Racing Chihuahua

It’s like being hit with a brick wall of the  completely, blooming obvious.  Knocked side-ways, shell-shocked, released, calmed, elated and sorrowful.  All in the space of just right now.  I’ve cried rivers of tears, destroyed contact lenses in the process, emerged sodden and blinking in the dusk of the day.  Driven home feeling  small and incapable, familiar roads different and difficult in the haze of what’s happening, of the things I’ve seen.  And I keep seeing more.  And now I see that the inability to sleep, which is making me itch in my own skin and  dull and unsteady, is maybe, quite probably, definitely,  part of the process.   Sleep is the drug I have to go without.

And I”m so, so incredibly tired. I’m wading through water and the smallest thing requires a mountain of thought.  A cup of tea is an Everest worth of effort. My brain  feels tight and dessicated and so shot through with electricity that it can’t shut down.  Yet  later it’s become too large for it’s container, heavy and dull, straining against the sutures of my skull.   Every time I move my unanchored brain feels like it’s drifted across the fluid it sits in and thudded against the sides of my head.  Confused and dizzy.  Everything’s ‘happening in slow motion.  I’m lagging minutes behind the rest of the world.  When I look in the mirror I see eyes like saucers, dilated and glassy from lack of sleep.   I’m desperate to fall into the dark, soft, un-knowing of sleep.

But I can’t, so I’m sleep walking through the days, sodden through from the lack of it and it slowly dawns that I’ve been making connections as I see each dawn come in.  Lying restlessly in the bed that’s no longer a place of solace and comfort but an alien landscape, with no fit or comfort.   In the short space when sleep comes, when I can’t tell if I’m awake or dreaming, things drift into focus and they make sense on waking, when I realise I’d not so much slept as been forced to shut-down.   Sleeping and not sleeping and drifting through the dark, dusty corners my mind and picking up things and re-filing them with newly, focused eyes.

Mission Control has taken over, I’m no longer manning this ship.  I’m lying on my back, looking at the sky, adrift in the  current of a wide, warm river. I’m being pulled in by a benign kind of tractor beam. Ladies and gentlemen I am floating in space.

And standing mundanely in the kitchen it’s suddenly right there.  And the world’s gone still and stopped around me. I’m hollow inside, covered in goosebumps on the outside  and the answers are lying, quite literally right there in front of me.

Just like they told me they would.

And I’m fizzing with the sheer magnitude and joy of it, even though I know that this is just the beginning of it and no one said it would be easy.  But.  This isn’t a mid-life crisis.  It’s a mid-life* revelation.

*I’ll have ‘better late than never’ inscribed on my tombstone if you please.

It’s been one of those days. You know the ones?  The ones that start after a night of unsettling dreams and interrupted sleep which begin out of kilter and just keep tilting.

Despite my reputation for tardy time-keeping I’m rarely late for *official* appointments.  But I’m cutting it fine even before I realise that I’ve left things behind in the house I’ve just locked, things that I really do need in this nomadic life of mine. .  A few hundred yards down the road and it’ s horribly apparent that at least one of my tyres is pretending to be a pancake.

Time’s slipping through my fingers as I pull into the nearest garage and fail to realise  I’m using the air *thing* by the HGV pump until the ignorant —- with the belly, slouched in his flatbed starts hooting and making gestures at the other one. Oh you want me to use that one then, the one almost out of sight, behind the garage in the bit covered in sheet ice.

Now i’m definitely, probably late but still clinging on.  Inevitably despite going as fast as the traffic / speed limit will allow I can’t make up that much needed 15minute cushion. My pins lady sounds mildly put out but tells me not to worry, and no she won’t let me pay for my missed appointment. Guilt factor +10, unsettled, unhappy and discord in treble figures.

Turn around and head home, to a house full of noise sounding not so much like it’s filtering through the party wall but being forced through with blunt instruments. Decide to fulfill request to collect and delivery a parcel from the village shop.  It will definitely give my ears some respite and perhaps help restore some balance to the day.

The car is not where I left it. It’s five  feet further down the road from where I left it, in gear with the handbrake full on…  Clearly the slush I thought I’d parked on clearly had a higher ice content than I realised. Do I feel stupid? Oh yes, pillar-box red stupid   It’s just there, in the wrong place, no damage done, but my heart’s in my mouth. We’ve had one incident here in which my car was the recipient of both my neighbour and her car at roughly the same time.  Suffice it to say  neighbour,  car and my nerves were all fairly broken, damaged and frayed respectively.  That’s one New Years Eve none of us will be forgetting in a hurry.

Drive cautiously into the village to collect the parcel and nearly get hit by an haughty old bag in a Chelsea Tractor.  Yes I am making a really, really bad job of parking but I was doing it long before you appeared…  Anything else?  That not so funny, comedy shadow is still looming over my not very tallness and everything’s just wrong.

