An Outing: The Ending

You will have to excuse me, it's been a while since I wrote for my blog, a while since I updated you on my brief weekend away, and even longer since I actually experienced it - my memory is somewhat fuzzy. The only reason I am writing tonight is because I promised myself I would. Let me tell you, if you're looking to practice your writing, and perhaps make a career out of it, forcing yourself to write is never a wise approach. Much like me you'll find yourself sat in an old chair, mind wandering and aching as you churn out words. Not even good words. Certainly not your best words. Much like I'm doing, you'll sit there, run your hand through your hair and rest your head in your palm for a few seconds. You'll consider your options:

1) Write another night, when you feel inspired
2) Suck it up, get working
3) Nobody reads this anyway, forget the series. Write about other things

So I consider my options. I refuse to put it off and put it off - option the first is no good. '2)' could be a winner. Then again, after every sentence I get a sinking feeling that this isn't my best work. I want to delete every sentence after scrawling it. Eradicate and remove it and pretend it never happened. Despite this, I'm plodding on. I plod on because, though I may not be a very good writer, I am, at least, an honest writer. I would rather explore my feelings of fatigue and frustration than bottle them up and pretend they don't exist. It's all about experience. I have very little experience. Perhaps people will read this and think "what a drivelling idiot, this rambling is pathetic" or perhaps they will think "actually, I can really relate to that dejected, frustrated feeling. I've been there, I empathise." I won't know until I bite the bullet and post what I write. Option 3 is somewhat true. However, I happen to be something of a collector, I like neat, tidy order. Abandoning my write-up of a weekend long-since passed would niggle at me. "Why didn't you finish Sam?" "Why not post a little entry? Wrap everything up? Won't that look neat and complete?" So, I am in two minds. The OCD-angel on one shoulder encourages me to finish. The anarchistic devil opposite wants to move on and explore and do as he pleases. Let me try to satisfy both by briefly summarising what you missed.

• We board a York to Edinburgh train on Saturday Morning.
• We board an Edinburgh to Glasgow train on Saturday Afternoon
• A young girl called Ella, seated a few rows ahead, constantly interrupts the journey with incessant moaning.
• Never teach your children a second language, especially if you don't speak it.
• Riding the Glaswegian subway is how I imagine demons commute to work in Hell.
• We saw Bill Bailey on the Saturday night. We sat so high up I was making eye-contact with the rafters. I felt a nosebleed coming on. At one point I attempted to burp before realising there was little atmosphere left for it to emerge into, so the bubble of irn bru gas sat idly in my gullet.
• We rounded off the trip by rock-climbing in an abandoned church.
• We board a Glasgow to Edinburgh train on Sunday Afternoon.
• We board an Edinburgh to York train on Sunday Afternoon.
• I board a York to Accrington train on Sunday Evening.
• I get bored of boarding somewhere along the way.

Now, perhaps I can put that whole weekend to bed. We will resume normal programming shortly

Thank you and goodnight

Image Owner: Donna St. Pierre

An Outing: Entry Two.

After volunteering my seat and retiring to a fold-down chair opposite a toilet with a broken door we stopped in Leeds for a gaggle of Yorkshiremen to board the train. I'm not sure what the collective noun for several Yorkshire folk is. Perhaps not a gaggle, they were all very quiet and evasive when it came to eye contact and conversation. You might think this would suit someone as chronically unsociable as me - and it did. It did until a cyclist showed up and wanted to demote me further, from sitting outside a broken W.C. to standing outside a broken W.C., so he could stow his bicycle. Trying to find some space in a crowded compartment is made all the more difficult when the stuffy Yorkshirefolk don't acknowledge your existence. Perhaps they had finally cottoned on that I was from Lancashire. I'm not sure how though - it wasn't my accent, I hadn't said a word. I must have had a 'west-of-the-Pennines' vibe about me. Thankfully, after an imbroglio of a train journey, our arrival in York was uneventful.

im.bro.glio
Noun
An extremely confused, complicated, or embarrassing situation: "the Watergate imbroglio"

I found Alex waiting for me on a bench in York. We did that involuntary thing friends do when they haven't seen each other for months - I believe it's called smiling, before burying any emotions (like men!) and heading out into York. We got about fifty metres out of the station before being accosted by some charity worker or nightclub rep. I hate those people. Actually, that's not strictly fair, I hate the job they do - paid to cram flyers into my hand or to guilt me in to donating 'just £2 a month'. I'm not sure which I detest more, a stranger engaging me in conversation or a stranger engaging me in conversation for their own selfish gains. As luck would have it, I was following Alex into York and Alex was following me. He soon realised I had no idea where we were going and therefore was the worst person to follow. We did a U-turn to catch a bus and did our best to evade the nightclub charity rep girl as we passed her again.

