Ho Ho Ho....

I'm doing what I said I wouldn't do. I'm buying the presents I said I wouldn't buy.
Stumbling around the inside of a shopping centre with corridors like a maze and no discernible exits.
It's far too warm and it's crowded with people who seem to be like this all year round, as far as I can tell.
I find myself going around in circles, not really sure about my choice of  venue for shopping or what I'm actually looking for. It's a pattern I've followed for as long as I can remember.
I never learn.

I'm lucky. I see something that catches my eye and I make the purchase. Time to get out.
My sense of direction is second only to my sense of work ethic, dodgy at best.
Finally after somehow going round it twice, I find the exit and make it outside into the winter evening.
Cars, Christmas lights and the bustle of a city going slightly off kilter due to a week worth of  festivity heading its way.

I'm on the train and looking in to the darkness. I'm usually on an earlier one but Christmas buying has changed the game.

There's no sunset and outside of the stations, no lights other than those of distant houses or the closer ones of farms and the odd level crossing,

Suddenly I'm tired. Not the proper full on time for bed tired but the my eyes want to close and I'll miss my stop tired. I'm being lulled by the rhythm of the tracks coming up through  the floor and right in to the core of me.  I could just surrender, go with the feel of it, wake up where I will. What's the worst that could happen?

I don't though. I wake up and think about the people I'm working with at the moment.
Everyone has a different story but there's only a limited amount of ways to read them because the system works that way. The one size fits most solution still only fits most. Different people who've found themselves in a situation that needs to be sorted out in a way that perhaps doesn't mean them reaching the expected respectable destination but one that's right for them.There's always talk of individual journeys but it's never really meant in any other way than get them into a job.
You get a job and everything else just melts away, no more problems because you're like everyone else. What more could you want?

It's always a bugbear for me. Just help them back onto the right track , let them sort it out themselves.

I'm fully awake now and I'm off the train.
Back towards home, bearing gifts and more a wise man than when I left this morning.

Have I seen you before somewhere?

What is it with the colour grey?
Why's it so popular with those associated with any form of training or learning for adults.
It's as if everything has taken its shape from the carpet and made its way upwards.
No matter how much they cover the walls with pictures of people giving positive quotes and rainbows telling everyone how colourful and powerful they are, it's still all grey under it.
Grey,battered and slightly skewed.

Standing , staring out of the fourth floor window. I watch the pigeons swinging in the netting that's designed to stop them nesting under the bridge.One of them balances like a circus acrobat and then springs up onto the the metal of the bridge. They perhaps don't care about the year's approaching end.
The twinkling lights over the road are doing their best to entice the unaware into the the shopping centre where all manner of delights await.
It is of course Christmas time.
I don't feel it.. More so than years before. I was in Argos the last night gone, waiting for some item to appear so we could just leave please, just let me leave. People queueing to buy shit that they couldn't give a rat's ass about the rest of the time. Love and family all wrapped up for one day a year before they get juiced up and get real with each other over the sherry trifle.
This year, more than most, I just don't get it. My gift money is going to a donkey sanctuary.

Travelling on trains is one of the things I love. It's often crowed, I mostly find myself standing and it can be a daunting task when the weather's got its hat on but somehow, nothing beats it. Add to that doing the thing I do in a different place with people with different faces but the same problems and you've got the double.
Plus, there's this the feeling that the place I'm working in has, in fact, just appeared from the recent past.It really is like an advert for what people think training providers should look like. I keep expecting to see Warwick Davis appear dressed as a goblin telling me I can't read .I just have to follow this crazy horse through this unknown and vast grey desert. It has the potential to burst into colour at any point and I'm holding on with both hands.

To top it off, all things do come around again. You just have to follow it and see where you end up.

I really have no idea but I'm not letting go. Not now.......
 

   

Into the new...Again

So off we trundle,
Back to trains on tracks and doing the same in a different place. Different faces with different stories all being squeezed into the one size fits all box we've come to love so much.
One thing I've missed about travelling on a train is  how much I notice time. There's no need to think about the car in front or behind for that matter. You just have what's inside your head. Another is really being able to see winter  sunsets for what they truly are. Early December and the sky was on fire. That sense of forever making me ache like nothing else can. It's as if the past ,present and future all collide and want to burst out of my head. I want to follow something I can never truly explain and it never really goes away.

More winter sunsets, more skies that stretch  on forever and look like fire..

????

People will always go back to what they know,
Comfort, routine and stability will always win out. Very few really want the things they pretend to.

