bad mood music

I woke up in a bad mood this morning.  I retired last night feeling quite chipper, so what happened in the small hours to knock me off course, I cannot say.  I would have thought that REM sleep was the definitive portion of one's day that one could ringfence as "not subject to mood swings".  It seems I was wrong.

Well, as I intimated might be the case a couple of weeks ago, I'm off to another carol concert tonight.  This one takes place in a Wren church in the City of London.  It's usually a riproaring shindig too.  Just as well - I could use a fillip.

Hi-tech shambles

It's been cold of late.  No massive surprise there, I suppose.  It is December after all, but it's been quite a warm year, so winter's tendrils felt particularly unpleasant.  Saturday in London was a charming day, full of winter sunshine and with a festive dusting of frost.  But festive comes at a price, and that price is draughts.

Despite living a new-build house, the missus and I have noticed that the front door area tends towards the draughty and unpleasant during cold spells.  Being a modern house, ours has eschewed the traditional porch or hallway off the front door that the Victorians favoured.  The thinking behind this is to maximise the space one has to live, front and/or lounge in, and this the configuration does admirably.  Unfortunately it also means you've only got a sliver of wafer-thin mdf between you and the great outdoors.

I took to the web to find solutions for this modern architectural foible.  Apparently the only option is to buy a new front door, which runs to about £500.  Or one can lag the inside of the shit door with space-age thermal lining.  Sadly, that stuff costs a fortune too, and one then has to fit it, which looks tricky to mine untrained eye.

In desperation, I decided to line the inside of the portcullis with cushions.  I don't know why but we seem to be overrun with cushions; people keep buying them for us.  We're both quite thin, and obviously look like we need upholstering.  We'd recently had a cull of unused scatter-cushions and the condemned ones were piled up in the front room, waiting for the end.  I simply stacked a couple up against the inside of the front door, like a brightly-coloured, flaccid flying buttress.  The result?  Instant draught-free comfort.

My spirits were lifted immeasurably by this small victory for cheapskate lateral thinking.  Some much we encounter in modern life is disposable and impossible to fix, needlessly so too.  Why does it take a degree in engineering and one hundred man hours to replace the battery on an iPod, for example?  There's no reason why it should be so difficult.  What it does do of course is put you off trying it yourself.  No, chances are you'll leg it down to Currys and buy a brand new replacement.  That might be good news for Apple, but it spells disaster for the environment and for you bank balance.

I'm no anarcho-syndicalist, but I am suggesting we wrest some power back from the man and his corporations by changing the batteries on us own consumer durables.  Take to the barricades, brothers.

Bored members

Aah, a funny day today.  I woke up feeling rested and reasonably buoyant.  This is rare, doubly so for a Monday, so I embraced the moment and lept two-footed into the working week.

Something happened en route to the office though, and I toppled over into a trough of bewildered ambivalence at about 11.30.  I'm still in it as I type, rooted to the floor and staring at the stars.  Will I climb out?  Perhaps.  But, in truth, the grey cloud and chill wind I can divine at the top don't inspire, so perhaps I'll park my weary noggin on a pillow-shaped boulder, and make the best of it down here.  Down here - when I am to master of my own destiny.  I answer to no-one.  I sleep and work when I wish.  I have shelter and a few friendly spiders for company.  The perfect housemate, your spider - they're more than happy to keep themselves to themselves.  As am I.

Guinness...straight glass

Well, I survived the annual office Christmas piss-up relatively unscathed.  I had to be up earlyish this morning to scoot off to a physio appointment, so I took it easy.  Actually, I didn't take it easy; I necked at my usual fevered pace, but I dragged myself away from the crash site at 9pm, so all was well.

This morning I felt very pleased with myself as a result.  What a dreadful little prig I am in circs. like this.  My hubris was compounded when I got to work and surveyed the damage amongst my colleagues, one of whom was so hungover he winced at every time he took a step around the office.  The chap who sits next to my desk, and who has a raging thirst, couldn't a recall a single event from the entire evening except for his being harangued by the staff at his hotel for trying to climb over the reception desk and steal a bag of Maltesers when he returned to his room in the small hours.  He then had the Olympic chutzpah to complain about the absence of bacon on the complimentary breakfast buffet.

