A very strange thing happened a few days ago at work.

I enjoyed myself.

It started with just a few emails I received in response to a call for guests’ dietary requirements for a meeting I was organising. The replies were unintentionally anarchic, and though began with the rather sober “Martin Phillips does not eat red meat,” continued on to the rather endearing “Sir John does not like cold soups and is not overly fond of mushrooms. He also prefers fruit based puddings.” Presumably he prefers these served in his favourite Winnie The Pooh bowl as well. An addition several days afterwards then provided the curious admission that “Peter Franklin Jones does not like creamy things.” But the best response I received, which has since become a popular insult amongst my friends, owes to the direct, almost disgruntled way it appeared as sent. No ‘Dear Ben’ nor a ‘Yours sincerely’ - just a one line response:

“Jane Smith is a fish-eating vegetarian.”

You can almost hear the vitriol or petulance with which that should have been deservedly put.

The day ended with my disgraceful flirtation with a fellow PA over the phone, and indifferently in front of my boss and the accountant. I had hardly listened to a word he’d said because I was too busy listening to the sound of his voice and his accent. I love the Canadian accent. I don’t know why. I know it varies slightly from place to place, but I’m foolishly inclined to trust anyone who over-pronounces their Ts and pronounces their Os as if they’ve only recently got over a cold. I think the phone call ended with him accurately concluding that I was either a rampantly predatorial homosexual, or one pencil short of a case.

Yesterday I took a train to the country. Even typing that is like taking a deep breath. The best things in life are always simple. The best things in life are free. Sometimes all you need is a good friend who can cook, drive, knows about wine, is happy to spend time with you, lets you choose the dvds, but perhaps most importantly, has a charming house in the country he lets you stay at when his parents are away. But mostly it’s definitely the being able to cook and knowing about wine that helps.

My brain is going through a lot of changes at the moment. It’s been the most refreshing change to just sit and do nothing - no duties, no responsibilities, no one wanting anything from you or having unspoken issues with you. To get a complete change of scene somewhere quiet. I’ve started feeling very uncomfortable in the flat in Highgate, I don’t quite know why, but for someone who now considers themselves a full time writer, not feeling comfortable in your environment is a very serious thing. It’s not that it’s a particularly unpleasant environment. I just find it increasingly hard to relax there. Maybe that’s just London. This is something I will clearly have to think about more, and work on making better, even if it’s just a case of sprinkling some salt everywhere and dangling some lavender from the rafters.

I also rebuilt my 100words entries and emailed them to Jeff Koyen who manages the site, after half of 2005 was lost in the migration to the new website. Hopefully they’ll be uploaded before the end of the month. I’m not mentioning this for any other reason than the fact that this meant sitting in front of Google for several hours, and picking out my entries from June to December 2005 one by one - day by day. It was therapeutic - going through my past piece by piece, and fishing out each individual moment from its aimless drifting into some semblance of order.

It felt a little like reassembling the road map of where I’ve been, just to remind myself of where it is I’m going.

they are fizzing on burning skin -
these tears wet as they slowly sink in
to sluice dry and stale flesh
to prove there’s something still within.
yes, there is still something there
with white face, black lips,
a corpse can once more sing!
it’s not affected -
the quizzing consort in my brain;
it’s not defective, this something going insane.
just a word used to denote
that which can’t be contained.
this is a missive
missile fired. Fire!
just a way of expressing the truth;
this, the beginning, the life redefined,
the first step in cutting the noose
so I can say something certain.
I. Am. Losing. My. Mind.