After a week spent teaching people English, including a lovely woman from The Congo with a liking for terribly fitting wigs, the old thought patterns start to filter in.
I'm people watching again and getting lost in what I see. How do we manage to stop ourselves from screaming in pound shops?

 How can someone's silence  equate to them having strong feelings about someone? How does wanted attention some how become a threat to someone.
Why do you find yourself, in the middle of what you'd expected to be the quietest of seas, mentally adrift and course less in uncharted waters, as unsure as when you were seventeen, possibly more so?

People will always go back to what they know, remember that. Familiarity is contemptible but the only anchor in this stormy sea.

People go back but they take what they want from the things they played with, the familiar need never know how they've changed, it doesn't need to. Too many questions for the returnee.

Don't ever believe you can't have your cake.
Some fuckers shove it in with both hands and then tell you it's how things are when yours has been eaten. Different flavour of cake  served on old familiar plates. You have to go through it to really understand.

It makes no sense and it's pointless trying to make it yourself.

 Comfort routine and stability. My cage and my crutch...

  

??

The death of a man I've never met made me stare out of windows and feel a sense of mourning.
Someone who struck a chord in me, for reasons I'll never really understand, decided to put an end to himself for reasons only he will ever know and I felt as if something have been taken away from me, like I'd lost something.

Ask me to knock on someone's door in my own road to see if they're OK and I'll run a mile, because I'm afraid of the feelings it'll bring out in me.

How does that work? 

Still

I find myself staring into space during morning meetings.
Although I have new challenges and new people to meet
I'm still distracted by the play of sunlight through rain
And the thought that this might not be the end of all things

It's frightening but you have to do it..
you have to move...

I said stop it

I'm tired of the word tolerate.

I'm tired of how it's used in our everyday to describe how we should relate to each other.
I tolerate you and your differences, your beliefs and your views. I tolerate your presence and your values. I tolerate how you live your life differently to me and I tolerate how you see the world through different eyes that I can never accept, only... tolerate.

See how this has built up?  A mental dam holding back our rivers of independent thought.
The men in suits use it as their byword for the modern world. We tolerate in the absence  of all else, especially acceptance. 
Acceptance is a word way out of fashion in today's world. Acceptance is something we find ourselves unable to come to terms with, we are without the capacity to deal with it in the main.  Ironically,were we to accept certain things about ourselves, we'd perhaps be in a better position when it comes to dealing with each other and our own perceptions of this reality and how we see it as individuals and groups. 

We're told that to tolerate is the way forward .We, as civilised and modern people, lay the cornerstone of the way it should be in when dealing with those who are different than us. We are benevolent and kind and have tolerance of those around us with diverse beliefs and lifestyles. 

We are tolerant.

What this has come to mean in some ways is really  just another way of saying  we'll put up with this until we can convince you to be like us or we'll end up hating each other. What is it with us ? Why do we have to impose our values  and our expectations on others just because they don't live this short life like us?


What if we're encouraged to accept things? What if we just accept that people are different and won't be like us. Situations will be difficult and challenging, life will be different than we want it to be? 

Being told that we should tolerate only increases our inability to actually move past our collective problems. It doesn't encourage communication or interaction. It makes things sound like they're an illness or disease more than anything else. Things to be put up with, struggled with and despised.

Acceptance means we have to look at ourselves as well as others. We have to be honest about our own shortcomings first.That's the uncomfortable part.  Admitting to our own faults makes us less able to point out those in the people or situations we so happily tolerate.We can't accept things and be the same as before, because when we've accepted them, they don't hold us back any more. It makes us more able to deal with lots of things and put our energies into moving up and on. It takes a lot to be accepting of things but it helps us let go of negative thoughts and feelings that keep us in the places that aren't always good for us. There are plenty of places not good for us at the moment. All of us.

Get yourself out of yours if you're in one.. 

Leave tolerance to those who want it.

Start accepting        

     

Shop until it drops..

A moment of moral crisis in a major retail outlet...

The cost of the garments in this place is reflected in the way that the majority of the people buying them seem to treat them as they let them fall to the floor or simply walk past as they lie there. They're left  for others to collect  and as a consequence of this infectious apathy , I'm less and less inclined to look at the garish summer items on display  and rather retreat into my own world of scathing disdain for those around me. I do, at one point, begin to make a point of picking things up and putting them on hangers.

I am reminded that the entire point of the day's outing is to purchase said garments for a holiday. I appreciate this, as always, but the atmosphere in this strip-lighted cattle shed is one of unpleasantness magnified and I find I'm becoming distant and defensive.

