I Came, I Saw, I Suffered Immensely
“You do know the weather forecast is horrific, yes?”
“Yes. But I am MIKE!”
“What?”
“Er – I’m MIKE. It’s…it’s like a machismo rallying cry. I’m facing off against the world, see. Staring it down. And there can be only one winner.”
“Well yes. That’s certainly true.”
My housemate eyes me pityingly as I continue to lace up my boots. (more…)
So my housemate says to me, “You’re going to the Pork Pie and Cider Festival, right?”
“What? It’s this weekend? But – but I haven’t….no, that’s happening the weekend of the…oh, it is the weekend of the…..oh for…..”
I’m flustered. I’m befuddled. My dignity is shredded.
(But I will have my revenge). (more…)
Earlier in the week, I was enjoying being uncomfortable again.
Comfort is a concept I’m not…comfortable with (damn my language and its grammatical quicksands). Comfort is a state of being you should probably only dip into, to enjoy with a contrasting experience in the forefront of your memory. You stamp the snow off your boots, you rub your numb hands in front of the fire, and then you press your nose against the window. It’s cold out there, you whisper comfortably.
Over the last month or so, I haven’t traveled far and I haven’t stretched my muscles enough. I’ve grown lazy and comfy. And now there I was, dragged yet another suitcase of books I still hadn’t read after 3 years of lugging them around York, rumbling across town to my new house for the second time that week (of five such trips)…and enjoying how tired I felt.
It’s a fact. I liked being that tired. There’s a kind of joy that accompanies pushing yourself towards a physical limit – usually accompanied by the humiliation of how far you’ve let that limit slip back recently. Luckily (now I know this will sound weird)…luckily I now get to walk 40 miles a week, to and from work. All I need is my new mp3 player to arrive and get teaching me colloquial Greek and everything will be perfect.
My thoughts were interrupted as a suitcase wheel caught on the kerb, flipping the whole thing over and nearly wrenching my arm out its socket.
Yeah, I giggled into the sky, bring on the discomfort. I want it. It’s good for me. I’m ready for it.
The reply in this little exchange between myself and the Fates came a few days later, when I was struck down with the worst food poisoning I’ve ever experienced (or possibly it was the Norovirus – in which case, the piece of mackarel I bought from Morrisons is blameless and I apologise to it unreservedly).
As I lay on the bathroom floor for 6 hours under a warm coat I’d managed to drag over myself, too weak to stand, shaking so hard I couldn’t press the buttons on my phone to ring work to let them know I wouldn’t be turning up, and occasionally dragging myself a few feet to visit my two friends Ralph and Huey, I realised that actually, discomfort can be a bit of a bitch.
Hi. I’m a 38 year old man, living at home with his mum.
(Until she’s recovered from her recent surgery. Probably returning to York this time next week).
Walking through town last night, I squinted until everything was blurry – until it was 1998 again, the last time I lived here. I listened to someone explaining the finer points of making up a rollie. I watched as the side of the church cracked open, spilling buttery light and rosy-cheeked young urchins onto the street (and since my eyes were half-shut I couldn’t see their cigarettes or cans of lager). I squinted at the rebranded kebab shop until its name changed back.
The streets looked too wide – explained by the fact that they’ve recently been widened – and the same shops are constantly in flux while others endure as fixed points in time and space. The latter are a marvel. For every safe, sensible attempt at yet another bakery or grocery store there’s something so wildly nichey that it couldn’t even survive in York (a city that has a shop selling Christmas decorations all year round). At an inaccessible end of the roundabout near St Nicholas’s Church there’s a Fung Shui shop. It’s a shop that sells Fung Shui. In East Yorkshire. To Yorkshire people. And yet somehow it’s survived for at least the last half-decade. I’m fascinated by this Shackleton-like feat of endurance, flying in the face of every commercial law I know. I want to know more. There’s obviously a story there.
Even if I squinted, the boarded-up Amusements along the sea-front stubbornly remained shut. I dimly remember going in Dave’s (above) – distinctly remember walking through the doors, but nothing else, as if I’ve had that memory surgically removed by someone desperately covering their tracks and/or hiding just how bad it was in there. All the amusement arcades are derelict buildings waiting to have their roles reimagined – even the mighty Pastimes. There’s a hint of Pripiat about the place, except it’s not radioactivity, it’s apathy.
Squinting goes some way to hiding all that. But squinting is dishonest, and so very 1998; it reminds me to who I used to be when I’d rather concentrate on who I am now. Also, squinting gives you frown-lines. Being English, I already have enough of them.
So while I’m back here, I’ll open my eyes and see what happens.
Image: the repairman
Writing is a serious business. We writers have a moral and spiritual obligation to our peers and our readers to strive for the utmost sobriety of tone and to stick to the facts clinically and empirically without unnecessary rhetoric digression or lack of intellectual focus and rigour.
So I’m told.
Anyway, if you’re a student and you’ve just started a course filled with seminars…which you may very well have just done, since it’s Freshers Week here in York…here’s a fun thing you can do that will add spark, zest and zither (is that the word?) to your discussions.
One of the best points of any journey?
The second day back home.
It’s like this. Being wise, you’ve taken an extra three or four days off work for a post-holiday holiday, just enough time to battle jet-lag and sort through the mail. The first day is all about sleeping – and on the second day, in the same exhausted, nervous fog you get after drinking too much coffee, you lurch into town…
…and rediscover it. By going away, you’ve unfamiliarized yourself with your own home. You can truly see it again. Because familiarity makes the world – disappear. When you know exactly where you are and where you’re going, your thoughts will turn to fresher topics and your eyes shift to cruise-control. Starved of stimulus, your awareness withers and you start to pine for novelty with a leaden, blunted heart.
So here are four ways you can fall in love with your surroundings all over again.
