Heavy Rain

01.14am April 1st 2014 - It began to rain.

Not a spattering or a suggestion. Honest, dense, full rain.

I climbed onto my window-sill, opened the window, and revelled in it. I watched it crash down and I watched it flood the gutters. I sat and observed as a few young 20-somethings with short beards and lens-free spectacles stood out in the downpour. They removed their shirts and endured a drenching. Possibly a case of kids being dicks, but really I know I only demean them because I envy them. I want to be caught out in a storm. I want to feel a sense of cold, primal vulnerability - and just endure.

But it's past 1am and I'm a self-conscious introvert, so I'll watch from my perch.

I enjoy the sound, I enjoy the patter sensation, and I enjoy the rhythm. There is a street light outside, below my window. Droplets pelt down on it. They burst on top into a fine mist. Despite further drops thundering down all around, the mist undulates - catching on the air to swirl listlessly, illuminated by the halogen glow.

Then something peculiar. The scent of the tree that sits next to that street light. I'm not sure if it's blossom, sap, or pollen, but it's natural, bright, and reminds me of trips abroad. Of holidays where a week's hot sun is washed away in one stormy hour, and you're hit by an unfamiliar petrichor. I considered discussing transmission of scent, olfactory reactions and the properties of water as a conductor of smells. However, it's nearly 2am now. Suffice it to say, I enjoy the rain.

Image Owner: Rex Roof

Time-flu

What am I even doing?

Let's see - there was a minor excursion to Glasgow. Then I enjoyed a warm Summer. I climbed a hill. I played a lot of video games. I started writing a book. I subsequently stopped writing a book. I restarted my degree. That's the long and short of it.

I got preoccupied. Sue me.

Please don't sue me. Please. I'm poor and reclusive. I do not want letters and lawyers. No news is good news. Let me be a quiet, easily-distracted introvert. For those familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality test, I am an INTJ. For those unfamiliar with the Myers-Briggs personality test, go and familiarise yourself with Myers-Briggs personality tests. One of the hallmarks of being an INTJ is becoming obsessive over hobbies and subjects.

I started blogging, I devoted hours to it
Then I did some bar training and learned lots about hundreds of cocktails
Then I had some down-time in winter and hit the video games quite hard
Now I'm working on my biology degree. All day, every day.

It is hard to strike a healthy balance. Variety, spice, life, all that jazz. I want to be able to do a bit of work, finish a bit of studying then enjoy a bit of downtime. Instead I do a lot of work until I'm sick of it. I study until 3am and 4am, barely able to stay awake. And, similar to many young men my age, I can lose whole days to TV and gaming.

So if anyone wondered where I was. I got distracted. It has happened before and it will happen again. Hell, blogging itself is a distraction for me. Funny - what people fill their time with.

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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.

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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?

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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