 The people in these places should have claws, if they don't already.The air is filled with the sound of their shrillness and I expect to turn and see semi evolved dinosaur types, shredding and tearing their way through the denim and tie died cotton ensembles on show. Fighting over the spoils and discarding the rags they do want.
Unconscious savagery all around me. I look for my wife, the usherette of sanity in this cruel picture house of consumerism . 
  
 As I weave through the spray tans, the gangs of piled high hairdos and the dead eyed,I catch sight of one of the cleaning staff, slowly pushing a huge broom about in a mock display of servitude. I beam him my thoughts "Throw it down and walk away. Let's see how long it is before they're up to their scaly knees in the things they've discarded". He, of course, doesn't and continues to deliver £6.29 worth of sweeping as is deserved of the situation.

Having any of theses thoughts in places such as this is a god-damned curse. Not being one for shopping at the best of times, finding myself in a here only exacerbates this and by now, I'm filled with disdain for everyone around me.
I somehow manage to reach my wife as she peruses the various styles of footwear perched on the wire racks.  I'm asked if I like a pair of glitzy sandals and my reply is as throw away as they look. My response is taken on-board, they're not made to last longer than two weeks and that's the point, not much of this is. That's why it's left lying around on the floor by the passing crowds,ignored, discarded, already forgotten.

 This entire shop is a reflection of how we, as a society, treat the things we buy, in fact, how we treat most things after a certain point. Cheaply and without pause for thought for what it actually means. Is it a bright colour? is it fashionable? will it make look like the person in the picture? Odds on, no. It'll make you look like..you but in something summery?
I can't buy anything from this place. There's too much going on under the bright sign too  ever make it a possibility. We get to the queue and I just want out.
   
Right,
Lets breathe and relax,pull back a bit and remember why we're here.

The day is a good day. Without this present incident it's full of humour and the chance to spend time with my wife. These are the pluses, always the pluses. Always be thankful for the pluses.
 I have to restrain myself at times as it's easy for me to become cynical about most things and it can be a cause of unrest. I have to remind myself about the fact that I too buy things, albeit mostly books and games. I build the defence around myself that these things are different.They're crafted and created by people who want to say something about the the world.They're filled with imagination and ask questions. The spectacle today is all about the things I avoid and really don't take pleasure in.

 Perhaps all such outlets would be better places if instead of images of pretty young things on the walls., they had pictures of the people who make them. The people who spent their days putting these fashionable items together, so that they could be left on the floor for.Our attitude may change towards  things then. A cheap attitude somehow cheapens others' lives.  
 After all,we ourselves, are as short lived as the latest styles on display and the newest trends we so happily covert.  
 Then again ,perhaps I'm wrong about it all and it's better for everyone that I stick to buying books and living in my head?   

Killing Time

Friday is filled with rain.
 It's the kind of rain that falls in thick, never ending streams. 

It feels serious.
So, a walk around the museum to wander around the collected past of my town and other parts of the world.
I decide that today is a day for the art world, so I make my way to the top floor. I'm in the mood for  still life , abstraction and the visions of  those who can capture the often unseen in life.
I'm in the mood for quiet contemplation on the imagery and meaning held within the gilt frames and shaped materials on display.

 What I forget is that it's Easter holidays.

I forget that places like this will be the haunt of the bedraggled parent and grandparent.
 The kingdom of the displeased and unquiet child. Sure enough, my first ten minutes are an unexpected insight in to the workings of parent and child relations. Sobs, squarks, runnings about to name but a few some of the activities going on around me. Couple that with wanton disobedience and  that thing that kids do when you get more than two in the same place; they turn into pinballs in a big pinball machine. All over the place with enviable freedom. This secretly delights me. Not because I especially enjoy watching children run about, no. It's for different reasons. One, they're not my children and two, there's something in watching sensible and responsible adults trying to impose their attitudes on little four year old  pinballs of I don't care.
The game goes on until someone tilts it.

I stand in the middle of this like the uncle who's got no kids but has  been dragged along to share in the joys of it all.

Eventually, the shepherds somehow gather their flock together and herd them off to bother the the Ancient Britons downstairs.

I drift into ceramics only to be confronted  with another cohort of small voice boxes. These, however, are in a different situation. As the others were free to roam, these are on the school trip. Like tiny offenders on community service, they wear fluorescent waistcoats and  are guarded by young women who do the responsible adult thing but have hairstyles that want me to know they are fun people really.

 Prisoners already kids. 

