Your author's last day as a journalist was the third Thursday in June of 2003.
I was 24 years old, and unlikely to ever reach the pinnacle of my profession. The endless brushes with deadlines had worn me down to a nub of directionless energy, and I was ever-more aware that I felt physically sick every time I had to pick up the telephone.
For all that, I'd achieved what I'd set out to do when I was 16, and I could always hold out the hope that one day I'd wake up and my phone-illness would be cured, or that my restless and nervous being could be made to focus itself more narrowly. I was talented enough to have been head-hunted at 21, even though I often looked in the mirror and mouthed to myself that those who'd identified me were out of their fucking minds.
It was all to become irrelevant anyway, by around noon on that particular summer's day. I was a sports journalist, and the third Thursday in June is important for football followers in England: the fixtures are released, and supporters up and down the country more-or-less crash the internet speculating where they'll be going on the forthcoming season's first day, final day, and when the enemy from down the road is coming to park its tanks on their lawn.
These fixtures are released at 10am, and I had agreed to come into work for eight that morning to help prepare them, so that at ten on the dot we could publish them to the website for whom I worked. Of course, it meant that I got an advance look - in other words, I had prior knowledge about the particular order in which my club were playing next season's fixtures, two hours ahead of almost everyone else.
At about 9am, BBC Radio Five began to give out some of the bigger football clubs' itineraries, couched in a particularly cautious language. 'We understand Manchester United are playing such-and-such an opponent on the first day of the season, whilst Arsenal's opening fixture is said to be against such-and-such.' This gave me the confidence to carry out the idea that had been forming in mind for most of the morning - what harm could it do?
I duly logged onto an unofficial messageboard used by Barnsley supporters, signing in with my nickname of 'Imago.' At 09:06, I posted that our first fixture would be at home to Colchester United, and, at 09:14, followed this up with the other 45 dates and opponents, for the duration of the season from August to May. I then carried on with my work.
At between half-past eleven and noon, I was called away from my desk by my line manager and taken into an upstairs office - my line manager and his boss were present. I was told that Barnsley FC had made a complaint about me in the form of an e-mail, stating that I had broken the 10am embargo. I was asked if I'd anything to say. I shrugged my shoulders and said: "No, not really," or words to that effect.
I was then asked if I was responsible for posting the fixtures onto the messageboard, and I replied that I had indeed done so. At that point, I was taken back to my desk, and I continued with my duties for a further twenty minutes, or perhaps half-an-hour.
My line manager again asked to speak to me, and told me that he was going to have to suspend me from work for a week. I was told to go back downstairs, collect my belongings, and leave the building. It was made clear I should not speak to anyone about what had happened until the company had concluded its investigation, after which I would be asked to attend a disciplinary hearing.
The disciplinary took place the following Thursday, with the outcome that I was sacked on three counts of gross misconduct: breaking e-mail policy, disclosing embargoed information, and damaging the business with regard to the Football League (the governing body for lower-division clubs in the English game.)
My opinion about the way I lost my job has changed over the years. At first, I was astonished that I could be sacked for what I saw as a minor aberration; these days I reckon I was probably asking for it. Regardless, the fact is that I've not been paid to write since.
I mention all this, years after the event, because I have always been aware of the identity of the person who send the initial e-mail to my line manager stating that the embargo had been broken - the press officer of Barnsley FC themselves. As above, my opinion of this person (whom I've never met, or seen) has changed as time has passed. Initially, I wanted him to die in an accident, then later I imagined buying him a drink and asking him to explain what motivated him to do it. Latterly, I have been grateful that he helped to lever me out of a profession which was gradually edging me towards suicide, if I ever think of him, or that day, at all.
I mention it now because it's come to my attention that this person has himself been suspended from his job - the one at Barnsley FC which he still holds - for being over-critical of a match referee in one of his website match reports. He is the first journalist to have ever been charged with bringing the game into disrepute. A member of the public alerted the football authorities to some apparently inflammatory language, and this has been enough to jeopardise his future career.
When I daydream, I sometimes wonder how I'd react to the news that someone whom I have crossed in the past has died in suspicious circumstances. Would I ever be brave enough to tell a police officer: No, officer, his death was nothing to do with me - but I wish it had been? I am clean, but I long to shake the blood-covered hand of the person who carried out this nice bit of work!