There's not much to say after getting on the bus. We drove through York and out the other side, got off, crossed a field, I threw stickyweed at Alex because I'm childish. He tried to explain, as we approached his student house, that he lived out in the 'rough' part of York, where most students don't like to live. Saying 'the rough part of York' is quite oxymoronic - especially when you say it to someone who grew up in a dilapidated industrial town where knife crime and knock-a-door-run are regional sports. My point was made as we passed two girls walking a dog. One stopped us and complimented me on my shoes - I'll be honest, they were good shoes. Now if it had really been a rough area, like the ones I'm accustomed to, saying "Hey, nice shoes" would be followed with "They're mine now" and I would have been knocked to the floor and mugged for my clogs. Instead the girls smiled and walked off and that was the end of it.

Image Owner: Xerones

An Outing, Entry One.

This weekend I decided upon an adventure. If you have followed my posts for the last few months, you will know I have devoted a lot of time to working. Truth by told, I have been going stir-crazy, trapped by the same four walls. My walk to work, my greatest outing, has been a flight of stairs at the rear of the building.

How best to present my weekend galavanting? I could type up the whole experience in one fell swoop, though you would get bored reading and I would get bored writing. Instead, I suppose I'll copy out my notebook entries, originally written as I travelled.

Friday, May 10th
One redeemable feature of living in the north is the undulating landscape. I have caught the train from Accrington to York. Between tunnels and dilapidated industrial towns I catch a glimpse of how the north used to be. Stone cottages sit in narrow valleys; the hills climbing hundreds of feet behind them. Here, ancient walls have outlasted the towns they once protected. Herons and foxes occupy this narrow window of wilderness.

Everything here seems to flow in unison. Rivers and walls, canals and train-tracks all carve a parallel path through Old Lancashire. I am approaching Hebden Bridge. A small station with organised walls, and  roofing that could have been stripped right off a greenhouse. Black signs fixed with pristine, white lettering denote the locations of general rooms and parcel offices. Wooden buckets in the centres of the two platforms play host to freshly planted flowers. They bring a little colour and chaos, interrupting the OCD-signage and alphabetised brickwork.

Finding a seat on a minorly-crowded train is a nightmare for the chronically unsociable. There should be a checklist provided to us for safe seating arrangements. Seating arrangements that will see us suffering as few interruptions and embarrassing back-and-forths as possible.

• Where possible, find a window-seat facing forward - with no neighbour
• If unavailable, resort to a similar, backward-facing seat
• Avoid areas for bikes, prams and wheelchairs
• Avoid tables - three potential neighbours are worse than one

Unfortunately, I settled for the third option. Now sat at the rear of a carriage where there is space for prams and wheelchairs. Making the best of a bad situation, I took the window seat in order to scout upcoming platforms for pesky disabled children and single mothers who might usurp me.

Bradford Interchange is where it happened. One of the few stations whose platform I could not recce, as it's at the opposite side of the train. A 20-something mother boards with a bright pink buggy, which she crams against my legs. I hesitate for a moment, a shy rabbit destined for the pie. Not wishing to be squashed against a window, shins covered in pram-bruises, I offered my chair to the mother. "Here, you take these seats, I'll find another." I would say more but already the cogs in her head are turning - "that's not a local accent" she's thinking, "'e's not from 'round 'ere" she will inevitably conclude, at which point the Yorkshire hivemind will activate and two tweed-clad moustachioed Yorkshiremen will hoist me up and eject me from the train. We were over an hour into the journey and nobody suspected I was an imposter. I had gained their trust and was not about to jeopardise it. Instead I wandered off to the next carriage, found no seat that met my new list of criteria and ended up sat in a fold-down chair between two carriages, where the bikes are meant to live. I'm not sure what was worse, the awkward fear of encountering an errant cyclist, or the smell of piss coming from the adjacent W.C.