Home again and I’ve just heard the forecast which apparently will see the thermometers plummeting to minus eight . Decide to scrap the ice off the path by neighbours house. She may act like she’s 20 years younger, but 83 year old bones don’t take kindly to falling and I figure that doing something else *useful* might help with the balance thing.  So head down, merrily scraping  (yup that’s solid ice) and I realise I’m not the only one scraping. All four Polish builders (the ones currently just doing their job, but making my life hell) from the house next door have joined in. They make a far better job of it and work up from where I’m working down and clear the pavement to the end of the street.  I tell them they’re kind, give them the thumbs up and try to explain about Pat (you know the lady with the dog) they give me a nod and a smile.  I’m not sure they understood much beyond the thumbs up but I’m definitely going to buy biscuits tomorrow. I hope Poles *do* tea and biscuits.. Or maybe donuts…

(maybe the scales did get some balance – the day ended with a hug, supper and the pub)

London, people, lots of.  Want to escape but I’m trapped in a metal tube, jerking along in a blaze of stark strip-lighting.  Country mouse, nay dormouse .   Stink of hot bodies, beer breath, most looking like they’ve already downed a nights worth.  I feel alien here.  Something’s changed since this was part of the daily grind.  A lot has changed and it’s not just the passing of time.

Go through the motions of the evening.  The company’s good.  A friends birthday, his friends making an effort, do my best but I’m floundering.  Surreptitiously glance at my watch, long for quiet, pillow, book.

Rewind a week.  Lying in a tent listening to the rain beat down on it’s not necessarily waterproof flanks. Pitched at 12.30am in a downpour, towels sacrificed to sop up the flood.  No bike this time but another wet field in a long list of fields,  perhaps one too many.   Most recently they’ve been inhospitable.  Wonder if it’s the endless repetition of being soaked through and ferrying home a car full of sodden kit or is it that I’ve got old, that I’m too tired, too broken?

I saw friends in that last muddy field; they were in all honesty my main reason for being there.  I’d gone sans bike ostensibly to do other things but those long, not seen friends were the main draw.  I’d gone prepared as always and with no expectation of seeing the sun.   I could see  folk having fun, that it was probably special but I couldn’t get there.  Unhappy, tired, sick well differently so, getting dizzy getting out of bed in a tent you can’t stand up in is unusual even for this bag of bones.

Fed up, very. Questioning things that I’ve always looked forward to, always enjoyed no matter what the weather gods threw.  Reminisced cheerfully under dripping shelters about the days when a gazebo acted as sun block rather than a way of keeping dry. Opened another beer, stayed up too late encased in wellies, waterproofs and occasionally a sleeping bag.  Chatting, having fun with people I love,  doing the thing I love, or was that ‘loved’.

Maybe I just need a ride, maybe that will re-set my mind which has defaulted to ‘give up’. There’s the rub, until I can shake this bug which encased my lungs in barbed wire and filled my legs with lead the bike lies redundant, unloved in it’s corner by the fire, with a flat tire and a coating of dust.  Yes dust.  It’s only been a few weeks but my mind feels like lungs underwater and  I’m looking at the list of things entered and curling into a ball of disinterest and dread.

Every year it’s the same.  That first hint of damp lingering in the air like thin silvers of smoke.  The slight chill that raises a rash of goosebumps. The hard dry turning to plasticine and puddles. That evening ride finishing in the glooming that chivvies me home to the box marked ‘Lights’.

Every year it’s the same.  My spirits start the slow annual tumble down into the dark that gets earlier every day.  I  grieve for the summer I’ve been waiting for, that I always wait for.  Every year I feel cheated it always seems that she’s just paused before hurrying on to another place that’s never quite ‘here’. And I think back to bygone days that  seemed to stretch on into forever of nights searching for cool spots on hot pillows, peeling skin, tide marks and tanlines, dust stained socks and bikes that can just be let go and left at the end of a ride.

Every year I go barefoot till my toes go blue. Clinging on, pretending till the inevitable miserable digging round for warm layers and the driving inside for lack of light, reluctant getting up to dark mornings.  The dank grey smog that creeps in and clings limpet like to the lining of my mind,  sending lethargy into my legs and muffled sadness into whatever’s left.

Every year the same. I shuffle through, hating the shortening evenings finding no comfort in a lit fire until at some always undetermined point something: a line of trees ablaze, wall to wall blue sunshine, a sharp breeze in my face, something triggers the warmth that spreads across the wastelands.  And suddenly those armwarmers,  the  second layer of socks, the muddy splatter and the chasing of the light don’t seem quite so much like the end of the world…

Adjustment, it’s a process. It’s been this way since almost always, but every year it feels like the first time,  I think it always will.

‘I had slept badly and spent most of the night, neither awake nor asleep, in that state that collects troubles from both the conscious and unconscious worlds… I realized …that I was beginning to feel rather desperate with fatigue…

As I stood there feeling myself to be three-quarters fantasy and only a quarter real…’

Laurens van der Post

4am tired, hollow eyed and empty. Peer at alarm clock. Late. Fling self out door, Blood Buzz, loud. Eyelids peeling back, driving to the wire. Boy racing cross-country. Twenty miles of back road winding. Winning.