i’m finding it hard to eat. vegetables taste like they’re rotten. meat doubly so. i can feel the mashed up remains of putrefying flesh turning and gurgling in my stomach and i have to fght the uge to be sick. my throat burns. surely it’s the remnants of my soul i can taste on fire. i am jsut a shadow of what i used to be. i miseed an opportunity a long time ago - i see that - a fundamental and yet incconspicuous chance to take my life where it should have gone. whther that was success or death i now no longer know. i now no logner have the energy to care. i could end my life now but i lack even the interest in doing that. i am not a coward because i no longer even know what courage is. i live every day, increasingly, without feeling anything. wasting -that is all this is. wasting flesh, wasting time, wasting away. this. is. not. life. and yet i lack the will or interest to make any of this better. why is nothign better. why am i cocooned, embamed, buried alive in my own body, in my own mind? why does having lived no time at all feel like i have lived too much. can i even make you understand? can i make you care? can i make myself care? you see, i can’t even write this. i can’t write anything anymore. it once used to come so easily, and with such great certainty. now it’s all guesswork. all done with mirrors and tricks of the light and the smile of a conman. i’m just reading out the words i found in something like a magician’s book once. i have no idea what they mean. i can’t put them all together. i do not crave death. i do not. i simply hate my life. i smply can’t stop believing that there must be something else. something more or something less - i don’t care, just something different. something that surely makes sense. this urge to be sick again. the sickly sloppy pizza left half eaten on the plate. just looking at the charred flesh and the watery pineapples sends bile pooling at the back of my throat. wasted food. wasted money. you have to make the best of everything. you have to make the best of decay. right now i know where i could go and what i could let happen. i could just go there, right now, and all of this could end. and i know it would, and i know i could do it. so why don’t i? why don’t i? do i want to live, is that it? do i secretly enjoy the squalour? am i just a coward through and through - not afraid of endings but simply scared of action? i don’t have anyone to talk to. i don’t have anyone who understands. everyone’s too afraid to admit they know nothing. they’re all too afraid to admit they don’t care. i wouldn’t care. why should anyone else? why can’t someone else? i’d rather the honesty thn the saccharine. i’d rather the truthful indifference than the constant well meaning gawp of the uncomprehending. if my mother can’t hug me and tell me everything will be okay - if i have no lover’s arms to lose myself in and take a breath from the world, then how can polite concern possibly save me? i lost my spark and it’s gone, forever. how can anyone else truly know what that feels like? how can anyone else know what it feels like to live like a corpse and feel yourself achieve nothing but rot, all around you - the stench of yourself and the sight of even the food you must eat turning your very stomach? i am going to make myself sick and get this rotting flesh out of the acid burning inside of me. then i will go to that place and stare it in its absent face. i will imagine myself there and see if that thought brings me any comfort, any peace. no. will i do any of this? i will not. i will just stay here. i will just resign myself to inaction. i do not fear death because i died a long time ago.

I love it.

Some pictures of this recent freak business that we call snow.

Beth sent me a text yesterday morning saying that the tubes weren’t running, so I fished out my camera, threw on some clothes and skipped merrily straight on over to Highgate Wood to get myself lost for ten minutes or so, before pretending to find an alternative route into work.

“Doctor Crusher to Primark, on the double.”

Grammarians please excuse the gratuitous use of the Greengrocer’s Apostrophe on this site.

Why does this fill me with inspiration, and not my usual surge of deep envy?

Bloody UTF-8 encoding text editor putting blank spaces after the globalfunctions tags.

And we’ve all had that problem before, haven’t we girls?

Anyway, I’m a genius. Comment away. Or don’t.

I tried to be clever and make FancyURL’s even fancier.

It didn’t work. It did however completely screw my blog up.

For the time being I’ve had to disable comments until I fix… whatever it is I’ve broken.

I forgot all about it.

How could I have? I mean, this is epic in its formativeness, isn’t it? This is the kind of thing you surely always remember.

As soon as I caught the tail end of that image a few days ago and gave it a little tug, the old memory suddenly burst back into being like… well, like something from the depths screaming back towards the surface, gasping for air.

I was about seven and swimming at my local leisure centre. My friend was in the café with his family, but I still wanted to play. I’ve always loved swimming, but I’ve never been a strong one at all. I always just splashed about and had water fights - never actually swam. I was tiptoeing towards the deep end when the ground, unsurprisingly, fell away. I sank into the water and it closed over my head. As I bobbed back to the surface I opened my mouth to gasp for air. I’d barely inhaled it when a mouthful of chlorinated water smothered me, and back under I went. Again I came to the surface, and this time I cried out.