It is true - I swear it on everything that I hold dear - that I didn't report this man to the football authorities, and nor did I prompt anyone else to do so on my behalf. The first I knew of it was a web link I clicked on Friday. For a brief moment, I did curse the fact that I wasn't the one to have landed him firmly in the shit, but it was a short-lived sentiment.
There is no glory in revenge, in lying stock-still in the darkness for years, and then leaping from the gloom to throttle someone, silently, like a coward. There is no reward in either unrequited hate, or unrequited love. I obsessed about Bluefish for months, when I should have turned my energies and abilities elsewhere. For what seemed like an eternity, my thoughts were utterly wasted on a woman who had neither need nor want of me, and it is only since the New Year that I've extinguished her.
Similarly, I don't (any longer) squander many thoughts on the manner of my sacking or the person whom I always complained had instigated it. In actuality, I was the instigator, and it is for me to take responsibility for my own actions.
There is no progress to be made in recycling the past over and over again - it is as purposeful an exercise as imagining what I'll do with all my riches when I win the Lottery (when I never actually trouble myself to buy a ticket in the first place.) The past and the future are mere ghosts of the mind, which shift and slide as the driving force of my present disposition instructs them.
My atheist self is now troubled, because it does seem as though some kind of equalising Other is at play. Co-incidences are the mother of gods, and the mother of love. What other explanation can there be for all the above other than the existence of a subtle, karmic god? What else can it be other than an expression of love from the outermost circle of heaven that I think of my hypothetical partner, and immediately the song with which I most associate her comes on the radio?
No. No. These are just co-incidences, and we bring all sorts of trouble upon ourselves when we ascribe such events to an interventionist, levelling God, or to the angels of romantic love. One day we'll associate everything with everything else, and at that point our sanity will have broken down, beyond all repair.
Sunday, 30 January 2011
Wednesday, 26 January 2011
Completion.
I think often of the departed Danny, and I sometimes write about him, too.
Both the thoughts and the writing lack an element of finality, though - they are incomplete.
I see Danny on the run as the wind plumps up his fur, trying to retreat from the force of nature which is inescapable, as was his own death. I hear Danny push my bedroom door, and think about the feeling of him impacting on the middle of the bed, like a brick launched into a pond. Yet there is nevertheless something missing, and it applies to everything I might wish to think about.
Danny was one cat, singular, in a world full of cats, and he succeeded innumerable other members of his species. Yet when I write about him, the conditions of his existence fade into the background, and his feline lineage is of no consequence.
To do Danny full justice, and to appreciate him entirely, it is important to respect the continuum from which he emerged, and which flows on inexorably even in his absence.
It is the job of the writer to (in this case) understand and acknowledge the cat in the cat, and separate out the uniqueness from the traits without which there would be no individual feline. In each individual cat, there are the traces of every cat that has ever existed, and every cat that ever will exist - the cat in the cat.
Somehow, the author must pull together all these cats in their collective, sum-over-history, and re-present them in words, in the form of a singularity.
This is the true task of anyone who tries to sculpt words - progressing from the particular to the general, without ever straying too far from the single example we begin with.
Both the thoughts and the writing lack an element of finality, though - they are incomplete.
I see Danny on the run as the wind plumps up his fur, trying to retreat from the force of nature which is inescapable, as was his own death. I hear Danny push my bedroom door, and think about the feeling of him impacting on the middle of the bed, like a brick launched into a pond. Yet there is nevertheless something missing, and it applies to everything I might wish to think about.
Danny was one cat, singular, in a world full of cats, and he succeeded innumerable other members of his species. Yet when I write about him, the conditions of his existence fade into the background, and his feline lineage is of no consequence.
To do Danny full justice, and to appreciate him entirely, it is important to respect the continuum from which he emerged, and which flows on inexorably even in his absence.
It is the job of the writer to (in this case) understand and acknowledge the cat in the cat, and separate out the uniqueness from the traits without which there would be no individual feline. In each individual cat, there are the traces of every cat that has ever existed, and every cat that ever will exist - the cat in the cat.
Somehow, the author must pull together all these cats in their collective, sum-over-history, and re-present them in words, in the form of a singularity.
This is the true task of anyone who tries to sculpt words - progressing from the particular to the general, without ever straying too far from the single example we begin with.
Tuesday, 18 January 2011
God.
If the atheists are ever to rid themselves of God once and for all, they must first realise that there is no single crushing blow which can be delivered.
Instead, they must be prepared to behave as a swarm of fleas, draining a single drop of blood at a time, until the idea of a petty, interventionist god is fatally weakened.