Anyway, one Yuletide hurdle cleared.  Time to pin back the ears and hurtle toward the next.  To the pub!

There's a good boy

As we go to press, my plan to behave myself at the office Christmas party tonight is holding-up manfully.  I rode my bike to the tube station this morning and left it there.  The strategy behind this move is that having to ride it home from the station later will reinforce my resolve to drink moderately - the rationale being that one cannot ride a push bike when catastrophically pissed-up.  Although having said that, I have done this in the past of course, once memorably along the very narrow towpath of the river Lea.  The blood still curdles at the thought of that trip.

At my age, I should be able to control myself better than this.  In small groups I am quite disciplined, but in a vulgar mob I lose all restraint.  This is due to my profound shyness.  I need at least four pints to settle my nerves.  By then of course one's judgement is clouded and the Tasmanian Devil that lives in my head starts goading me into "having a tear up".  The residual sensible part of my brain sees all this unfolding, but is powerless to intervene.  He just sits in the corner, shaking his head and tutting.  After a couple of hours of determined necking, I'll find myself dancing, and then even the crapulent mind knows the game's up.

No dancing tonight, none.

Carol King

Missus O and I attended our first carol concert of the year last night.  Our residents' association set the whole thing up, and despite the light drizzle, it was very jolly and very festive.  I do like a carol concert, but it's particularly pleasing to yodel glad yuletide tidings with your friends and neighbours in attendance.  Life-affirming stuff.

We've another one in the diary for next week, a traditional service of nine lessons and carols at St.Stephen Walbrook, a Wren church in the City of London.  That one is our annual curtain-raiser proper to the festive period.  The vicar of said church is a very, very jolly man, generous of spirit and warm of welcome - just what a proper Christian should be.  I believe he retires this year; he'll be missed.

Sadly, this year I've begun my customary bout of maudlin Xmas-introspection early.  It's a tiresome ritual, this.  I sift through the smouldering wreckage of my achievements, silently weeping in nostalgia for a past that never existed.  It's as much fun as it sounds.  Drinking doesn't help of course, but getting through advent without drinking would be like treading grapes on stilts: infuriating, protracted and absolutely pointless.

I'm having a mid-life crisis I think.  It's tough.  I'm not depressed, just bored, which is actually worse.  The only upside to this is that if the name of the condition is to be taken seriously, I should live to the ripe old age of 92.  Bingo!  It reminds one of that joke Woody Allen tells at the beginning of "Annie Hall" - "Well, that's essentially how I feel about life.  Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly." 

I may bemoan life at times, but it's better than the alternative - that I do know.  Clive James gave the lie the romantic notions that surround the youthful death wish when he was given a terminal leukemia diagnosis.  He noted that all thoughts of self-immolation and nihilistic grand gestures that he used to have as a younger man fell by the wayside.  He started to concentrate on the what he had.  A bird in the hand...

Yes, that's the stuff!  Thanks, Clive.  I should remember this lesson when I'm down in dees next - read the words of a funny, intelligent wordsmith.  That's life-affirmation.  A defibrillator for the spirit.

Yuletide pressure

I popped to see my physio this afternoon.  My left knee's been giving me a bit of non-specific gyp, as I believe it's known in the medical game, for a couple of weeks.  So I needed an expert eye and a BUPA slush-fund to give it the once over.  The prognosis is positive.  I'll be back to my middle-aged best in no time.  The only eff in the oh is the fact that I have another appointment on Friday morning at 9am.  Normally, this wouldn't present any great hardship, but this Thursday is our firm Xmas set-to.  Generally, the day after this is reserved for sweating and personal recrimination.

When the fizz suggested this "window", I bullishly thought "Yeah, why not.  Let's do it,"  Now I can't stop welling-up at the prospect.  I may have to back out.  I don't like to disappoint him, but the inner-weasel is strong.  The weather's supposed to be shithouse as well on Friday.  I've started making excuses already.  Have you noticed?

But first things first - it's our residents' association annual carols tonight.  I'll get through that and see how I feel in the morning.  I don't hold out much hope for the current appointment's prospects.  Know thyself.