They drift around the 17th Century table ware displays like an unsteady dayglo knee high cloud amid the oohs and ahhhs of the captors. The cloud slowly dissipates and I am ,for the last five minutes, left pretty much alone. 

As I make my way back down the stairs, I catch up with two of the straggling mini convicts and one unlucky  guard , left behind to assist in the tackling of the stairs. One of them informs me that he is  a"big boy " for walking down the stairs , his screw informs me that she is "sorry" that it's taking so long. I inform both that it's ok because, it is.

Out into the steady downpour again, I make my way back to my own prisoners who await my rfeturn. Their crimes? Not understanding the inferred and how to use  the apostrophe correctly.

Their sentence.....Life

Hello and welcome to....

Being somewhere else..
The glamour of the time away from home falls short when twinned with waste land just off the M1.

The actuality of the small kettle and tray of tea bags hits home when you really are making it just for one.
Overheard conversations being held by salesmen who've travelled the length of the country and wandered through the great invisible North South divide. No glamour there either, just massive amounts of relief that it wasn't me.

An induction into the new and the obligatory tell us all about you team builder thing. Here I am, amongst real grown ups who have job goals! What do I do?
I am honest, refreshingly so. After being told that others enjoy the wonders of F1 and various sports, I am compelled to let out that I enjoy looking at the stars, thinking, daydreaming and occasionally writing something. I curse myself at one point for not giving away the secret that I also enjoy gaming, on my , in the dark mostly and never online. I should have put the lid on the tin and given away that I also enjoy sometimes walking up hills with my friends. They may have sent me home at that point with the wails of their mistake made ringing in my ears. 
I couldn't help thinking about the room we were in. How many other inductions and private functions had it seen?How many speeches and first dances had taken place in it? These places all seem to be built using some identical plan, some duplicate brick and interior layout.
Later, I ring home and explain about the day and the feeling of  detachment. It is echoed through the ether.
Food time and I'm with some nice folks. I do the talking thing but eventually I start listening to them talking to each other and the wondering kicks in. Who are these people and what do they want from all this? What was their reason for jumping ship? That's how I want to ask, just as that, why did you desert the flaming wreck of your previous role? Maybe they didn't. Maybe they had some conscious  reason for moving up the ladder rather than the feeling that they should be somewhere else now. Perhaps I read too much into people. Perhaps they're  just as lost as I feel in some of these situations.

Eventually, it's back to the massive bed ,another one cup tea bag adventure and my book. I talk to my wife again and suddenly, as I look through the window, I catch sight of the sprawl that is Sheffield, falling down the hill like a bed of low scattered embers. There's magic again and the everyday gives up its beauty under the glow of sodium. 

In all of this, I think I somehow get closer to where I'm actually supposed to be, where my unseen pull is eventually going to lead me. It takes time and there's much to be thankful for in the meantime. Not least this.

Colours, values and names change but underneath, it's still all about working with the uncertain and the unpredictable. Even if it involves hotels on reclaimed wasteland, just off the M1.

E=You and me 2

Now that we have calculated the distance between us

We have proof that it is not as wide as we thought

After our data has been collected and displayed

In scatter graph and pie chart

We can show evidence of coloration and similarity in the almost equal shares

Of the two coloured circle

And the dots that cluster around the straight line

Now that we have sized each other up, first by estimate

Then the inch, the centimetre and the micron

We finally have the measure of each other and can present the findings

 I already know that this will only highlight the flaws in the facts

 It will point out the odds hidden in the evens

And have us dividing ourselves

 By numbers that will always be prime

You will present with flipchart, use illustrations and pointing stick

I will scribble down half-finished thoughts

And mumble my way

Through self-conscious poetry

Good night and good luck...

Walking through the wet streets of a late night town.
From the doorway of a bar, the sound of  live music wraps itself around the spill of smokers who brave the drizzle to top up their chemical levels.
I'm only half conscious of where I'm headed but I know at the end of  this uncertain journey  is home.
I'm filled with the drink of several hours of slow celebration of a life changer.

I've ended one chapter of the story only to start  another one in a vaguely different place with vaguely different people. That's the outside of it. On the inside, I've broken away from something I needed to for a long time.

Others come and go and it can leave you feeling as if you're the pin in a massive wheel, only moving in a circle, always spinning and aware of how everything else around you changes while you remain routed on your allotted spot. Central to things, but nonetheless, static when compared to others and their ever changing lives.It is, of course a complete illusion. Sometimes it's just the movement that counts.