“Help!”

Again I sank, swallowing more water. Once more I burst up out of the water, but not as high or for as long as before.

“HELP!” I screamed at a lifeguard beside the pool, my arms thrashing uselessly about. As the water again stung at my eyes and gravity tugged me downwards, I saw him standing idly, arms crossed, not even looking at me. I was desperate to breathe, desperate to break the surface. As I struggled upwards once again I could see him through the water. Just standing there. My arms thrashed a final time through the surface, but I didn’t even get a chance to call out. Water flooded into my mouth and I had no choice but to swallow it, sinking once again. I was seven. I was seven years old I was drowning in a busy pool, being watched by someone called a lifeguard. I was seven and I thought I was going to die.

It won’t surprise you to hear that I didn’t. As it turned out, this was only the first time I thought I was going to die.

As I writhed frantically around under the water, fighting the urge to open my mouth and inhale the water, I felt an arm around me, and it pulled me upwards. Suddenly there was sound again, and there was air, and I gasped and I gasped and I gasped at it.

I don’t remember his face, but I remember he had a hairy chest. I’d never seen chest hair wet before. I suppose I must have done because I used to sit in the bath with my dad when I was a baby, but I wouldn’t have remembered, being less than a year or so old. His hair looked a little like our dog did after he’d had a bath. I remember this man had a hairy chest, and a big string arm around my chest and under my useless little boy arms that had completely failed to keep me afloat. And I remember his voice, perfectly. A gravelly London drawl, about thirty to forty. Just another person using the pool - probably a dad out with his kids. Not a lifeguard. Not that kid with the Jason Donavan hair who was being paid to watch the pool and save lives, the kid who just stood and watched while I was drowning. And I remember what this man said to me.

“Are you all right?” he asked. God, I really can still remember his voice perfectly.
I must have said yes. I do remember saying “thank you” over and over. I remember gasping. Then he said “this is a wind-up, isn’t it?” I suddenly became so scared he seemed to think that I was faking - that he was going to drop me back into the water - that I flung my arms around him like a limpet and wouldn’t let go. I remember this made him laugh. He carried me back to the shallow end (in my frantic thrashing I’d drifted further into the deep water than I thought) and gently let me go. I remember walking exhaustedly over to the nursery area, and sat with the mothers and their babies and toddlers in armbands, panting as I got my breath back. I remember hearing my friend shouting at me from the café overlooking the pool - “are you all right?!”, over and over. I waved but couldn’t shout back. I didn’t have the breath to shout. I don’t remember everyone looking at me, at the strange screaming boy who was surely only pretending - or was he? - but I suppose they must have been. People do that when they don’t know what to do. They just look. They just watch and see what will happen.

I hate to sound trite or melodramatic, but, clearly, that man saved my life. I was seven and didn’t think about it - clearly even forgot about it for 20 years. I just swam off and carried on being seven, lived twenty more years doing just as stupid things, never even acknowledging the fact that if he hadn’t reached out and grabbed me when he did I would have drowned. He saved my life and I’m wondering what he’s doing now. I’m wondering if someone ever needed to save his, and hoping that they did.

But this repressed little trauma explains a great deal. It explains why I have frequent nightmares about being killed - usually stabbed - in public, with everyone thinking it’s just some kind of game or joke, and the last thing as I see as the knife is pushed slowly into my chest is the polite amusement of my friends as they watch. It explains why for most of my adolescence I was petrified of deep water. And I suppose it shows that in life there are cowards and there are heroes, and it’s always easier to just pretend you don’t see something - that it’s not happening - and let someone else get their chest hair wet.

I’m just not sure what to think about that all having remained largely buried in my head for the last two decades. I wonder what other hidden terrors lurk within, and
how many of my other neuroses they could explain.