Then and only then can we push the deity out of its tower and watch it spiral towards a Nietzscheian death. Until religion is sufficiently worn out, though, be content with nibbling away an infinitesimal at a time, and know that you will get there eventually.
Yesterday, another gobbet of flesh was ripped away from Christianity in England when Bristol County Court ordered two religious hoteliers to pay £3600 in damages after they refused to admit a homosexual couple (who are civil partners) to a double room (ie one with a double bed) on the grounds that sex before marriage runs contrary to their beliefs.
If we were unsure before, we are now certain that England is a secular nation - the laws which are passed here are derivations of the minds and pens of lawyers, judges and politicians, instead of emanating from the mouth of god, and we are by now grown-up enough not to pretend otherwise.
Furthermore, we now know that my own private beliefs are superceded by legislation designed with the public in mind. Your god is yours, and if he exists at all, it is only in your own mind, and you cannot invoke him when you intend to act outside the law.
Perhaps this event is the one which will in the long-term be the catalyst for secularism to overwhelm all aspects of our society, swamping all religions, no matter what their basis. In order for the public perception of something to change, first the message has to be internalised that whatever we wish to overturn is in some way unacceptable.
Quite how the pressure to create a negative impression of something is generated and applied is for a different day - what concerns me here is that it happens, and that it (maybe) happened yesterday. Before the smoking ban in public places was implemented here, I remember the refuseniks who said they'd continue with their habit - in my experience, they are very few and far between, and now they (generally) smoke only in the designated places.
Partly, no doubt, this is because it's illegal; but I think of the considerable social pressure which compels smokers not to light up where they shouldn't - this is perhaps as compelling as the threat of being fined for your actions.
As soon as something becomes unacceptable, the memetic propagation across human synapses occurs very quickly indeed, and a kind of self-policing is evident. It's your authors suspicion that we have - or soon will - reach a similar tipping point where religion is concerned, and Bristol County Court on January 18 this year represents the birth pains of a great, broad, sweep.
Instead, they must be prepared to behave as a swarm of fleas, draining a single drop of blood at a time, until the idea of a petty, interventionist god is fatally weakened.
Then and only then can we push the deity out of its tower and watch it spiral towards a Nietzscheian death. Until religion is sufficiently worn out, though, be content with nibbling away an infinitesimal at a time, and know that you will get there eventually.
Yesterday, another gobbet of flesh was ripped away from Christianity in England when Bristol County Court ordered two religious hoteliers to pay £3600 in damages after they refused to admit a homosexual couple (who are civil partners) to a double room (ie one with a double bed) on the grounds that sex before marriage runs contrary to their beliefs.
If we were unsure before, we are now certain that England is a secular nation - the laws which are passed here are derivations of the minds and pens of lawyers, judges and politicians, instead of emanating from the mouth of god, and we are by now grown-up enough not to pretend otherwise.
Furthermore, we now know that my own private beliefs are superceded by legislation designed with the public in mind. Your god is yours, and if he exists at all, it is only in your own mind, and you cannot invoke him when you intend to act outside the law.
Perhaps this event is the one which will in the long-term be the catalyst for secularism to overwhelm all aspects of our society, swamping all religions, no matter what their basis. In order for the public perception of something to change, first the message has to be internalised that whatever we wish to overturn is in some way unacceptable.
Quite how the pressure to create a negative impression of something is generated and applied is for a different day - what concerns me here is that it happens, and that it (maybe) happened yesterday. Before the smoking ban in public places was implemented here, I remember the refuseniks who said they'd continue with their habit - in my experience, they are very few and far between, and now they (generally) smoke only in the designated places.
Partly, no doubt, this is because it's illegal; but I think of the considerable social pressure which compels smokers not to light up where they shouldn't - this is perhaps as compelling as the threat of being fined for your actions.
As soon as something becomes unacceptable, the memetic propagation across human synapses occurs very quickly indeed, and a kind of self-policing is evident. It's your authors suspicion that we have - or soon will - reach a similar tipping point where religion is concerned, and Bristol County Court on January 18 this year represents the birth pains of a great, broad, sweep.
Sunday, 16 January 2011
Pentameter.
Here is my own amateruism displayed:
A hundred thousand words without structure,
And thus no human voice beating below;
No English cadence we can recognise.
Hence the new challenge: to cookie-cut ideas;
So as to make them fit someone else's mould.