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To find a place that cannot be found

Strange how, at 3am, everything blends into one. I am alert and I am asleep - eager to achieve but too uninspired to follow through on anything. I sit here flicking through the same old web-pages, refreshing occasionally, while the world around me sleeps. I know they're all tucked up in bed, I know my monitor won't divulge anything of interest 'til sun-up, but that's not enough to convince me to sleep. Dave Gorman said, when being paid to write a novel, he would sit at his computer and aimlessly browse the internet. It has everything. An organised, comprehensive bank of all things ever - right at my fingertips. "I don't know about you, but I find EVERYTHING EVER to be quite distracting" he said.

But as I mentioned when we started, 3am turns me into a walking, talking dichotomy. I can't find the will to put away such an expansive distraction. Simultaneously, I cannot find the energy to concentrate, sift through page upon page and do something constructive with my time. I could learn musical theory, read up on immune parasitology - instead I refresh the same old pages, hoping something will catch my attention. It does not.

The definition of insanity, I've heard, is to do the same thing over and over again, and expect different results.

I don't think I'm insane, far from it. I think I have a lot of drive, a lot of energy and enthusiasm. But I'm without focus. I'm without direction. Each day I struggle to be productive. Hell, some days I consider getting showered and dressed a minor achievement - a satisfying, day-well-done.

When did I become so lost?

Image Owner: Shutter Addicts

Ache

I am tired.

Not a sleepy, sore-eyed tiredness that can be shrugged off after a few hours' kip. This is different. I can feel this, in my bones. A dull ache that won't subside. Perhaps it's the stress, the worry or the three hour shift that soon became 10.

I made a serious decision last month. I don't like those life-changing, adult decisions but I was up against a wall and time was a scarce luxury. In order to properly care for a sick child I sacrificed a year to his care and my family's well-being. At the end of the day family is all you have. Families are there, and families endure. So yeh, if that means watching a monitor for 5 hours, looking for a fit, then so be it. If it means cleaning a man's stomach contents from a piss-filled urinal, then so be it. I don't regret my choice, or begrudge being left in this position. I only wish I could do more.

It's interesting what people go through in times like this. When the wolves howl and the world comes down, all we can find to wear is a brave face. But the acne scars and the vacant eyes on the surface don't do justice to the haemorrhaging hell beneath.

In other news, it snowed tonight. I was reminded earlier of the saying "worse things happen at sea" - it doesn't help when the world around you is blanketed in a frozen ocean. In this winter trees become wraiths and the world is swallowed up. Lest I be swallowed and drowned too, I am retreating to bed. As a child I would hide under my covers from bumps and creaks in the dark.

Perhaps that solution can be applied to my current circumstances

Image Owner: Donna St. Pierre

To Distant Friends

I was bound to have to tell you sooner or later. But it's difficult. It isn't the sort of thing you send in a text, and it's not something I feel comfortable sitting down and discussing when we all get back together.

You've all met my youngest brother, James, I think. And you all know he has a disability - CFC syndrome. I won't bore you with the symptoms, I've probably told you them before, but one is severe eczema. At the start of February he picked up a herpes infection. For the rest of us it would manifest as a coldsore, but for him it's a systemic viral infection. He was admitted to hospital where the virus spread from his skin to his blood, and then on to the rest of him. It took a weak of aggressive antivirals and antibiotics to clear the infection and by all accounts he should be dead. Anyway, we responded quite quickly and had a lucky escape.

He was released from hospital after 7 days and life carried on as it always had. Fast-forward about two weeks, he's still home and all's well. While I was watching him he came into my room and complained about feeling sick. I asked if he had a sick-bowl and he pottered off to get it. But he didn't come back. After a few minutes I went to check on him and found him in the living room, collapsed on the floor, metres from his sick-bowl. We called an ambulance and I managed to get him conscious again but he soon drifted off again and began fitting. His fit lasted for several hours before they got sedated at the hospital. Fearing he had relapsed, doctors started his antivirals again and kept him for another week. They also did a CT scan to check for clots and haemorrhages - there were none. They also performed an MRI just to rule any eventualities out. On this MRI there is a marble-sized mass at the rear of his brain. A follow-up MRI with dye confirmed the mass was not a mistake on the scan or a remnant of his herpes infection. At this time we were told the mass could be anything from a bit of scar tissue to a brain tumour. The plan was to send him home to recover and get fit for a month before passing him off to a neurology team to treat the brain anomaly.