So, I make my way , unsteadily, to a place I know where transport to the comfort of my home awaits. If the happenings of earlier this morning are any gauge, I must have been quite unsteady.

It's funny, you never really think about the influence or impact you have on others until you're standing in a room with them looking at you and waiting for you to sum up your feelings on the last eleven years of your life. Conversely, you are suddenly aware of their effect on you. Things like that can't be summed up at all really. Every time I've thought about it, it comes out differently. In the end,it was stilted and clumsy with the added extra of  my true self being displayed in the tears that  really said how I felt about my final goodbyes.

It's all about people. Nothing will ever affect you like other people. It's dangerous to let them in but endlessly rewarding and affirming when you do, whatever the outcome and whatever the cost. If you build anything, build it on those around you, however you do it.

 On the outside,I've walk away from the past and I'm walking towards things I'm not even sure about in some respects. That doesn't even matter. Like I said, sometimes, it's just the moving that counts and the doors it opens.

 On the inside, I'm willingly taking a piece of my past on towards the new uncertainty.

It holds those I want to take with me..

Not having something to say and yet , still wanting to say something.
Having no opinion but still full of  thoughts on all things. Watching and waiting for something to happen.
The world turns again and we are somehow standing still and moving at the same time.
We don't seem to have learnt about some of the things we do but we continue nonetheless.

Giving prayers to the wrong gods, if any we have made for ourselves, could be the right ones. Not really looking at those around us and noticing the wear and heaviness they carry with them.
Basking in the glow of economic growth and still living cheap.
Fucking over the good things for the fleeting and hollow but still we laugh about how short this time is and how we mean to live it to the extremes. We are only here once we cry and we don't even know that.

Torn between two extremes , loathing and loving

and in the the middle,

my continued self eroding apathy 

Really ?

I hope the end of all of this doesn't come down to just good or bad.
I hope that the Universe has more imagination than that. To have experienced the entire spectrum of human conditions and then to have it summed up by one of two outcomes just seems rather flat, uninspired. Frankly disappointing.

Walking into the glorious sunset of the last evening, I began one of the countless conversations with myself.
It can't come down to just I'm good or I'm bad. Everlasting paradise or everlasting damnation. How is that anywhere near the deserved outcome of all this? How does straight lined thinking , in anyway, make the connection with the ultimate ending of this time in our  multifaceted world, our transient and evermoving existence in this supposed reality? How can that just be...it?
I can't except that a Universe so full of questions and possibles would have the face to put that forward as a solution to what can only be described as a missmash of  supposes , contradictions and  unknowns.
I'm plugging for the heart of star or the centre of a black hole myself. What's distance between you and your neighbour when you burn slowly for billions  of years? I could go for one of endless lives not yet lived or this one, with different chapters and outcome, anything other than heaven or hell.

I can more than handle the prospect of this never really ending. All things infinite and continuous, ever changing and evolving. Each one, whether lived before or new , offering  as of yet undiscovered  possibilities and experiences that we somehow, unknowingly , take with us  and develop as we travel through forever.

I don't want just good or bad. It does nothing for us, not as individuals or as community. We aren't that simple and neither is all this and to be expected to believe that that's what we've got coming because of what we do here and now is as small minded as some of the things we do with our time and energy while we're here.

Behave yourselves now...

People ask...

People ask,

"Why don't you write more"?

"Get it all down on the page, tip it all out".

I try to explain, give them an idea of what they're asking for,

I say “Imagine a house with the door locked, all you can do is look through the letterbox, what can you see”?

“Not much” they may well reply “Only the hallway with all its different doorways leading God knows where. What's that got to do with it"?"

“That’s the house in my head” I tell them “The one where I keep all the ideas I've got and I can't find the key..”

You can sleep walk through things. You think you're doing something as you've always done it but you're really just going through the motions.
Possibly, that's the problem . Something you've always done or something you've done for a long enough time. Long enough for it to become like sleep.

I discovered lately that you have to be awake. You have to bring yourself out of it, make yourself remember who you really are. So many things around us make us fall into this state of waking sleep. Modern life, everyday concerns and worries, work and its all pervading effect on our secret and true selves.

You need some light. It doesn't matter where it comes from but you need to follow it. You need to stop being asleep to who you really are and what you can be.
Sorry, I can't tell you what or who that is. That's your job to find out.

Just follow your own light... 

I've done bits of things

Bits of these

Bits of those

And that’s the problem

I suppose

Doing bits

Never really adds up

Until all you have

Are lots of holes

Stitched together

With bits of these

And bits of those