How could it ever be otherwise, though?
For nature's laws are immutable, too.
The calibration of the proton's weight,
And the metre of writing alike commute.
Now I suffer the dead, constraining hand,
Applying its brakes to creative thought.
Subjugated by the pentameter
Iambic is too much for the present.
A hundred thousand words without structure,
And thus no human voice beating below;
No English cadence we can recognise.
Hence the new challenge: to cookie-cut ideas;
So as to make them fit someone else's mould.
How could it ever be otherwise, though?
For nature's laws are immutable, too.
The calibration of the proton's weight,
And the metre of writing alike commute.
Now I suffer the dead, constraining hand,
Applying its brakes to creative thought.
Subjugated by the pentameter
Iambic is too much for the present.
Tuesday, 11 January 2011
Home.
I was back in Yorkshire over the course of the last weekend for a fleeting visit, knowing that soon I shall set down roots there once again.
The vast, frozen spine of the Pennines, its ribs splayed out to the sides, x-ray bright with snow against the darkness; a leviathan unconscious but breathing underneath the inclement weather.
Up at the apex where as I child, I swore, I had reached the highest point on the planet, with Barnsley and Manchester both glowing thousands of feet below, and the ashes of Sylvia Plath interned beneath the earth, I apprehended the surrounding bleakness and called it home.
This Yorkshire, this excess of memories where Danny would make balistically for the door when the wind caused his fur to stand up the wrong way; where I smashed my mouth open on a concrete post we were using as a cricket stump; where I met the wet-eyed, wet-lipped muse who doubled as my first serious girlfriend, for all of seven weeks.
This Yorkshire into which I leaked last year, suspicious-looking under the umbra at three o'clock in the morning, seeking out the woman who deserved so much better, and whose motif is the gently admonishing: does this look like a girl's house? when I failed to put down the toilet seat; where I restricted you to three or four hours of sleep and promised you far more than I ever delivered. For as long as I live, I'll think of: does this look like a girl's house? on a regular basis.
This Yorkshire, a spaghetti of events experienced, and events half-imagined, and infused with a history which a Lamarckian would stain us all: Arthur Scargill, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Harold Wilson, Peter Sutcliffe, and I go back no more than 25 years in selecting those names.
Austere, spare Yorkshire, I see your stripped trees and sinewy dogs and hear your pebble-smooth vowels in my dreams, yet I wake up separated from you, the beat of a heart with no organ present, a river without flow.
The vast, frozen spine of the Pennines, its ribs splayed out to the sides, x-ray bright with snow against the darkness; a leviathan unconscious but breathing underneath the inclement weather.
Up at the apex where as I child, I swore, I had reached the highest point on the planet, with Barnsley and Manchester both glowing thousands of feet below, and the ashes of Sylvia Plath interned beneath the earth, I apprehended the surrounding bleakness and called it home.
This Yorkshire, this excess of memories where Danny would make balistically for the door when the wind caused his fur to stand up the wrong way; where I smashed my mouth open on a concrete post we were using as a cricket stump; where I met the wet-eyed, wet-lipped muse who doubled as my first serious girlfriend, for all of seven weeks.
This Yorkshire into which I leaked last year, suspicious-looking under the umbra at three o'clock in the morning, seeking out the woman who deserved so much better, and whose motif is the gently admonishing: does this look like a girl's house? when I failed to put down the toilet seat; where I restricted you to three or four hours of sleep and promised you far more than I ever delivered. For as long as I live, I'll think of: does this look like a girl's house? on a regular basis.
This Yorkshire, a spaghetti of events experienced, and events half-imagined, and infused with a history which a Lamarckian would stain us all: Arthur Scargill, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Harold Wilson, Peter Sutcliffe, and I go back no more than 25 years in selecting those names.
Austere, spare Yorkshire, I see your stripped trees and sinewy dogs and hear your pebble-smooth vowels in my dreams, yet I wake up separated from you, the beat of a heart with no organ present, a river without flow.
Friday, 7 January 2011
Pleasure.
When recovering from an illness, I recognise the beauty of crossing the apex of the complaint's parabola, and the gradual descent back towards normality.
After a bout of sickness, for instance, the flexing and unflexing of the convalescing stomach muscles is practically orgasmic, and the first mouthfuls of scrambled egg more delicious than a Michelin-starred menu.
At such a point, when I declare that I'm feeling better, what I mean is that I'm feeling better than at any other time in my life. In the little window of time marked by the overlapping of illness and complete wellness, as long as I am careful, I outlast my normal self.