Kalt in the name of the law

Kin Nora, it was cold in London over the weekend.  Saturday was one of those concrete-nipple-inducing clear winter days, of which we're so justly proud here in northern Europe.  Trouble is it also co-incided with a day-long yomp around Camden and the west end in search of the last few Xmas pressies.

It was actually very lovely to be in town on Saturday.  The weather, lights and crowds of shoppers all aided the festive feeling.  It pervaded everything - even my lunch in the pret on Frith Street in Soho was a jolly affair, as I watched the hoards scurrying about with their groaning Hamleys bags.

Sadly, I did eventually agree to succumb to exposure, thanks to the bitter conditions, and rather let myself down by getting a touch tearful and maudlin.  I also had a full-sized replica of a Viking sword on me at the time (long story), which I had to carry home on the train.  This of course acted like a magnet for mentalists and the congenitally drunk as I waited for my train.  If your timing is off to even a modest degree, Liverpool Street Station can periodically resemble a mediaeval asylum.  

It's not as much fun as it sounds either because the threat of crapulent violence is ever-present.  LP station serves Essex and east London, for the most part, and so is extravagantly overfurnished with leering tattooed cockneys.  Add a couple of stiff Yuletide what-have-yous and a tweedy, thin bespectacled man carrying a broad sword (yours truly) and you have yourself a social powder keg.

I did manage to get home unmolested as it happens, but it was the most unrestful 15 minutes I've experienced since queueing for a urinal in the gents of Millwall's firm's pub just outside The New Den.  That episode required an acting masterclass from myself.  You need to look non-threatening and hard at the same time, and all you've got to play with is your stance and your facial expression.  Get it wrong, and you'll resemble the hunchback of Notre Dame trying to suck the skin off a pickled lemon.

Kipper Bisto

The prose might be a little rudderless today.  I'm in one of those mental holding patterns I enter from time to time.  I'm subject to that slightly unnerving feeling you get when you're sat in the dentist's waiting room, waiting for the local anaesthetic to kick in before the fracking begins in earnest.  This makes it hard to unboss the eyes and get on with things.

I'm my own worst enemy at times like this.  Bitter experience has taught me that getting stuck into work or chores brightens my mood hugely.  Despite this, I always vacillate when bored.  This prolongs the moment of inaction and makes my mood worse.  Even jotting this guff down requires a decent run up at pres.  But once I begin, it's quite therapeutic.  For me I mean, not the reader.  Don't look at me like that - I'm not Claire Rayner.

The wayward psychological steering has also put me behind somewhat with the old Xmas shopping.  I made some progress last weekend in Norwich, but since then nuttin'.

Come on, you - finger out.

When is Christmas this year?

I've taken my psychological eye of the yuletide ball of late.  This is particularly irksome as I'd promised myself about a week ago that I wouldn't.  I should explain - "taking the PE off the YB" means allowing yourself to get swept up in the pre-Xmas brouhaha too early.  You keep thinking tomorrow's your last in the office for a few days when in fact you've still got twenty days left to toil

It's a real pick axe to the optimism when the alarm clock goes off at 7am then.  "Oh, fcuk, not another work day?" your brain complains as you fill the breakfast bowl with Bitesize Shredded Wheats yet again.  Also, "evening-Jerry" can be relied upon to drink too much and stay up late at this time of year because he, too, is convinced he's on holiday.  And there's nothing I can do to disabuse him of this misapprehension.

So, I'm stuck with it.  Could be worse I suppose.  I could be in an iron lung.

A routine matter.

I think I may finally have divined the root of my lifelong ennui and general dislike of matters societal: it's routine.  The business of routine I mean, not it's straightforward, the divination.  I don't know why this didn't dawn on me sooner.  I hated routine as a child.  It's my first real memory if I'm honest.

You can see the problems this brings one.  Every part of modern life is subject to the jackboot of routine.  From nursery onwards, we're taught to operate within very narrow confines and constraints.  I railed against this development as a nipper.  Prior to going to nursery at the age of three, I spent my time at home with my mother, in an completely improvised and most enjoyable protracted playtime.  Why wouldn't I hate the agencies of routine, then?  They wrenched me from this joyous, ambling life and tried to force me to conform to their bourgeois version of reality.  In their joyless world, play was to be enjoyed in predetermined and regular bursts.  "Playtime's over, children."  "Whoa, hang on a sec, I'm really breaking new ground with this Lego sculpture; I can't stop now."  