No! Stymied by a 30mph, flat-capped, silver surfer with time to kill. Really not now. Glance at clock make that a double no with an eye-bleeding espresso on the side, no sugar.

Don’t tail-gate, don’t. Not big, not clever and he’ll just let the speedo drop to just above zero. I know I would. Hang back, be polite, be polite.. Know this road like the back of my cat-scratched, washed-out hands. One chance, maybe two if the oncoming isn’t. Hoping and it’s a clear ahead. Change down, opportunity snatched. Foot flat to, engine howling happily, let loose, wolf at the moon. And we’re past.

Twelve years and the suspension’s a bag bouncing spanners but we can still pack our punches. Drive like there’s actually a hole in the bonnet and the devil’s on my back, eyes fixed on the road, but there’s a persistent red light in the corner of. I swear it’s getting brighter, more insistent every time i steal a glance.

And the parking gods are looking down kindly and we’re there by the skin of. No 30 zones violated, the invitation to an open road accepted gratefully and the engine didn’t putter to a halt for lack of food. Whispers heartfelt thank you. Oh may the wheels of steel last forever more. For when my legs aren’t fit to carry me I’ll just drive till I drop off the edge.

We’re going to run out go-go juice driving the 200 yards round the corner to the garage aren’t we?

My trusty Nokia is on it’s last legs, putting it face down in a pool of water the other day didn’t help and to be fair it’s had a hard life.

As if my magic I get a text from Orange as I’m walking past the local Orange shop so I pop in as the gods are telling me it’s time to upgrade and a contract has got to be cheaper than ‘fleece as you go’. I’m travelling light as I’m planning to fill the courier bag with shopping so I’ve just got a debit card and a tenner, rather than a huge wallet taking up valuable room. We don’t get past the telephone/ address check seemingly because I’m ex-directory. No bother, perfectly reasonable. I’ll pop in next week with some utility bills as requested.

This is next week, it’s cold, brass monkeys cold. Two layers below the waist, three up top including a waterproof and I’m still cold. I’m also very tired and sicker than I’ve been in a while but I decide that parking and my waistline are both the stuff of nightmares and the fresh air and some pedal turning will do me good. It’s the only reason I’m riding 12 miles to Amersham and back instead of doing bits and bobs in the village. I’ve got a letter from the bank and a phone bill both with my name and address for all to see and a full wallet as per last week’s instructions.

Strangely the young lad remembers the small girl clutching a cycling helmet wearing a fine splattering of mud. I get through the phone check this time (huh?) and then apparently I have to choose from one of various credit cards I know for a fact I either don’t have or are not sitting in my wallet under the names on the screen. So they ask for the letters. No it’s not a bank statment we can’t accept that. Well I’ve got on-line billing but this letter has my name, address and an account code on it. No dice. Well here’s my phone bill. No that’s an broadband bill we can’t accept that. No it’s my phone bill – Pipex bought out Homecall and like Orange who provide broadband AND landline calls so do Pipex. We’ll we’re sorry…

Okay well I’ve been an Orange customer since 2000 and this card, that you do accept is mine is registered to my ‘pay as you go ORANGE account’ surely that’s enough proof of me and my address? No, we can’t accept that? Why not? They can’t provide a satisfactory answer. I’m losing patience now, not least of all because the shop is freezing. Apparently they have to leave the front door open (so much for globabl warming) for reasons I never get to the bottom of. Perhaps Orange can tell me why they feel it necessary to freeze their staff and customers and heat the outside world?

I leave them photographing the not-utility bill (which is odd as you’d think broadband in this day and age would be classed as a utility) to email it to Orange who ironically they can’t reach on the phone. And here’s me thinking they’re a telecommunications company. Nip round the corner to my bank who helpfully print a page of my on-line statement with my address on it and stamp it with today’s date. The cashier gives me an understanding nod and says that’ll do it.

They’re concede that will do it. How much time has this taken? Nearly an hour or thereabouts, including waiting to be seen. Oh but the phone you want is out of stock. Well given that it’s the one you suggested last week, it’s written on the brochure by you, that I waved at you when I came in and is clearly stuck to your wall suggesting it’s in stock why the (insert expletive of choice) didn’t you tell me before we started this process?

To to add insult to injury you offer me a phone that you actually admit is inferior. Now common sense would suggest you’d offer me the next one up and that way you get a ’sale’ and a signed contract. But no. I ask if you can tell me which of the local Orange shops has *my* phone in stock. No, we don’t have access to that information. Any offer to phone around to check or even to tell me where the nearest branch is well, you’ve guessed it is not forthcoming. Communication breakdown…

I’ve been an Orange customer for *10* years and 3 months. I don’t ever want to know how much money I’ve spent with you. I still don’t have a fully working phone and I’m wondering if I can transfer to another network and keep my number, but thank you Orange for inspiring me to finally update my blog.

From the Times Online:

”At the end of a garden path, in a home-made observatory overlooking Wee Glenamour Loch, there is an air of expectancy among a gaggle of astronomers.