Being careful means to do everything in moderation: to eat only a few mouthfuls of egg; to listen more carefully to my body than I normally would - when it demands sleep, I don't this time ignore it, and the fuzzy, kaleidoscopic dreams I have are anyway more enjoyable than the normal ones.
Not, though, that I have been ill, at least not as far as the body is concerned. Since March last year, though, the head has suffered more than it should have done, and it's only now that I feel I'm sliding down the other side of the curve.
The 'illness' in the mind has manifested itself in a lack of interest in the things I love the most - too sad to lie in bed and read, craving sleep too much to get out of bed and catch the three trains needed to travel to Barnsley for the football, visits to the gym slackening off to a total stop, to the extent that I'd feel an utter stranger in there these days.
Yet, suddenly, and inexplicably, I am stronger, and more willing. With the same attention to detail I'd give to my poor, inflamed stomach, though, I tread carefully, allowing things of beauty and pleasure to leak back into my existence only gradually, lest I overdo it and end up feeling worse than ever.
The strains of Soul-Limbo on the radio which mean another night of Ashes cricket is starting takes me back to my teenage years, huddled up in bed with an earphone (scared to death that I'd shout out when a wicket went down and blow my cover), awake all night listening to the commentary from Australia, and aware that I was pissing away any chance of success in the (apparently) crucial O-levels which were only five or six months in front of me.
Nowadays I stay up until four in the morning and turn in to work at 1pm, in no fit state to do my job but enlivened by the few hours I spent listening to the Test Match Special commentary. More tired than is good for me I may be, but I seem to float through the eight hours, the long-gone ghost of something approaching joy fluttering within.
I recognise the flutter: it is passion, it is enjoyment, it is pleasure - I want more of it, but repeat that I don't wish to push my luck. Tentatively, I'll pick up the book on the fall of the Ottomans lent to me by a colleague, and scan its pages for a few minutes; my fingers brush over the porcelain cat which resembles Danny, and I feel neither sadness nor emptiness, but a connection with him which remains unbroken.
The present slow rediscovery of enjoyment and purpose is the pleasure of pleasure, and I feel almost ecstatic. This is the stage prior to landing on the solid ground of wellness, and I tentatively wonder what it'll be like to no longer be travelling, but to have arrived.
After a bout of sickness, for instance, the flexing and unflexing of the convalescing stomach muscles is practically orgasmic, and the first mouthfuls of scrambled egg more delicious than a Michelin-starred menu.
At such a point, when I declare that I'm feeling better, what I mean is that I'm feeling better than at any other time in my life. In the little window of time marked by the overlapping of illness and complete wellness, as long as I am careful, I outlast my normal self.
Being careful means to do everything in moderation: to eat only a few mouthfuls of egg; to listen more carefully to my body than I normally would - when it demands sleep, I don't this time ignore it, and the fuzzy, kaleidoscopic dreams I have are anyway more enjoyable than the normal ones.
Not, though, that I have been ill, at least not as far as the body is concerned. Since March last year, though, the head has suffered more than it should have done, and it's only now that I feel I'm sliding down the other side of the curve.
The 'illness' in the mind has manifested itself in a lack of interest in the things I love the most - too sad to lie in bed and read, craving sleep too much to get out of bed and catch the three trains needed to travel to Barnsley for the football, visits to the gym slackening off to a total stop, to the extent that I'd feel an utter stranger in there these days.
Yet, suddenly, and inexplicably, I am stronger, and more willing. With the same attention to detail I'd give to my poor, inflamed stomach, though, I tread carefully, allowing things of beauty and pleasure to leak back into my existence only gradually, lest I overdo it and end up feeling worse than ever.
The strains of Soul-Limbo on the radio which mean another night of Ashes cricket is starting takes me back to my teenage years, huddled up in bed with an earphone (scared to death that I'd shout out when a wicket went down and blow my cover), awake all night listening to the commentary from Australia, and aware that I was pissing away any chance of success in the (apparently) crucial O-levels which were only five or six months in front of me.
Nowadays I stay up until four in the morning and turn in to work at 1pm, in no fit state to do my job but enlivened by the few hours I spent listening to the Test Match Special commentary. More tired than is good for me I may be, but I seem to float through the eight hours, the long-gone ghost of something approaching joy fluttering within.
