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..