I hated being told when and what to eat, when and what to play, when to come and when to go.  I assumed in my preschool naivete that everyone felt the same, but no - most people seemed to like strictures.

The problems continued into secondary education of course, intensified even.  I did find some succour at university.  I could sleep when I wanted and work when I wanted.  What these three years taught me is that I am very productive and very diligent when allowed to be.  I also wasn't beleaguered by chronic fatigue, as I was at school and am now.  The reason for this is not that I slept too much, in the usual lazy sitcom parody of studenthood, but that I was able to retire only when tired.  That meant I could sleep and rise 7 hours later, feeling rested.

Sleep, apart from this brief hiatus, has always been a problem for me.  The reason?  The notion that you must immediately go to bed adds unhelpful psychological pressure to the situation, which is guaranteed to ruin matters.  So even if you are tired, you'll struggle.  It's a bit like trying to have sex with a hectoring partner who continually shrieks "GET A HARD-ON.  QUICKLY NOW - I'M WAITING" as soon as you've pulled your socks off.  That's not going to help, believe me.  Nor, if you're reading this, is trying to slap some life in the offending organ whilst simultaneously tutting and rolling your eyes.

So, the theoretical solution to my ills is clear: shatter routine.  But how does a man with a square job, like me, do this?  Answers on a postcard please.  I do my best at the weekends; I wage a guerrilla war against routine.  I go out of my way not to have appointments in the dairy at the weekend, and this extends to not meeting friends in the pub.

Now, anyone who knows me even vaguely well will wrinkle the brow at this.  Normally, I adore the pub, and can think of no better environment in which to while away my hours, but on a Saturday night it's that enforced and carefully demarcated window thing again.  We'll meet at 9pm and stop at 11.30.  There's no scope for things to develop in an organic way.  There's no distant horizon to gaze at.  The whole enterprise lacks romance.

That's it I suppose - I'm a romantic.  I must remember to explain this to the missus when I get home.  "I'm too romantic, which is why I've resigned from my job."

Good-bye to all that

Bah - the gods of progress are conspiring against me.  Mrs O and I were in Primrose Hill on Sunday evening, and discovered that our former local has been sold.  The new owners are making the usual comforting noises about not changing the place too much, but we've all heard that before.  Besides, they also own a couple of other pubs in the kinds of areas that only merchant bankers and TV presenters can afford to live.  I don't know these particular boozers, but my guess is they're efficient and rather soulless restaurants-cum-pubs.

There's nothing inherently wrongs with pubs of this kind; it's just that the one they've taken over was the last of its kind: a truly independent local hostelry that reflected the diversity of the neighbourhood it was in.  The couple who ran it until recently were an admirable pair.  They were a New Zealand couple d'un certain age, who wanted nothing more from life than a heavily-laden table, a couple of bottles of fine wine and a terrier or two scurrying about their ankles.  They used to eat their supper every night in the pub itself, even though they only lived upstairs.  It was a joy to watch two people dine with such brio.

They'd run the pub for donkey's years, after moving to London in the 1960s.  The pub they built resembled them and their shared outlook on life.  It served fine food (this was years before the fad for gastropubs took hold) and fine wines, not to mention fine ales.  But it did this without losing its unpretentious, convivial and cosy atmosphere.  It was not a place for posing, posturing and/or poncing about.  Primrose Hill has plenty of establishments where you can indulge those particular interests.  My fear now is that it will go the way of the others.  Also, I read on the web this morning that the new owners have already tried to sell off half the beer garden to a property developer, with a view to turning it into a "luxury dwelling".  The rotters.

I always hanker after moving back to PH.  It's a lovely, friendly and well-positioned place.  I love my current home, but The Hill will always have a special place in my heart.  It was some small compensation to Mrs O and myself that although we could not afford to buy so much as a skip there in which to live, we could always go back and revisit the pubs and restaurants that served us so well during our stay.  Now it seems they're being picked off one-by-one by developers.

It's becoming like the other moneyed areas in London: conservative, corporate and dull.  Oh so dull.