Days like these

Some days are good. The ones that you never expect anything from for instance. The ones when someone says something that makes you think about what it is you're doing and ,perhaps more importantly, why you do it. I suppose the thing is, that you reach a point when you don't think about it so much any more.

Today was just such a day. 

When you work with people whose lives are a collection of unhappy events rather than the smooth expected run of the made up world we think we live in , you can start to lose sight of what it is that's really important or even what's going on. Sometimes, you get a reminder of the effect you can have on others and how they start to look at themselves when given the perspective of one who can perhaps see the person they could be if they'd give themselves half a chance, that's the biggest problem with this game I call a job, people think they have to be one thing when really they just need to be helped towards being what they actually can be, themselves with a bit more confidence and a little more idea of the things that might help them get there.
The small things make big changes. 
When someone tells you that you've given them the confidence to do something positive, something that most people would do on an everyday basis without thinking, then you get a sense of what it is you're actually doing for people. 

This should never be about numbers or how much money is being made, it should always be about the things it's purported to be about. Journeys, people growing, situations improving and life being a little more sunshine than shit.

There are those out there ,pilgrims in an unholy land, who like myself do it for the people thing. It's hard, sometimes unforgiving and you get to see the underside of this swirling, muddled, fucked up mess we call society.

 But it's all worth it for a glimpse of  the possible..   
  

Imagine if dust caused trains to stop running. What if the accumulated daily shedding from our slowly decaying selves made rail travel impossible ?
 The 07.36 to Derby is cancelled due to a build up of people dust.


All things are dust , even the trains,waiting to give up their own ghosts, lose their form and go somewhere else. Nothing is really solid but still we cling to the  solidity of our decisions and the certainty of how things will turn out.
 Even when we half joke about nothing lasting for ever and how we can't be sure of anything, we're still not fully aware of what we're saying to each other.
I know this will happen and so do you. Doesn't really help ....does it?


As with a lot of things, best not to think about it too much before it starts happening before my eyes.


 Anyway....any more fairs please.

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?