You can probably guess the next bit. He comes home and he's ok for a week. We're now at the start of March. Once again he comes to me and isn't himself - lethargic, dizzy, unresponsive, morose. He's taken back to hospital to get checked out and begins fitting again. They admit him again and his fits become more frequent, from every few days to every few hours. He's still in hospital now and will be for the next few days or weeks at least. Yesterday he forgot who our middle brother and extended family are - remembering only Mum, Dad, Sam and his grandmother.

With the month I've had, I didn't have much time for uni. I spent my time visiting the hospital, working my parents' shifts so they could be with him, and generally picking up the slack at home. As a result I'm not finishing university this year. I decided to interrupt and will hopefully go back and finish my last semester in 2014. My choice was either this, or ignore everything at home and focus solely on my degree. Obviously with the state my brother's in I'm not prepared to forget everyone to pursue a bit of paper with my name on it. Besides, I haven't slept properly or had time to look after myself since seeing him collapsed and fitting a few weeks ago.

I'm not quite sure how to wrap up, other than to say that this made more sense than dropping you a brief text like "lol guess what, not finishing uni, brother's got a tumour" or to wait til we're all together and ruin everyone's night with a whole host of shit. So yeh, you're my friends - you should probably be in the loop.

Pause. Reflect.

Only 4pm... I've already been awake 12 hours.

The tossing and turning exam stress induces makes sleep difficult. While there's nothing but jitters and nervous anticipation on the surface, you feel your insides churning.
We're past that now - free of stress and life changing responsibility for another five months. Exams are in the past and I'm returning north. The stone towers of the city recede, submitting to hills and valleys doused in white. Snowfall has left my home looking somewhat pretty. It's funny how acres can change in a day's absence.

It's difficult to write about the snow. Within itself, it is an empty canvas - blank as the page I'm trying to fill. There's nothing to be inspired by the pale hills, nor the frozen sky. All they do is reflect. Amongst this icy uniform I find the time to breathe, appreciating that winter's stress is behind me. I will need these few days to gather my thoughts, recuperate and brace myself for the onslaught.

When all is said and done, life is reduced to this - a series of struggles. Interrupted only by preparation for the next.

If, by chance, I am not arming and readying myself - I'm already out in the fray.

Image Owner: Emersonreference

The Chase

It is not every day that I get to feel like a hero - with this in mind I try to seize the opportunity when it presents itself. This story is a few months old. Unfortunately between university and procrastination I haven't had time to recount it, until now.

Our story begins on a wet Thursday afternoon, as all Thursdays in the North are wet. After walking into the city centre for lunch I made for the bus stop in order to get home. Safe in the knowledge that my bus wasn't due til 3.45pm I sauntered along quite merrily. Well, as merry as can be in a miserable, industrial city. My peaceful stroll was soon interrupted, however, as I turned the corner to see my bus leaving five minutes early.

Somewhat inconvenient.

For the common man, this would be the end of his story. He would feel a tad annoyed, find some shelter and wait for the next bus. But not me. Knowing the route the bus takes through Manchester, I turned and ran. I took a route through dark alleys, multi-story carparks and a section of China town. My short adventure through the city saw me leaping fences and bravely (recklessly) crossing roads in order to head off the bus.

As I made it to the town hall, I entered the courtyard and saw my bus approaching from the opposite direction. I pelted down to the next bus stop - managing to reach it and signal with seconds to go. If I had missed the bus a second time, I would have felt terrible. Then again, just reaching the bus put me on top of the world.

Here, for your reference, is the bus' route, and my own improvised shortcut...

The bus is highlighted in red, myself in blue - with arrows to show direction. After narrowly missing my bus at point 'A' I bravely traversed the city in search of success.

It's the little things.