I recognise the flutter: it is passion, it is enjoyment, it is pleasure - I want more of it, but repeat that I don't wish to push my luck. Tentatively, I'll pick up the book on the fall of the Ottomans lent to me by a colleague, and scan its pages for a few minutes; my fingers brush over the porcelain cat which resembles Danny, and I feel neither sadness nor emptiness, but a connection with him which remains unbroken.
The present slow rediscovery of enjoyment and purpose is the pleasure of pleasure, and I feel almost ecstatic. This is the stage prior to landing on the solid ground of wellness, and I tentatively wonder what it'll be like to no longer be travelling, but to have arrived.
Monday, 3 January 2011
Yorkshire.
I've lived away from Yorkshire for the last 20 months - dragged all of 50 miles down the A1 motorway for the purpose of stable, regular employment.
In that time, I've made no attempt to get to know anyone in this new place; I nod to my neighbour when I encounter him as I'm leaving the flat, but couldn't tell you his name.
To my regret, being here meant that I missed the sad, inevitable conclusions to the two most important days of last year - August 2, when my grandmother died, and November 10, when Danny was put to sleep.
In the former case, I got in contact with my family just as my grandmother was drawing her last breaths. I was unable to even cover the few hundred yards to the train station before my phone went off and I received the news that she was dead.
I thus travelled northwards knowing that I was too late, and trying to remove the guilt of being absent is one of the goals of this coming year.
In the latter case - with Danny - I was there on the morning of his death, aware that I'd never see him again. I had to leave him at something after 8am, as a consequence of needing to come back here to work, and he was put to sleep at 10am. Again, I regret not being present at the decisive moment.
When I posted in the early hours of New Year's Day, I spoke of the urgent need to obliterate the aggregation of past sorrow. To that can be added guilt and loneliness; all these things must be assuaged if we are to arrive at any semblance of happiness.
It'll help, then, that I received the news last week that my job is almost certain to be moving back to Yorkshire, and within the next month. It'll not alleviate loneliness, and nor will it alleviate guilt, but I'll no longer feel as though I am drifting.
Drift has been the prevailing emotion in this town; going nowhere at all in a place I don't belong, detached from family, whatever friends I managed to accrue, and from the comfortable certainty of being near familiar places.
It has felt for a long time as though I am observing my own life, watching myself fail and refuse to communicate and with personal goals reduced to one: get out of bed at some point during the day. There is no future here that I'd wish to contemplate, the perpetual re-ignition of ambition itself the infuriating start and end point of ambition.
I long to get away from here, and never return. The stock of memories around every corner is too great, and contributes to the stasis which I have become. In one more month, I hope it will be over.
In that time, I've made no attempt to get to know anyone in this new place; I nod to my neighbour when I encounter him as I'm leaving the flat, but couldn't tell you his name.
To my regret, being here meant that I missed the sad, inevitable conclusions to the two most important days of last year - August 2, when my grandmother died, and November 10, when Danny was put to sleep.
In the former case, I got in contact with my family just as my grandmother was drawing her last breaths. I was unable to even cover the few hundred yards to the train station before my phone went off and I received the news that she was dead.
I thus travelled northwards knowing that I was too late, and trying to remove the guilt of being absent is one of the goals of this coming year.
In the latter case - with Danny - I was there on the morning of his death, aware that I'd never see him again. I had to leave him at something after 8am, as a consequence of needing to come back here to work, and he was put to sleep at 10am. Again, I regret not being present at the decisive moment.
When I posted in the early hours of New Year's Day, I spoke of the urgent need to obliterate the aggregation of past sorrow. To that can be added guilt and loneliness; all these things must be assuaged if we are to arrive at any semblance of happiness.
It'll help, then, that I received the news last week that my job is almost certain to be moving back to Yorkshire, and within the next month. It'll not alleviate loneliness, and nor will it alleviate guilt, but I'll no longer feel as though I am drifting.
Drift has been the prevailing emotion in this town; going nowhere at all in a place I don't belong, detached from family, whatever friends I managed to accrue, and from the comfortable certainty of being near familiar places.
It has felt for a long time as though I am observing my own life, watching myself fail and refuse to communicate and with personal goals reduced to one: get out of bed at some point during the day. There is no future here that I'd wish to contemplate, the perpetual re-ignition of ambition itself the infuriating start and end point of ambition.
I long to get away from here, and never return. The stock of memories around every corner is too great, and contributes to the stasis which I have become. In one more month, I hope it will be over.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
